Carla Diedericks

Me picking vegetables in my family garden.

I’ve never had a hot dog. Not at a baseball game or at a barbecue. No chicken nuggets, no turkey on Thanksgiving and no sizzling bacon in the morning. My childhood didn’t smell like burgers on the grill or the drive-thru bag in the back seat.

Instead, my childhood smelled like nutritional yeast, almond butter on whole-wheat toast and the smell of roasted kale chips. We used flax eggs instead of real ones and carob instead of chocolate chips.

My parents became vegetarian in college. By the time I was born, meat wasn’t banned, it just wasn’t a thing in our household. Like microwaves or soda in our home, it was something other families had that mine simply didn’t.

When people find out I’m vegetarian, their reaction is always the same: But aren’t you missing out?
I usually laugh it off, but the truth is more complicated than a simple no.

As a kid, I didn’t think about it much. Dinner was dinner, our dinners just happened to be made with soy instead of chicken. But at school, food became a quiet reminder that I was different. While classmates passed around ham sandwiches or talked about Chick-fil-A, I sat there unscrewing the lid of my lentil soup, feeling like I’d missed the memo on how to be a normal kid.

I didn’t feel deprived exactly, I just felt like an outsider. There were moments where I wondered what it would be like to bite into a burger, to know what people meant when they said bacon made everything better. I couldn’t miss the taste, but I could miss the shared experience I never had.

For a while, I tried to blend in. I asked my mom to pack peanut butter sandwiches or plain pasta. I stopped correcting people who assumed I used to eat meat. It was easier to let them think I gave it up than to explain I never had it in the first place.

The older I got, the more I realized how much my relationship with food had shaped me. I was raised to think critically about my food and where it comes from with intention and a level of discernment. It was talked about in our house like it truly mattered, because it did.

Now, I look back and I’m grateful.

Grateful I never had a phase of sneaking fast food or questioning what was in my dinner. Grateful that my childhood taught me that what we consume says something about what we value and that being different isn’t a deficit, it’s just another version of normal.

People still ask if I’ve ever wanted to try a burger. I usually shrug it off, but it’s hard to explain that my childhood had its own staples, like almond butter on sprouted toast or brown rice with steamed vegetables.

So no, I’ve never had a hot dog. But I’ve eaten the same dinner on the same mismatched plates a hundred times, with the same people, and felt fufilled in more ways than one.