Tune In, Turn On, Veg Out
In August, 1989 I visited two friends who were at that time teaching school in Jichedza, a small rural village in Zimbabwe. John and Sonia had to contend with many strange tribal customs and beliefs while teaching. For example, when the newspaper reported that several high school girls had been possessed by demons, the entire school closed down until the local witch doctor and priest could be summoned to perform an exorcism. Similarly, the school shut down when the cafeteria was unable to provide meat for lunch one week, because the children’s parents believed one would literally die if one didn’t eat meat every day. As vegetarians, John and Sonia were something of a local miracle—people were amazed at their continued survival.

Such beliefs could be more easily dismissed were they not so reminiscent of our own cultural heritage. When I stopped eating meat in the mid-’80s, I found people had no idea what to feed me. I would be invited for dinner and the host would place before me a plate piled high with sliced cucumbers and carrots. Or I would be given beef stew with the explanation, "there’s only a little meat in it." It was as though I had suddenly become strange and foreign, and nobody knew quite how to respond. My relatives asked "what do you eat?" and frantically quizzed me for recipes so they would know what to fix for me (usually spaghetti with tomato sauce). I recall my father telling my younger brother that vegetarians were "stupid" people who "didn’t know what they were missing."

These days, my father brags to me about how he and my stepmother never eat red meat anymore. I buy such exotic foods as tofu, veggie-burgers and not-dogs at the local supermarket, and even McDonald’s has a soy-burger on the menu. Vegetarianism has become mainstream, largely because Americans have become health paranoiacs who can describe in detail the condition of their small intestines but can’t tell you the names of their next-door neighbors. Perhaps as an inevitable product of the "me" decade, many of us have internalized the idea that taking care of the world starts with taking care of ourselves—but we’ve forgotten that it shouldn’t end there.

If you want to meet a whole bunch of your neighbors, and bone up on the connection between a vegetarian diet and a healthy planet, the third annual Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society potluck picnic on July 18 is the event for you. Rae Schlect, who started the group four years ago, says it now boasts 157 members. The Society puts out a newsletter, hosts monthly restaurant outings (as in going out to restaurants, not forcing them into the open, though that might not be a bad idea either) and generally pursues a mission of educating the community and promoting a vegetarian ethic. The group meets the third Monday of each month, and they just held their annual meeting in March, with Howard Lyman, former cattleman and activist vegetarian, as the featured speaker. The group is not-for-profit and is affiliated with the North American Vegetarian Society.

Schlect, who started paying attention to her diet after age 60—she’s now 67—says the goal of group members is to become vegan. But as with most changes of lifestyle, this can happen in a series of steps, and carnivores are invited to join since, as Schlect points out, "otherwise we’d just be talking amongst ourselves." In any case, the picnic is purely social, and open to everyone.

The event will be held at the Town of Ulster Park, off Route 32, from noon to dusk. There will be games and a BBQ pit will be open for cooking (no meat allowed, of course). Admission is $5, $3 for members, and there’s an additional charge if you don’t bring a dish to share.

As Schlect observes, we’ve all been bombarded with propaganda by the dairy and cattle lobbies. "We’ve been so brainwashed—’you need your protein’—my God, [you’d think] if you didn’t eat meat you were going to die." Well, it’s not true. And you really don’t have to limit yourself to spaghetti, either. For more information about the Mid-Hudson Vegetarian Society, or to pick up a few recipes before the picnic, call Vicki Peters at 565-0862. n