My husband is not a vegetarian. I am not a vegetarian. With a Master’s degree in ecology I am deeply familiar with and a big believer in the food chain. Humans are designed to be omnivorous. Should I feel bad about eating a cow? Does a lion? Of course not. I suppose it could be argued that lions, unlike (most) humans, don’t have a sense of morality, wherein lies my crux. In my house, we watch The Simpsons, a lot. I know it isn’t exactly appropriate viewing, but it’s the only cartoon besides Futurama (which we also watch) that I can stand, and that we can watch together without me wanting to stick my head in the oven.

I think The Simpsons is one of the best things American culture has to offer. It’s clever, hilarious, and subversive. No matter how many times I’ve seen an episode, I frequently find something new and funny that I’ve missed before, and I never tire of it. I also think Lisa, who is strong, intelligent, and skeptical, is a good role model. There is one particular episode however, that I blame for my current predicament with my daughter– Lisa The Vegetarian. As you can tell by the title, Lisa decides to become a vegetarian in this episode after bonding with an adorable baby lamb at a petting zoo. Marge serves lamb chops that night at dinner—which speak to Lisa “Lisa, I thought you loved meeeeee?” in a little lamb voice. Lisa declares that she thinks eating animals is wrong, and is a vegetarian in the series from that episode on.

Now my daughter has seen this episode at least three times, because I think it’s one of the funnier ones. However, when she recently claimed that she wanted to be a vegetarian (we hadn’t watched that episode in at least three months prior to this exclamation, but I can’t figure out anywhere else she would get the idea) I wasn’t so sure how funny I thought it was anymore.

Prior to this my daughter had eaten hot dogs, turkey, and ham with gusto. I was a little curious if she really understood what she was saying, so I asked her,

“Honey, what does being a vegetarian mean?”

“It means you don’t eat meat”.

“And why do you want to be a vegetarian?”

“Because I think killing animals to eat them is cruel”. She’s 4.

We then had a discussion about the food chain, but I can’t really argue with her logic. If she can articulate her objection that well, I am willing to support it, doing otherwise would become a power struggle and I want to encourage her to think for and express herself. From there however, we have gotten into a bit of semantics.

“Mom, where does milk come from?”

“Cows”

“Do you have to kill them to get it?”

“No honey, getting milk from a cow doesn’t hurt it, remember when you milked a cow at the State Fair?” (of course, this technically is true, but I didn’t tell her what happens to cows that run out of milk or where they go when they get old).

“Ok, then I’ll drink it”. She looked pensive for a few seconds and then said,

“What about eggs?”. Hello grey area.

Sept. 27th 2006

 Well her vegetarianism lasted about two months.  Today in the store she asked

“What are sausages made from?”

“Pigs honey”.  She looks thoughtful for a few moments….

“Well I don’t like pigs so I’ll eat that”.

 I then tried in vain to explain hypocrisy, but gave up.

Also the last episode of The Simpsons we watched mentioned “Hookers” since I don’t feel like explaining the meaning of that word to my very curious 4 year old we will no longer be watching it.