At the age of 6 my oldest daughter declared herself a vegetarian. It went something like this:
“Uh mom, what am I eating?”
“That’s chicken sweetie”
“Chicken? Like Chicken from the farm, like Chicken Little?”
“Um well yes chicken from the farm”
Long pause.
“So do we wait till they get old and die and then cook them?”
“Well, no”
Long pause
“Mom, what else do we eat?’
At this point I could tell this was not going to be good. I could see her little mind spinning and making connections…beef-cow pork-pig lamb, duck, etc. After I explained to her what we typically eat and don’t eat (dogs cats) I could tell she was horrified. And seriously I could see it through her eyes. We humanize animals in all the story books and then we serve them up for dinner, kind of freaky if you think about it. So a few meatless days later she approached me and very excitedly announced she was going to become a vegetarian (and then proceeded to explain to me that there are these people in the world called vegetarians who actually don’t eat meat… heard it on Animal Planet…)
So what does a mom do? I will say I have made some poor mom decisions in my life (like the time I MADE my daughter go to church “Get your butt in the car NOW” because I thought she was faking illness and she threw up all over my car) but this time I pulled out a good one. I told her we would research what it would take to become a healthy vegetarian, what foods we needed to eat, how we would have to change our diet. So we sat down and started to Google. I didn’t know it then, but this was a start of a drastic change in my family’s life. One I am grateful for everyday, and the coolest part is that it came to me through the wisdom of my child.
