There's still a ziplock of turkey in my fridge, but I've chosen sunset as the time that I will turn back into a pumpkin-eater. I've thoroughly enjoyed my foray into the land of meat-eating, and now I'm done. All Thanksgiving leftovers--meat or otherwise-- that have not been consumed by this evening will be frozen or turned into something so tempting (sweet potato custard, cabbage & potato soup made with leftover mashed potatoes) that I predict they will be done away with by bedtime.
I consider myself an amoral vegetarian. I don't object to eating animals, but it seems to me that it's easier to keep weight off as a vegetarian who also goes easy on cheese and bread and sweets. And I no longer go into full-on hypochondriac mode when I read about the most recent batch of e-coli contaminated ground beef or lunch meat. I eat tons of vegetables because that's what vegetarians do, and I hope that will make up for the first two decades of my life when ketchup, butter-slathered corn on the cob, and an occasional salad garnished with bacon were my only concessions to edible plants. I lived on steak, ice cream, and homemade desserts then. I ate chips or french fries every day. Nearly every high school lunch was a half-pint of chocolate milk and a Hostess Snowball. In college I switched to Heath Bars and Cokes. If I were a horse, the condition of my teeth alone would send me to the glue factory. Thank god for modern dentistry. And my dentist probably thanks god for patients like me.
I saved a lot of money eating out of vending machines instead of paying for cafeteria meal plans. And oddly enough, going vegetarian is pretty cheap, too--but I didn't know that when I was 15 or 20. I'm not even sure I knew there was such a thing as a vegetarian. When I was 13 I met a boy who told me he was an agnostic. My whole world was Catholic then, and I had no idea what strange religion he was talking about. When he told me it meant that he didn't know if he believed there was a god, I was so perplexed that I wrote down what he said in my diary. I think I met my first vegetarian a decade later when one of my college friends joined a yoga "cult" and stopped eating meat.
Amazing how the world keeps getting bigger and bigger.
Bon Appétit!
