I work at The Greenhouse Tavern, which is an awesome restaurant with really tasty food. It’s located on East 4th Street in Cleveland Ohio. The restaurant, which will celebrate it’s one year anniversary in April, was named one of the Top Ten Best New Restaurants in the country by Bon Apetit Magazine. I’ve heard that’s kind of a big deal.

The concept of the restaurant is to protect the environment and support the local economy by offering only all natural ingredients and by buying locally whenever possible. We are green certified and even the decor is made of recycled and earth-friendly materials.

With such a concept, it’s understandable that some people expect the menu to be predominately vegetarian and vegan. Hippies love the environment, after all, and hippies hate eating animals. These people are surprised and often disappointed to find that the menu is full of (organic) meat, and offers only one vegetarian and one vegan entre at a time.

(For the purposes of my point, I’m going to lump vegans with vegetarians. Vegetarians have an ambitious goal; vegans just take it to another level. It’s all the same to me, impossible.)

What’s more frustrating for vegetarians is that many Greenhouse dishes could be veggie if it wasn’t for one arbitrary animal product. The pomme frites (french for “french fries”) are made with duck fat. The chestnut soup is garnished with bacon.

In fact, the Greenhouse kitchen treats bacon as a condiment. They will make a beautiful vegetarian dish but decide it needs more salt. Rather than add salt, though, they will throw in bacon, chopped so finely that no human being could ever hope to eat around it.

I have to admit that the menu is frustrating for me, too, because I’m mostly vegetarian. I am vegetarian with a few exceptions. I do eat bacon, because it’s delicious. I’ve been told that bacon is the meat product which most often brings back vegetarians. One of the Greenhouse chefs told me that, and I suspect this is why he puts bacon in everything. Chefs hate vegetarians, but I’ll explain that later.

A vegetarian who eats bacon is weird, I know. I also eat seafood, eggs (that’s right vegans, I love chicken abortions), and vegetables fried in duck fat. Sometimes I also eat soups and sauces made with meat stock, or pick around the chicken in Chinese food, or the sausage in my mom’s lasagna. Rather than be the kind of pain in the ass who requires their own pie, I will pick off or just eat the pepperoni on a pizza I’m sharing with friends.

I fit in none of the classic categories. I hang back with the vegetarians when the restaurant staff tastes a new lamb steak or a pork chop dish, but they don’t join me for the frites or the Devils on Horseback (stuffed dates wrapped in bacon, mmm). Omnivores itching to debate me on our right to eat animals feel betrayed when they learn that I totally agree with them. Animal-rights vegetarians who don’t take me seriously at all sometimes change their minds when I explain my position.

Why do I complain about the menu like a vegetarian when I clearly will and do eat meat? This is not an easy question to answer, because my attitude towards food and animals has developed as I’ve aged and will continue to do so. First, a little backstory:

My father, the son of a farmer, works for the Ohio State Division of Wildlife. The first home I can remember was on hundreds of acres of preserved wetlands. I could sit at our breakfast table and watch bald eagles fly from their nest to catch fish from the same pond where I learned to ice skate.

I was raised to respect animals and the environment, but I was also raised to respect hunters. Despite popular opinion, most hunters are not drunken rednecks murdering willy-nilly in the woods. They are sportsmen and women who love the outdoors and respect nature. Like farmers, they are carrying on a human tradition and honing a survival skill that is older than civilization.

I believe that there is nothing wrong with killing an animal responsibly. It’s like cutting down trees to make paper, as long as you recycle and plant more trees. Wildlife conservationalists set limits on how many fish a fisherman can harvest, making sure there will be enough fish left to reproduce and feed the eagles. Deer hunters keep the deer population in check, saving deer from starvation and saving the motorists who have taken over the deer’s natural habitats from wrecking their cars by plowing into these poor, dumb animals.

The native Americans who once lived off of this land found literally everything they needed in what is now our back yard. The Greenhouse Tavern is a fine example of the present “green” movement back to that ideal. This is one of the reasons I eat their bacon, but there’s more to it than that.

Another admirable example of living off the land is the country of Costa Rica, in Central America. I have been lucky enough to live in Costa Rica twice. My first trip to the land of pura vida (pure life) was in 2007, when I lived there for almost five months as a university exchange student. It was during this time that I first saw a documentary called The Corporation, which significantly rocked my view of the United States food industry. You don’t have to watch it to understand my point, but I do recommend it.

Unlike in the United States, almost all food I ate in Costa Rica was produced locally. My host mother walked daily to the corner shop and purchased food that had been delivered that morning by farmers or fisherman. If the food was packaged, there was still a good chance it was from within the country (which is the size of West Virginia). If it was imported, it came from neighboring Nicaragua or Honduras, or, at most, from Mexico. Mexico to Costa Rica is still closer than shipping, say, strawberries from California to Ohio, or potatoes from Idaho to New York.

The farm animals in Costa Rica are entirely different, too. Pigs look more like wild boars. No matter how good the pizza, Costa Rican pepperoni always tastes strange. The cows are much bonier and more graceful than the hulking Frankensteers I am used to seeing in rural Ohio. Hamburgers have an entirely different texture.

Costa Ricans take pride in our enjoyment of their food products. The fresh, local fruits and vegetables offer natural flavors I have never experienced anywhere else. When I told my host mother that I was eating the best pineapple I’d ever tasted, she said it was because I was eating real pineapple for the first time.

That’s how I came to understand the hamburger differences, too. They weren’t like USA hamburgers because they were natural hamburgers, made of real cows, which was a new experience for me. Even if you haven’t seen the documentary, you can understand how this information started to screw with my head.

Upon returning to the United States, I lost my appetite for animal products. I went from drinking two gallons of milk a week to skipping it altogether (Google: Monstanto AND dairy). I stopped eating meat. I started buying groceries at Trader Joe’s and easily spent $75 a week trying to feel full on healthy alternatives. I tried soy milk but hated it. I wasn’t a big fan of tofu. I didn’t understand the point of vegetable products made to look and taste like meat (to-wtf-urky). In my hometown, which practically shuts down for deer hunting season, I baffled friends and family members by being for killing animals yet against eating them.

My main objection to eating meat that the commercial product could have been mishandled by one of the numerous companies who touched it before me. I was also afraid that the animals might have been treated with unnecessary chemicals which could give me cancer. Animal cruelty was an afterthought, but still another valid argument. To go back to hunters for a moment, you don’t get any of these problems with a wild animal you’ve humanely killed yourself (unless it’s been grazing on land contaminated by a landfill or a chemical spill, of course).

I still ate bacon because, as I said, bacon is delicious. I figured bacon was mostly just fried fat, and it’s so small that it would take a long time to give me cancer. I was also eating eggs because I knew I needed protein, and they are at least protected by shells.

Eventually, I lost enough weight that my family started to worry about me. I wasn’t getting enough fat or protein and I realized that I’d have to make some compromises. I started drinking milk again while I was back in Costa Rica last year for a six week visit. All dairy products in Costa Rica are produced by Dos Pinos, a state-owned monopoly supplied by local farmers. I weened myself back onto dairy that I trusted, and since then I’ve just been trying not to think about it. I also spent more time in Costa Rican kitchens and learned how to make an awesome beans and rice recipe (gallo pinto), which helped replace the protein missing from my diet.

Since I’d eaten meat on my first trip, I had to explain my new food views to local friends. They were very sympathetic. Costa Ricans think that the food we eat in the United States is slowly killing us off. (I picked up their fear of cancer via unnecessary chemicals on my first trip.) “That’s why Latinos do all the hard jobs in your country,” one friend even told me. “We are stronger and healthier, because we eat better food.”

This brings me back to The Greenhouse Tavern. None of my objections to food products apply to anything served in that restaurant. They work hard to support only local, responsible farmers. If I could eat every meal for the rest of my life out of that kitchen, I would give up on vegetarianism altogether.

Unfortunately, that’s impossible. You can’t flip-flop back and forth between no meat and lamb steak (I tried that once and was sick for days; it’s all or nothing). I don’t have the budget to eat at The Greenhouse every day and even if I did, I couldn’t do it. I live in the real world, where I sometimes go places and get hungry. I know how hard this is for vegetarians. They have to pack snacks. They have to alienate themselves in every restaurant they go to by asking lots of questions and avoiding a lot of dishes. One of the reasons I am not a more conscientious vegetarian is that I realize we are a huge pain in the ass.

Offering vegetarian alternatives recently caused a huge complication in an already complicated event menu at The Greenhouse Tavern. At the time and in the aftermath, I heard the phrase “fuck vegetarians” more than once. I won’t point fingers, but it was a common sentiment.

This isn’t unique to our restaurant, either. I have worked in restaurants since I was fourteen years old, and I have never seen a restaurant employee pleased to learn that a diner was vegetarian. Reactions usually range from anxiety to annoyance, or even hostility.

Servers dislike vegetarians because our questions and special needs take time away from their other tables, costing them money in lost tips. Chefs and cooks dislike vegetarians because, by refusing to eat meat, we are rejecting a substantial part of their life’s work. (Imagine telling a painter that you can’t appreciate any artwork that contains the color blue.) We also add extra stress to a stressful work environment by submitting unusual and often difficult requests rather than simply trusting, as most patrons do, that they will serve us a great meal.

As a vegetarian who sits on both sides of the fence, I want to reassure restaurants – it’s not that we don’t like your cooking. We fully understand and appreciate the skill, education, time, and love that goes into your dishes. We really want to eat your food because we hear that you are quite good at preparing and presenting it. We are just trying to be healthy, responsible human beings.

There’s no reason we can’t be friends. If you can meet us halfway by offering a few more animal-free dishes to enjoy, we can help you out by ordering straight off the menu like everyone else.

And I will do my part by raving about your delicious, responsibly-farmed bacon.