I’ve mentioned Amanda enough by now that I should not have use the phrase “blogging spirit guide” again, but … there ya go. Amanda writes a really creative and thought provoking blog called Tastee Pudding (where I guest posted today) on finding and living a creative life. Her idea for the Blogathon guest post day was to write about her personal food politics. I like the idea so much, I will be posting other personal food stories in the future. Amanda, thanks, for so much!
Greetings, One Per Week readers! I’m excited to be guest blogging for Katie as part of the Word Count Blogathon. Since Katie writes a lot about food, I thought I’d make that the focus of my post today.
copyright © 2007 sean dreilinger
Katie and I share similar values when it comes to food. We both buy local and organic whenever possible. We both love farmers markets, and we love cooking with ingredients we find at said markets – at this time of year, that means thick stalks of asparagus, artichokes, spring onions and a bizarre little delicacy called fiddlehead ferns.
We’re both very interested in the politics of food production; we read Michael Pollan and watch documentaries like Food, Inc (Katie even hosted a potluck/viewing party).
But there’s one big way in which our eating habits are very different: I don’t eat meat.
For a long time, I was what I’ll call a “conscious carnivore” — someone who only ate meat when I knew it had been raised in a humane way. Then one day, I saw a poster that changed my mind.
Yep, a poster. I was at Jivamukti yoga studio in NYC, and as I rounded the corner after class on my way to their cafe, I came face to face with a poster by PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals).
Now, I typically avoid PETA materials — the extremism of their tactics alienates me; plus, they use imagery of suffering animals to recruit people to their cause, and images like that absolutely devastate me, so I tend to avoid them.
But there I was, face to face with this poster, and there was its message: Animals experience pain. No matter how humanely they’re raised, nor how mindfully they’re slaughtered, at the moment you kill them, they hurt.
And suddenly, I knew I couldn’t be responsible for hurting an animal.
Some might argue that I wasn’t killing the animal myself, so how was eating it the same thing as hurting it? My feeling is that by buying and consuming meat, I help create demand for it, and that demand leads to more animal killing. Not to mention, on a spiritual level, I can’t enjoy eating something when just looking at it makes me think of pain.
I’ve never written about this before – my decision to become a vegetarian – and my intention is not to “guilt” anyone into giving up meat. I respect that we all make different choices with regard to what we put in our bodies, and why. I’m just sharing why I made this decision for myself.
I officially gave up meat on January 1, 2007. In those first few months, I found myself craving steak, and burgers…which was weird, because I’d rarely eaten these things even when I did eat meat. It was probably my body’s way of telling me it needed more iron, which I now make sure to get from sources like cereal, beans and leafy greens.
I’m lucky, because I like a lot of vegetarian food – from beans (chickpeas, cannelini beans, lentils) to tofu and other soy products, not to mention vegetables themselves. Summertime is my favorite time to cook – give me fresh produce from the farmer’s market, olive oil, a little garlic, and I’m all set. If you want to experiment with vegetarian cooking, I highly recommend a cookbook called The Passionate Vegetarian; I haven’t found a bad recipe in it yet (be prepared for the author’s very silly name: Crescent Dragonwagon — no, I’m not making that up!).
If you love meat too much to give it up, but are drawn to the economic, health or environmental benefits of vegetarianism, you can follow Katie’s lead and experiment with Meatless Mondays.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with going a step further and giving up dairy and eggs. My inspiration? A book by Alicia Silverstone, of all people. I won’t get into all the details here, but if you’re interested, pick up her book, called The Kind Diet. It’s well-sourced, and written in a very accessible way (sort of like the book about blogging that Katie recently wrote about).
I think this is what it’s about: Experimenting. Learn about where your food comes from, and how it affects you. Make choices about what you want to put in your body. See how you feel. Make new choices. See how you feel, again.
We don’t need to lock into lifestyles, or labels. But I do believe that food production has sufficient impact on everything from our health, to our local economies, to the state of the environment, that we have a responsibility to, at the very least, educate ourselves.
With that in mind, here are some recommended resources:
- When PBS aired Food, Inc, they also compiled a host of educational materials about food production and related issues. Highly recommend.
- Katie’s very own post, Five Links to Get You Knee Deep in Food News
Hi Katie and Amanda! I am giving The Omnivore’s Dilemma a second read right now. So much great information in there. Thank goodness for writers like him!
[...] As Katie noted, it’s ironic that she wrote about sausage for my blog, since I wrote about why I’m a vegetarian for hers… Tada! Rice pudding – the finished product – by Katie Jett Walls. Looks pretty [...]
Christa, I’m actually reading Omnivore’s Dilemma with 5th graders – there’s a young readers edition, and I’m co-leading it with a great teacher at the school where I work.
I can understand the desire to not cause pain to animals, and I can understand how this would lead one to choose not to eat meat. However, I often find myself wondering, of vegetarians/vegans, “Why do these people believe that plants don’t feel pain when we cut them down or pick their fruit?” Is it simply easier to believe that a plant doesn’t feel pain because it has no method of expressing its’ displeasure to humans? There are some methods (Kirlian Photography and electometering which, I admit are a bit “out there”) which suggest the electrical field of a plant changes quite a bit when harvested. If a plant could scream or convulse in pain, would we feel differently about eating them? How would that affect the vegan/vegetarian movement? I understand that there are many more reasons not to eat meat (the ecological costs of meat, for instance), but if we look at food consumption through the lens of, “anything we eat kills something else that lives,” how does that change our relationship to our food?
Since I have been primarily a vegetarian throughout my big diet, I have to say I feel 1000% better than I used to. My cholesterol & triglycerides are normal (after being high for a long time). I used to have a lot of digestion problems – all gone.
Even after the diet is over, I’ll be staying on a mostly vegetarian diet. I recently found out I need to avoid soy, due to a thyroid condition, but I do enjoy beans and all kinds of veggies.
I never would have considered it until I lived it.
[...] Personal Food: Amanda’s story [...]
How funny, I just commented on the post about Becca’s story that I wanted to read “The Kind Diet”. This is a sign that I’ll have to check it out now!
Thanks for sharing your story Amanda (or to Katie for organizing these posts). I eat a mostly vegetarian diet, and I hit a wall sometimes with the protein sources. I like beans, tofu, nuts/peanut butter, and veggie sausage, but after I’ve eaten them all week, I crave more variety. Am I overlooking any great sources of veggie protein?
cultstagemonkey- plants don’t have a central nervous system like us animals. yes, they grow, but so does our hair and our finger nails. there are no brains and no ability to feel pain.
Meat Market is another very good book about why someone would go vegan. I’m not hardcore about animal rights like a lot of my vegan friends (as in, I don’t want animal liberation. I think it’s ok to use animals- to a certain degree-, but I disagree with current farm practices. Good ones are too far and few between and it’s easier to eat vegan than to look into every dairy or egg product to make sure they meet my standards. Also, all of those industries feed into each other. Dairy cows can’t produce unending supplies of milk w/o giving birth, most of the calves are sold to veal farmers and chickens that can’t lay anymore are killed for meat.), so I was expecting a very biased book from Erik Marcus, a known animal rights vegan, but I thought it was very well done.
hey jen w.,
you should check out seitan (aka “wheat meat”) and stuff like the chickpea cutlets (from Veganomicon, my sister likes to use lentils in place of the chickpeas.) also, making your own sausages is super easy and you can season to your liking (my friend julie’s video and recipe: http://www.everydaydish.tv/index.php?page=recipe&recipe=109.)
There’s also a product called Soy Curls that are kinda like TVP but a different shape and somehow way better. they end up having the texture of pulled pork so a popular thing to do with them is make BBQ sandwiches with them, but they’re very versatile.
also, check out using jackfruit (http://theurbanhousewife.blogspot.com/2008/02/jackfruit-carnitas-tacos.html)! not a ton of protein, but it’s different and awesome.