Monday, December 29, 2014

Eating Without Meat (#Read26Indy Books 22 and 23)

I'm borrowing this joke from a friend's Facebook page:

An atheist, a vegan, and a Crossfitter walk into a bar. I only know because they told everyone within two minutes. 



I always tried to not talk about being a vegetarian. I just wanted to be left alone to eat what I wanted, without having a discussion about why, or having people assume I was giving them the side-eye because of their dinner.

When Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals came out, I didn't want to read it. Mainly because I read an article where the actress Natalie Portman's promoted it and compared eating animal products to rape:

I say that Foer's ethical charge against animal eating is brave because not only is it unpopular, it has also been characterized as unmanly, inconsiderate, and juvenile. But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just "This is tasty, and that's why I do it." He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don't believe in rape, but if it's what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).

I went vegan a couple months back, and I've been vegetarian since high school. I'm probably one of the more sympathetic people to discussions of what we eat. But compare something to rape, and my entire consideration of your point is gone. I've turned off my brain. I think you're a jerk. If you have to compare something to rape, to slavery, or to the Holocaust, you've already lost the argument. Something can be awful, truly awful, but only rape is rape. Find a new metaphor to make your point, because you're not winning any converts with this one.

That aside, when I decided to eat vegan, I wanted to read some books. That's always my first reaction to something new - I go to the library's online card catalog and see what topics there are on the subject. I chose these two books - Eating Animals and Main Street Vegan. Eating Animals to learn about why we as humans eat like we do, and Main Street Vegan as more of a how-to book. I'll start with the latter one.

Main Street Vegan was obnoxious. It's the kind of book that, if read by a non-vegan, would only serve to enforce the idea of vegans as self-righteous. It compared dairy to "white slavery" (p. 93). It claims that eating vegan makes you hotter ("Eating whole plant-based foods makes people attractive" p.232) and will fix almost every health woe (heart disease, impotency, prostate cancer, and that's just on p. 232-233). Some of it could be seen as tongue-in-cheek, but ultimately it didn't seem like she was just having fun with her readers. Let's cut the crap: eating healthy is good for your health, yes. But I'm not going to claim that eating vegan is a magical cure-all. You can eat like crap as a vegan, be unhealthy as a vegan, suffer from disease as a vegan. Eating healthy does not necessarily equal eating vegan.

I didn't choose to eat vegan for my health, though I know many people do. I'll admit it, I'm a lazy vegan. I should eat more fresh veggies and fruits, but that takes time, so sometimes it's pasta or a microwaved veggie patty. Today I ate a veggie loaf TV dinner for lunch because I was in a rush. I don't think that makes me any more healthful than anyone else.

That's not to say that the book doesn't have its valuable parts. Some of the recipes look pretty good, though I haven't tried them yet. And I appreciated the chapter on vitamins and supplements - the gist is that vegans can get most all vitamins and minerals in their food just fine, except for B12. So on my next trip to Whole Foods I bought some B12 supplements. But overall, this probably isn't the book I would recommend to someone curious about veganism, or to most new vegans. And people who have been vegan for years likely know this stuff already.

Much more interesting was Foer's Eating Animals. Like I said before, I was skeptical, but the book was quite good. I wish I could get my meat-eating friends and family to read it, just to get their thoughts. I would love to have a genuine conversation, without finger-pointing or anyone telling anyone else what they "should" be dong.

One thing I noticed right off is that Foer never says he's a vegan. He's a vegetarian. The book rarely discusses dairy, and only touches on egg production a little. And he admits to struggling to give up meat. He links food back to tradition, like the traditional turkey at Thanksgiving, or the meals your grandparents made, and wholly admits to wondering if the he can fully revere those traditions without preparing the meals that go along with them.

Foer frames the book as an exploration of why we eat meat, where our meat comes from, and the process it takes to turn animals into meat, borne from a desire to be able to explain it to his newborn son someday. He visits farms that are focusing on raising animals for meat in ways that cause as little pain and stress as possible. He tries to visit larger, factory-style farms, but no one will let him in, so he goes on a midnight trip with an animal rights activist. And his conclusion is that the people trying to raise meat the "right" way are doing good work, but he still can't bring himself to eat it. But its still better than the status quo. He does make the good point that the people who eat more sustainably-raised meats typically also eat factory-farmed meat as well, so their good intentions still put money in the bank accounts of those they claim to not agree with.

Some of Foer's descriptions made me feel queasy, and I suspect he was holding back. Learning how chickens are butchered and prepared for sale grossed me out, and made me glad I hadn't eaten it for years because I would not be able to put it in my mouth after that. Reading about how many cows aren't actually knocked out by the machine that is supposed to stun them was horrific. I'm not going to go into detail about all of that, because I feel like it's a stereotype of vegans that they are constantly trying to shock people by showing them videos and photos of the horrible conditions in factory farms. The truth is that people don't want to see that. Show them the images and they will shut off completely. I don't know how to open the conversation, because the way we treat living things is important. We don't have to see a chicken as equal to a human, but as humans I think we are expected to have some compassion for them, to at least respect them as living creatures, even if we eat them. You could laugh at the idea of being nice to your food. But when your food had a heartbeat, is that such a crazy idea?

I've struggled with the idea of even writing a blog post about being a vegan, because people tend to roll their eyes when they even hear the word. But then I realized, it's my blog, and no one has to read it if they don't want to. I'm not attacking anyone. I want to have a dialogue about it. I don't want to have an argument, throwing words at the other side like weapons. No one wins that kind of battle. But food seems to be one of those topics that we just can't talk about, like religion and politics. It's too heated, too divisive. How did it get to be that way?

Eating meat is normal, common, expected. Humans have been doing it forever. So it's easy to say that we always will. Sometimes I think that I'm not actually making any sort of difference by sticking to my plant-based food. But even if it made no difference at all, I still couldn't eat  meat. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't look like food. I don't want it in my body. But maybe it will make some tiny, imperceptible impact. And as Foer eloquently puts it:

It might sound fantastic, but when we bother to look, it's hard to deny that our day-to-day choices shape the world. When America's early settlers decided to throw a tea party in Boston, forces powerful enough to create a nation were released. Deciding what to eat (and what to toss overboard) is the founding act of production and consumption that shapes all others.