#bricknet

Nonmeat Nonweek

The following was written by my best friend Bret, who chose to celebrate Meat Week by not eating meat.  Enjoy!

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Nick Johnson is my best friend. One of the things about Bricknet that everyone must know is that we are a team, but we are competitive. Any game night involving Super Smash Brothers or any various speed based card game would bring out our vicious unsportsmanlike insults. Also Crash Team Racing doesn't count because that game sucks not because Nick always wins.

So when Nick announced he was going to be eating Meat for a week I knew I had to respond. Eat Meat for a week? So what? Basically everyone already does that all the time anyway. I'm going to NOT eat Meat for a week! That'll show him.

I learned three very important lessons this week.

1) It's hard to not be vocal about being vegetarian.

2) Being vegetarian doesn't mean being healthy.

3) Things are better with friends.

As silly as it is, a lot of our lives revolves around food. (I say it's silly because in the end it all turns to poop, hehe!) People go out to restaurants and chat. People bring and share exciting foods to work. Dates almost always feature fitting in small talk in between big mouthfuls of dinner. So when one decides to become vegetarian, one is basically limiting one's self from a big part of society. True, they can still partake in the act of going to restaurants or hanging out around people eating food, but eventually the questions do pop up. Whether a new vegetarian likes it or not, the conversation will always at some point revolve around them. It's unfair really. No one ever asks Meat eaters why they choose to eat Meat!

And the biggest question vegetarians get is "Why?" To which any normal vegetarian might answer "I don't like animals dying to feed me" or "health reasons". Of course this week I had to memorize with George Carlin-like skill the following: "My best friend from Rochester who I moved out to Chicago with is a vegetarian but he is leaving Chicago and sad about all the Meat he missed out on and so for one week only he is eating Meat and because particle physics change one thing about one Bricknet and the other Bricknet will respond with equal or greater value I have decided this week to not eat Meat."

"Uh... what?"

Point - Nick.

Veggies are good for you, right? Right. I'm not here to promote some sort of conspiracy theory that carrots are unhealthy or salads are bad. But here's the kicker. As a vegetarian, you actually have to eat veggies to be healthy. Yes that's right. Which means my week of eating buttered noodles, cereal (the kid kind with cartoons on the front and mazes on the back), skittles, popcorn, oreos, pizza (cheese, broccoli, spinach), and peanuts has been about as healthy as I've ever been. Sure every once in a while I got a veggie wrap or Morning Star Black Bean Burger in there, but those healthy nuggets only had my body more confused and stomach wrenching as it was used to it's regular stock of sugar or starch. So while I'm sure Nick's Meat Week is no more healthy than my Non Meat Non Week, Nick has had to suffer through delicious dish after delicious dish while I get to sit back and pin my regularly disastrously unhealthy eating habits on Nick's gluttonous free for all.

Point - Bret.

The obvious self loathing stand up-y joke here is that Nick has more friends than I do. Cue the sympathetic applause for the "underdog"... and Bret takes the win. But that's too easy. I could make some huge big wrap up speech about the ultimate lesson I learned and summarize it with a sentimental touch about Chicago and improv and Thanksgiving type stuff and life. But I'll let Nick have this one. And I'm sure he'll do a fine job of ending on a nice post, most likely involving some dumb ass food puns. (Spice up your life!)

Also that sounds really hard and I have a pomegranate frozen yogurt with red white and blue fruity pebbles- er I mean dinner waiting for me. So I will GRACIOUSLY AND QUIETLY SET DOWN MY METAPHORICAL CONTROLLER AND/OR HAND OF CARDS AND LET NICK WIN.

Point - Nick.

Meat Week now has a partner and I couldn't be more honored.  Citing the concept of scientific supersymmetry, my best friend and co-Bricknet, Bret, decided to bring balance to the force by giving up meat during Meat Week.  Considering Bret has previously attended food festivals in which the goal is to eat absurd amounts of strange meats, I'm so very excited to hear how Non-Meat Week goes for him.

His plan to forego meat reminds me of my first week without meat.  In college, I started working out regularly without seeing any results, so I knew my diet was probably to blame.  I decided, primarily for funsies, to give up meat for 1 week in the fall of 2006.  My older brother had been a vegetarian for a few years already, so I also thought it might be fun just to see what it would be like.

That week flew by so I decided to go for 2 weeks.  2 weeks turned into a month, a month turned into 2 months, and so on.  After 3 months, I had dropped nearly 30 pounds.  It turns out that actively focusing on what you eat (or don't eat) forces you to reconsider your decisions and make better choices.  It hardly seemed like a diet, though.  It was actually really fun.  While vegetarian foods likely existed prior to my own vegetarianism (though I have no proof), I would have previously completely ignored them.  I imagine it is like being a baby who is just starting to eat solid foods.  Everything was new; I even had the opportunity to find new favorite foods now that my original favorites (chicken wings, honey baked ham, my grandmother's roast recipe) were off-limits.

I suppose that's one of the goals of Meat Week - trying foods I haven't eaten in 8 years to see what they are like.  I've heard that your taste buds change every 5-7 years, so it will, to a certain degree, be like trying these foods for the first time.  Will Bret have the same experience I had 8 years ago in my first meat-free week?  Who knows?  But just like any adventure, I sure am glad to have someone to go through it with me.