It was almost two years ago when I decided to be better than everybody else by becoming a vegetarian.
That was when I quit eating animals of any kind, and began living on a purely vegetable diet. Finally, I could be morally superior to my friends and family, and every meal became a chance for me to remind them what terrible people they really were compared to me.
I Have Eaten Thousands of Animals.
To initiate some conversation, I usually confess during mealtime to having already eaten thousands of animals before my own glorious transformation into a vegetarian, but I then excuse myself by insisting that I never actually killed the poor creatures that I'd consumed, and that in fact I was nowhere near the horrific, bloody scene when it happened.
Since I would NOT personally enjoy killing animals, I might explain to my fellow diners that I am happy that such killing of innocent creatures is something that is done far from the dinner table, in a faraway slaughterhouse so that the whiff of death might not spoil our appetites.
Using Prettier Words
If it turns out that nobody wants to think about or discuss the distant killing of animals at the dinner table, I might tone it down, and offer pleasant substitute words which will help program more comfortable imagery. I begin by apologizing for my language, then I suggest some words better suited for mealtime-- nicer words that might ease those dreadful feelings that are liable to ruin a good meal.
Beef
“How is your burger? It’s made from a ground up cow, but I’ll be sure to call it ground ‘beef’ here at the table. What’s a cow anyway? A cow is really just a bunch of beef, wrapped in an expensive leather wrapper to keep the flies off." I might suggest to a nearby diner, qualifying the notion with my spiritually advanced laugh and a chummy, playful elbow into their ribcage:
"Raw beef squirms around a lot before it gets peeled and put in the cooler, and the sturdy leather wrapping helps to protect the meat in your delicious burger from the dirt, urine and feces that goes everywhere when these beef wraps are killed...” I always explain, emphasizing how these words like beef help to make the food seem less dead, so that everyone can try to enjoy the particular animal that they have chosen to eat, right down to the very bones.
Eating Pork and Poultry Without Guilt
I know more of these handy substitute words, and I always loudly list the nifty little word spells that make animals magically become food-- words like pork, poultry, and even venison, which is a good one; it makes deer seem more edible. While naming these popular food animals though, I always go blank when trying to remember the food word for rabbit. Little bunnies, after their soft fur is ripped off, they have a name-- it's on the tip of my tongue-- what is the word? Nobody dares remember, and we usually end up talking about Bugs Bunny around that time, to everyone’s relief. ’I want my hasenpfeffer!’
I Feel Better!
It feels good to be morally superior, and vegetarianism is a way to maintain that superiority with every meal. A skilled vegetarian can-- with a single well-placed wag of an eyebrow-- turn hearts and stomachs while describing the suffering that animals go through to become human food, and they can leave the dinner table feeling better for it.
Since becoming an active vegetarian myself nearly two years ago, my friends who still eat creatures-which-once-had-heartbeats now always get their food ’to go’, and then they go to pick bones and pull tendons in privacy, away from my neat explanations of the magical words that are used to help them to justify the mass killing, and far away from my morally-pristine eye.
Vegetarians like me are great, and when a vegetarian tells you that they feel better after changing their diet and becoming herbivores, they mean that they feel better than you if you are a still a carnivorous savage. Some expert vegetarians prefer to have meat-eaters in the world for this very reason, but I am even better than that: I would prefer that more people refrain from advocating the mass slaughter of animals so that there will be less suffering in the world. Just that one bit less suffering makes the world a better place, and I can say with a confident and arrogant puff that this improvement in the world is partly because of righteous and hyper-moral beings like me, the vegetarian.
thanks for reading along, I really am a vegetarian but this article is intended as satire and fiction, and should be seen as humor. This post in no way tries to tell anyone what to do, how to live or think, and is for entertainment purposes only. Before becoming a vegetarian, the weirdest thing I ever ate was some barbeque beaver. Tasted just like poultry. I had no part in killing that beaver, and in no way wish to promote harming beaver or anything else. I only intentionally kill fleas and mosquitos, and that's only when they attack me first.
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