Food and Religion

From a young age there were two things I knew about being Hindu. The first being that we had to be vegetarian on Mondays, and the second being that we had to be vegetarian on Thursdays. We also had to be vegetarian on every full moon, or any big holiday, such as Diwali. So to sum it up, we had to be vegetarian a lot. 

I never really understood what the deal was with being vegetarian. But being child I didn't question, I just ate what I was given, never really noticing the difference. Mac and cheese, vegetable fried rice, vegetarian curries, were all components of my weekly eating schedule, literally. My mum actually purchases a dry erase schedule which she paste to the fridge and planned out each meal in advance, including all the vegetarian meals. 

When I hit 5th grade I stopped being vegetarian. I can't remember if it was a Tuesday or a Thursday, but I cheated. I saw all my friends eating chicken nuggets in the cafeteria, and I knowingly went for it. I had never felt so guilty in my life. I came home crying to my mum, coming clean for what I had done. To my surprise, she wasn't upset - she had done the same thing when she was my age. She explained to me the reason behind being vegetarian on certain days. According to her, Hindus dedicate each day of the week to a different form of god (deity), and our family was vegetarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays because those are the deities our family had chosen to worship. 

Although I am no longer consistently vegetarian on Tuesdays and Thursdays I know understand the religious reasoning behind the food restriction that I lived by for a good length of my life.