By HAKEEM JIMO

I used to eat like everybody else. I proudly called myself an omnivore, boasting about being able to eat any and everything. My body and stomach would cope with all. Similar to the Chinese saying: We eat anything out of the sea except ships, anything from the sky except planes and anything with for legs except chairs and tables.

When I was a teenager, I was proud that I can gobble down ten scoops of ice-cream and ask for a waffle after. Then I traveled for the first time to America. For the first time I was able to do justice to those ‘All-You-Can-Eat’ restaurants.

Growing up

When I was still in my early twenties. I felt like ‘All-You-Can-Eat’ is all you could wish for and it was annoying that I never saw this offer in Germany where I grew up or in Nigeria.

Growing up in Germany can be strange in many ways, especially regarding food. You won’t believe how many ways there are to prepare potatoes. I have eaten enough irish potatoes for two lives and always accompanied with a hearty serving of meat. Fridays was traditional fish day. I grew up partly in the countryside in Northern Germany – on a farm to be precise. Once a year our household slaughtered an entire pig with our neighbor and the meat was shared. It filled up the entire huge freezer and took months just to even devour half.

During this period, I started cutting down on meat. I felt it was simply too much. German cuisine, sausage on bread in the morning, smoked pork loin or cutlet with potatoes and few vegetables for lunch, sausage on bread in the evening , is meat intense.

Decision

I just more and more settled simply for the vegetables, potatoes and sauce. Even though it was a deliberate decision, it was not yet based on a conviction or knowledge. Rather it was an intuitive or natural decision. The concept behind a meat free diet came then at the university in Hamburg, Germany. At the cafeteria I discovered a new food stand. They called it the ‘Alternative Dish’: it was vegetarian. I found myself often choosing this option.

Then I found my partner, an African-American and a vegetarian in the fourth generation due to her native American nation heritage. She explained to me they stopped eating flesh when some of the Cherokee realized that the natural cycle and co-existence of humans, nature and animals was broken by the settlers from Europe. Through her I got my first real background of eating without using animals.