The Night We Met Our First Vegetarian

Growing up in Southern Illinois, I had never met a vegetarian. We were meat lovers. We felt like we were supporting local industry when we indulged eggs, ground beef, brisket, steaks, or pork chops since many people who lived in our area were farmers. We never talked about cholesterol either.

But one night in college, it all changed. Marcia, my wife, had painstakingly worked on dinner for Mark and Victoria, a couple on our small Bible College campus in Springfield, Missouri that we had met on campus. Mark grew up in a missionary family and was a Missions major, so we figured that missionaries-in-training would eat anything.

Marcia brought out one of her specialties: gorgeous lumps of ground beef wrapped with a strip of bacon. We called them "Bacon Wraps" and we thought they were beautiful. We later learned after moving out East that wraps were actually an uppity kind of sandwich that was supposed to be healthy, but being from a small Midwestern town we had never seen a real wrap. Only our “Bacon Wraps.”

We sat down to eat dinner and Victoria had this condescending smirk on her face when she saw all of that beef. With all of the politeness she could muster, she looked at Marcia and said, “I’m sorry. I need to tell you something--I'm a vegetarian."  What? A vegetarian? We were shocked. A vegetarian, living deep in the heartland! What was a vegetarian doing among us normal people! Marcia apologized, but it was too late to change course for this meal. To make it worse, despite being a vegetarian, she couldn’t even eat our vegetables because they were buried in a casserole with Velveeta cheese, which Victoria also seemed to oppose eating even though I don’t think Velveeta can technically be excluded from a vegetarian diet. So she managed to pick at a salad during the meal, but did not use any of the bacon bits or boiled egg slices that we customarily scattered over our salads.

After the awkward vegetarian moment, we told our life stories. We found out Victoria had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. Then the whole vegetarian thing made sense.

That was the last time we ever had Bacon Wraps.