The Dream - Why I am a Vegetarian

I used to eat a fair amount of fast food. I would eat at McDonald's at least once a week.

One night, about eight years ago Mitra, baby Darius and I had taken the evening ferry to Vancouver. On the ferry, I had eaten a particularly gross hamburger and later that night, I had "The Dream".

In my dream, I walked into a McDonalds. It was strangely quiet and I was the only customer. This made sense in the dream. I went up to the counter and ordered my usual: a Big Mac, a regular hamburger and a vanilla milkshake.

The server handed me my food. Instead of a usual bag, the server handed me a big black garbage bag (the kind that have a hint of green in the plastic, if you hold it up to the light). The garbage bag was rolled down.

I opened up the bag and looked inside. The bottom of the bag was filled with dirty sawdust - like sawdust that had been thrown on a shop floor to soak up spilt oil. The bag also contained old black dress shoes of many different sizes.

I remember thinking in the dream, "This is odd". Another voice said in my head, "This is always what you have been getting. You just never saw it this way."

I looked closer at the shoes and was struck in horror by the realization that the shoes were mismatched. Remember the image of those huge piles of shoes in Auschwitz? It was as if someone had taken a shovel full of shoes from this massive pile and put these mismatched shoes in my bag. I could feel this whole machine turning away and cranking out my meal.

I awoke in a sweat. I lay there in bed in the early morning and felt the impact of the dream wash over me.

I made many changes in how I eat as a result of that dream. The first change was to stop eating at McDonalds. After many years of eating regularly at McDonalds, I stopped the day after my dream and haven’t eaten there once in the eight years since this dream.

A few months later, I stopped drinking coffee. I was never a big coffee drinker, but I would consistently have a cup of coffee in the morning. I noticed that within a week of not drinking coffee, my stomach stopped hurting in the evening.

About six months later, I stopped eating refined sugar for about four years. I used to eat a lot of sweet food! It was really hard to not eat candy bars, white chocolate and the like, but I did for four years. After we sold the company, I started having some sugar again. Now I eat some refined sugar, but far less than I ever had in the past. I am much more balanced in my consumption of sugar.

Then about a year after I had The Dream, I stopped eating meat. It seemed to me that not eating meat just made sense. It is not that I have any issues with killing my food. I just didn't want to participate in the industrial production of meat anymore. It was like coming full circle back to the original moment of the dream.

I find it interesting that one short dream could change so much in my life. No other dream has had such an impact on my life.


Postscript 1 - Mitra’s Reaction

A funny story...

When I came home and told Mitra that I wasn't going to eat meat any more, she just laughed at me.

"What are you going to eat? All you eat is meat!"

She was right. My diet used to be very unbalanced (lots of meat and carbs, no fruit and veggies). Becoming a vegetarian has meant that I had to eat way more fruit and veggies. After six years of no meat, I have started eating a little meat in the past six months.

It seems to me that I had been so unbalanced in one direction that I needed to go far in the other direction for some time before I could find a healthy balance (lots of fruit and veggies with a little meat once in a while).


Postscript 2 - Keeping It Quiet

When I made the other changes to my diet, I never told anyone. I just wanted to keep them to myself. However, when I stopped eating meat I found it impossible to not mention.

The day after I made the decision, I was at lunch with a business friend. I ordered a veggie pizza and he asked me if I was vegetarian. A week or two later, I was traveling for business in the US. We stopped somewhere to eat dinner and every item on the menu involved meat (even the salads!).

I often attend business lunches and dinners. Every time I do this, I always have ask the server for a vegetarian meal. Not only does this announce to everyone at the table that I am vegetarian, but it invariably means that I am served at a different time than other folks at my table.

I tried being a closet vegetarian, but found it impossible.


Postscript 3 - Part of the Family Story

Darius refuses to ever eat at McDonalds. He happily eats meat, but is adamant that he will never eat at McDonalds because McDonalds is bad.

I once asked him why he has such strong feelings about McDonalds (especially because he has never eaten there). He told me all about my dream in McDonalds. It was an odd moment for me because I had never directly talked to him about my dream. However, he had overheard me tell the story enough times that he could recite it from memory. It was surprising.

I realized in that moment that the story of my dream had become part of the fabric of our family story. The kids know the story by heart and it informs how they live their lives.