A Note on Being a Carnivore

You know how I always cushion the more difficult of my goals with saying something along the lines of "...but I have no willpower, so whatever..."?  It comes up a lot -- in budgeting, exercising, looking like a professional at work rather than a dumpy college kid (but those few extra minutes of sleep are priceless I tell you!).  I don't know why I say I have no willpower because it's almost a complete lie.  In fact, if nothing else I'm more often accused of being stubborn to the point of dumb when my mind is made up on something.

So I guess I'm just lazy.  I'm a lazy, lazy girl.

This is never more clear to me than when I stop and think about my eating habits and, more specifically, my habit of eating meat.  Here is my dilemma: I am one of the biggest carnivores I know (I seriously love meat)...and I wish I were a vegetarian.  I don't really have any health-related problems with eating animals aside from the regular, run of the mill, we-should-all-eat-less-red-meat-because-our-bodies-have-a-hard-time-digesting-that-crap drama everyone's heard over and over again.  But I do have some serious animal-rights related issues with eating meat.

I'm a huge animal rights fanatic.  Did I ever mention that before?  Well, I am.  I mean, I log on to the PETA website regularly (though I will say their tactics are often way passed too extreme for me), I don't allow myself to enter animal shelters unless 1) I can actually feasibly adopt 15-100 animals that day, or 2) I want to find myself sobbing in bed for the rest of the day, and the only regular charitable donations I make are to wild life conservation groups.

And yet here I am, chomping away.  It makes me feel terrible.

So why do I keep eating meat?  Before you judge, just hear me out for a second.  As lame as it may sound -- and believe me, I'm well aware -- eating meat is sort of intertwined with my culture.  Being from Hawaii, and being Native Hawaiian on top of that, hunting and fishing kind of come with the territory.  Seriously, my family can actually be broken into 2 categories: the hunters and the fishers (though both factions usually dabble in the other).  I grew up camping out in cabins while my cousins and uncles went out hunting for pigs (and my grandfather is the one who taught them all to hunt).  I was always the kid my dad took with him when he went throw-netting or 'opihi picking.  I've seen my brother-in-law clean more pig carcasses in our driveway than I can even tell you.  If you open up our deep freezer chest at any given time, you'll probably find either some tuna my uncles caught and brought over for my grandparents, or the meat of the pig my brother-in-law caught the day before.  I collected bones as a child, for crying out loud!

So while my family and most people I know eat everything they hunt (to not do so would be incredibly disrespectful to the animal), that still makes us a hunting, fishing, meat-eating kind of people.

So I guess that's how I'll justify being a carnivore until I can finally muster up the willpower and courage (because telling my family I no longer eat meat would be a scary thing) to stop.  I'm also not expanding the list of animals I eat, and actually still only eat those that I've eaten since childhood (so no duck, goat, veal, venison, buffalo, lobster, crab, shrimp, etc. etc.).  And I don't eat shark -- which, living with Nate, who's half Asian, is fun -- but that's because my Hawaiian family believe the shark to be our family's guardian spirit (our 'aumakua), and that would just be wrong.

In case you're wondering where this all came from, last night I caught an episode of the new Travel Channel show "The Wild Within" which follows this dude around as he hunts, cooks, and sort of explains his philosophies about hunting animals for food or (if you're a jackass) sport.  In case you're really interested, he'll be going pig hunting in Hawaii during next weekend's episode.