For most of my life I have chosen to eat a vegetarian diet. The last few years, I'm stepping closer and closer to veganism. It just feels right for me. Pretty soon after my darling Bobolink and I travelled to Europe together in the spring of 1970, and rapidly found ourselves feeling utterly at home in Amsterdam, Frances Moore Lappé's Diet for a Small Planet came out. Her thoughtful examination of the environmental impact of First World consumption of animals really spoke to me.
Some people choose vegetarianism for their health. For some it's a moral issue. Lappé's Small Planet examines the bigger picture, asking whether the billions of people who go to bed hungry every night do so because of a food shortage. She presents some startling facts about how much water and how many units of plant protein are used to raise and deliver one unit of animal protein. In the 1971 edition, she goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the artful, ancient knowledge about combining beans with rice, bulgar wheat with chickpeas, and soy with any of a variety of grains will give us more than sufficient protein for a healthy life. In the 10th anniversary edition, she shares how she's learned that nutritionists have demonstrated how we can get all we need for good health even without her previously published amino acid combos.
Ten years ago I learned that my kidneys were running at 30% capacity. Turns out that my double pneumonia at 18 months with a prolonged high fever, a severe oxygen shortage, and a Hail Mary of massive doses of newly discovered antibiotics that saved my life all conspired to bring some severe damage to my baby beans -- unbeknownst until my fifties. My nephrologist, looking at the bigger picture, remarked that the lower protein, vegetarian diet I had gravitated to starting in my teens had been key in helping my damaged kidneys keep me going so energetically for half a century. I cherish my animal instincts.
Sometimes I like to suggest that I feel most at home with friends who eschew instead of chew meat. They seem more pacific, less aggressive. That may be poppycock. Above all, I learned early on that people do not like to be asked to think about what they eat. I have tried to avoid all prosthelytizing. So if you're feeling defensive about what you consume, please stop reading this post now.
I'm a committed vegetarian (and fish is not a vegetable) because:
• I'm not willing to kill and prepare an animal with my own hands in order to eat it
• I abhor the way humans treat the animals raised for slaughter
• My body tells me every day that I'm better off eating plants
• Eating animals in this world in this day and age is short-sighted and elitist
• The energy invested in bringing meat and fish to the marketplace is way out of balance with the energy I might gain from consuming it
• I do not choose to trust that the commercially raised flesh offered for sale isn't polluted with natural and manmade poisons, including antibiotics, mercury and a long list of chemicals not ever intended for human consumption
• My accident of birth into relative affluence does not entitle me to eat irresponsibly, disregarding the reality of billions of my fellow man
Okay. That's clear. And that's me. You, dear reader, and I, dear me, are blessed with countless choices every moment of every day. Most people in the world do not have a lot of options. I will still love and respect you whatever you choose. And I will love and respect you even more when I see that you are making those choices in a thoughtful manner. Namasté.