As you might imagine by the title of this column, I am a passionate and outspoken enthusiast of all things meaty and delicious in this world. So much so that I wrote a book on the subject: The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers, a fun and fact-filled polemic on what it means to be an animal that eats other animals. Tasty, thought-provoking stuff — or at least I hope it to be.

Now meat is not a narrow topic. It is, in fact, a hell of a hefty beast. In the couple of years I spent researching and writing the book, I had a chance to learn about everything from anthropology to diet and nutrition, biology, ethics, medical findings, even spirituality. I interviewed a revered Tibetan Buddhist Lama, who spoke of the karmic implications of enjoying animal flesh…in which he, it turns out, often partakes and enjoys, usually yak, beef or lamb. Then there was the squirrel hunting, cow butchering, Testicle Festival-attending, and my attempt to eat pretty much every animal — and animal part — I could get my hands on. (Note: Goat, rabbit and pigeon are divine; stay away from the bull penis.) When you delve down into it, there are topics within topics, themes within themes, and then some.

So when I tell someone what I do for a living — write about meat — I'm always intrigued by which of these topics they might want to discuss. For many the initial impulse is to ask if I’m often attacked by militant vegetarians foaming at the mouth (I'm guessing with soy milk). And the answer is: Not really, no. Aside from some very heated discussions on BBC radio with the brain-washees at PETA, my conversations with vegetarians are often fair and intelligent. More interestingly, and more surprisingly, is the growing number of people who tell me: "You know, I was a vegetarian for X number of years…" Implying, of course, that something, maybe someone, brought them back from the dark side of textured vegetable protein and tofurkey and into the magnificent world of carnivorous delights.

To someone like me, this is verrrrrrrry interesting. Especially since many vegetarians become so for intensely personal reasons, usually pertaining to ethics or animal rights. Strong tonic, for sure, and both are valid reasons to eschew eating our animal friends. So I'm forced to wonder, "What made them decide to jump ship and swim back to being a land-lubbing meat eater?" Whatever it was, it must be equally as powerful as their reasons to pick up the cause in the first place, right?

My first reaction: "It was bacon, wasn't it?" And for many vegetarians, that marvelous splendor of crispy, salty, smoky pork meat and fat was indeed the culprit and the cause of their return to the fold. How could anyone not be drawn to bacon? I can only imagine how maddening it might be to smell hot bacony air, perhaps wafting from the kitchen on a late Sunday morning, and keep oneself from indulging. It's enough to drive a person googly-eyed insane. As was the case for my friend Brandon, a long-time veggie, who one day confided in me with a little shame (but also, I detected, a hint of naughty joy), that he'd been sneaking bites of bacon from his girlfriend's breakfast plate. He swore it wouldn't amount to much, but I knew things could only go downhill from there. Lo and behold, it wasn't long before I was cooking us bleu cheeseburgers on his back yard grill.

But not every lapsed vegetarian becomes so by way of bacon temptation. The more accounts I accumulated of people reneging on their veg vows, the more varied they became. In many respects, these tales are similar to loss-of-virginity stories — all of the basic elements are there, but no two are exactly alike, and almost every one is intimate and special. It's the details that make the stories great. And as the number of folks confiding in me how they gave up on vegetarianism increased, I began to search for common themes and threads. Aside from the standard stuff, what did all of these stories have in common?

There are, I concluded, two basic ways — besides bacon — in which a vegetarian becomes a former vegetarian. The first is a slow, gradual, procedural shift, both in diet and ideology. It's like the snowball effect. Call it "The Meatball Effect." A person, like Brandon, starts eating a tiny bit of meat here and there ("Just a little won’t make me not a vegetarian" the reasoning usually goes), proceeding to side dishes, then entrees, and eventually the sometimes painful admission that one has become omnivorous once again. According to my buddy Toby:

We always ate shrimp at Thanksgiving. One year, I wanted a shrimp. I wanted a shrimp a lot. I swore the family to secrecy and ate it. And then I ate about five more. Once I'd done that, it came down to degrees: "Well, as long as I stick to seafood." "Well, as long as I stick to white meat." "Hey, wait — pork is white meat!" "I want a cheeseburger." "My aim's totally better than Nugent's." And so on, and so on...

At the opposite end of the spectrum — and, it seems, the more popular one — we have what I've termed "The Meat Cupid Effect." These stories are a lot more fun, and more interesting. Basically what happens is that a vegetarian, no matter how long they've been one, suddenly craves meat as though his very life depends on it (and often in borderline-insanity quantities, too), and all hesitation goes instantly up in barbecue flames. As though they've been pierced through the heart (and belly) with an arrow shot by Eros Carne, the God of Meat Love. I have tons of these tales: There's Midge, who went "beef crazy" at a summer cookout and wound up eating five hamburgers; Emily, who lapsed when a carnivorous boyfriend cooked up some ribs ("A Kansas City girl can never say no to ribs," she confided); and Hank, a vegan who, sick of always feeling sick despite the accompanying sense of moral superiority, snapped and pulled off the highway to down a Burger King Whopper. Then there's my friend Sarah, who became vegetarian when she began dating one, and soon discovered that one side effect of the veggie diet, for her, was the loss of 45 pounds, which, as a self-proclaimed "fat goth girl" at the time, she greatly appreciated. But a number of years and one particularly brutal winter later, she found herself craving Buffalo wings. "Something snapped," she said, "and I decided to give in. In the grand scheme of things, I realized, I would rather spend my energy on things I really care about, and I just didn't care about not eating meat anymore." So she found herself digging into a hero-sized plate of Atomic Wings, finding them every bit as wonderful as she'd remembered. I was there, as a matter of fact, sitting across from her, watching a smile creep broadly across her face as the flavors sunk in. It was a joyous thing to witness.

But the best lapsed vegetarian story, the Mac Daddy of them all, came by way of my friend, Matt. As a college senior, he started dating a girl who, for 13 years, had adhered strictly to the veggie way, after an unfortunate incident with an Arby's Beef 'n Cheddar. Now the thing about this girl, Matt confided, was that even though they had frequent and vigorous sex, she'd never once in her life achieved a sexual climax. (Note: I'm in no way suggesting that this has something to do with her vegetarianism). Then, during one spirited afternoon of lovemaking, something happened, and she had one of those tectonic shift-sized, Earth-shattering orgasms, much to Matt's delight, not to mention his self-satisfaction as a studly sort of guy. After much laughter and some post-coital nuzzling, she declared something Matt never would have expected: "I need meat…I want an Arby's cheddar and beef RIGHT NOW."

"Apparently," he said, "the orgasm made her crave meat. Uncontrollably. I asked before I served it to her if she was certain she wanted to do it, and there was not a trace of doubt in her mind. She still eats meat to this very day. She says that she always whispers a little prayer in my honor every time she bites into a nice, juicy cheeseburger."

Now that, friends, is a story.

Scott Gold is the author of The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers (Broadway Books, 2008), a selection of which is featured in Best Food Writing 2008 (Da Capo Lifelong Books), and which you can find more about on his Web site . A New Orleans native, Gold now lives in Brooklyn, New York. He also enjoys many vegetables.

“Shameless Carnivore” photograph by Ryan McVay/Getty Images, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.