LA Moms Blog: Help! My Kid's a Vegetarian!
My apologies to my vegetarian friends out there, but I have to confess that when Kira decided to stop eating meat I considered it a parental failure on my part. The fact that I wasn't able to pass on my love of bacon or impart to her the importance of appreciating a good steak? I may as well have deprived her of other important life skills, like learning to walk or knowing how to cry when she wanted something from her father.
Like any good parent, I worry about my kids and the internet. When my husband and I got them their own computer we made sure to put it in the kitchen in plain sight, so that I could keep an eye on them. That way, while I was chopping potatoes I could make sure they weren’t chatting with any 43-year-old men pretending to be 12-year-old girls, or looking at R-rated pictures of Disney stars. You know the ones.
But little did I know that the real danger lurked in things that got sent to them by their own friends. Because it was one such email that had a drastic effect on our lives - a video emailed to my tween by a well-meaning classmate.
Calm down - it wasn't porn. It was a grainy, black and white video of a slaughterhouse. And it turned my daughter into – shudder – a vegetarian...Read More...
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tags: vegetarians | teenagers | teens | tweens | please eat some chicken
In the wild, animals eat other animals. Also, protein is a VERY important and healthy part of the human diet. I'm sure she'll outgrow it. In the meantime, she needs to learn how to cook vegetarian ... if she feels so strongly, then cooking her own food should be an honor. :-)
ReplyDeleteI love that you added a tag called "please eat some chicken" to this post.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with eating meat as long as it has been humanely raised and slaughtered. We get our meat from a farmer at our local farmer's market. I am starting not to order meat when I go out to eat because I'm sure it has been raised in a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation).
Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteLook on the bright side - she will learn to look at what she eats more closely, which means eating healthy and nutrition-filled food. She will learn to independently discover new varieties of foods and that will benefit the whole family. it seems like she is motivated by compassion, which is never a bad thing. Do encourage her to vary her research on vegetarianism and not base it on a single video.
Good luck and happy journey. We should all be free to challenge and explore concepts we were raised believing, and it seems like this change will cause your daughter to question and lead an examined life.
Wow, I can't imagine trying to find different protein sources for your vegetarian daughter. It's difficult enough packing lunches for kids who DO eat meat.
ReplyDeleteI like Mrs. Columbo's suggestion :) !!
Wow aren't you iggnorant.
ReplyDeleteI'd hate to have a parent like you.
(:
Great blog! My 8 year old has just decided that she wants to be a vegetarian and I am trying to figure out how to go about it. It's good to know that I am not alone in trying to figure out why and how.
ReplyDeleteGo to http://andrea.myefoods.com/ for prepared dinners for vegetarians, they take less than 20 minutes to make and only require the addition of water, has TVP so you know they are getting enough protein, and less than a dollar a serving (and vegetarian food can be so expensive!! This is cheap!)! You can have your dinner and know they are eating ok as well
ReplyDelete