Dolf's Blog
Integral thoughts about development, humanity, spirituality
Why I became a vegetarian
26 January 2007
This afternoon at lunch, one of my colleagues asked me why
I had become a vegetarian. That is now five or six years ago during
the time that there were all kinds of animal diseases in
And it was easy, by the way. Initially, I promised myself
that I could eat some meat again after having been a vegetarian for
a year, but that never happened. The craving or need for meat wore
off after a few months and never really returned. The only thing I
missed were hamburgers and the one and only Dutch Kwekkeboomkroket (if
you don't know what it is, come to
So my decision was an ethical one, but with an implication
that I realised a few years later. As my decision not to eat meat is
based on ethics, i.e. not wanting to be part of a system that
slaughters animals industrially, I can eat meat in places where that
system does not exist. That means that I can eat meat in the type of
countries where I tend to go on holidays (
So I introduced a criterion that goes as follows: did
someone actually run after the chicken to catch it and then prepare
it or not? To be perfectly sure, I hereby plea for a quality mark
stating if the meat you buy was run after or not and coin the name
for it as well: Chased Meat. So I suppose that from now on we
can find sections in selected supermarkets with Chased Meat and
menus in restaurants with signs indicating that the meals contain
Chased Meat only (I propose an icon of a running, headless chicken
for this purpose). And McDonalds can introduce Chased Hamburgers (McChase?).
Don't blame me if this actually happens, by the way…
An other colleague mentioned the fact that this could apply to biological and ecological stores as well, but I don't think that Chased Carrots would work very well…
