Last week, my 6-year-old daughter announced she was a vegetarian.
The strange thing is, she loves meat. Her idea of a good between-meal snack is a plate full of salami slices. When we go to Denny’s, I make sure I order bacon with my breakfast so she can have mine — to go with the bacon she already ordered for herself.
Then there’s the chicken McNuggets, the spaghetti and meatballs, the cheeseburgers — all things she loves.
On top of it all, she’s a picky eater. Take away the meat, and there’s really not much left.
So when she made the announcement during dinner preparations one recent evening, I laughed spontaneously. I just couldn’t help it. I didn’t mean to deride her, and I’m not sure how my secretive little girl took my reaction.
Without further discussion, I accepted her pronouncement. I think she had a plate of noodles for dinner that night.
Not wanting to compound any problems I may have caused with my initial burst of laughter, I waited a couple days before I asked my daughter why she decided to become a vegetarian.
It must have been something she saw on the Disney Channel — an episode of Hannah Montana, perhaps — or something she picked up at school.
Sort of like the time she told me that I looked like a “gangster” because I had forgotten to put on a belt and my pants were riding a little low.
(How much does private school cost, anyway?)
When I asked her why she was a vegetarian, she just shrugged. And I shrunk — I feared she was again becoming self-conscious of her decision, and I was making her that way. I wanted to send her a different signal: That she had a right to make this choice, and I wasn’t challenging it.
Oh well. Her vegetarianism didn’t last long anyway. She had to give it up a couple days later, when she learned that the frozen chicken patties from Costco have meat in them.
Today, she’s prone to identify herself as a “flexetarian” — again, who knows where she learned that term?
She defines it like this: “Sometimes you eat vegetables. Sometimes you stretch to eat meat.”
The 6-year-old vegetarian
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