Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things one can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became a vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim some identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom's Volvo's bumper, a bake sale cause to fill the self-conscious half hour of school break, an occasion to get closer to the breasts of activist women. (And of course I did also think it was wrong to harm animals and destroy the environment.) Which isn't to say that I refrained from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Privately, the pendulum swung. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, "Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?"
I first became a vegetarian when I was nine, in response to an argument made by a radical babysitter. My great change---which lasted a couple of weeks---was based on the very simple instinct that it's wrong to kill animals for food. I imagine most children have some version of this instinct at some point, and while it says nothing at all about the rightness or wrongness of meat, the overcoming of it can, itself, leave a mark. Parental explanations almost always come in the form of half-truths, glossings over, or worse---"Animals live long, happy lives in the sun, and when they one day die, they share their meat with us." Kids are even better at recognizing such bullshit than adults, even if, because they need a stable world, they don't pursue it. Whether or not something is learned about food, something is learned.
My most recent shift to vegetarianism was inspired by the birth of my first child. Facing the prospect of making food choices on his behalf---and of having to come up with explanations that he would also digest---I took the questions posed by meat seriously. Instinct no longer felt like enough. And neither did information. I wanted to have a full engagement with the subject. I wanted to see it for myself, not because there isn't ample access to relevant photographs and videos, but because I was not the photographer. (Observation is easy, implication is honest.) This full engagement---which resulted in my book, Eating Animals---required me to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from my childhood, and probe those instincts of right and wrong that two decades earlier made me change. The answers to some questions became very clear very quickly. Some remain cloudy.
Will this vegetarianism be the last one? It's impossible to say, of course, but with my filled-out picture of not only contemporary animal agriculture, but my own understanding of fatherhood, it feels impossible to imagine a time when I would bring such food---which is virtually always unhealthy, destructive and cruel---into our home. Our home could not be our home in the same way, given what I now know.
But perhaps there's more to it. Perhaps it took all of that previous inconsistency, all of that pendulum swinging, to bring me to this place. Perhaps "failing" was not failing but approaching, one awkward step at a time, what I always wanted.
The question, I've come to think, is not what inspires one to change, but what inspires one to remain changed. It's easy and common to learn something---through an argument or fact, image or experience---and feel compelled to make different choices. But for how long? Change is inspiring, but only rarely durable. Part of this difficulty is found exactly where you'd expect to find it: most change isn't easy. Making different choices at restaurants and supermarkets is, for most people, harder than it might seem. What's the big deal? Order something else. The big deal is we've been eating these products since we were kids, and we digested them with stories. We got over our colds with chicken soup. We celebrated the Fourth of July with grilled burgers and hot dogs. We ate our grandmother's brisket. These things matter. As do our cravings. As does convenience.
But I wonder if more of the difficulty doesn't come from the ways that we talk and think about change. When it comes to meat, change is almost always cast as an absolute. You are a vegetarian or you are not. It's a strange formulation, and it's distracting. (Those who profit from animal suffering and environmental destruction want us to think in dichotomies, rather than practical realities.) Imagine someone asking you, "Are you an environmentalist or not?" For most of us, caring about the environment isn't an on-off switch, but a set of daily choices that we try to respond to as best we can. I buy energy-efficient products, and turn off lights when leaving a room, and recycle and so on. But I also fly on airplanes. Does my occasional flying completely undermine my identity as someone who cares and tries? Should I, faced with my inability to live consistently, make no efforts to live better?
Obviously not. We don't live our lives on the inside flaps of philosophy textbooks. We live in the world. And in the world, everyone is a hypocrite. In the world, change is not a switch but a process. Being serious about changing requires a certain amount of forgiveness. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't draw lines in the sand, or that we should be quick to accept all of our own apologies. But if animal welfare matters to us, if the air and water matter, if swine flu and E. Coli matter, if global warming matters, if biodiversity matters, if rural communities matter, if our ability to tell honest stories to ourselves and our children matters... then we shouldn't be distracted, intimidated or misled by someone else's idea of purity. We should begin at the beginning, and begin now.
Michael Pollan: "Food Rules": A Completely Different Way To Fix The Health Care Crisis
Laurie David: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Lee Schneider: And the Award Goes to ...
Joshua Rosenthal: Diet Change: Save the Planet With Meatless Mondays
Vegetarianism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Vegetarian Times - Great Food, Good Health, Smart Living
Vegetarian Food - Vegan Recipes - Vegetarian Cooking - Raw Food ...
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Dr. Sharada Hall
http://bod
Feed yards are very expensive and used only before a calf is killed for meat, jsut a few days! Beef processing plants? Thats one day.
So the fact that cattle are raised in horrible environmen
Maybe Foer got his info from Siberia?
It's been 2 weeks now... my maid keep secretly putting either egg or bacon, sliced very thin and put strategica
It's so hard... but coming from a farmer family (granddad owned the country biggest farm, sorry PETA...mos
It took me 27 years to finally come to my senses and decided "ok I maybe can't stop all the killings but I sure don't wanna have anything to do with it anymore", hence Vegan.
Now I'm hungry, all I can eat is fruit and veggie.. At least i'm a sexy vegan... *i wish*
Jonathan is speaking the truth and we have to recognize what is being done and look at it for what it is.
I am one that has been a "some time vegetarian
It is what it is, we are eating a living being and it has some of the same bodily functions that we do. how far are we from cannibalis
Either way, make your lifestyle choice based upon truth!!!! Not fear, persuasion or ignorance.
Many blessings & all the best,
Ms. Toussaint
BeYOURTrut
http://www
While it is harder to get the surplus protein needed for muscle mass with a vegetarian diet, I'd like to also point out that many protein supplement
Oh, and gorillas - averaging 400 pounds (the males) of bone and muscle - are entirely vegetarian
Now where is that pig......h
Feed yards are very expensive and used only before a calf is killed for meat, jsut a few days! Beef processing plants? Thats one day.
So the fact that cattle are raised in horrible environmen
Maybe Foer got his info from Siberia?
We do not raise meat birds, but have friends who raise pastured poultry and raise heritage breeds that have not been geneticall
I know I am not going to convert any of the fundies here, but I am just so sick of all farmers being painted with the same brush. There are great people out here doing their best to change our entire food system and even the meat farmers are happy for people to eat less meat if the meat they do buy is raised naturally and sold at a fair price.
As a long time vegetarian
It is so true. Never have I met a person who actually fits comfortabl
As a farmer, I am quite happy as a vegan and encourage people that I meet to become vegan as well.
You can still be a farmer in a vegan world (in fact, farmers will be essential in a vegan world, just as they are now!), it is just a matter of changing what you are producing and how you produce it.
The ve-vangeli
Many of the world's poor live in marginal lands that can't support plant-base
Barbarak Kingsolver
The problem is that Americans want to find a way to eat animal products and feel good about it. Sorry, but no. "Meat, poultry, and eggs from animals raised on open pasture. . ." What kind of nonsense is this? The world cannot be fed from humanely raised animals--t
"Bananas that cost a rainforest
And we're not talking about "the world's poor." We're talking about the holocaust against the animals in the U.S.
Barbara Kingsolver teaches her children to lovingly raise animals, and then kill them. And teaches them that this is okay. It's not. It's a psychologi
Perhaps we are lucky, but it can be done.