Strictness and conversion

I never did an update on my Lenten initiative, but I just read a quote that explained it for me. I was a vegetarian for 40 days, and I did not cheat once. Well, I did eat these completely disgusting potato "wedges" from Arby's during a necessary drive-thru that had something in it that in some former life MIGHT have been bacon, but it was so far from their incarnation then that I haven't worried about it too much.

Anyway, the point is that I did not cheat. No "Sundays don't count," no "because it's a special occasion" or "because it's Thursday" or whatever. I actually had a bite of chicken on my plate at one point and I did not eat it...not because I thought God would hate me or something if I ate it, but because I had said I was going to do it in solidarity, and I knew I would remember that bite.

At the end of Lent, commonly called Easter, my husband asked if I wanted to go get a big old burger to celebrate, because that's what I had talked about. I thought about it. A burger sounded good, in theory. We have a kajillion burger places around us, it was Easter, and I had made it 40 days without eating any meat.

But when I got down to it, meat did not sound that appealing to me. What sounded appealing was a little place down the street from us that has amazing tacos and salsa. We went there instead, and after hemming and hawing I decided on a chicken dish that I had been craving. I ate it, and the salsa was great and the cheese was great and the way they fry it was great (all cornbread-y), but the chicken was a little weird. "It just doesn't taste good!" I said to my partner, and he got a look of fear in his eyes, like, oh s$%&, this veggie thing is going to stick.

I felt kinda sick that night. The next week or so I sort of experimented with eating meat again. Not ever beef, because I just couldn't stomach that, but some organic chicken and such. I had thought that at the end of the experiment I would try to eat only organic and local meat, because I was never opposed to eating animals, only the treatment and how much it takes to prepare one and ship it and make it cheap and all that (See the omnivore's dilemma for more info on that, good stuff). I could not eat it. I did not want to eat it, and it just tasted, for lack of a better word, strange.

So I guess I've become a vegetarian. Today I read a quote that summed it up for my experience at my new favorite blog, No-Impact Man. “Only through strictness do you have a conversion.” He was quoting his food mentor, Alisa Smith, who was cautioning him that although you can cheat in the process, you'll only experience the impact (or in his case, no impact) though strictly following the process. And I really think that's what happened with my vegetarian thing...that through strictness, something in me, not even consciously, unexpectedly, had a conversion.

I'm sure the theology of all this is going to come up at a later date, but for right now, it just makes me wonder what else I could be strict about!