Universally, from vegetarian and meat-eating friends alike, my meatening up has been met with positive reactions, from simple “cool how fun” replies to enthusiastic offers to be my “meat mentor” from a chef and invites to meals filled with a bonanza of beef, platters of pork, something “encased in intestine” and even promises of  a dinner of “pig knuckles and chicken feet. You’re in for a treat.” Um… I’ll get back to you on dem bones.

Which brings me around to the two most common questions I’ve gotten: Doesn’t meat gross you out? and Won’t you get sick?

To the first I say: Not really. Meat itself I don’t find gross. I’m not — I mean wasn’t — a moral vegetarian along the lines of “It’s wrong/bad to eat animals” or “Eating pork makes me think of a real pig and the smell of bacon makes me cry and want to snuggle with piglets.” I don’t think I could eat cat or dog, I’ve loved too many, but I am going to give frog a try and I had not 1, not 2, but over the course of 2 years 20 pet frogs. Which are, by the way, not vegetarians either. And unlike frogs, I don’t plan on eating any of my meals while they are still alive.

But I have cooked a lobster — and I don’t know that eating a piece of sausage has the same “wow I really just killed this delicious creature purely for my own pleasure” connection that plunging a live crustacean into a vat of boiling water and then eating said animal does. It’s not just the plastic bib that makes eating a lobster not pretty. And I have always, as long as I can remember, favored fresh whole lobster over all other fish, and never minded the whole messy process of it or that it was, just a little while ago, a live animal.

The second question is more of a problem, and is why I’m taking it slow. I’m not jumping right into a steakhouse and telling the waiter to bring it on. In small quantities, pork doesn’t (so far) make me sick. On the other hand, the last time I had a meal that I didn’t know was cooked with beef broth, I got to know the toilet real well. And if hidden beef broth puts me on a path to discussing things like “Ah, I forgot I ate peas yesterday” with my new BFF the toilet, I am worried about eating it outright.

Still, I believe that if I take it slow and eat well-cooked qualty meat, that should help. You don’t run a marathon the first day you start running, and I won’t order the Mega Meat-Splosion! platter quite yet.

The only people I have not yet told about my meat-venture are my parents. As parents, they have heard  much,  much,  much worse things from this daughter over my 34 years, yet I am still working up to telling them. I think they will basically take it with puzzlement, not dissapointment or anger, but I figure there’s no rush to tell them.  I’ll let you know how it goes when I do.