How to adapt when kids chirp about eating meat

When my eldest son was about three, we went out for a mom and son lunch date at a local Greek restaurant. I ordered him chicken fingers and chicken souvlaki for me.

I remember it especially for two reasons. We sat chatting amiably, like two oddly-paired equals, enjoying a meal and each other's company. It was a foreshadowing of how our relationship would evolve as he grew and needed me less. 

'Is chicken... chicken?'

It was also memorable because of this exchange. He was eating his chicken finger, when all of a sudden he stopped, looked at me with one of those intense stares of dawning insight and asked, "Mama, is chicken… chicken?"

Uh-oh.

So I said yes, and then he asked, "How?" I explained about how animals eat other animals to survive, how humans are animals that evolved to use tools and how we learned to farm other animals for their meat. 

"So the farmer makes the chicken dead, so we can eat it?" he asked.

I said yes.

He asked how the farmer makes the chicken dead.

We went on for a bit — with me sweating through the grossest parts — and then we forgot about it. 

Adopting new eating habits

Cut to 10 years later.

This same son, now 13, has spent the last two years going through a phase of worshipping bacon-wrapped meats of all sorts, eating every kind of steak, poutine and burger with carnivorous relish. Then, he suddenly tells us that he is a vegetarian. 

Excuse me? When and how did this happen? 

Before my family changed everything to do with meals, I needed to know if he was doing this for some flippant quixotic reason.

"The mass production of animals is affecting the climate more than so many other things," my son Eli told me.

"It's such a high cause of pollution, and such a high cause of all these other things. And it just doesn't seem morally right," he said.

Oh. 

His other reason to stop eating meat had to do with the suffering of animals in the food industry.

The mass production of animals is affecting the climate more than so many other things.- Eli Flacks, 13

He'd seen a video at school about the food industry at the same time the Paris Climate Conference was happening. From there he did his own research, checking and re-checking his sources.

He made his decision and suddenly, we had to adjust. So we did. 

"I was a pescatarian for two months and it really wasn't that hard," Eli told me. 

Really? Really? It wasn't hard? It was for me — I don't know how to cook fish!

I had to shop for all the different eaters in our house. We had to make him lunch that had protein while being nut-free. He won't eat a tuna sandwich. 

But I did adjust, and just as I did, he entered a new phase in the dawning of 2016 — "pescatarian and free range-atarian." 

"You have free-range and you have it in moderation," Eli said. "I'm still not going to eat pork, and red meat very rarely."

Learning from the young

Sometimes the kids' phases give me whiplash. But this time, it's really made me think.

There is absolutely nothing I disagree with in either his reasoning or his careful decision-making process.

In fact, he's convinced me. I think I might just follow him on this change. 

And he definitely has changed. 

"Physically, I feel great," my son said. "In my heart, I'm not sure if I made the right decision to stop, but I'm going to see how well I feel about it, and then I might just keep it just like that — not eat pork and live like that." 

"Cool, Eli," I replied. "I'm very proud of you, you know? You know that?"

Yeah, he does. That's something that's never changed. 

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Diane Flacks is a parenting columnist for CBC Radio. Follow her on Twitter @dianeflacks