My 28-year journey trying to cut meat from my diet

As an avid meat eater for 28 years, I understand that trying to cut meat out of your diet can mimic the experience of a slow, hellish death. The constant social effort and bland meals are no way to live. My 28-year journey trying to cut meat from my diet unfortunately was never meant to be a success so I could be a vegetarian or vegan. However, it provided me with a better understanding of the negative relationship I had been building towards food and how to build a more positive one. I am grateful for it and hope it provides anyone reading this with a new perspective on meat-eating. To me, it is not a zero-sum game, but a life-long relationship with how we respect food all the way from its source to the experience of preparing it, eating it, and how it fuels us.

My first failed attempt. Roadblock: Culture

My first introduction to the fact that eating meat killed another living being was when I was about 14 years old. My Seventh Day Adventist friend asked me why I ate meat if the only thing I truly enjoyed were the flavours that accompanied it. This can be true for certain dishes in Singapore (where I lived at the time). In fact, one of my favourite dishes (Mee Rebus), is just a thick, soupy gravy made from mostly sweet potatoes and other asian aromatics — the recipe does include meat, but can easily be done without. At 14, my logic told me he was right and that it really shouldn’t be that difficult. Little did I know that Southeast Asia is one of the unfriendliest places on the earth for anyone trying to cut meat from their diet completely.

The first challenge, family. My mother is a saint and housewife and cooked for her family of 8 every single day. Every dish was complex and required at least 10 different ingredients, one of which always had to be meat. Negotiating with my mother to castrate her sacred recipes — the recipes she held so much pride in — the recipes made my father fall deeper and deeper in love with her every day, was of course a losing battle. They were dishes that encapsulated her identity as a mother and a wife. They were passed down to her from her mother who worked so hard to acquire and grow her collection of recipes.

My second challenge was nearly every hawker center owner or restaurant I stepped foot in to make a simple inquiry if a certain dish had meat. I would be lucky if someone simply said “Yes, there is meat in that and not in this”. Most times I was welcomed with a snare and a “tsk” followed by an annoyed: “I don’t know, we not vegetarian, go somewhere else” from staff/owners not willing to take the responsibility for feeding meat to a potential religious vegetarian. As I’m sure you could’ve guessed, I stopped trying after a few months.

My second failed attempt. Roadblock: Ego, fear, and vanity

Fresh out of college and a traumatic surgery for a ruptured ovarian cyst, I hopped onto the fitness/wellness bandwagon. Lifting weights at the gym, eating “clean”, being your best self! It was all the rage and only further helped fuel my unhealthy obsession with being “healthy”. This time, I did not want to cut out meat because I didn’t want to hurt other living beings. This time, I was fueling my ego and my fear of going back to the operating room for another ruptured cyst. I had it in my head that if only I ate healthier, it wouldn’t have happened. I had ignored other contributing factors like my stress and my anorexia. So, I went “clean” vegan and cut out sugar because, why not. It was the most awful experience. I was constantly dizzy, fatigued, bloated, and felt extreme fullness accompanied by extreme dissatisfaction. But of course, this time I was more determined and more stubborn because my ego was a pretty powerful thing. My life was full of salads, a whole lot of restriction, and very little enjoyment. It was only a matter of time before I got extremely sick, feeling lethargic and weak. And even after that, I was so delusional that I thought it might have been diabetes. By then I was a hypochondriac and didn’t know it. Thanks to the common sense and support from my parents and siblings, I went to a physician who told me I had a bad case of the flu. My immune system was probably compromised from the very very drastic dietary changes and over-exercising. It was then I knew I had to stop trying not to just cut meat from my diet but also the restrictive eating because flu or no flu, I just felt terrible all the time.

My third failed attempt. Roadblock: It is not all or nothing.

Awareness of my body’s needs, moderation, and the discovery of the full variety of foods in the world

Since then, I worked as a baker (yep, completely off the wagon). I worked alongside cardiologists, exercise specialists, and dietitians (who had worse diets than their patients btw). I tried creating an online directory of vegetarian-friendly restaurants and hawkers to help myself and others. I have completely dropped off the healthy bandwagon and even jumped back onto my pre-surgery anorexic eating habits for a short period of time. My relationship with food has been far from healthy or stable. Food fed my boredom and dissatisfaction and I do not even want to look at the sight of it when I was anxious or depressed. However, the experience of tasting, chewing, eating brought me so much joy and I still had no idea how to respect it or my body’s relationship to it.

After getting married and moving to America with my husband, we ate a lot of meat, more than I ever had before. This was funny because I consider the US to be one of the most vegetarian/vegan-friendly countries I have been to, right alongside India. However, I felt that I had tried cutting out meat twice in my life previously and failed. So, I guess it wasn’t for me?

Gradually, the bigger portion sizes of food and therefore meat, made my husband and I gain weight. Nothing crazy, we weren’t obese or anything, but we definitely noticed. I had to also start cooking meat for myself for the first time ever (yes, I am a spoilt millennial). And after 3 years of putting my hands on several different sorts of raw animal meat, I started not wanting to do it anymore. The taste and smell of raw animal meat had gotten to me. The smell and texture of raw meat somehow transcended into its cooked state. I would constantly be paranoid over whether the meat was fully cooked in fear of food poisoning. At first, I noticed myself trying to deal with raw meat as little as possible — like dumping minced chicken directly from its foam tray into a hot pot, hurriedly stirring it in an attempt to cook as fast as possible. I then started using my oven more and more — like slapping chicken thighs onto a foil-lined tray and letting the oven take care of everything I did not want to deal with.

When my husband started traveling for work more, I no longer felt obliged to handle raw meat to feed my hungry loved one. It was just me, so who cares? Eventually, I stopped cooking altogether because I felt like if I didn’t cook meat, then what was there to cook or to eat? So, I ate a lot of instant noodles and take-out. I realized that when I distanced myself from the problem (handling raw meat) and went directly to eating cooked meat in the form of takeout, I was less bothered — the same way we deal with a lot of problems in life, I guess. I found this problematic and wanted a better relationship with my food, not because it was logical to not eat meat, to feed my ego, because of my hypochondria, because an instagrammer told me to, or to tell the WORLD I was vegetarian/vegan — like its some sort of achievement. I just didn’t want to experience my food this way. I wanted to truly enjoy every step of what it meant to prepare food so that I could enjoy the experience of eating it and fueling my body.

So, I came up with the 8 tenents below — not with the intention to BE anything, but to re-frame my limited beliefs of what made a delicious and satisfying meal, and have a better relationship with my food:

1. There are no good or bad foods. Eat everything with awareness, intention, and moderation.

2. Meat is not bad for you. If you feel your body needs it, eat it with awareness and intention. It is not required for it to be called a meal.

3. There are way more vegetables, legumes, nuts, seeds, and grains (VLNSG) that exist in the world than there are meat options. Therefore, you can build an extremely satisfying, flavourful diverse meal without needing meat.

4. Grains/Carbs are not my enemies. It gives me the energy to do wonderful things.

5. VLNSG can be as delicious, sometimes even more delicious than meat — if cooked with the intention to be satisfying on its own and not a side-thought/dish.

6. You have not treated/eaten VLNSG as a main dish ever in your life. Rediscover cooking techniques that make them the star in a way that delivers new, exciting flavour profiles you have never experienced before. (Caramelized onions changed my life)

7. Everything in moderation. Excess of fiber from VLNSG (especially raw vegetables) WILL give you gas and make you bloated/uncomfortable. Go slow.

8. Every cuisine has wonderful vegetarian recipes that are wholesome and not full of meat replacers, take advantage of them. (My favourites are the Sichuan and the Mediterranean cuisines. Indian is of course a classic)