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Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Have your kids ever given up meat?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
About couple of months ago, my oldest daughter woke up, ate bacon and eggs for breakfast, had a piece of pepperoni pizza for lunch and had sworn off all meat by dinner. She has been a vegetarian - no meat, fish or poultry - since then.
Her decision still seems a bit out of the blue to me. She had never expressed a distaste or disgust for meat, and I can’t think of anything that happened between lunch and dinner that day that would have sparked her choice. But she eats eggs and dairy products and seems to enjoy the meat substitutes, so the transition has been pretty smooth.
I remember reading several months ago that a growing number of kids are becoming vegetarians. The figure I saw was that about three percent of Americans aged 8-18 have switched to meatless diets, up one percent from an earlier study. Vegetarianism isn’t sweeping the nation’s youth, but it is growing. (The poll didn’t reflect if the kids’ vegetarian diets were long-lasting or just a phase.)
I have gone through two vegetarian “phases” in my life - once as a kid when my parents announced the steak on my plate was actually Bob, the bull on my family’s farm. That disconcerting bit of news turned me off of meat for a while, but it wasn’t very long. As an adult, I simply lost the taste for meat and didn’t eat it for a few years. When I was pregnant with my second child, I was so anemic that in my 8th month, the doctors and nurses said if I wasn’t morally or religiously opposed, I should really consider eating a steak or ten. I went to Capital Grille, at a proper steak and began to say goodbye to iron deficiency. Though I don’t eat much of it these days, I still do eat and prepare meat at home.
The summer is probably a good time for my daughter to make the switch to a meat-free diet, because it actually gives me time to prepare a well-balanced vegetarian menu for her. I still need to figure out what she will take for lunch when school starts back, but I have time to figure that one out.
Have your kids ever gone through a vegetarian phase? What brought it on and did it last? Do other members of the family eat meat while your child doesn’t? How do you balance the nutritional needs of growing children and their dietary restrictions with young (often picky) palettes? Do your kids have friends who are also vegetarians or have they found it difficult to stick to their diets at parties or other gatherings with friends?
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