I’ve been thinking a lot about 23 and myself. Not the DNA kit that reveals that you once dated your half-brother “by accident.” The year 2023. Will this be the year I discover the perfect diet, for example?
I’m not talking about diets to lose weight like when your grandmother lived on Tabs and Figurines. I’m talking about diet lifestyle choices. Maybe this is the year you become a “sustainee”, which sounds like where they used to put people with TB in the old days.
If I become a sustainer, which is also a real thing, I’ll be the favorite for dinner. (“You see, it’s time we reduced our environmental impact through a diet of whole grains, nuts, and legumes…Wait! Where are you going? I wasn’t done!”)
And while we’re on the subject, what are legumes? No one really knows, but I’m pretty sure they’re those little wax-made fruit soda bottles you can eat. No problem.
Sustainers are the noblest of very specific lifestyle diets to choose from in 2023. If that cloak seems too heavy, perhaps you’re more of a “social omnivore,” a term I just learned about in the current issue of “Bon Appetit”, which I think in French means “I would rather be smoking”.
Social omnivores do not buy or eat meat at home, but will eat it at a restaurant if invited to dinner or at a dinner party at someone else’s house. I think the more familiar term for this dietary lifestyle choice is “cheap butt.”
Seriously, the social omnivores are trying not to be so rigid as to hurt their feelings or have the dinner hosts prepare a separate meal like a picky child.
Perhaps you are more of a “flexitarian,” described as someone who is primarily a vegetarian but occasionally eats meat and fish. Unlike social omnivores, flexitarians occasionally pay for meat and fish and eat it at home. They might even invite some “meatatarians” to show their open mind. Meatatarians are people who consume meat every day. Like me.
You could leave that carnivore mentality behind at 23 in favor of becoming a “reducatarian,” which is someone who consciously reduces the amount of meat and dairy consumed in a day. If you still don’t understand what that means, let me use it in a sentence: A social omnivore and a reduceatarian go to a bar. How long is it before the reduceatarian realizes that he has bought all the rounds?
“Climatists” don’t eat beef or lamb because of the environmental impact of corporate farms; “pescatarians” eat fish but not meat; and “vegans” eat no meat, fish, shellfish, dairy, or eggs, subsisting entirely on a wholesome and noble plant-based diet, supplemented occasionally by thinly veiled disdain for others. The “carnetario” eats meat but not fish, so I guess the average age is 24 months. It will take a little longer before the “fish” is in the shape of a battered, ketchup-soaked finger in a school cafeteria.
I was having trouble finding the right path (you can’t be a carnivore forever), until I heard about the “veggie-vore”, someone who is not a vegetarian and eats meat but tries to inflict minimal suffering on animals and commit the least possible environmental damage. Perfect.
I already buy grass-fed beef because I prefer to think my steak came from a cow that lived a beautiful life roaming bucolic pastures alone in the blue part of Texas, so, okay, the streets of Austin. And I’ve bought free-range and cage-free eggs for years because I prefer eggs laid by a group of chatty chickens who wear “Rosé All Day” T-shirts and mock all the energy of the big rooster in the barnyard.
You may have thought too much about all of this. So, like a vegetarian vore, right?
Celia Brokenbark He is an author and a New York Times bestselling columnist. He writes to [email protected].
Get a weekly roundup of South Carolina opinion and analysis from The Post and Courier delivered to your inbox on Monday nights.
Source: news.google.com