The interesting thing about growing up as a vegetarian is eventually you become an adult and through happenstance, you find yourself living with a meat-eater. When my parents divorced and found new mates, they didn’t make not eating meat one of their requirements. Neither did my sister or I. As a result, the four of us are now the only vegetarians in our respective homes. This generally doesn’t create a problem, but it does create situations for which we are wholly unprepared: like dealing with the fact that my brother-in-law’s insides are going to rust out like an old car forever parked on the lawn in a particularly rainy climate.
Here’s the thing about this guy: he doesn’t really like food. He likes eating, but food itself holds very little interest for him. To say he’s picky would not only be an understatement, but a gross bastardization of that word. He hates vegetables. I mean, hates them. To the point that the only way he would eat pasta when he was younger is if his mom ran the tomato sauce through the blender and made it as ketchup-like as possible. He’ll only eat potatoes in french-fry form.
He and my sister have been together for nearly nine years, and I always viewed this as a funny little quirk — until recently. The fact that he won’t eat a baked potato that is doused in butter, cheese and sour cream, because it’s not fried (although, to be fair, he won’t even eat steak fries, because they’re too potato-like) or even eat pickles on his cheeseburgers has always been mildly amusing to me.
But since we’ve moved back to Virginia and see my family on a regular basis, things have gotten bad. We had he and my sister over for dinner a few weeks ago, and not only did he eat the giant steak that Luke made for him, but he finished the one that my friend couldn’t. The next day at work, his stomach hurt so bad that he had to go home — and he never leaves work early.
We made fun of him mercilessly and chalked it up to a one-time thing. That is, until this weekend. On Saturday night, we were gathering for my step-sister’s birthday. My sister and her husband were already running late, because they had been at their friend’s daughter’s 1-year birthday. I got a text saying that they were going to be even later, because her husband’s stomach was acting up again.
My dad laughed and assumed that he was projectile vomiting from drinking too much (my sister and her husband have only been out of college for a couple of years), but I had my own suspicions, so I texted her back, “Too much drinking, or too much cow?” This is the response I got:
“He hasn’t drank at all. I think too much variety of animals… He had meat loaf, chicken alfredo, spicy chicken, pepperoni, ham, and turkey.”
Who does that? Now, I’m obviously not an expert on how much meat the human body can handle, but that seems like a really bad idea, right? He’s young, but he’s clearly having problems. Should we stage an intervention? A meatervention? We’re obviously not going to convert him to vegetarianism; that would be like telling Tiger Woods he can only play putt-putt from now on. We’re not monsters, after all.
But there has to be a happy medium, doesn’t there? A world in which he and my sister can share more than a cheese pizza and we won’t have to try to develop iron-colon technology for him? Our whole, “uh, you know what’s good? Veggie burgers,” suggestions aren’t very helpful, so I turn to you; the reader. How do we stop my brother-in-law from inadvertently cloning a cow inside of him?
Clacked by Kona Gallagher 
on Mar 31, 2009 @ 15:00 EST5EDT
I don’t mean to laugh at his predicament, but this post had me laughing!
Hmmm… Does he like fish? Have him try swordfish – it’s a very meaty tasting fish or see if you can trick him into trying a portobello mushroom burger – again, it has a very meaty taste that might satisfy him a bit.
Either way, good luck!
Darlene W.