The vegetarian challenge.

I received my absentee voter ballot in the mail yesterday (how stoked am I that after re-registering, I still get to be an absentee voter? VERY!), and I was looking at the propositions, trying to figure out what some of them were saying because you know they try to make the verbiage so totally confusing that you end up voting the way you didn't want to.

Prop. 2 is titled: Standards for Confining Farm Animals. Initiative Statute. I read the body of it, which basically is going to force farms to give their livestock (some of the livestock animals, anyway) room to MOVE. Shocking! How dare we want to allow animals to move???

Okay. So I'm partial to animals; however, I'm not an animal activist. I wear leather. I eat the pig and chicken (but not the cow). I think it's fine to eat animals. Go ahead, eat all you want. I just don't like seeing the conditions animals must live in before they are slaughtered for our consumption. It's horrific. It's sad. It makes me cry.

When I told my husband about this proposition, he said he was listening to a newscast about it on NPR. They were talking to farmers about it all and what it would mean for them. I already knew what he was going to say; the already expensive chicken was going to cost way more if Prop 2 was passed.

So I told him I wouldn't expect any less than that. But he wasn't going to convince me otherwise about how I will be voting for this proposition because if I wasn't married to him, I would be a vegetarian.

Way back when, we both tried to eat vegetarian. My husband's hips started hurting him and I just felt plain icky, so we stopped. The hardest problem was cooking meals we would both liked. If I have the option of chicken or pork, then I fair much better. We're both picky in our own rights; I don't like meat too much and rarely like the meat things I do cook, and he doesn't like creamy things, including sour cream, heavy cream, mayo, cottage cheese....

I told him that there are plenty of vegetarian food staples I like to eat that I know he doesn't, so making dinner is hard. When asked what I was talking about, I said like lentils. He said he's eaten lentils before. And I said that the difference between him eating lentils before and me eating lentils now, is that I would choose to eat lentils whereas he wouldn't.

And then he challenged me. I call this the vegetarian challenge. He told me to plan a week's worth of tasty vegetarian meals and then we'll talk about it. He had to go and throw in "tasty," though, which means something different to him than it does me, but that's okay, because this gal loves herself a challenge.

Game on.