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conscious effort on my part to stay in shape, as walking in L.A. is not an option. On top of which, as I started working consistently, I had more money, which meant more access to food. Rather than lose weight, I found my weight increasing. My comfort with food simply outweighed my determination to be a smaller size.
    Then, at the end of 2013, after fourteen years of being a pescatarian, I had an epiphany while I was in the midst of the Earthbar Juice Cleanse. I had survived the cleanse for five whole days the year before, but this time, I kept it real with myself and decided that three days was enough. I had just come back from a weeklong East Coast trip, where I had eaten room service and pizza every single night and drank at least four out of the seven days I was traveling. I was already forty pounds heavier than I wanted to be and newly entering an industry where every extra pound matters. My body was begging me for a restart. So when I got back to L.A., I made a vow to change my ways. But something happened during the cleanse: I started watching marathons of Chopped and Master Chef and began to question why I stopped eating meat in the first place. I honestly couldn’t recall. Then it all came back to me. I was in the ninth grade and my father had picked me up from school; NPR was playing on the radio, as always. About the same time we were assigned to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle ,I remember listening to a story about how meat was processed and what hot dogs were made of. Then and there, I decided to give up meat. Even my dad, whose regular palate matches that of a protein-craving pregnant woman’s, declared that he would stop eating meat, too. The following day my last meat meal (on purpose, anyway) was chicken enchiladas. My dad’s resolve was less firm. He continued to eat the hell out of all meat (except pork).
    Now, nearly fifteen years later, after years of dealing with the confusion of my extended family and peers—“Not even chicken? Chicken doesn’t count!”—I decided that I wanted bacon.
    On the final day of my cleanse, I cleared my entire schedule to take a trip to Trader Joe’s, Costco, and the Farmer’s Market. I had to stop myself from picking up every single type of meat imaginable, but still came home with ground turkey, a Wagyu steak, chicken drumsticks, chicken breasts, and the most important of all: bacon.Or so I thought. My entire life, my mother had restricted us from pork. As a girl, I thought it was out of respect for my father’s religion. But when I grew older, I found out it was because my mother just didn’t think pork was “clean.” This logic didn’t really matter to me, as I had resolved to stop eating all meat except fish anyway. But when standing in the aisle of Trader Joe’s, deciding which type of nitrate-free, hormone-free, organically clean pack of bacon to choose, I opted for the turkey bacon—the kind with which we’d grown up.
    That evening I returned to my apartment with bags of groceries, filled to the brim with meat, meat seasonings, and vegetables that taste good with meat. I couldn’t even finish the final two vegetable juice cleanses I had paid for; my appetite had already transitioned. I could barely sleep that night, as I dreamt of my first breakfast meal, with its new addition: bacon.
    I woke up at six in the morning and went straight to cooking. Scrambled eggs, sweet potato hash, and . . . dry turkey bacon. It didn’t look like it did in all the food shows I had been watching, but now wasn’t the time to nitpick. When I took that first bite and closed my eyes in ecstasy, it was as if I had never left the meat-eating world. It was the best bite of food I had ever eaten in my life. But looking back, I think my pleasure could be equated with one of my longtime abstinent friends getting laid on her wedding night and exclaiming how amazing sex was, even if, in fact, it had been only mediocre. Deep down, I knew there was better in my future. My