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Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian

Tonight I did something I haven't done in almost 20 years. Well, two things. First: I made chicken soup (for Al, who was wishing yesterday that he had some to help him fight off a cold). Second: I ate some.

I stopped eating red meat in the fall of 1987, when I was a sophmore in college. I continued to eat poultry for almost a year after that, but then it got so chicken and turkey tasted like meat, too. I almost got to the point where I gave up seafood as well, but I had a chat with my tastebuds and my psyche wherein I explained to them that I had grown up on seafood (in New England), that it was an easy way to get enough protein, and that I planned to have my (non-bacon-infused) chowder and broiled scallops and fried Haddock as long as they were available to me. (I hadn't started eating sushi yet—I didn't discover that until the early 90s—but I'm glad we had that talk before sushi and I were introduced.)

Aside from a small nibble of ham and one of chicken while I was pregnant to see if they appealed (they didn't), I haven't knowingly eaten any non-seafood meat since 1988, if memory serves. Until tonight. Without thinking too hard about it, I decided to taste the chicken after I removed it from the soup pot. It was actually quite good! I'd used an organic, had-access-to-the-great-outdoors-but-never-actually-went-outdoors chicken from Trader Joes, and I'd simmered it with some onions, carrots, celery, fresh parsely, and a bit of dried rosemary and thyme. I didn't add any salt because I hadn't planned on tasting it to check the salt levels; I figured I'd leave that to Al.

So anyway, the chicken tasted very mild, and not at all like the over-processed, over-salted mechanized death that I'd come to expect chicken to taste like, based on the smell I associate with KFC and some of the rotisserie chickens all brings home. So I ate a bit more. In all, I probably ate about six small shreds of meat, plus a small bowl of broth and vegetables over egg noodles. (The broth did need salt, but honestly, the chicken itself tasted much better without any.)

My stomach feels a tad sour now, but other than that I seem to be processing this foreign food OK. Whether I'll eat any more tomorrow (or ever again) remains to be seen, but I don't regret eating what I did tonight. (Although I couldn't seem to get the phrase, "meat is murder. tasty, tasty murder" out of my head the whole time I was chewing.)