A hunter's daughter takes her shot

By Sara Peck



The rudest awakening of my childhood was not anything Santa-related, but that the antelope heads poking through our family room wall weren’t standing in the adjacent garage and inquisitively looking through—they were dead, there was no body behind those cuddly faces.
After that day I was afraid to fall asleep on the couch watching television. Can you imagine waking up as an 8-year-old to taxadermied heads in the dark? To flip the bill for the thousands in therapy I’d need, my father would probably have to take those heads on Antique Roadshow.
My father was and is a hunter/gunsman/motorcycle guy ardently, passionately and fully. While my mother was pregnant with me, he was hunting in the Arctic Circle. When I was six, I asked him to bring me back a duck bill from a trip in Maine to use as a hand puppet (I would only later realize how morbid this was).
When he needed to blow off steam, my dad loaded up his faithful shot gun and took down the squirrels that dived between trees, fearing for their lives. Why buy Halo II…I hear the thrill of holding a gun in your hands is a little more powerful than a joystick. To prove a point, I brought a squirrel tail to my kindergarten show-and-tell. Other family functions were too marked by light-hearted animal slaying—on Easter, the best eggs were always inside the mouth of our bear rug or hidden behind the pair of taxadermied ducks.
At age 11, I announced that I was becoming a vegetarian. No matter how many times that he explained to me that hunting was not about the killing but about the memories with friends, I had had enough.
Now, I’m not one of those trendsters who saw a "meat is murder" T-shirt on Pam Anderson’s goodies and took it as a message from Hugh Hefner himself, shunning off animal products until sushi came back in vogue. I was honestly opposed to what my father did.
Many of my 9 years as a vegetarian were spent 1. defending my choice and 2. persuading others to do the same. Most of my friends who knew my family were both amazed and amused that a hippy wild child could come from a two-story colonial safari complete with bear rugs and antique shotguns mounted on the walls.
I’ve seen my fair share of fair-weather vegheads — they nibble some tofu, read a little of Civil Disobedience, and muse uninformedly about joining the Peace Corps. But within a week or two, when some handsome graduate student takes them out to a fancy steak dinner, they click their $300 heels back to meateaterndom.
These people annoy me almost as much as those who carry fabric shopping bags screaming "I’m not a plastic bag" only to fill them with designer bottled water—an equally trendy, but infinitely more harmful choice for the environment. Vegetarianism as a trend certainly has its benefits—even a short-lived reduction in meat-eating reduces ones carbon footprint—but ideologically it just seems insincere and petty.
So, when friends of mine leaning towards vegetarianism tell me that it is "too hard" or "I just don’t think I could do it with my crazy schedule" I take it as pure laziness. Even Burger King rolled out a veggie burger in mid-2002 (not that I’d recommend eating it in non-dire circumstances—after many bunches of paper napkins were wasted blotting away grill sludge-fat, I could still hear my arteries waving the white flag). Other, less-intimidating vegetarian staples like hummus are regulars in many restaurants, and might I recommend the roasted red pepper variety? And in Stop n Shop, right next to the chocolate covered pretzels and greasy trail mix, there are packages of soy dogs, just waiting to be grilled. The laziness, I have concluded, is mostly mental.
To his immense credit, my father has always respected and supported my decision. Even if now, 9 years later, he sometimes "forgets" that I don’t eat fish, he will always help me badger the waiter for extra veggies in my emaciated side salad or bought me tofu when I’ve run out. He reminds me to call ahead at family gatherings to ask what vegetarian food will be there; he isn’t even embarrassed when I bring an Amy’s frozen dinner to Christmas.
If you need no other reason to at least convince someone to hide tofu in your dinner, I will leave you with this story.
My father, the gun-toting, cow-blood-makes-the-best-gravy, Harley-riding dad, actually has eaten tofu. And liked it. When he and my mom visited me at college one weekend during my sophomore year, I did what all impoverished, bohemian college students do—give their parents a tour of the local eateries. My roommates and I longed for parental visits to try out that new restaurant or to languish in a full meal not rationed over a week in plastic baggies in our fridge.
After wooing them with stories of great grades, sunshine, rainbows and lifelong friends, I did what any good date would do—I cashed in. I took them to my favorite overpriced but delicious vegetarian eatery that I would only go to on three occasions: 1. post breakup (the vegan chocolate peanut butter cake was always my rebound romance) 2. After finding money on the street (never happened) and 3. When someone else was paying –Blind Faith Café in Evanston, Ill.
My dad was used to my vegetarian antics by now, but never before had he been without the convenience of ordering a burger while I interrogated the waiter about anchovies in Caesar dressing. The whole menu is vegetarian and vegan, even the desserts.
After ordering the Seitan Marsala dish, a feeble shout-out to his love of Italian food, my dad waited grimly for his meal to arrive. I can only imagine that he invited the homonym between the meat substitute and the fiery depths of hell.
And then it arrived, covered in sauce and loving resting on a bed of egg noodles, not the starchy ones he so loved. But no matter how it looked, the "meat" was really just a blob of wheat gluten. He took his first few bites with trepidation, probably mentally plotting a course to the nearest burger place for a real meal after be forced down a few bites of this slop to make me happy.
"This is really good," he said, looking around furtively to make sure no one 1,000 miles away from New Haven knew him. My mother almost gagged in shock—he wasn’t lying. Not even a little bit.
"I know."





Editor's note: Vegging Out barely needs to say "Sara Peck rocks" at this point because you have read her truly tasty visit to her family dinner table. However, for the record "Sara Pack rocks," and Vegging Out offers a big thank you for this post - and for teaching a hard core carnivore a thing or two about meat.

Do you LVTOFU?

Yes, the question is whether you love tofu. Whether you do or you don't, you better not love it too much in Colorado.
It seems a woman there who wanted to profess her love for the bean curd wanted to do it through a vanity license plate that read: ILVTOFU.
The folks that regulate motor vehicles out in the Centennial State, however, decided that that combination of letters might be seen as something other than a statement by an enthusiastic vegan. The first time I looked at, I saw what she did - I love tofu. They saw something that folks might misread, according to news reports.
Now, I am a little familiar with that part of the country, as my sister has lived in Colorado for about 10 years. It's a great place to visit. But it's also a place where meat seemed to me to be king. Before I came over to the side of the light, as a vegetarian, I even some years ago ate a buffalo burger in Denver.
Is there a dark plot to promote more meat eating in this decision by the Colorado DMV? Probably not. But is there some silliness in assuming people would see some nasty or naught in the tofu plate?
You know what they say about assuming.

Read the full tofu-gate story from one publication here

Anyone have any ideas for how to save your bones?

A new study from Downunder claims those of us who live on vegetarian diets have "slightly weaker bones" than those who imbibe on flesh. This is according a story posted here and making its way across the Internet at many sites.

For anyone who does not want to read the entire story, it basically says a joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found vegetarians had bones 5 percent "less dense than meat-eaters."

"The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker," the story quotes lead researcher Tuan Nguyen as saying.
He went on to say there was "practically no difference" between bones of meat-eaters and ovolactovegetarians, who excluded meat and seafood but ate eggs and dairy products.

"The results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, are associated with lower bone mineral density," Nguyen wrote in the study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the story said.
"But the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant," he added.
Nguyen, who is from Sydney's Garvan Institute for Medical Research and collaborated on the project with the Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine in Ho Chi Minh City, said the question of whether the lower density bones translated to increased fracture risk was yet to be answered.

This is all food for thought so to speak.

But we also should note that the online charts at http://www.health.gov/ give numerous sources of non-dairy calcium, such as fortified ready-to-eat cereals, soy beverage, tofu, collards, molasses, spinach, soybeans, turnip greens, oatmeal, plain and flavored, cowpeas, white beans, kale, okra, beet greens, Chinese cabbage, and dandelion greens. Calcium levels in those foods vary and absorption rates vary.

Many sites catering to vegetarian and vegan lifestyles also mention concerns about high levels of protein consumption interfering with calcium absorption.

The Vegetarian Resource Group online site here , citing various sources, reports recommended level of calcium for adults 19-50 years is 1,000 mg per day. An intake of 1,200 mg of calcium is recommended for people 51 and older, it says. It also, however, warns "there are a limited number of studies of vegans, most of which find low bone density as well as low calcium intakes," and notes one study where vegans had calcium intakes close to recommended levels found that calcium was well absorbed from a vegan diet.