The Choice

We ended 2020 with surf and turf and an evening gaming with members of our safe six.

Way back in the before, on March 14, 2020, we'd decided that the eight of us would be our safe group. And none of us would see other people without masks except in very special circumstances and that when that happened, we'd quarantine and warn the others in our group.

Two of the couples saw family for Christmas, so they didn't join in our New Year's gathering.

With a smaller group, none of us wanted to party like frat boys, so we looked back to the traditions of our childhood. Our friend G. always watched Contact with her parents. Her wife remembered New Year's as the one time they got surf and turf.

So that's what we did. Board games until we made dinner, then chatting and a movie until we watched the ball drop in Animal Crossing.

It was a very 2020 celebration.

After our steak dinner, one of the topics of conversation was how rarely we all ate beef at this point.

My husband and I stopped eating pork about two years ago when I discovered a totally weird, adult-onset allergy. And while we had never made any official decision that way, we found that we just weren't eating a lot of beef any more.

"I think I'd like to stop eating beef at all," my husband suggested the next day.

"What about burgers?"

That might seem like an odd response, but my husband is, or I guess was, a burger guy. Chances were if you asked him where he wanted to go to eat, he'd be looking for somewhere with a great burger.

"The Impossible burger was good."

It was. We did a head-to-head taste test of it versus our favorite beef burger at Red Robin. You could barely tell the difference.

"I might miss steak," I confessed.

"You could order it when we go out, if you wanted, but I'd just like to stop eating mammals. They're too closely related to us."

We have a dear friend who used to say he was a vegetarian because he like animals better than people and they wouldn't let him eat people.

"And, I'm not comfortable with the environmental impact of raising cattle," he continued.

He's always been the very logical one.

So 2021 is the year for us. We had one last roast in the freezer that needed to become Italian beef, but after that, beef is no longer part of our diet.

We're not giving up poultry any time soon. Birds aren't cute and fuzzy like mammals. Neither of us feels bad about eating them, but the truth of the matter is that the people we were 10 years ago wouldn't recognize us.

Our pandemic eating plan has been fairly rigid, allowing us to lose weight and build muscle instead of gaining the "Quarantine Fifteen." It also means that at least three, sometimes four, days a week, we're eating vegetarian.

My vegetarian friends are cackling madly at this development, but this is a choice we can live with and sustain.

But Bryan, if you're reading this, I still hate tofu!