Shrimp Death

Pam of Nerd’s Eye View used to have the following statement in her profile,

“I don't eat four legged animals - it's just a preference, not a political act.”

Which is the sort of vegetarian I’ve been for the last thirty-five years of my life. It is a choice I made as a teenager and I just never got around to changing it.

Since I am the cook of the family, this means that we eat a lot of vegetarian meals. No exclusively; I do cook up the occasional meat dish, but probably only once or twice a month. I rely on my husband and children eating a good piece of meat when we go out to eat in restaurants.

When the children were in day care, they ate meat every day. So, I always assumed they weren’t squeamish about killing animals for meat.

That is until my five-year-old my son practically broke down one dinnertime as we were eating a rice, vegetables and shrimp dish. When I asked him what was wrong, he said pathetically, “I don’t know if I can eat this. It makes me sad to think of how they kill shrimp.”

Unfortunately, I think I started laughing. If there is one being on this earth whose death doesn’t make me wince, it is shrimps. Do they even have brains? At least I didn’t express what I was thinking when my son told me about his qualms, which was, “If you think that is bad, just wait until you find out about chickens, calves, lamps, pigs…”