by Mark Hart

Created on: November 19, 2008

If your child has announced he or she has become a vegetarian, it probably means one of three things: 1) Your child is developing moral categories for his/her life; 2) Your child is a college freshman and already following the heard; 3) Your child may not be cut out for the modern world of cutthroat competition and you have failed as a parent. In any case, Do Not Panic. This is probably not the disaster you envision. (However, should your child say s/he is a VEGAN and you have never lived on the star Vega, all bets are off since vegans are a different species entirely!)

You can imagine my wife's and my surprise when our daughter came home for Thanksgiving her freshman year at college and announced she would not be having turkey for dinner since she was now a vegetarian. We tried to brush it off, thinking she would change her mind once she smelled that big, golden-brown bird roasting in the oven. But by the end of dinner I became concerned. Like the rest of us, she could eat marshmallowed yams, green-bean casserole, and pumpkin pie by the plateful, but Turkey (and even gravy!) was off the menu. When she declined a left-over turkey-with-cranberry-jelly-and-stuffing sandwich the next day at lunch, I really began to worry that this wasn't just a phase and tried to reason with her. "Wouldn't you rather smoke pot, get tattooed and pierced, or fall in love with members of the same sex like the other kids?" I pleaded, but she seemed determined to rebel in the extreme. So what could I do?

All I could think of was to educate myself. After a quick search of vegetarianism on the internet, I discovered that Miley Cyrus is rumored to be vegetarian, Brittany Spears once posed nude with vegetables, and there are secret garden supplements you can add to make vegetables grow to monster proportions. (I also found a great recipe for making venison taste like pinto beans but that's a different story.) Upon further searching, I discovered a lot of celebrities and famous athletes are vegetarians; that vegetarians do not only eat salad; that soy beans have replaced tobacco as the number one cash crop in Virginia; and that the natural estrogen in soy flubber can make men grow breasts just like Brittany Spears'.

In other words, I realized I could no more restore my daughter's desire for cooked animal flesh than I could bring the Rams back to Los Angeles. So, over a not so subtle T-bone steak at Black Angus on New Years Eve, I finally informed her I would respect her lifestyle choices and could she please pass the A-1. Fortunately, the story ended happily. When she returned to the United States after a semester abroad her junior year, the first stop she wanted to make on the way home from the airport was at In-n-Out Burgers for a double-double with cheese. Our little carnivore was home!

One final word of reassurance to those of you who fear your child has gone over to the green-side. There are actually many more tasty vegetarian items in most supermarkets than you might imagine beside veggie burgers, soy milk and Tofurkey. Some stores, like Trader Joes, have whole sections that look suspiciously like deli items but are actually (like hotdogs) something else altogether. I have even been known to pop a BBQ veggie rib and wash it down with an alfalfa/carrot/mango/blueberry smoothie on occasion . . . and lived. In fact, I can envision the day might come when it would be just as unthinkable to eat fried chicken or bacon as it would be to throw the family pet on the grill.

Learn more about this author, Mark Hart.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.