Friday, 7 November 2014

I’m a vegetarian, not a terrorist!

By Isabella Sánchez Bolívar (undergraduate FIGRI student)

Most of you might think that the hardest part of being a vegetarian is eating out at restaurants, eating at friends’ houses, getting enough proteins and vitamins or finding vegetarian products, but that isn’t true. The most difficult part of being a vegetarian is dealing with the prejudice that society has.

Every time I tell someone I am a vegetarian, people treat me like a terrorist. First, they start with their interrogation, asking questions like: “why are you a vegetarian?”, “how long have you been a vegetarian?”, “if you don’t eat meat, what do you eat?”, “don’t you miss meat?” After answering all their questions (which I have to say I have answered thousands of times), they begin to criticize me and judge me. According to them, not eating animals is stupid because it won’t stop the mass killing of animals.

Not only that, but they also ask, “animals are delicious, so why are you so stupid to stop eating them?” I won’t talk about the reasons why I and millions more people around the world are vegetarians because that is not the purpose of this article, but if there is something that really upsets me, it’s people trying to convince others to do or not to do something. I strongly believe that everybody is free to think and do whatever he/she wants to think or do if it doesn’t affect the lives of others. That’s why I can’t stand it when they try to convince me to eat meat again because I never try to convince anybody to become a vegetarian. It is a personal choice.     

That’s why being a vegetarian in Colombia is not that easy and it is not because of the reasons you could imagine.


It is because the hardest part of being a vegetarian is dealing with people who just don’t understand. 

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