Recently, a childhood friend came to visit me. Sitting companionably next to us at our hip Brooklyn restaurant table, the cute waiter covered his bases: “No vegetarians, right?” Taylor responded, “Right!” at the exact same moment as I timidly raised my index finger, in a gesture reminiscent of the one I hate doing to ask for the check at the end of the meal. I clarified, “Kind of. I mean that…I guess, ‘yes.’ For the purposes of this meal, I’m a vegetarian.” Taylor looked at me like, well, like I’d said I was a vegetarian. The waiter dutifully showed me the one acceptable dish on the menu and mentioned a couple off-menu options, then left Taylor and me to sort out our obvious issues. My friend of almost twenty years demanded an explanation.
That’s the kind of “vegetarian” I am: a postmodern, equivocal, non-dogmatic one. My reasons and commitment are steadfast, but too complicated to fit under the description “vegetarian,” and, frankly, too involved for any semi-conscientious person to unload on others during the menu perusal. I wasn’t converted through a childhood love for animals, a PETA video, or a religious practice. I, self-loathing cliché that I am, read a popular book.
“Conversion” is exactly the right word to use. I grew up in a meat-loving family. My dad’s favorite eatery is Wienerschnitzel. Yes, Wienerschnitzel of the “3 for $3.99” deal: one chili cheese hot dog, one order of chili cheese fries, and one chili cheese burger for less than $4. I clearly remember the first time I offered veggie pizza as my choice during the family pizza round-up (for nothing other than a love of sauce-covered mushrooms and onions): my father incredulously asked “What, are you European now?” Never mind how much Europeans love their meat—vegetarians are liberals, and Europeans are liberals, so vegetarianism is European.
My eating habits formed in this environment. As I am quite possibly the most unwilling cook you’ll ever meet, I survived the second half of senior year of college on cans of 99-cent Hormel chili and salt and vinegar chips. But when I moved to New York for graduate school and lived on my own, under the vague sense that such a diet was probably not the best for me I tried eating less-processed foods. I still demanded that they didn’t require any work, though, so I survived the first half of the year on berries, cheese, crackers, bread, and Nutella. My meat-consumption declined out of sheer laziness.
Then, last Christmas a friend who endearingly proselytizes about everything from political candidates to television shows gave me Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I put off reading it for a while, sensing, as Foer notes, that something was “wrong” with the way I was eating that I didn’t want to face. The decisions and the inconveniences outweighed my yet-undefined recognition of unease. In the meantime I joined a CSA with my roommate and realized I was going to have to learn to do something with the pounds of vegetables that would soon be filling my fridge. After about six months of waiting, I was finally ready to read Foer’s book; devour it, actually.
The impact the book had on me was instant and shaking, although I eventually parted ways with his argument. I don’t believe eating animals is inherently wrong (Foer becomes a strict vegetarian and decides to raise his son that way), but even a little trip into the world of factory farming was enough to convince me that it contains very little right. I can honestly say that I had never before questioned the meat I was given in nice little shrink-wrapped packages; why would I, when the majority of my modern consumer options are just as divorced from their organic or creative roots? Everything else in my life appears in colorful containers on the store shelf as if by magic, and food has never been an exception.
But that, above all, is the “unnatural” part of our eating experience. Food is not furniture, and it is not technology: it has a shelf life (or should), is universally and constantly necessary, and encompasses life and death more fully than anything else we daily engage. I dislike the fact that my epiphany came from a trendy young writer, and wish I had possessed the introspection to have asked myself these questions sooner, but Foer acknowledges these contradictions in the way we eat. It might be too simplistic to set them up as head vs. heart, but eating and the rituals surrounding it retain emotional strongholds that few such mundane activities do. I have always been a “crust first” sort of eater, which I get from my dad. We both spin our toast on the tips of our fingers, making sure to eat all of that yucky healthy part before savoring the soft innards. My mother, on the other hand, chomps away efficiently from one side of the bread to the other. It would be a stretch to call my identification with my dad in this regard sentimental, but it is part of our family idiosyncrasy. I was raised on margarine, and so have always preferred it. I still have to cut all the corn off the cob before eating it, a remnant of my 3.5 years with braces. Eating habits reach deep into our past, and those roots are not cut easily. We eat, as Foer’s title doubly references, like animals—instinctively, emotionally, aggressively, and with the added human-bonus of 24-hour stores and prepackaged options.
So, as prompted by Foer, I have applied the rational logic that I already use for other decisions to my food. I am careful about the people I want to be around, the leaders I want to support, what objects to surround myself with, and how I wish to dress and present myself, so why wouldn’t I implement the same consideration to the food that works its way into and through my body three (okay, more like five) times a day? Now I will only eat meat with a variety of qualifications—grass-fed, open-pasture, not factory-farmed, etc.—which, in essence, makes me a working vegetarian. The rationale is a compilation of many factors, including the treatment of animals and workers in factory farms, the aggressive use of preemptive antibiotics, the conflicts of interest in a system where the government overseers are or have been on the boards of the major corporations, and the risk of disease and infection to humans through crossover viruses, from regulations often lax in standard and nonexistent in practice. I have no problem eating animals that have had a full, healthy, productive life, but even then I try to limit my intake. This has all been a recent process, and is one I am still exploring. I've eaten meat once in the last four months, and I am fine with that frequency. It’s not always easy, and I’m not always convinced I’m doing the right thing, but this is all part of setting up my own household, defining my values, and deciding who I want to be. In other words, typical twenty-something idealism.
In New York there are options for me to be such a picky eater, and I am aware that my particular brand of annoyingly complicated, pain-in-the-ass, air-quotes vegetarianism is largely possible by my position as a young, single, middle-class, white, graduate-school educated person. But, if I have been given the options to do this, to throw my consumer weight behind companies and products that support an organic and ethical mode of eating, why wouldn’t I? I was saddened by the family interviewed in Food, Inc. (cliché again…) that outlined their choice thus: hunger, from spending their little money on healthy food, or diabetes, from spending their money on filling options like dollar cheeseburgers and sodas. Should I, out of guilt and a sense of powerlessness, eat the way others who have less options have to? I am not completely comfortable with this facet of the issue yet, but for now I’ve decided that having the privilege of choice also gives me the responsibility to make the best one I can, and hopefully to put the companies and farmers who are as ethical as they can be one step closer to making their products more widely, and possibly more economically available. My local CSA has low-income and deferred payment opportunities, and many CSAs accept food stamps, and these are some of the most important steps towards giving all people the option to eat as they choose—real choice, not “Doritos or Lay’s” choice.
So I’m left answering the question “Are you a vegetarian?” with “Well…” The truth is that I’m not, but the more relevant truth is that with our current food system, I might as well be.
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
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"I was saddened by the family interviewed in Food, Inc. (cliché again…) that outlined their choice thus: hunger, from spending their little money on healthy food, or diabetes, from spending their money on filling options like dollar cheeseburgers and sodas. Should I, out of guilt and a sense of powerlessness, eat the way others who have less options have to? Will that improve the situation? I am not completely comfortable with this facet of the issue yet..."
Maybe this will make you more comfortable with the economics aspect of vegetarianism. When one purchases grains and legumes in bulk packages, along with low cost seasonings like salt and pepper and additional ingredients like onions or garlic or root vegetables, the cost per serving is less than the cost of a fast food meal. Never mind that it's also far more nutritious and less toxic. The cost of greens, like collards or spinach or mustard greens, is not much, and with them and, say, beans and rice, you've got a very healthy and, in my opinion, delicious meal.
There is a reason that historically, foods like legumes and grains and greens have been considered poor peoples' food -- and that's because they are. For much of the world's poor, these are their dietary staples.
There are larger issues, of course. Meat in the U.S. is so cheap compared to many vegetables because of feed grain subsidies and low cost access to public lands for grazing, and the environmental costs of factory farms are not factored into the price that consumers pay, but those are subjects for another discussion. For now, if you're feeling guilty that your vegetarian diet is one of privilege, you can let that guilt go. This is not to say that you can't spend lots of money of fancier vegetarian items, like Thai-flavored baked tofu or organic kale, but if you want a healthy diet that is very friendly to a thin wallet, then vegetarianism fits that definition.
Good luck with your journey,
B&G
Wal-Mart- will price match anything sold anywhere else as long as the shopper brings in the printed advert.
The Hispanic oriented supermarkets have ridiculous produce prices every week as loss leaders- and their ads come in the mail- so its not even necessary to purchase the newspaper on food ad day.
The excuse that healthful fresh foods are more expensive than processed junk or fast food disappears when one takes advantage of those truly mindboggling prices.
I'm mainly semi-veggie (lacto-ovo plus fish) and I have no qualms about cutting my produce budget by 75% or more. And as a bonus- since I almost never buy anything there that isn't give-away price match- I'm costing Wallyworld money...
A vegetarian since 1982, I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985, as anti-apartheid demonstrations rocked the UC San Diego campus. I first became interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Author John Robbins provides these points and facts in his Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America (1987):
Half the water consumed in the U.S. irrigates land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population, creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times as concentrated as raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause thrice as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes thrice as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined.
Meat producers, the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contribute to half the water pollution in the United States. The water that goes into a 1,000 lb. steer could float a destroyer. It takes 25 gallons of water to produce a pound of wheat, but 2,500 gallons to produce a pound of meat. If these costs weren't subsidized by the American taxpayers, the cheapest hamburger meat would be $35 per pound!
Subsidizing the California meat industry costs taxpayers $24 billion annually. Livestock producers are California's biggest consumers of water. Every tax dollar the state doles out to livestock producers costs taxpayers over seven dollars in lost wages, higher living costs and reduced business income. Seventeen western states have enough water supplies to support economies and populations twice as large as the present.
Overgrazing of cattle leads to topsoil erosion, turning once-arable land into desert. We lose four million acres of topsoil each year and 85 percent of this loss is directly caused by raising livestock. To replace the soil we've lost, we're destroying our forests. Since 1967, the rate of deforestation in the U.S. has been one acre every five seconds. For each acre cleared in urbanization, seven are cleared for grazing or growing livestock feed.
One-third of all raw materials in the U.S. are consumed by the livestock industry and it takes thrice as much fossil fuel energy to produce meat than it does to produce plant foods. A report on the energy crisis in Scientific American warned: "The trends in meat consumption and energy consumption are on a collision course."
"All Things Are Connected," the concluding chapter to John Robbins' Pulitzer Prize nominated Diet for a New America(1987), begins with a quote from (reincarnationist) Christian mystic Edgar Cayce:
"Destiny, or karma, depends upon what the soul has done about what it has become aware of."
John Robbins writes:
"At the present time, when most of us sit down to eat, we aren't very aware of how our food choices affect the world. We don't realize that in every Big Mac there is a piece of the tropical rainforests, and with every billion burgers sold another hundred species become extinct. We don't realize that in the sizzle of our steaks there is the suffering of animals, the mining of our topsoil, the slashing of our forests, the harming of our economy, and the eroding of our health. We don't hear in the sizzle the cry of the hungry millions who might otherwise be fed. We don't see the toxic poisons (pesticides) accumulating in the food chains, poisoning our children and our earth for generations to come.
"But once we become aware of the impact of our food choices, we can never really forget. Of course, we can push it all to the back of our minds, and we may need to do this, at times, to endure the enormity of what is involved.
"But the earth itself will remind us, as will our children, and the animals and the forests and the sky and the rivers, that we are part of this earth, and it is part of us. All things are deeply connected, and so the choices we make in our daily lives have enormous influence, not only on our own health and vitality, but also on the lives of other beings, and indeed on the destiny of life on earth.
"Thankfully, we have cause to be grateful--what's best for us personally is also best for other forms of life, and for the life support systems on which we all depend."
When I first read Diet for a New America, I thought it could have the same kind of impact on mainstream American society that Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet had in the '70s.
In writing his expose on the livestock industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988. It was one of the most inspirational moments of my life!
He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism. I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.
Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the "Green" end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.
John Robbins elaborated further on the economic waste of raising animals for food in May All Be Fed, which my brother gave me for Christmas in 1992. Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. Twenty-five years ago, Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock have consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.
When I met with Miyun Park of Compassion Over Killing in the fall of 2004 (she was visiting from out of state; attending an animal rights conference at UC Berkeley), I told her John Robbins' Diet for a New America was the book that did it for me...it made me want to go public with the vegan message.
A 2007 pamphlet put out by Compassion Over Killing says raising animals for food is one of the leading causes of both pollution and resource depletion today. According to a recent United Nations report, Livestock's Long Shadow, raising chickens, turkeys, pigs, and other animals for food causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all the cars, trucks and other forms of transportation combined. Researchers from the University of Chicago similarly concluded that a vegetarian diet is the most energy efficient, and the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by not eating animal products than by switching to a hybrid car.
"Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today's most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation."
---Union Nations' Food and Agriculture Association
70% of the grain grown and 50% of the water consumed in the U.S. are used by the meat industry. (Audubon Society)
Over 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to grow grain for livestock. (Greenpeace)
It takes nearly one gallon of fossil fuel and 5,200 gallons of water to produce just one pound of conventionally fed beef. (Mother Jones)
Farmed animals produce an estimated 1.4 billion tons of fecal waste each year in the U.S. Much of this untreated waste pollutes the land and water.
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in animal pounds.
I had the opportunity to hear John Robbins speak at a Unitarian church here in Oakland in 2001. The church was PACKED! John writes in The Food Revolution (2001):
"The revolution sweeping our relationship to our food and our world, I believe, is part of an historical imperative. This is what happens when the human spirit is activated. One hundred and fifty years ago, slavery was legal in the United States. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in most states. Eighty years ago, there were no laws in the United States against any form of child abuse. Fifty years ago, we had no Civil Rights Act, no Clean Air or Clean Water legislation, no Endangered Species Act. Today, millions of people are refusing to buy clothes and shoes made in sweatshops and are seeking to live healthier and more Earth-friendly lifestyles. In the last fifteen years alone, as people in the United States have realized how cruelly veal calves are treated, veal consumption has dropped 62 percent."
veggiegrrrl: I've thought a lot about what you said, and I understand the difference between myself and a vegetarian. For me, though, the problem is exactly what happened to me at that restaurant. When the waiter asks, I could say "No, I'm not vegetarian but I won't eat any of the meat here," but I'd feel like (and be) kind of an asshole. So while I don't go around telling people I'm vegetarian or wearing shirts or anything, it's unfortunately the state of many people's comprehension that there are only two categories: vegetarians and everybody else. I'd be interested if you had any other ways for me to navigate the problem without further increasing people's ignorance about true vegetarianism, and without coming off like an asshole.
These days I do buy the bag of dried beans, much cheaper than fast food, but it takes hours to prepare (15 minutes to rinse, overnight soak, couple hours to cook) and with my indifferent culinary skills, the result is barely palatable.
And I eat microwavable or pan fry-able salmon. So no vegetarian I, veggiegirrrl, but I tend to decline to eat furry or feathered meat from grocery stores or in restaurants, and in fact almost any meat in a restaurant (fast food or fine dining).
But I would eat meat from Polyface farms in a heart beat. We are, after all, omnivores. We've just set up a meat production and distribution system that kills us even as we enjoy it.
Maybe we need a new term, slow food eaters or perhaps rejectetarians. Maybe Sarah Palin would have a good suggestion.
When people ask me, I just say that I eat a primarily plant based diet. No explanations necessary and I am just following what the esteemed doctors at Harvard University recommend.
This way I am not offending anyone if I occasionally eat sushi...
The best we can do for ourselves is to try to follow a diet that is healthly for us and not offend our beliefs about where our food comes from.