Columnist Scott Dickensheets: Going cold turkey when it comes to meat

IT'S BEEN A strange week around Casa Dickensheets, not the least of reasons being that we've given up meat. Not just red meat, either; anything that can be referred to as "the other (choose your color) meat" is gone as well. To describe this decision as "out of the blue," to call it "spur of the moment" doesn't do justice to the speed and suddenness with which we arrived at it. One minute my wife and I were noticing the slight pot belly bulging over the shorts of our 11-year-old son, the next we were at Borders buying "The 15-Minute Vegetarian."

As hectic modern suburbanites, ours has been a diet heavy on fast-food meat, meat-like substances and whatever they put in Big Macs; my most reliable source of vegetables lately has been the lettuce on hamburgers. This no doubt helps explain my own beefiness as well as my son's incipient roundness. Clearly, a change was in order.

My wife, who's never been afraid to make life-altering decisions out of the blue, on the spur of the moment, proposed we go veggie. Slim down, get healthy! And I, never afraid to agree to outrageous propositions before thinking them through, said, "Sure, why not?" We settled on a one-week pilot program. That should determine if life as a sprout-muncher will turn me into something like Jack Nicholson from "The Shining," typing "hamburger" backwards again and again until I reach for the ax.

Ours is not a hardline vegetarianism. We'll still eat eggs and dairy products. "I've never understood that," my wife said of those vegetarians who philosophically avoid any product associated with animals. "I don't think it's cruel to the cow to drink its milk." Left unaddressed, however, was the cruelty of feeding your husband tofu, which I've always considered the almost-edible equivalent of damp styrofoam. We haven't eaten any yet, but I fear the time is coming.

We became veggie burghers Friday, and it took longer than I expected -- until late Saturday morning -- for the meat craving to set in. It was a strange sensation, a frantic neural SOS from my taste buds demanding grilled protein. As luck would have it, my wife and kids were out of the house; I would have to handle this on my own, without her shame-on-you stare to keep me in line. So picture a little demon dancing above my left shoulder, holding a Fatburger. Go ahead! Who's gonna know? Above my right shoulder, an angel proffered carrot sticks and asparagus. Do the right thing ...

Predictably, I sided (reluctantly) with the angel -- with a twist. I ordered myself a pizza topped with onions and fresh garlic; by God, someone was going to suffer with me!

The worst moment so far came Sunday night, when my wife crashed into my TV trance by suddenly reading aloud from the tofu.com website.

"Raw tofu tastes better than boiled potatoes," she announced. Now there's the sort of argument that might change a guy's mind about eating damp styrofoam. "If you can eat yogurt or cottage cheese, you can eat raw tofu." When she started reading from a recipe for sweet and sour tofu balls, I couldn't stop myself from reaching for the laptop:

Regrubmah I typed. Regrubmah ... regrubmah ... regrubmah ... heh, heh, just kidding, there. I'm fine, still hanging in ... regrubmah ... regrubmah ... only a few more days to go ... regrubmah ... regrubmah ...

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