Can we have a soy burger to go with those fries?

When I was 9, I offered my friend a slice of pizza.

After she had taken two bites, I assured her, “Oh, don’t worry, I took out the pepperoni.”

She screamed and started crying.

My friend was an Indian vegetarian- as part of her Brahmin traditions, she had never come near a morsel of meat. I knew this, but her emotional reaction to the chance of pepperoni contacting her innards was baffling to me. I profusely apologized.

At the time, I was a non-vegetarian, piously avid about the meat I ate and determined in having the prefix ‘chicken’ before any meal I purchased at restaurants. I was not allowed to consume cows or pigs because of my religion, but once when my friend had a SpongeBob-themed birthday party with beef ‘krabby patties’, I willingly complied.

I could be found scraping the last bits of mutton from my plate for a long time after dinner was over and preferred to call the soy nuggets my mother packed me for lunch ‘chicken’ nuggets. A carnivore who perched vainly on the top of the food chain, I was oddly disdainful towards those who kept to their plant-based diets.

Seven years later, I became vegetarian. Although I do not mind being around non-vegetarian food, consuming the flesh of animals became unnatural for me. On a winter night, I looked at my bowl of goat curry and out of nowhere, felt revulsion. Nine months later, I left a spicy McChicken burger in its wrapper, untouched, and never went back for a bite.

 It is not easy to stay on the ‘greener spectrum’ of food in America either, however, (and by green I just mean vegetarian because the plastic wrappers strewn on my floor know how unhealthy I still am) with scarce a menu dissenting from the conventionally protein-dependent diet of an American.  

When I was still a meat glutton and lived in India, I never gave the local options of McPaneer and McVeggie burgers a second look. But here in the United States, I sometimes find myself hopelessly facing a drive-thru menu board with nothing but, “Can I just have some fries, please?” to submit to.

 Finding an entree item that spares the default of meat is almost impossible at mainstream American restaurants like McDonald’s, Olive Garden or Chili’s (where I have finally surrendered to an appetizer of onion rings during main course). The instinctive choice of the American is very often high calorie–meat- nothing can get in the way of our pork chops, cheeseburgers, bacon strips and bologna, quintessential to American life like the Super Bowl and bald eagle are.

To leave meat, for many, is out of the question.

The unsurprising reason behind the orthodox meat culture is this: meat in America is sold convenient, appealing, undoubted and, above all, cheap. The poorest stratas of society that can barely afford potatoes at a grocery store can easily buy a burger combo at the close-by fast food restaurant.  It is not without reason that only 3.2 percent of Americans are vegetarian and 0.5 percent are vegans (http://www.vegetariantimes.com/article/vegetarianism-in-america/). The gustatory sector of the country hardly feels the need to cater to those Americans who avoid meat.

But despite the overwhelming majority of the population that thrives on diets of poultry, an increasing number of people living in America are abstaining from it. Religion, animal ethics and health benefits have become a significant reason for Americans to part from cheeseburgers and barbecue nights.

For Viennay Garcia, a senior at Coppell High School, a fond sensitivity against animal cruelty turned her vegan when she was 11.

“I really love animals: I’m big into animal rights,” Garcia said. “I began researching into animal agriculture and the dairy industry and the things that I found out weren’t things that I supported on a moral standpoint. So I decided it would be easier if I just stopped contributing to the problem.”

One of the sickening facts I learned from speaking to Garcia concerns the vile nature of the censored dairy industry- in order to obtain a maximum yield of milk, “cows are artificially and forcibly inseminated year after year” (http://freefromharm.org/dairyfacts/). As a staunch believer in animal rights and as any human should be, I was horrified; my own gradual inability to consume meat had stemmed from such a sentiment.

Although rare scriptures of ancient cultures and religions originally demanded 100 percent vegetarianism, most Indian Brahmins- part of an upper Hindu caste- also strictly follow a vegetarian diet, even in the United States.

“It’s our religion,” Anagha Sanne, a Brahmin from Southern India and now a senior at CHS, said. “In India, Brahmins are considered sacred and perform the poojas (prayers) at temples. It’s seen as offensive to the Gods if we eat meat, because meat is supposed to be inauspicious.”

For people like Garcia, Sanne and myself, it is often with a sigh that we resign to the spare food option for the unconsidered vegetarian in the corner of the menu.

“If you’re cooking at home there’s a lot of alternatives, but in regards to restaurants or going out, there’s not,” Garcia said. “I have family in Europe and they do eat meat, but they eat it maybe three times a week, whereas here in the U.S. people have meat every day, for almost every meal. I feel like it’s excessive, you don’t really need to eat that much meat every single day, all three meals.”

My own trip to London last year also revealed similar observations: rather than selling ‘king’ sized burgers sopping with ample oil and calories in the name of ‘fast food’, there were several light and less meaty sandwiches available. The revelation was a welcoming surprise, and it strikes me as strangely interesting that Europeans have embraced healthier, less meat-inclined diets while most of their Anglo neighbors are still left behind.

To entirely leave meat is out of the question for many Americans, so that is not what we abstinents ask. Protein is essential to survival, making meat a very practical choice, and without us consuming them, the lower rungs of the food chain will run amok.

What we ask, instead, is that America step slightly away from this rigid dependence on meat that is turning farms into grisly scenes of horror and many of our people into obesity-ridden victims.

But perhaps even that is too far of a step. If not opting to reduce the amount of meat we consume ourselves, let us turn more friendly towards those who choose to.

So let me try again and make a tall order. “Can I have a soy burger to go with those fries?”