Confessions of a Lacto-Ovo Aquatarian- Part ONE

It's 12:18 p.m. on a rainy Wednesday afternoon in Hackensack New Jeresey and I am sitting at my desk eating a ham sandwich that I just made. The bread feels soft, yet lightly crisp on the outside while the ham squeezed between is cold and slightly damp. I bite into the bread, into the meat and then pull back and chew, quickly swallowing, hoping that I don't change my mind and throw the sandwich away. I thought all morning about the decision to change my diet of 5 years and 6 months. At 7:40 a.m. in Englewood New Jersey, while cutting ham to go into a salad for my fiance's lunch, I heard myself say aloud, "I think I will eat meat today". How did 5 and a half years of abstaining from meat come to this? Was I an unhappy vegetarian or just waiting for a moment when no one was judging to snatch a piece of meat?

The strange thing about being a vegetarian is that people who are not vegetarians feel a need to judge your eating habits. "So do you eat eggs?" they would ask.. "Yes, I am a lacto-ovo vegetarian, so I eat eggs and milk", "But isn't that from an animal?" they would reply, "Yes, but I am not a vegan", and deep inside I would be screaming, "Who are you to judge me just because I choose to not eat certain things and eat others, I don't need to explain myself to you, are you the vegetarian police now? You stupid fuck." But instead I would explain the different types of vegetarianism and explain that vegetarianism is an umbrella and underneath that umbrella there are vegans, who do not consume any animals directly or indirecly, which means that they do not eat animal byproducts. And then there are lacto-ovo vegetarians who eat milk and eggs, but usually these individuals choose to eat organic or natural milk and eggs and there are also aquatarians which is a term for vegetarians who also eat seafood. But the conversation would never be over just then. They would ask me to justify my reasons for eating seafood, but not land animals, which would get us into the tiresome conversation about the hole in the ozone, the amount of water and grain used to produce one pound of protein from beef, the inhumaine treatment of livestock, the hormones, antibiotics and additives that go in so many meats and then of course the conversation would end, if it ends, with heart disease. But none of this explains how I came to abstain from meat in the first place . . .