-Two months after my last article, I am glad to report that I still self-identify as a vegetarian, but the roast I had at Christmas was incredible. And here is how I justified eating it. My grandmother is as soaked in Southern tradition as anyone you would ever meet, and by golly, she cooks everything with meat. She really cannot comprehend that I no longer eat meat, if not through the inability to understand it, from pure forgetfulness.

Anyway, cut to Christmas dinner. Ham, turkey and pot roast greeted me, along with the usual fixings.

I entered her home with the sheer intent of not touching a single meaty morsel, but as she began to oversee the serving of the meal, I realized just how much it meant to her to have us all gathered together for this meal, and how much love she had put into, not to mention the fact that she is getting to an age where it takes extreme effort to handle a meal like that.

The perception of me picking at plain mashed potatoes and macaroni and cheese when she had this spread led me to take the meat when she offered it to me.

I realized that, for me and me alone, the impact of refusing her meal would carry further then that of consuming the meat. So the meat I ate.

I once had the story told to me of Buddha eating wild boar as his last meal, as he deemed refusing the meal to be more insulting than to eat the meat. I have applied this to my view on being a vegetarian – in no instance will meat that is offered to me and refused come back to life in some miracle, just by means of me not eating it.

I do not hang out in a butcher’s shop and solicit dinner invitations, but I will just say my boundaries are a little more flexible now.

But I would like to note this – Just because something says ‘BOCA’ on the menu, doesn’t make it a meat-free item.

I had to learn that the hard way.

Author