Why I became a "vegetable - tarian"

I have a friend who has a niece that refers to people who eat nothing but vegetables as "vegetable - tarians", that is how she now refers to me. About a month ago I decided to transition from being a semi-vegetarian to being a vegetarian.

I had been thinking about becoming a vegetarian for quite some time but I suppose I needed something to push me over the edge. That thing was an announcement last month by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that cloned meat would be entering the food supply at some unspecified time in the near future. They also announced that cloned meat would not be labeled as such.

I refuse to be a guinea pig for corporate meat producers and the FDA.

I am also a very picky vegetarian because of the influx of food from China and Mexico. Food items from these countries have been reported to be substandard and potentially harmful to humans for a variety of different reasons. One thing I have heard is that it is a common practice in Mexico to use human waste as a fertilizer.

So now I do not purchase food from those countries and also avoid food that is not labeled with its country of origin. This is a problem when shopping in most commercial food markets since many times they don't label their fruits and vegetables with the country they are grown.

I do most of my shopping now at a specialty market that gets most of its fruit and vegetables from within a few hundred miles. And they clearly label the origin of food grown outside of the U.S. I also shop at a few different local farmers’ markets.

I have even had to be very careful when buying fruit juice since a lot of fruits used to make commercial juice are grown in China. This is sometimes a problem because a lot of juices do not label the origin of the fruit used in the juice.

All of this might seem like a lot to go through but to me it's worth the trouble, I don't want to find out in five or ten years that food I have eaten was not safe and is likely to make me sick in the future.

The U.S. has allowed food safety to take a backseat to corporate profit. That is totally unacceptable. I hope food safety becomes an issue this election season.

Do you worry about food safety?

Are you concerned about food grown in China?