Vegetarian?

I cannot express how I excited I am for this unit we have started with Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.  I had been looking forward to this since I saw it in the syllabus because of my own experience with becoming a vegetarian.   I had said when I signed up for this course that it would probably have a great impact on how I feel about staying vegetarian and ultimately if I will continue with the diet.  I was especially excited after our class discussion to find that Chris was a vegetarian for ten years and had raised her kids to have this diet as well.

My own becoming a vegetarian started about a year ago when I began experiencing severe health problems.  It came to a point where I was hospitalized because I had been unable to eat or drink anything for almost five days.  I had already been to a GI specialist who had diagnosed me with IBS, and gave me pills to help with symptoms.  It became clear that this diagnosis was incorrect when I was hospitalized.  My doctors were very confused at what was happening because I was a healthy nineteen year old who was active and practiced healthy eating habits.  I was ultimately diagnosed after almost two days in the hospital with gull bladder disease and had my gull bladder removed.  This diagnosis was a surprise to my family and me, but not to the doctors.  We found out that people at younger ages are having their gull bladders taken out at higher rates not due to bad diets as is generally the cause.  The doctors explained that because I had a healthy lifestyle, my gull bladder disease was caused by a combination of two things: the consumption of prescription medications and the steroids that are put in our seemingly healthy foods (mostly meats).  This was shocking to me, I was never a sickly person, so it was not like I had abused prescription medications by any means, and my parents had raised me on a very healthy diet. 

This causation spoke volumes to me about our society.  In our American society we thrive on money and the idea of time.  We are constantly racing one place to another, which is very different from other societies.  There was a large possibility that I was given prescription medications from my doctors for reasons that could have been cured without medications.  This over usage of prescription pads in the case of doctors generally happens to speed up the turnover of one patient to the next as well as the influence of the pharmaceutical companies to make more money.  Our food industry is set up in a very similar fashion where we are given meats that have such large amount of steroids in them that they are affecting our health, just to speed up the growing process of the animals and to make more money.  I love that Kingsolver has strong political undertones throughout her book about these issues that I feel have impacted my physical being so much.

After doing a large amount of research about gull bladder disease and our food industry I decided to go vegetarian.  My symptoms after the surgery went away faster and I feel like I am living a lifestyle that will be much healthier for me in the long run.  In a society of many people who do not understand why I have a diet such as this it is empowering to read about a family who went against the larger amount of society to live a healthier, greener lifestyle.