Meat Log: Beer-atarian?

It’s been a little less than two weeks since I accepted this fool’s bet. I find it repugnant that it’s only been 13 days. Until I counted for this article I had it in my head that this had been going on for months. How did my life become a recurring nightmare of me saying “challenge accepted” in slow motion?

The Psychology of Meat

Speaking of dreams, I’ve literally been dreaming about eating meat 3-4 days of the week. While the initial will-breaking need for steak has subsided, I’m still woken by the craving. My favorite is the one where I am eating chicken, a burger, or whatever and I realize I’m eating it and then freak out and wake up. In the first one I even resorted to induced vomiting (in the dream) to remain bet kosher. I wonder what a psychologist would say about this?

A friend’s mother accused me of missing all of the delicious antibiotics and growth hormones that we feed our meat. To that I say, heck yes, I miss it. Is that what makes cow so good? We use like 25 million tons of antibiotics a year on cattle, which is about 8 times the amount we use on humans. At this point we must have perfected a BBQ flavored injection.

This is what I get for quitting meat on strictly unethical grounds. Who knew proving someone wrong would hurt so much?

The Pitfalls of Eating

There are going to be screw ups. Meat is EVERYWHERE! I went to a promotion at Buffalo Wild Wings two days into the bet. Yeah, I knew it was going to suck. Wings, burgers, wraps, and sandwiches were all out. So I decided to ask the server what the fry their onion rings in. She, guessing vegetable oil, went to the back to double check. Turns out they fry pretty much everything in *LARD. So after milling around for a while I decided to inspect the nachos. They looked safe. Cheese, peppers, onions, lettuce. No meat sauce. So I had a couple.

And then it occurred to me that I DON’T KNOW HOW TORTILLA CHIPS ARE MADE! After a little research I learned that, like most other chips, they need to be fried in something. So then paranoia set in. What if BW3′s fried their chips on site? Did I just lose after 34 hours? Maybe, but I never had the heart to call Buffalo Wild Wings and ask. Which was moot since…

I lost on the first day. I ate some Ramen that I purchased before quitting meat. CHICKEN flavored Ramen. And chicken flavored Ramen contains actual “powdered” chicken. While no one can tell me where/how one powders a chicken, it does indeed sound like the first day was a wash. And maybe the second day too. And there have probably been other mistakes since. At some point during the second week I realized that this is just part of quitting meat. Real vegetarians have these problems, and more than one has told me how they’ve accidentally eaten meat in one of its many (powdered?) disguises. So I continue to my quest to become the best fake vegetarian.

*At this point we’ve established that I have to do 90 days without eating meat or any of the non-vegetarian meat products, including fish. What does that mean? Basically I can eat anything that an animal didn’t have to die to produce. Obviously actual meat is out, but cheese, butter, milk, eggs and some of the other staples of American decadence remain within my reach.

Yeah. Some of those days half of my calories are beer and liquor.

Filling The Meat Hole

So what the hell have I been eating? A lot of cheese and beer, by the look of it. I have an awesome app I’ve been using to keep track of food (for later mockery) and found that everything I lost in meat I pretty much replaced with beer during the first and second week. Here are some of the incriminating photos.

The app allows me to keep track of what I’ve eaten and gives an approximation of the calories. As you can see, the food portion is rife with “other” items. Sometimes I take a bowl of Ramen and crack an egg in it, then microwave it for 4 minutes. I know what you’re thinking, but I replace the chicken powder with cheese.

Haven’t gotten salmonella yet!

Meat War

I was recently bull-rushed on Facebook by another writer. She has taken it upon herself to post delicious steak recipes on my wall in an attempt to break me. She is meat enemy #1. Regrettably for her, I CANNOT BE BROKEN! And her crippling fear of spiders and clowns (hint) has made the conclusion all the more inevitable.

13 days down. 77 days to go.

I'm going to do all of this on March 16th