Have I become an eco-freak?

I stood in line at the supermarket this afternoon with about 25 bucks worth of vegetables, muesli and free-range eggs. I turned around and saw that the young couple behind me were buying two frozen pizzas and a liter of Coke.

Now granted, I was doing the complete shopping for 3 days, and they were probably buying for some spur-of-the-moment thing (“Should we just grab some pizzas and watch TV?” - “Sure, why not.”). But nonetheless, I looked at them surreptitiously and wondered how on earth they can survive by eating like that. My teeth cringed at the thought of that syrupy, acidic beverage hitting them.

So, have I officially crossed the line into vegetarian earthy-crunchiness? It’s not the type of thing I ever thought I could do. After all, I was an unrepentant carnivore - the more meat, the better, and make it as bloody as possible, please. Now I eat fish, and any other meat enters my diet maybe once a month. The rest of the time it’s barley and beansprouts for me.

It’s not that I think that this is a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a Good Thing. And in Germany, it’s really not an odd thing. The Germans are a lot more concerned about what they’re putting into their mouths than most Americans are, and it’s fair enough. I don’t particularly want to be eating meat filled with hormones and antibiotics, and if there’s something genetically manipulated going into my food, I want to know about it.

But self-righteous vegetarians and flaky health-food nuts give the whole organically-grown-vegetable-eating sector of society a bad name. So I’ve started to feel like a food freak, especially when I’m in the States. It’s silly, but when I look at veggie burgers in a supermarket in America, I often get the same feeling that I have when I look at the foreign films section at Blockbuster: I generally seem to be the only one doing it, and I usually feel like I have the word “PRETENTIOUS" stamped on my forehead.

I know this is a paranoid way to think. And I’m not all earthy-crunchy - not by a long shot. Sure, I do my best to buy eggs from happy chickens and bananas from happy banana pickers, but I also buy big old bags of potato chips. I actually have a strange affinity for the taste of frozen pizza, and I have often been known to indulge in the fantastically sinful eclairs that they sell in a coffee shop downtown. And I do so love a really rare steak. And in general, I just love all types of food far too much to ever say, “Oh, I could never eat that…"

But still. Not only do I know what amaranth and quinoa are, I also eat them. Frequently.

Break out the Birkenstocks.