mr T made me a vegetarian in 20 minutes or less, for 3 easy payments of $39.95.

i'm not saying you should stop eating meat. not at all.

go right ahead, eat all you want.

but me? i'm out.

it all started some years back, when i ran into a friend i hadn't seen in a long while and she mentioned that she had since become a vegetarian. i thought to myself, "man, i could never do that". and as is my way, whenever i find myself saying that, well, i have to do it. so for a while i went veg, just to prove i could survive. i did, and i came away with the satisfaction that i was paying a lot more attention to the things i put in my face, and i was learning a lot more about good cooking. it's not often that a restaurant makes it easy and enjoyable to not eat meat. often i find myself in places like one particular establishment in philadelphia that had not one single item on the menu that was sans flesh, besides beverages and desserts. even the salads all had meat in them. so i found i was eating in more often, or bringing the dinner party to me. in addition, i felt all clean and happy inside. i didn't have to sit back, caress my belly, pregnant with food baby, unbutton my pants, and groan like an old man as i digested my way into a food coma.

while i was going in and out of nice long streaks of being an herbivore, it never fully took hold for longer than a year or so. blame it on the devil's nectar. every once in a while, usually when hungover, i would get a hankering for chicken wings, or a greasy burger, or BBQ of some kind. what's more, how can you go to a ballgame without getting a couple of stadium dogs?

but that feeling is usually easy to suppress with thoughts of what actually goes into making chicken wings, or a greasy burger, or BBQ of some kind (and as it turns out, it's not all that hard to get a veggie dog at a ballgame, and believe it or not they taste exactly like regular hot dogs. i guess all that's left do now is prove that there is actually meat in a hotdog in the first place).

best case scenario, meat products are the charred and/or fried, rotting flesh of a dead animal. not to say that it isn't delicious and satisfying decomposing corpse, and i understand anyone's motives behind horking some of it down. i did it for years without a second thought.

it's the worst case scenario that often hurts the ol' blood lust. unfortunately the worst case scenario is basically as far as your imagination will carry you. honestly, imagine the worst it could be. somewhere in the world, something you may purchase for consumption is made that way. think about it: human body parts, band aids, prophylactics, all found in fast food. chickens with more than two legs, hopped up on steroids until they are so deformed with juicy white meat bits that they can't even move. i don't even want to know what hotdogs are, but i'm pretty sure they have parents (or at least were inside an animal in some capacity, at some point...poop). the things they do to veal cows are awful, and the things they do to kobe beef cows are just silly (i'd rather eat a salad while an asian woman massages me with warm sake, and serves me beer. although i suppose there is some pleasure in knowing that when that cow died, it probably had no regrets. that cow sure knew how to live).

nevermind the logical and moral quagmire of animal products. nevermind that sustaining a meat eating culture as large as the western world is an enormous drain on agricultural, labor, water, economic, and energy resources. nevermind that the human body was not designed to hunt, kill, eat, or digest meat (we lack the stamina, agility, and physiology to hunt and kill, our teeth are those of herbivores, and our stomachs work at far too slow a pace to produce healthy results from eating fatty, sinewy foods like meat. in addition we don't work our bodies hard enough to require the complex proteins and rich fats we get from eating flesh). nevermind that vegetarian foods, whether or not that's all you eat, are just as potentially tasty and satisfying as any meat, and tofu is one of the most under-appreciated, inexplicably feared foods on the menu. nevermind that moral objections to eating meat open up a pandora's box of other no-no's. leather, fur, dairy, eggs, and, in the olden days, gelatin-based foods and glue, among other things all fall under the umbrella of animal products.

but my aversion to leather shoes goes far beyond the whole animal skin thing, they just look lame, and they are uncomfortable. why subject ourselves to them if we don't have to? yet, it's hard to play catch with a baseball glove made out of hemp. so leather is a complicated issue. meanwhile, fur is a total waste of time, and cheese is too delicious to give up. no, no. i have no desire, at present, to break down the entire moral dilemma of animal products.

it's the thought of what meat actually is that bothers me, these days. i've never looked at a person and sized up their juicy cuts (look at the briskets on that gal. yum!), but the reason we don't do that is because we allow our emotional attachment to guide our moral decision not to eat each other, smothered in country gravy, with your choice of coleslaw or home fries. so why should it be that i am ok with eating an animal that, given the chance, i would pet gently on the head while i tell it it's such a cutie? i mean, i'll tell you right now, if i'm standing next to a big friendly cow, with its wet, empty, stripper eyes, i really don't have to fight the urge to rip its throat out with my teeth and feast on the soft bloody insides until there's nothing left to do but chew the nutrient rich marrow from the bones. so, really, i have no desire to let someone else bust its head open with a sledgehammer, grind up the soft bloody insides and nutrient rich bones in a loud, scary looking machine, let it sit around for a few days, then serve me the mangled, charred remains with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.

yet, regardless of all of the above, in the past, the siren song of the carnivore cried out to me every now and again.

until the day mr T busted the door down.

OH YEAH! i mean, umm, PITY THE FOOL!

i'm no opponent of infomercials. i find them more entertaining than most network television. the magic bullet is one of my favorite programs. the characters are classic: the drunken buffoon of a husband "ewww vegetables!?", the lush wino grandma who smokes in the house "ain't nobody making muffins in my kitchen, that's just a mess waiting to happen!". add the vomit inducing serving suggestions (hard peppermint candy in a milkshake? alfredo sauce in 7 seconds?) and you've got a recipe for entertainment.

so it should come as no surprise when, 2 minutes into the flavorwave infomercial, i'm hooked. all it took was an unassuming woman standing in her "kitchen" telling us about how she's having a special friend over for dinner, that must be him now...

BANG!

a cloud of dust erupts into the room as the kitchen door goes flying across the set (that lady could have been killed, clubber!) and mr T barrels into the room in a juggernaut pose, "where's my dinner, woman!? i don't smell nothin' cookin'".

what's not to love? explosions, mr T, degrading treatment of women (it's the A-team, minus the sweet rapist van)...

what's not to love is the time lapse footage of meat cooking. over and over again, they hit us with fast forward footage of the machine turning meat products from large, frozen bricks, to wrinkled, greasy, twisted up flaps of nastiness.

of course they have to pound that footage into our brains, because the whole point of the flavorwave is that it can cook frozen meat, and fresh vegetables all at once in the same amount of time, to perfect doneness. it better, because mr T is hungry, and he pities the fool who tries to eat this frozen hunk of T bone, especially after he's slammed it against the edge of the counter a few times, flinging frozen shards of cow like IED shrapnel (and i pity the woman who tries to eat his hunk of T bone, especially after he's slammed it against the edge of the counter a few times...). seriously, if mr T doesn't get ahold of himself, he might just kill this woman. luckily he has plenty of flavorwaves around, so in less than 20 minutes her dead body could be reduced to a pile of nondescript, gristly meat flaps with a dental record. at that point it's just a matter of selling it to wendy's.

now, i know not everyone is like me. we are a rare breed who watch infomercials for fun. as are we a rare breed who take the time to actually think over the life story of everything we put in our mouths (we'd all have starved by now), but do consider trying out the veg life, maybe just for a week or two. it doesn't really matter me if it becomes a permanent or even a long term thing, but it will give you a little appreciation for something you may have thought you "could never do".

to both vegetarians and carnivores, i think it's important to note that it's hard to say you've truly had the human experience until you have consumed some meat inclusive culinary delights, so long as they are done right. i think you could easily live without a mcDonald's burger, for example, but a philly cheese from a street vendor in philly? sushi in japan? new zealand lamb? brats in germany? fish and chips in the UK? some things have to be tried.

to the carnivores who ask, "but if i can't eat meat, what do i eat?" and, "how do you get full on vegetables?" strict hindu culture is vegetarian (some branches even cut out certain vegetables, like garlic and mushrooms, because they are believed to interfere with meditation. think that's weird? christians eat the body and blood of jesus, and what the hell is gefilte fish?) and they are as healthy as anyone else. many of them have cut, svelte bodies, and many of them are fat. in fact, hindus come in all shapes and sizes. so trust me, it's plenty possible to get a complete and satisfying diet as a vegetarian (not everyone will end up skinny and gangly, like me).

to those who take up this challenge: carry on my wayward son, there'll be meat when you are done. but if you want to enjoy that meat, don't think too hard about where it came from, and i pity the carnivore who sits through the mr T flavorwave commercial.