Growing up I was a fussy eater. To quote George Carlin, "Fussy eater is a euphemism for 'big pain in the ass'". My mom would agree with that sentiment. When I was 11 years old I went on a 2 week school trip to eastern Europe and when we returned a chaperon from the trip informed my mom that I might be anorexic because they had trouble getting me to eat anything. She told them that while she appreciated their concern, I was not anorexic, just very picky. When given the option of eating something I didn't like or going hungry, I would usually opt to go hungry.
My poor mom. My dad rarely got involved in what I ate, and being the only girl in a family with lots of boys I could often use that to my advantage in getting my dad to do what I wanted, including ordering pizza when my mom wasn't around to make dinner.
Fast forward 6 years to my 17th birthday when I decided after another trip to Europe (Spain this time), that I was going to stop eating red meat. I stayed with a wonderful host family in Madrid, they were incredibly kind and my last weekend there they took me to Segovia to this amazing restaurant. When the menu came out they told me I had to order the lamb or the pork as those were the house specialties and since I wasn't sure if I liked lamb I opted for the pork. Growing up in the US, I was somewhat sheltered in regard to where food came from. I knew where things came from but it didn't always completely register. I had a rude awakening when the pork came out with the foot and tail still attached. I ate it, mostly because I didn't want to offend my host family and also because it was actually very good, but I had a hard time looking at meat in quite the same way after that. I think I wanted to cut out all meat but there were two issues with that. 1) I lived in semi-rural northern New England and most restaurants in the area did not have a vegetarian option at the time aside from cheese pizza and salad that was mostly iceberg lettuce. 2) As my mom pointed out when I informed her of my dietary change, I didn't particularly like most vegetables.
She definitely had a point. But being a semi-vegetarian though I had to start liking them. There are some I'm still not especially fond of (cauliflower and green peppers), but I love eating vegetables now. I'm a huge fan of mushrooms, spinach, cucumbers and carrots and I even like eggplant even if it doesn't like me back. 2 years after cutting out red meat I cut out all meat. 18 months after that I went macrobiotic and that lasted 6 months until I found myself at a lobster bake on the coast of Maine. They pulled the mussels out of the seaweed it had been steaming in and there was no way I was only eating corn on the cob that day. I didn't even like mussels before that but these were amazing. Then there were steamers and lobster and I decided that living within a mile of the Atlantic Ocean and not eating fish once in a while was just plain silly. My reasons for being a vegetarian had morphed over the years from being an idealistic teenager who didn't like killing cute animals for food to doing it more for health reasons so eating fish once in a while made sense from a health standpoint. It's the easiest form of animal protein for the human body to digest and it was fresh and local to where I lived.
In case you're wondering, I'm not a vegetarian anymore. But I'll leave the rest for part 2.
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