Chat About Vegetarianism

I just did a podcast about vegetarianism on the forums. There's this super, super cool learner member named Sri. She's actually Indonesian. And anyway, she comments on my blog a lot.

She's really active on the forums. She helps other people out and answers their questions. She's just like the uber super learner, you know? It's like, God, I wish I could be like her with Spanish.

I'd be fluent in a month. But anyway, she's not vegetarian, but it sounds like she eats sort of quasi-vegetarian. Um, like, she eats lots of vegetables, eats really well. Well, she started, like, scheduled this whole Skype discussion with other members on the topic of vegetarianism.

Hmm. Yeah, it's kind of cool, and so that sort of inspired me to, um, you know, maybe write a little, do a little podcast about being vegetarian. Maybe I should, I can interview you sometime about, because I talked about my story, why I'm vegetarian, but, um,

Yeah, maybe we could chat about that sometime and record it. Okay. Would you be interested in doing that? When did you become vegetarian? Well... You know, honestly, not strictly until at some point in Thailand.

Because I was still occasionally eating fish. So you're kind of mostly vegetarian, though, before that, right? Well, yeah, that... Everything was cut out except for occasional fish when I was 22.

Wow, so quite a while. Yeah. Because I don't remember you eating that much fish. I did in the beginning, and it was more of a rebellious thing because I felt like Todd is the one that pressured me into quitting eating meat.

And I wasn't comfortable with that. I was like, well, you know, I've already been thinking about moving along these lines, but I was hesitant about giving up fish, and so therefore, I'm not going to. Well, yeah, of course, you don't want somebody pushing you.

That's not good. Right. So in the beginning, it was more, and it definitely became less and less, but I think I still, you know, I honestly don't remember ever eating it in Thailand, but I must have, because it seemed like there was this turning point when I was

When Watt and I went with Gene and Brandy down to Phuket and went out on the boat when they went deep sea fishing, and one of them reeled in this fish, and it's a big fish, and it's flopping around, and somebody picked up this mallet-type thing and hit it, and just killed it instantly.

And when I saw that, I was like, I'm done. I'm not even eating fish anymore. Yeah, you sort of realize, oh, they are alive and sentient. Right. Yeah. They're aware and they suffer.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of get that a little bit when I scuba dive. You realize how, like, fascinating and intelligent they are. Mm-hmm. And it's like, you know, they're not planned.

I started realizing, I think, when I had my 75-gallon tank, actually. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I think that's always been, for me, the main thing. It's like if they're sentient beings with some sort of nervous system that's capable of suffering, it's like, yeah, I don't want to cause that.

Yeah.