Here’s an excerpt from an essay written by blog reader Jonathan Kime for Oxford American Magazine. We highly recommend you check out the rest of his humorous piece at the Oxford American website. Thanks for sending this our way, Jonathan!

“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m starting to feel less Southern.

It’s not that I’m married to a woman from New York. It’s not that I work for an international health organization with staff members spread across fifteen countries. It’s not even that I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a liberal college town the late Senator Jessie Helms infamously suggested putting a fence around in lieu of building a state zoo. It’s that I can’t eat pork.

There’s no vegetarian conspiracy at work here. When I told my cousin—who lives in a decidedly more rural area of the state than I do—that I couldn’t eat pork, he said, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. You mean you won’t eat pork.” I wish it were that easy, because then it would be something I could just snap the hell out of. A lot of Carolinians seem to have little capacity to understand this. In a way it’s like saying that if it’s not my own fault, if I didn’t choose to stop eating pork, then fate must be at work, or that God must have done this to me. If you want a North Carolinian to question his faith, tell him God won’t let him eat pork chops.

I realize I have some explaining to do. It’s not just pork I can’t eat; I’m allergic to something called alpha-galactose, a carbohydrate present in all mammals. Or at least all non-primate mammals. Say what you want about my rural, public-school education, but when the allergist told me this, I knew precisely what she was talking about. However, I have met some very educated people who have needed a refresher on the definitions of mammals and primates, so here goes: I can’t eat anything with fur except monkeys, which I have no interest in eating and probably can’t readily source in North Carolina anyway, not even at Whole Foods.”