By Zach Kolker

Clara Conroy, a Mount Vernon High School sophomore, has never purposely ate any meat. She has spent her whole life as a vegetarian. To some this is unimaginable, but to her it’s just how she lives.
Seeing that her whole family is vegetarian she didn’t have much of a choice.

But she has accidentally eaten some meat. She claimed that she ate a piece of pizza that had meat on it but she didn’t see that it did. “It wasn’t terrible,” she recalls, “but I didn’t love it.”

When Conroy is sitting at lunch table and her friends are eating meat you may think it would be tempting to try to have a taste of meat, but for Conroy it’s easy not to. If she ate any her body would reject it.“One time I ate a piece of pepperoni pizza and I threw it up,” she said.

By being a vegetarian she has had some trouble ordering food at restaurants because lots of places don’t offer many vegetarian options. At many sports banquets there has also been a shortage of non-meat dishes.

For school lunch she mostly brings her own food or gets salad and fruit from the salad bar. On some days, like stromboli day, she will get the vegetarian option.

Holiday dinners are also different in the Conroy household. For Thanksgiving she will go over to her aunt’s house, and they will feast on tofu. Her aunt is a vegetarian, but her relatives who do eat meat will have to suck it up and eat tofu for the day.

For protein Conroy says she usually eats beans, tofu, or soy products. Her favorite vegetarian food is pizza (without meat of course) and bread.

Conroy is doing what seems to be impossible to some. She plans to not eat meat for the rest of her life. But only time will tell if she can stay completely meat-free for her time on earth.

Some may think that Conroy is a vegetarian because she wants to keep in shape, but it is simply how she was raised. She was born into a vegetarian family. Think about your upbringing. You just follow your parents to see what they do, and her parents never ate meat. It’s just how she lives.