Violent and Vile Vegans and Vegetarians

 Judgemental:

Adj, of or denoting an attitude in which judgments about other people's conduct are made.

Thesaurus entry:

condemnatory, self-righteous, censorious, pharisaic, critical

The critical question in an Omnivores Dilemma was, “What to eat?” It is not an easy question to answer and Pollan himself does not completely answer it. He follows up nicely in his next book, “In defense of Food” with some good answers. Pollan spent years of his life, researching thoroughly, writing brilliantly, and his best conclusion was a tentative, “eat food, mostly plants, not too much”. So how is it that novices with far less acumen than he feel justified in spouting off about how evil meat eaters are? Oh, can you tell? I just got accosted, again, by ANOTHER vegetarian. It begs all kinds of questions, some of which follow from the Omnivores Dilemma. What to eat? What to do about it? How to respond to inflammatory, personal attacks about dietary choices? And how does one address the judgmental among us, or attempt to correct for their behavior? And is it even possible if one wants to avoid hypocrisy? I want so desperately to judge the judgmental! But I just end up judging myself.

Let’s try and avoid that and start here with something that we can all agree on: everyone must eat something. Oh, wait, there are breatharians, so I guess we can’t ALL agree on that. But they are few in number (for obvious reasons) and they are not long for this world (for obvious reasons). Oooh, that was a little judgmental I think. So, let me reframe that. Let us assume for the time being that breatharianism is a valid position to take. But let us also consider that, as breatharians say, one must attain a high level of transformed consciousness in order to be nourished by light. Let us assume that most of us are not currently nor will we ever likely reach that level of spiritual exaltation.  There, was that nice enough? All my breatharian readers, be sure to comment.

Ok, so MOST OF US need to eat. But what else can we agree on? Perhaps we can agree that there are mountains of research and opinion on the question of what to eat from a health perspective, from an environmental perspective, political and ethical. There is so much out there that not even Michael Pollan himself can synthesize it all so can we all agree that not one of us reading this blog is a true expert on the issue? Can we all have a little humility around this subject? We can agree then, I hope, that if we all were willing to look at the available studies, that we would find there is little agreement among them. There are convincing arguments that animal protein is the problem (convincing to some, but not to those who don’t buy correlations as causation… Doh! There I go again!). Others argue fat is the problem (the lipid hypothesis).  There are arguments that grain is a problem (for the environment there can be little doubt, but for our health? Harder to be sure). I was recently alarmed to find out that rice, a grain I formally thought was safe, has arsenic in it. It becomes a concern when rice ingredients are concentrated into a processed food product (like the gluten free ones I buy for my kids all the time). Then just the other night I met a girl who reported, with fear in her eyes as she looked at the crackers on the table, that she was deathly allergic to rice. Geez, I said. I had no idea! Her example raises some interesting questions and underlines the fact that we just don't know everything there is to know about this. 

Meanwhile most of the health studies don’t control for the multitude of confounding factors, such as exercise, class, race, zip code. And few if any studies look at more than one set of criteria at a time (i.e. environmental health AND personal health). Look, this is not an easy thing to make a decision about! Can we agree on that?

Can we also agree—those of us who even care to look at such things—that our food supply is seriously messed up? Can we agree that there are too many fossil fuel inputs for our food, no matter what we eat? It takes too much fuel to get organic vegetables to market, because they are still grown in a capitalist, globalized world-system that prizes forms of efficiency (mono cropping, poor worker conditions) which ultimately are eating away at the planet. But I got news for you. An organic banana from Costa Rica gets to my belly with less fossil fuel debt than an apple grown 100 miles from here. Yeah, I know. Pretty amazing! It takes more gallons of water to get a CAFO cow to market than I use in a year of showering! (Lets just not joke about how often I shower! You KNOW what I am driving at!) But that doesn’t apply to a grass fed cow, much less one that is raised through rotational grazing that science can show is actually GOOD for the environment. But I digress. These are things that might inspire argument.

Instead of arguing can we agree that the choices that people make about food are deeply personal? Can we agree that no one deserves to have their choice berated? Can we agree that berating people about anything is an ineffective form of social change? Can we agree that to berate someone, about anything, is a form of domination, or as Pierre Bourdieu would say, “symbolic violence”? Uh Oh! I just came DANGEROUSLY close to accusing that vegan I heard from this morning of beating me up with her words! Boy this whole hypocrisy stuff is really challenging!

The final thing I hope that we can all agree on is that no matter which particular diet is better for your body, better for the environment, or better for your soul, worrying about our diet may not be the most important thing that we could all be focusing on right now. You might say we have bigger fish to fry. Oh, wait. That came out wrong! The point is, that if the mounting, interlocking and cascading problems of peak oil, peak soil, peak gas, peak fisheries, peak water (this, by the way, may be the biggest peak to surmount) and peak warming are as bad as even the most sanguine of scientists say they are, within the lifetime of everyone my age or younger, we are going to have to really do something about our food supply.

Nobody can actually claim beyond scrutiny that one form of eating is remarkably better for you than another. That is so long as we rule out highly fatty, highly sugary, highly salty, highly processed food. So long as we agree that food means something that grows in the ground or directly eats something that grows in the ground, then there isn’t much difference in the quality of life you will receive, so long as you don’t eat too much of it. I mean, there isn’t a known diet that reliably kills you at 35, while another known diet reliably lets you live to 100. We are arguing around the margins here. We are quibbling about a few years lived or lost, a few pounds gained or shed, and pretending that food is the thing that makes us happy. So why do we choose to argue about about these details?

Instead of arguing I would suggest that we focus on the the following. If you are a meat eater please be advised that we won’t be able to raise meat the way we do today for much longer (and I’m talking about corporate farmed CAFO type meat). The ecological system will not bear it. We raise meat the way we do by raising grain the way we do, and in only a little while longer now that practice will come to a dwindling halt as well. That means you, you carb hungry vegetarian. We cannot continue to grow most of our Nation’s tomatoes, strawberries and grapes (not to mention dozens of other fruits and veggies) in California and ship them all over the world and expect that system to work in perpetuity. California is headed for another dust bowl as we extract and export it’s soil as fast as we can, truck it away in the form of avocados using hydrocarbon fuels to far flung corners of the globe. Attention all vegans! Your food supply is in danger! Shit. I love avocados. What am I gonna do!? Can we all agree that avocados rule!?

Ok, so I might have to give up avocados, and bananas for that matter. But instead of arguing, can we all agree that what we need to be doing in this country is growing more local food? Can we agree that with only 2% of the population even knowing how to farm (and most of them are over 50) we need to train-up a whole generation-plowshare? We can all agree that we need more carrots, and broccoli, and artichokes, whether we eat meat or not. Can we not? And since I know that you ovo-lacto vegetarians want to eat omelets, and you vegans are going to need fertilizer for your beats and beans, can we agree that we are going to have to have a few chickens? A few rabbits? A few goats? And since we are going to have those (and horses for transportation if you are REALLY a doom-and-gloomer) can you ethical vegetarians lay off while we meat eaters make use of those animals at the end of their productive life? If food is in short supply then let's not let that stored solar power go to waste, ok? And besides, if it gets really bad, if we are totally dependent on each other at the local level, if there are no more trucks bringing cauliflower from California, if your tomatoes get tainted, if drought demolishes your daikons, if a poacher pillages your potatoes or vile, vegan, vagabonds villainously vanish your vittles… if you are hungry and have no other choices, I’ll save some elk jerky for you. Hey, at least it’s raw!