Hi there,
I'm a vegetarian and have been for 17 years now (more than half of my life). I've grown up with vegetarian parents who experimented with various diets and bought organic food exclusively (they still do). Until I went to high school they cooked macrobiotic mostly (my dad did, he is the one cooking in my family). So as a kid, sea weed, tamari, sesame “salt”, miso etc were familiar cooking ingredients and seemed total “normal” to me. I guess my grand-mother provided some balance to that by cooking traditionally German (“rheinisch”) food for me and my sister. My parents have never forced us to be vegetarians so we were allowed to eat meat and there was even a time when my sister and I insisted they cook it for us and they did. I have never liked meat much though so giving it up at age 15 came only natural. Two years later, also at age 15, my sister followed as well. So the only ones in our house still eating exclusively non-vegetarian were our cats.

I had after several years of having been a lacto-ovo vegetarian gone back to including seafood in my diet (although I rarely ate it), so have my parents, by the way. But a few weeks ago I decided to ban sea food once again and let's see how it works. It was actually after preparing fresh shrimps here in Sri Lanka which tasted yummy but left me totally disgusted because preparing them made me realize more that these were actually living beings that I decided to go back to lacto-ovo (meaning dairy and eggs are included in the otherwise purely vegetarian diet). I felt that if I am disgusted preparing something, I should be disgusted eating it, too (I usually never prepared seafood myself but only had it when eating out).

I'm not a radical vegetarian but for me it's what works. :)
And I love cooking and eating so I'll be happy to join in the discussions around these topics!