Vegetarian rumspringa (Aspect 2 of Coffee Region, Cartagena, and Pasto)

I just ate a ham sandwich.

Let that sink in. I'll wait for a second.

Yes, you understood correctly. After twelve years of vegetarianism, I'm back on the meat. Well, temporarily at least. To refresh your memory from a previous post debating this:

1) Food is a major part of the culture in any country, and missing out on something this integral component is something that can't be ignored when a good deal of what one's life is dedicated to is world languages and cultures.

2) Vegetarian food in Cali is hard to come by, and when you do find it, it's often time very expensive. Tofu, for example, is double what it costs in the US, whey is also about double the cost, and while they don't have seitan, they have gluten. However, it isn't a complete protein. Gluten is basically the same as seitan except for it hasn't been marinated in soy sauce which adds in the final missing amino acid. 

I decided to make my trip to the coffee region my vegetarian rumspringa. For those who don't know, rumspringa is when an Amish youth leaves the community to go experience our way of life. At the end of that period, they decide whether to return or not. I made the choice to do this on a trip because there was a lot of shame wrapped up in the idea of eating even a little bit of meat again. It's a source of pride for myself that I don't eat meat, and I was sad to give that up, to part with that piece of my identity. At least while I was traveling, I would have no one to explain it to, no one to look at me to see what my first reactions would be, no pressure to do this any sort of way than how I wanted.

Flash forward to the coffee park where I ask for an arepa filled with chorizo. I ate it and waited. I was afraid that after twelve years, my stomach would launch a full scale coup, and I'd be rushing to a bathroom on the regular. Last thing I wanted was for that to happen during a roller coaster. No one likes a poopy pants. And everyone absolutely hates a poopy pants on a roller coaster. This is universal law.

But as I waited, I didn't notice much of anything. My guess is that because my diet has usually been pretty heavy on dairy, maybe this was close enough for my stomach to still process meat. There is also the fact that I had eaten meat for the sixteen years of my life, but suffice it to say, no bad effects whatsoever.

After I found out that eating meat wouldn't send me into a world of pain, I took full advantage of my rumspringa. "Let's tempt fate," I thought, "let's try to find some meat thing that I absolutely love and would go crazy for, something that would make me think I'm actually missing something because that chorizo arepa was like eh....." So I ate every meat item I could get my traitorous little hands on during that trip.... And nada. Meat, while it can taste good, still can't come close to rivaling vegetarian food in absolute savoriness. There's so much flavor in vegetarian food, and meat is just... there, all lumpy and stupid. Don't get me wrong. There were a few things I did like, but vegetarian or not, they weren't things one should make a habit of eating.

When I went to Cartagena, I tried step two of this grand experiment and didn't eat any meat to contrast, and it was probably the wrong place to try this. Not only is that city hella expensive, it's whole culture is based around seafood. Options were found; I didn't starve, but man, it was difficult without access to a kitchen to cook things for myself. I mean, yes, my hostel had a kitchen, but cooking in it was sure to give me an as of yet unknown disease, probably breeding in its darkened corners and waiting for it's opportunity to go out into the world. I've seen horror movies with plague motifs. I'm not going down that road. NOT TODAY, EBOLA!

After this experiment, the twenty pounds I've lost in the six months I've been here, the prohibitive prices of vegetarian food, and an increasing feeling of exhaustion and weakness, I decided this was the right choice. I won't eat meat at home, and I tend to follow a meal plan and it won't include meat, which means it'll mostly just be out when I'm at restaurants, but there you have it: I'm eating it none the less.

I was once explained that religions can often be broken down into one of two groups: ones that put a premium on time (such as Christianity, with an emphasis on history and potentially impending rapture or apocalypse) and ones that focus on space (such as a good deal of indigenous religions). I prefer the ones that focus on space, which I think Buddhism. It transforms and merges with the culture in which it finds itself. Zen Buddhism in Japan is not the same as it is in the United States, and there's good reasons for that. The Buddha himself wasn't vegetarian. His principle was to eat whatever was placed in his begging bowl. Well, Colombia is putting meat in my begging bowl, and so, it's meat I'll eat.