To be fair, I don't hate all vegetables, just cooked ones. There's something about the warm, slippery, mushy texture that makes me want to regurgitate everything I swallowed back onto my plate. It is ironic coming from a person whose family takes such pride in creating enough side dishes to feed a small country for gatherings. I feel like being exposed to so many different types of Armenian cuisine as a child only made me dislike it more when I grew up.
Despite the fact that "Ratatouille" is one of my favorite Disney Pixar films (and I dedicated an entire speech to the film in my Comm 101 class), I don't think I could ever bring myself to actually eat the said dish. According to the Dictionary, ratatouille is "a vegetable dish consisting of onions, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers, fried and stewed in oil and sometimes served cold." Yeah, no.
Disney Pixar's "Ratatouille"
No matter how inspirational and iconic the Remy-Linguini duo was, I would have to be paid quite a sum to indulge in such a platter.
Now, this isn't to say I don't like vegetables at all. In fact, I love raw vegetables. Carrots, broccoli, peppers, anything crunchy you can throw in a salad and put some dressing on and I'll eat it. My Subway sandwiches now consist of their entire vegetable section on a six-inch Italian Herb-and Cheese Loaf. I think of it as a salad inside a really large crouton.
Now, my point here isn't that if you're like me and hate cooked vegetables then you should forget about going vegetarian.
If anything, it's just proof that if someone as inept as I am can go without eating meat, then anyone can. Pasta, brown rice, buckwheat, salad, potatoes…the options are endless. I was so scared to eat at my school's dining hall when I first become vegetarian because I dreaded the idea of cooked veggies, yet, I Gordon Ramseyed my way through and ended up falling in love. I threw together some brown rice with roasted garlic potatoes on top, splashed on some nearby tomato soup for extra flavor and ate it alongside a bowl of salad and a grilled cheese.
The point is if you feel guilty to the point of going vegetarian from those shitty cow videos your one weird cousin always shares on your Facebook feed, just know that you can do it.
