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Lately every time there's a thread on reddit about vegetarianism and I find myself reflecting on becoming a vegetarian at age 3, I believe more and more that it was one of my earliest OCD symptoms, and I'm wondering if there is any research into this.
I have a clear memory of deciding not to eat meat on a very particular day. It was a day that I realized the chickens I saw on TV were the same thing that I had up to then loved to eat. I didn't have any reference point for it. My parents were both meat eaters. I didn't know the word vegetarian. It was not common where I lived. The concept of other people not eating meat didn't occur to me until several years after I had been vegetarian.
A few years later my dad got hens and I would have to collect the eggs sometimes. I stopped eating eggs. That was pretty self-explanatory.
At school when we had school birthday parties I would ask the mother that brought in the treats if they were baked with eggs, and I wouldn't eat them if they had been.
My grandmother was a psychiatrist in Sweden and was the only one who was very worried about me being vegetarian. She thought it would hurt my development. When she would come to visit she would scold my parents for having 2% milk. She was very into fat!
Anyhow, I developed very distinct symptoms of OCD around 5 years of age that are classic OCD. But as I grew older and learned more about OCD, I realized that other people are also grossed out by thinking about what meat is but that these thoughts don't stick with them. And it occurred to me that my "stickiness" to thinking about what every thing is that I eat is not dissimilar to the way I can't not pay attention to other data that people let slip by them that people with OCD cannot. To me, OCD is like a net that catches too much spurious data that others let flow by.
I started thinking about the rationality of vegetarianism in contexts where a person would have no choice but to eat meat. Could it develop in such circumstances? Could it ever be considered rational in such circumstances?
For me, the original inability to disconnect from what meat/dairy/egg is is still there but I also have an ingrained disgust that comes from many years of conditioning myself that is more visceral. When I was young my parents would sometimes force me to have a bite of meat. I would hold my nose and chew and swallow really fast with a glass of water and pretend it was something else. For me, eating meat would be like challenging someone to eat a cockroach. I've never been the vegetarian for whom it's difficult to give up meat. I would have to take it like a bitter pill.
Anyhow, I'm curious at to people's thoughts on this and what you would think of a very young child deciding not to eat meat. No one's ever connected my vegetarianism to OCD, so it's just a self-reflection. And I'm not asking for medical advice as I'm not looking to change my diet. I'm just more curious about the genesis of vegetarianism outside of animal rights and ecological considerations (I should say that in my elementary school years I described my vegetarianism as being a result of those considerations and maybe it was to a large degree, but I know now that's not mostly the case--it is more just the inability to disconnect from what I find extremely gross--I would like to say it's from being extremely ethical, but I don't think it's the case currently even if it was possibly at some time).
I have a clear memory of deciding not to eat meat on a very particular day. It was a day that I realized the chickens I saw on TV were the same thing that I had up to then loved to eat. I didn't have any reference point for it. My parents were both meat eaters. I didn't know the word vegetarian. It was not common where I lived. The concept of other people not eating meat didn't occur to me until several years after I had been vegetarian.
A few years later my dad got hens and I would have to collect the eggs sometimes. I stopped eating eggs. That was pretty self-explanatory.
At school when we had school birthday parties I would ask the mother that brought in the treats if they were baked with eggs, and I wouldn't eat them if they had been.
My grandmother was a psychiatrist in Sweden and was the only one who was very worried about me being vegetarian. She thought it would hurt my development. When she would come to visit she would scold my parents for having 2% milk. She was very into fat!
Anyhow, I developed very distinct symptoms of OCD around 5 years of age that are classic OCD. But as I grew older and learned more about OCD, I realized that other people are also grossed out by thinking about what meat is but that these thoughts don't stick with them. And it occurred to me that my "stickiness" to thinking about what every thing is that I eat is not dissimilar to the way I can't not pay attention to other data that people let slip by them that people with OCD cannot. To me, OCD is like a net that catches too much spurious data that others let flow by.
I started thinking about the rationality of vegetarianism in contexts where a person would have no choice but to eat meat. Could it develop in such circumstances? Could it ever be considered rational in such circumstances?
For me, the original inability to disconnect from what meat/dairy/egg is is still there but I also have an ingrained disgust that comes from many years of conditioning myself that is more visceral. When I was young my parents would sometimes force me to have a bite of meat. I would hold my nose and chew and swallow really fast with a glass of water and pretend it was something else. For me, eating meat would be like challenging someone to eat a cockroach. I've never been the vegetarian for whom it's difficult to give up meat. I would have to take it like a bitter pill.
Anyhow, I'm curious at to people's thoughts on this and what you would think of a very young child deciding not to eat meat. No one's ever connected my vegetarianism to OCD, so it's just a self-reflection. And I'm not asking for medical advice as I'm not looking to change my diet. I'm just more curious about the genesis of vegetarianism outside of animal rights and ecological considerations (I should say that in my elementary school years I described my vegetarianism as being a result of those considerations and maybe it was to a large degree, but I know now that's not mostly the case--it is more just the inability to disconnect from what I find extremely gross--I would like to say it's from being extremely ethical, but I don't think it's the case currently even if it was possibly at some time).