It’s Not Easy Being Green: Leia Owen Faces Skepticism as a Vegetarian
by Sammy Myette
Leia Owen has a full plate with four afterschool clubs, rehearsals for Footloose, dance classes, and volunteer work, but for the last seven months her dinner plate has been far from meaty.
While the vegetarian’s Tuesdays now consist of Library Advisory meetings and rehearsals, they used to be reserved for cooking dinner with her grandfather. It was one of these Tuesdays, in the midst of cooking chicken, when Leia had a sudden moment of realization.
“I looked at it and started crying,” she said. “I realized that this poor little chicken, it used to have a head and wings and feet and a life and children, and it was really really sad.”
After extensive research on the health benefits and risks, foods she was able to eat, and impacts of the meat industry on the environment, Leia decided to become what she fondly calls “an herbivore,” a term she prefers to use when telling people she is a vegetarian because it reminds her of dinosaurs and she thinks it is funny.
Though she felt confident about her choice, freshman Buren Andrews, who has been a vegetarian all his life, had his doubts.
“When Leia first thought of it,” he said, “to be honest, I didn’t think her commitment would last. I remember she tried to go off coffee for a while, and that didn’t last.”
If a long term vegetarian was skeptical, it didn’t come as a surprise when Owen’s other friends reacted negatively.
“A lot of people are like ‘Oh is that hard?” Owen says, “or ‘Well animals die anyway’ or ‘Do you kill plants? Why do you eat plants?’ “
During a rehearsal at her friend’s house, Owen was offered salmon by her friend’s father, Steve Lacerte. She explained that she was a vegetarian. Lacerte then went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bag of carrots. He asked Owen if she knew what they were, and she replied with the obvious, carrots. He corrected her telling her that they were baby carrots.
“ You took them out of the ground, you chopped them up and are going to eat them,” Lacerte continued, “you took them from their mothers.”
“It was so funny,” Owen said.
Even during our interview, while Owen was sharing vegetarian facts, an argument began among her and two seniors, John McLean and Chelsea Gagnon.
“The big meat industries hang up pigs from their feet and slit their throats, but not enough to kill them, just enough to let them bleed out on the floor. And they do that all day, every day and it’s awful. So that’s where your bacon comes from,” Owen said.
McLean, who was listening to the conversation, said, “Thats what they were born for.”
Owen had faced many retorts such as this and was well prepared. “We can maintain our position at the top of the food chain without polluting the environment and being awful people,” she said.
Chelsea Gagnon, a fellow vegetarian, also contributed to Leia’s argument. “The only reason we are at the top of the food chain is because we have a frontal lobe and we can reason. We don’t have to kill everything to prove that,” she said.
Though Leia does not eat meat, she ended the debate with advice for those who do. “But there are ways; there are farms that have free range and don’t abuse their animals and don’t feed them stuff they are not supposed to be eating,” she said. “When they [large meat industries] feed their animals stuff that animals shouldn’t eat, it’s just really nasty and really bad.”
Despite the frequent debates that surround her, Owen tries to avoid conflict as much as possible.
“I try not to argue about things often,” she says. “So you know I just laugh or I’ll just take it like ‘Oh ok that is how you feel and this is how I feel and that’s how we feel and that’s it.’ “
