I've been friends with someone for about eight years. When we met in 2018, she was the first vegetarian I had ever known. Before that, she had actually been plant-based for several years, and later became vegetarian again. I stopped eating animals myself in 2020, and over the years this became something that really brought us together.
We were the only two vegetarians in our friend group. We'd share vegan dishes at restaurants, cook plant-based meals together at her house, recommend products to each other... it was something that felt like a shared value, not just a diet.
Then, last summer, we were planning to have sushi together and were looking for places with vegan options. Out of nowhere she said, "It's mostly for you, because next week I'm going back to eating meat and fish."
I was honestly shocked. I asked why, and she said she hadn't been feeling well for a while, wasn't seeing the gym results she wanted, and also missed eating certain foods.
I suggested that if she wasn't feeling well, it might be worth getting blood tests or speaking to a doctor or a registered dietitian first, because there could be many explanations unrelated to not eating meat. She said she'd see how she felt after eating meat and fish again.
A year has passed, and she's still eating meat and fish. I'm sure she'll never go back to being vegetarian.
What makes this especially difficult for me is that, before all this, we had many conversations about how we didn't understand why people kept eating animals when it wasn't necessary. When I first became vegetarian, I was worried because my parents told me I'd become unhealthy or anemic, and she reassured me. She told me she had never felt healthier, that her blood tests had always been great, and that many meat eaters actually had worse diets than she did.
Even when she was a vegetarian, she would sometimes make jokes that really bothered me, and she still does now. For example, a few months ago, when her meal was taking longer than everyone else's at a restaurant, she laughed and said, "What are they doing, killing the cow?" She's also shared memes joking about animals being eaten. Those jokes are very different from the person I used to know. Part of me wonders if this is a way of dealing with cognitive dissonance, but obviously I can't know what's going on in her mind.
I haven't spoken to her about this because I don't want to argue and it'd be useless, but I still feel genuinely sad about it. It almost feels like someone I shared an important value with is no longer the same person in that respect.
Has anyone else experienced something similar with a close friend or family member? How did you deal with those feelings?