Nothing with a mother or a face...

I can't remember when exactly we decided that we wanted our children to choose for themselves when and if they were going to eat meat. Jon and I have both been vegetarians or near-vegetarians for all of our adult lives. During the past few years, we have occasionally consumed meat, but only when we knew that the animal had lived and died well. Although neither one of us resents being fed meat as children, we wanted to take an alternative approach. Instead of meat-eating being the "given," why not allow it to be a conscious choice?

It was easy enough when Zephyr was an infant to go to our favorite restaurant and order a buffalo burger and fries. Even up until the age of two or so, we could cook an occasional pot of elk stew or assemble some "happy cow" tacos under his radar. As long as we fed him ahead of time and didn't loudly relish in the deliciousness of the meal, we got away with it, no questions asked. As he got older, our meat consumption was a little more on-the-sly. We would sneak mouthfuls of homemade jerky while Zephyr was distracted, feast on sloppy joes when he was at a friend's house for date night.

Then, just as we recommitted ourselves to vegetarianism a few months ago, Zephyr became very interested in eating meat. He received The Tawny Scrawny Lion as a birthday gift from our friend Katie, and one day, after a quiet reading, the questions started. "Why was the Lion chasing the elephant? Why did he want to eat it?" One thing led to another, and pretty soon he was wondering why we didn't eat meat. "I'm going to eat lots of meat when I get older!" he insisted. "You might, or you might mostly eat vegetables and fruits like me and Dada." "I'll eat it all," he conceded, "but I'm going to eat LOTS of meat!"

And he may. But in the meantime, he eats a wide variety of things I never would have touched at his age- lentils, chard, sweet potatoes, bean stews, figs, beet greens, tofu, mangoes, pine nuts, and soy dogs (pictured above) to name a few. The other day, he was watching Jon pull heads of lettuce out of the garden. (Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, to be specific; he can try iceberg on his first cheeseburger.) "Why are you shaking them after you pull them up?" he wondered. "To get the bugs off," Jon answered. Zephyr mulled that over for a minute, and put two and two together, in that three-year-old way. "You shake the bugs off because we don't eat meat!" he concluded.