8/4 Food is Wonderful: Why I'm Vegetarian

Westerners are very hit-or-miss. On the one hand, there is the Whole Foods crowd that could give me their favorite tempeh recipe if I met them on the street. The rest seem affronted when they learn that I'm a vegetarian. Some people act as if I must have some mental deficiency to forsake meat. Others as if I just violated a taboo or called them a dirty name. The people in Cambodia just act like it's exotic. Since it isn't a part of their culture and, thus, is exotic, I think that that's the correct response to have.

When people ask me why I'm vegetarian, I give the concise answer, "animals, environment, and health." Concise may seem unlike me, but even I can be concise when I'm asked a question on a daily basis. Living in another country has given me two additional reasons: I like to think, and I like food.

This blog post serves two purposes. The first is my love poem to food because being vegetarian has made me love all parts of all food. The second is because I am annoyed. If you dislike the angry vegetarian, then you are the ones who made us. Acting affronted is not the correct response. I am a vegetarian because I love food and because it's good for the world. If you have important reasons to eat meat, and if you feel comfortable talking about the process that brought that meat to your plate while you're eating it, then come back to me. Until then, I expect respect.

In modern society, we learn to turn our brains off. If one thing characterizes me, it is that I don't turn my brain off. When I was a kid, I couldn't get to sleep at night because I couldn't stop thinking. The only difference now is that I work, thinking, from when I wake to when I sleep, so I don't spend several hours every day functionally asleep in front of the TV, and by night time, I'm exhausted enough to sleep. Some people try to derive their morality from their emotions. I derive my morality from thinking too much. My self criticism and self development from thinking too much. The idea of turning my brain off disgusts me to my core.

One of the foods that they have in Cambodia is fertilized eggs. You can get the unborn chicks at pretty much any level of growth. The other night, a friend (a Khmer-American) was eating one, but she didn't want to talk about it. If I couldn't talk about the production of the food that I was eating, I wouldn't feel right. Some people talk about voting with your dollars, but voting with your mouth is also important.

Dr. Larry Brilliant says that the most intimate exchange of bodily fluids is eating (have I brought that up in every verbose letter since I heard it?). If we can't speak at that most intimate of moments, then something is very wrong. I would think that a relationship would have to be pretty dysfunctional or, at least, out of my realm of imagination, if one partner couldn't say "I love you" to another in an intimate relationship (the first such relationship that comes to mind is Buffy and Spike's). Eating is sexual.

In my last letter, I mentioned that I want to feel proud in the clothes that I wear. I want to be able to think about the people who made them, about the materials that they're made of, about the message that they bear, and be proud. I don't want to have to turn my brain off. That would be as disgusting as being proud of supporting sweatshop labor. The same goes for food. I want to be able to think about the organic farming, the small and local farmers, the indigenous seeds, and the traditional recipes. I want to feel proud that all of that is now a part of me; that it and I are now indistinguishable; that, in that most intimate of moments, it is now inside me. So I don't believe in turning my brain off for polite dinner time conversation. I believe in experiencing the totality of a meal. If it's in your mouth, at least let it be on the tip of your tongue; how else could you taste it? Taste is totality.

And I don't want to shy away from that totality. I want to embrace it as a part of who I am. They say that blood is thicker than water, and that is true, for though the bonds between family members may bend or break, the kale that I ate at lunch will forever help me bind hemoglobin, letting me breath in and out, because you really are what you eat. I may be the intellectual brainchild of my mother and father's DNA, but the mass production of that code is the beans and rice in my mother's womb. Food is family.

As a vegetarian, there are still questions that go through my mind about my food, just like even when you don't buy from a sweatshop there are still questions about labor. But at least my family is not a species mutated in a lab with gene splicing and fed hormones and antibiotics so that I don't die from living in my own feces in one small cage for my entire life only to be killed by someone who never sees my face for they could not do their job if they saw those thousands of faces only to be ground together with my brethren from a dozen other countries prepared in a secret formula derived by food scientists to make me addictive transported thanks to a war for oil served by someone who hates their job to someone who is overweight and isn't even satisfied punctuated only by the grind of machinery and machinelike people. I am not good enough that my food gives me peace, but it lets me sleep at night without having to turn off my brain.

I love food. I have gradually crossed foods off of my list of things that I don't like. The only real food still on that list is squash, and if that's prepared well (pumpkin pie, I'm talking about you), I still like it. If you serve it to me on a plate and tell me that it's vegetarian, chances are extremely high that I will not only eat it, but actually like and appreciate it (though obviously, if something is poorly prepared, any food can disgust me).

Growing up, I was a picky eater. My dad cooked chicken for me every day for several years because it was the only thing that I would eat. I would even describe myself as a picky eater because everyone in my family and most of my adult role models would eat anything. Now that I'm not a picky eater, I have discovered that my former self wasn't that picky by today's standards. It's remarkable how many people won't eat anything that's the least bit out of their comfort zone! I didn't notice it so much in the US because Stanford is such a cosmopolitan place that people can pretty much eat whatever they want and it's not as if they're making a conscious choice to avoid the vast majority of food in the world. In Cambodia, some of the westerners that I have met are crippled by the food choices. I'm a vegetarian living a country where people don't even know what vegetarianism is, and I'm loving the food! In an earlier blog post, I mention that to truly appreciate a culture, you need repetition. That is true, and eating chicken on a near-daily basis for about six years did give me a certain appreciation. However, the appreciation of repetition is not an excuse for closing yourself off to the world. Walking a mile in one person's shoes doesn't prevent you from appreciating the aroma of another person's shoes.

When I ate meat, I didn't appreciate the diversity of foods because I didn't appreciate food. I ate food, and there were some foods that I preferred over others, but I wouldn't say that I loved food. If you eat meat, you don't need to appreciate food. You can just appreciate the taste of meat. I don't think that it's possible to appreciate food if you can neither cook nor eat a vegetarian meal. Obviously, if you're a decent chef, you appreciate food, and probably to a greater extent than me, but then you also know how to make vegetarian food. I have had more good eating experiences in the few years since I have given up meat than in the first 16 or so years of my life because then I didn't appreciate the experience of eating. I can't recall a single meal from the time that I ate meat that I would have described as "wonderful," but I could go on and on about the food at the Bellagio (I did eat there for 3 or 4 hours. Twice). Just since June, I've probably had 3 or 4 meals that were amazing. The mushrooms at Tamarine; the spinach at Blue Pumpkin; the cheeses at Comme à la Maison‎. I appreciated each of those more than I did any food in my entire life before I became vegetarian. It's not that meat eaters are doomed to never appreciate food, but, for me, meat made it easy to get in a rut. I think it was Chomsky that said that limitations are necessary for creativity.

If there is a certain food that you don't like, you are unreasonably limiting your experiences. In fifth grade, my teacher brought in different foods for us to try, and to this day I can talk about the frog and the rattlesnake that I ate. You don't need to have Rocky Mountain Oysters to experience the world, but you should have a good reason for rejecting a class of food. That doesn't mean that you have to like veggies as much as meat (I liked the rattlesnake; the snail made me puke. I'm still better for having eaten it), but it does mean that you should respect them. It's like cultures. Foods are intricately tied to cultures. Not every part of every culture has to be your favorite, but unless you have a moral issue (and not just a cultural taboo) with an aspect of a culture, you should appreciate the uniqueness, history, and people involved in that particular part of that culture. You should probably prefer a well prepared vegetarian dish over a poorly prepared meat dish. You should probably prefer the good aspects of a foreign culture over the bad parts of your own culture.

Part of the problem is addiction. The goal of a food scientist at a fast food place is not to make food tasty or healthy. Their goal is to make food addictive. Fast food eaters have the same behaviors as addicts. They even experience withdrawal when separated from frequent consumption of their fast food chain. When a person is constantly in a drugged state, it's no wonder that they can't appreciate non-addictive foods. I have heard that going off of high fructose corn syrup, while much harder than going off meat, will also make you appreciate food more.

If you only eat meat, then you don't appreciate meat. I never appreciated meat when it was the only thing that I ate. When I started eating tofu, beans, and rice, I also gained a newfound appreciation for fish. It's been 3 or 4 years since I've eaten meat and around 9 years since I've eaten red meat or pork. But you have never appreciated bacon until you have made baconlike tofu.

It also goes for simple foods. I love rice. I love that they appreciate rice in Cambodia. I can appreciate the different varieties and preparations that go into making rice. I can appreciate how it complements different foods and drinks. Why would someone feel limited by eating rice every day?

Being vegetarian made me realize that food is wonderful.

In case you are still wondering about my original reasons, here is why being vegetarian is good for animals, the environment, and your health:

Animals aren't treated very well in cultures that eat them. If they aren't free range, they probably don't have a much better life than veal. You've probably seen the cages in which they are transported on highways. Imagine living your whole life in one of those. Factory farms (also called "concentrated animal feeding operations" by people who don't want to think it) are particularly brutal, and again, unless you buy free range and only eat at restaurants that advertises free range, chances are good that you're eating an animal from a factory farm. See the movie "Food Inc." There are almost 7 billion humans living on Earth. More than 10 times as many animals are killed on a yearly basis for human consumption.

The meat industry is not environmentally friendly. If you never again drove a car or rode in a plane, it would have less of an impact on global warming than if you cut meat out of your diet (check out the UN Food and Agriculture report at http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM). Meat is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Less than industry, but more than transportation. Because demand for meat is on the rise thanks to rising wealth in the developing world, rainforests are cut down so that cows can graze. They eat a bunch of food and drink a bunch of water (so eating meat is poor energy policy also). Their urine and feces (responsible for methane and nitrous oxide, which are gazillions times worse than CO2) and the dumpings from the factory farms then pollutes the local water supply. After being killed, they're put on a plane halfway across the world and served to your plate. After mentioning that I rode the train home from school, someone once told me that they feel hypocritical calling themselves environmentalist because they took the plane home for the holidays; why don't people have similar thoughts about their eating habits?

No, I don't feel hungry all the time. No, I don't have any dietary problems. No, I don't have a hard time getting enough protein. First, being vegetarian made me appreciate food and diversified my diet. As a kid, chicken and fish were the only things that I ate. Now, I eat everything except for meat. Diversity is good if you care about getting vitamins and minerals, being able to eat outside of your narrow environment, and not getting fat after your metabolism slows down. Second, my food never makes me unhealthy. Meat eaters have to worry about things like mad cow disease turning their brains into mush (they also are the cause of thing like bird flu and pig flu, but for some reason people often don't make the connection between disease outbreaks and buying meat that was produced in conditions that diseases love) and getting sick from undercooked food. They also have to worry about the grossness of bloody food. Before becoming vegetarian, I was disgusted by undercooked chicken (which meant I didn't eat it, so I didn't get any protein) and occasionally puked after eating improperly stored or prepared meat. Since becoming vegetarian, food hasn't made me sick, and I haven't had to turn my food away. Obviously, there are pathogens that live on veggies, but pathogens are generally very specialized creatures, and it's very hard to specialize both for humans and for cauliflower. Third, eating meats will often give you weird chemicals. A lot of animals are fed growth hormone and antibiotics. When you eat their meat, you are eating their growth hormone and antibiotics. There are also plenty of natural chemicals that other animals use to regulate their own bodies that I wouldn't want in my body. Forth, giving up meat made me feel leaps and bounds more energetic. In my biology class, I learned that when animal proteins go into your stomach, it isn't just a matter of re-routing them to the part of your body that needs that protein. Our stomachs break the proteins down into amino acids and then rebuild them. If you eat beans and rice, your body gets all of the amino acids that it needs, but it doesn't have to wear itself out. Dairy products still make me feel tired whenever I eat them.

Yes, I am vegetarian. Yes, I have given it more thought than I ever did to eating meat, and I would feel hypocritical if I couldn't think about what I was putting in my mouth. Yes, I do love food, and I love it a lot more than I ever loved meat. No, that does not make me a second class citizen.

EDIT: To clarify, very little of this is a critique of meat or meat eating. It is a critique of an industrialized meat eating culture. To the hunters and the farmers and the free range eaters and the people for whom experiencing food is experiencing culture (you all know who you are): kudos.