It was a cool winter day about a week ago when a friend got his new grill. He invited a number of us over for breakfast to break it in. I stopped by and enjoyed some grilled bacon and eggs.
After breakfast, my friend entered with a plate overflowing with meat. Hamburgers, chicken breasts, and pork tenderloin teetered on the plate. One false move and the mountain of meat would come crashing down. He set it down and proudly proclaimed, “This should last about a week.”
As I laughed, I thought back to an article I read in the New York Times called Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler. It was your typical article about how much meat people eat, where it all comes from, and how many resources it takes to produce. It was the kind of article I would normally assume is written by some vegetarian hippie, and thus totally discredit in my mind. However, that combined with the mammoth plate of meat my friend had just produced, got me thinking.
I hatched an idea so crazy, that it needed to be tried. The unwilling victim of my experiment would be me. I decided then that I would give up meat for lent.