I did something recently I\u2019m not very proud of. I cheated. On my chickpeas. With a giant bowl of saucy chicken livers. It was late, I was clearly craving it and I might even try to blame it on one too many beers.<\/p>\n
This wasn\u2019t my first relapse but it was okay. Because technically, I was a flexitarian. That\u2019s a thing now right?<\/p>\n
Growing up, my diet was like most German-South African hybrid children –\u00a0 a bountiful spread of schnitzels, bratwurst, tjop and biltong. Both parents came from high meat-consuming nations so I can\u2019t even hold it against my folks, and back then the gaping hole in the ozone and the reality that earth\u2019s resources were, in fact, limited, weren\u2019t exactly dinnertime conversation.<\/p>\n
Somewhere in my early-twenties, it dawned on me, however, that the neatly cling-wrapped meat I was mindlessly consuming probably didn\u2019t have such neat origins. I did some investigating, and, after witnessing the ghastly process of animal cruelty involved, I swore off all meat for all eternity. But it was a daily challenge for me because my entire family and friends still ate meat and, truthfully, I missed it. Would Christmas ever by the same again without a roast?<\/p>\n
About three years later I experience my first relapse. We were at a casual farm-braai themed wedding, and I was embroiled in an emotionally draining relationship. Between steeling myself against our not-so-cushy reality amid all the \u2018happily forever afters\u2019 and resisting the juicy, 200g beef patties on offer that night, something inside my twigged. The next thing I knew, my choppers were sinking themselves into an obnoxiously large medium rare burger, dripping with juicy fat. I felt awful. Mainly because it tasted so goddamn delicious and it had, at least temporarily, released a pressure valve on one front.<\/p>\n
But what was beginning to formulate below the surface, as my self-loathing yet insatiable relapse into meat tortured me for weeks after, was that, on an intrinsic level, I wasn\u2019t clear about why I had chosen to be a vegetarian in the first place.<\/p>\n
I had ricocheted into vegetarianism out of sheer revolt. My decision to not eat meat was born from an inability to process what I had seen on those meat industry documentaries, not from any principles I had established or even bothered to understand. In not confronting my abhorrent disgust I had also neatly avoided asking myself any hard questions and instead had simply taken refuge in the predefined camp that is \u2018being a vegetarian\u2019. Without really knowing why I was there, there was little holding my foundations in place.<\/p>\n
My career in the online food content space gradually began to dictate my diet, where anything and everything that is trendy, smoked, infused and paired with beer and wine effortlessly steered me further and further from my tryst with vegetarianism. As long as what I was eating was good quality, free-range meat, I justified my new gourmet diet as something that didn\u2019t contribute to the animal cruelty in those videos and left it at that.<\/p>\n
But the bottom line was that eating meat just didn\u2019t sit well with me anymore. My energy levels weren\u2019t what they used to be on my lentils only lunch and all my jeans were beginning to feel like skinny jeans.<\/p>\n
During a scout for trending food content one day, I stumbled upon Treehugger founder Graham Hill\u2019s video on being a weekday vegetarian. So much of what he said resonated with me.<\/p>\n