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Articles and Information
Why be Normal?
by Tammie Ortlieb
I knew a vegan once. He was a runner. He was an engineer. He lived in your typical two-story suburban colonial. He ran for school board and took his dog on a daily walk. When Little League season rolled around, he piled his boys into the back of his Jeep Grand Cherokee and hauled them off to the ball field. He was, in most every way, pretty much normal.
It wasn't until a neighborhood potluck and three bites of his to-die-for gazpacho that I discovered his idiosyncratic ways with food. Not being hungry, but enjoying the company of good friends, I was rambling on (what's new?!) about how I had stopped by the local burger and play land that day. What with the great deal on supersizing and fortunate excess of my two-year-old's chicken nuggets, I was quite stuffed. To my surprise, I was met with a shake of the head and a, "That stuff's not good for you."
Can you imagine?
Since then I've learned that not all vegans weigh ninety-five pounds. Some even send their kids to public schools. Heck, some vegans ARE those kids in the public schools. In fact, I know of one vegan teen that wears regular clothes and has regular colored hair. She even plays trumpet in the marching band. How normal is that?
A friend was telling me the other day about a neighbor's daughter. Seems the mom is concerned that the thirteen-year-old may have an eating disorder. Upon a little probing, my neighbor discovered the girl has been losing some weight. She seems to be picking at her food. She orders her pizza without the cheese and no longer dunks her veggies in her favorite ranch dip. In fact, she won't touch meat, milk or eggs of any kind.
Oh, for Pete's sake, the girl is vegan, not anorexic.
You should talk to the Ortlieb's, my friend tells her. THEY'RE vegetarian, and THEY'RE normal. What's with that? You have to eat dead animals to be normal? You have to beat cow babies to the bottle to have any kind of common sense? You have to go around slathering sauce all over something that used to live and breathe and fart to have any kind of brains at all? Yeah, we're normal all right. Just not THAT kind of normal.
I guess this is why I take a certain pride in calling myself a mainstream mom. This is why I bake for school parties. This is why I lead my daughter's Girl Scout troop. This is the reason I carpool and potluck and sign up to head committees. I teach four-year-olds their Sunday school lessons and take the car in for repairs when needed. I do all this and still won't touch scrambled eggs. I do it because I know that friends, neighbors, teachers, and coaches are all watching me.
They know who I am. And they know what I'm about. They know that children come first in my world. They know that I love the dogs and cats I share my home with, on most days anyway. They know that I garden and that I share the fruits of what I've raised through the goodies that I bake. They know that I recycle by frequenting consignment shops and garage sales. And they know that I think twice about what I put into my body.
And maybe when the PTA's president's son approaches her with his desire to go vegetarian, she won't run screaming eating disorder to the boy's pediatrician. Maybe, unlike one mother I know of who refused to let her son be vegetarian because he couldn't get all of his nutrients, maybe she will take him to the library to check out some books on the subject. Maybe she will help him surf the web for menu and ingredient lists of his favorite restaurants. Maybe she will talk to him about the difference between a person who just stops eating meat and one who incorporates good nutrition into a plant-based diet. Heck, maybe she will suggest he talk to the Ortlieb's. After all, THEY'RE vegetarian and THEY'RE normal.
Tammie Ortlieb is a freelance writer with a Masters Degree in Developmental Psychology. Her work has appeared in VegNews, Veggie Life, Vegetarian Baby and Child Online Magazine, and Mothering.com. She resides in southwest Michigan with her omnivorous husband, three terrific teenagers- two veg, one wannabe-, and a you-tell-em-like-it-is-sister future green revolutionist fabulous fourth grader.
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