Thoughts on food.
I often have some difficulty explaining to people the dietary philosophy to which I subscribe. Do I think it’s the most rational one that I’ve heard? A-derr, which is why I practice it. And here’s how it started:
A little more than two years ago, I was on a bus ride to New York with my friend “Paz” (yes, it’s his choice to attempt anonymity on the internets), and we were talking about his room mate, Eric, and the reasons why Eric himself had switched to veganism. At the time, I was one of the many folks out there who trashed vegetarianism as being totally silly, and veganism as even worse. My reasons, of course, stemmed partly from the rationale of vegans I knew, and partly from a lack of personal understanding.
The narrative I’d consistently heard had been about cruelty to animals…the sanctity of all life, the sentience of all creatures, blah blah blah. Clearly, that was a story I wasn’t buying. I don’t believe that much of anything is sacrosanct, and animals are swell, but there is no evidence that anything that has ever existed in the universe, let alone the things we eat, has a mental or emotional capacity anywhere near resembling that of humanity. I’ve of course always preferred that animals be put to death in a humane way, but there is nothing in my book that is inherrently wrong about their deaths.
And the ALF? Gimme a break.
Anyway, I had the privilege of being enlightened on this cross-border trip. Paz elaborated to me some of the many environmental factors that might lead an individual to choose a different diet, and had evidently led Eric to doing so. Issues of inefficient use of natural resources: nearly 50% of our water is consumed by the process of raising cattle and other livestock; issues of deficiencies in waste management: animal shit spills have killed millions of fish; issues of pathetic expense vs. yield ratios: every pound of steak is paid for with thirty-five pounds of eroded top soil; issues of land misuse: millions of acres of rain forest have simply been cleared out to create grazing land. THE LIST GOES ON. And on. And on.
I like to think that I’m the type of person who, when proven incorrect or ignorant on a topic, will change his ways for the better…so about a week later, I went ahead and declared my veganism (because, really, if you’re buying anything from the meat and dairy industry, you’re supporting all of it — sorry vegetarians). This proved, living in a major city, to be remarkably easy.
In the months that followed, however, my philosophy grew a bit more nuanced. You’ll have to keep in mind, again, that I have no problem with the notion of eating meat — the focus of my conversion was not the “liberation of animals,” but rather the disenabling of environmental ineptitude. So, naturally, when room mates of mine started rescuing various non-vegan foods from the local Trader Joe’s, I had no problem partaking — after all, allowing an already inefficient system to go to greater waste is particularly bad. And this, I think, turned me into what some people call a freegan: a person who eats vegan if they’re paying for it, but doesn’t worry otherwise (which is just one of the many associated definitions with the term).
This has been a philosophy that has suited me very well. The majority of people that I’ve met who choose to label themselves as vegan have been…well, assholes. I imagine that many people would simply assume that they’re assholes because they’re vegan — meaning, they’ve become picky and unpleasant people to be around because of their eating habits — but actually, I think it’s quite the reverse: veganism, as an extremist philosophy, naturally attracts assholes, who tend to like being extreme for no other reason than to provoke the reactions of others. So it’s nice not to be lumped in with those people, and instead to have a label — if I so choose to invoke it — that lends itself to more ambiguous interpretations.
The Oracle says, everything in moderation (nothing to excess). I like this…I strive for this. I’d like to think that I’m embracing the complexity of a grayer attitude towards food.
