uncomplicatedly

First of all — if you missed it the first time or just want to remind yourself what a charming writer I am, I urge you to check out my essay on how and why I became a vegetarian: It Ain’t Easy Being Green: Memoirs of a Veggie Cowgirl. I originally wrote it for a food blog that my friend Matthew was starting up, but that site has since gone defunct, and my friend Ari was looking for contributors to her new blog, Vegan Ithaca — I was happy to send it to her so the piece could have a new home. Here (again) is the first paragraph to whet your appetite (again):

I became a vegetarian reluctantly. My two best friends in high school were vegetarians, so for years I had no choice but to champion the life of the carnivore. While Kate and Jessica wrinkled their pretty noses, I was the girl going out with the boys for all-you-can-eat ribs at Big Ed’s Barbecue. I believed in the food chain, meat was delicious, but also -– and not unimportantly –- eating meat marked me as a different kind of girl, one who made dirty jokes and drank hard liquor and just might be talked into a ride on the mechanical bull in the back of Big Ed’s.

As I said when I was promoting this piece before: it’s about ethics, it’s about gender, it’s about food snobbery, and I think it’s a pretty good time. The Vegan Ithaca blog is an idea whose time has come, and it makes me pine for a town that I already miss terribly.

But enough old news — the new news is that I’m working on another real live blog post and it should go live in the next day or so. So assuming you’re here for the off-the-cuff ethics and not for the dubious poetry that’s been populating these pages of late, you will be pleased!