We are one, and our actions matter.

I want to share some quotables that I came upon recently while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. They link what we like to think of as separate things: how we eat, what industry does, the war machine, and the impact of our way of life on our ancestors. I think a linked view - though less simple, and less easy to manipulate - is a lot truer to our lives as inherently biological organisms, despite our attempts to automate and electrify every last detail.
(These kind of quotes usually have a habit of being lost amid a blitz of little pieces of paper I keep around to "remember" ideas and suggestions and provocations and work schedules &c. But I trust that the internet, record of imaginary signals, will guard these a little more safely. And might better send them out into the world than moi in lecture mode!)


"Organic's rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations -- Dow, Monsanto -- that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in South East Asia. Eating organic thus married the personal to the political."
Michael Pollan

"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy

Veggie Tales

After writing an essay that did more finger-wag/nagging than reflecting, I'm ready to talk more about what it's been like to live, eat, and think vegetarian. After making it "official," I came to think that veganism would be a truer way to take myself completely out of the meat industry cycle than any of the various categories of vegetarianism. In other words, I chose to be an exclusive vegetarian rather than a lacto-ovo-vegetarian or pesce-vegetarian that entails more a la carte idealism than my choice.

The biggest challenge of veganism: is there animal in this?

Global food culture has undeniable roots in animal and human coexistence and codependence. Lots of the really important and the really banal dishes we regularly go to include not only lactose but things like fat and enzymes and emulsifiers derived from animals. Most of these chemical elements can be found in plants and fungi too, but we humans are far less experienced foragers than we are herders and slaughterers. One notable exception is the happy accident of alcohol production - thanks to yeast, folks around the world have been able to drink and be merry for thousands of years.

Example: cheese.
Lactose is an obvious animal product - goats, cows, sheep, buffalo, yak all produce milk and subsequently cheese, but what about the process itself? I found out from a coworker that rennet makes cheese unfit for even lactose-tolerant veg-heads! Rennet, aka chymosin, is a crucial protein that cleaves casein (another milk protein) micelles which helps transform milk from a diffusing mix of water and protein into a thick, coagulated mass that separates to become cheese. Rennet typically comes from one of two processes involving calf stomachs, a byproduct of the veal industry. Byproduct, or industry in and of itself? I wonder..

There are several rennet alternatives, including microbial and fungal production of chymosin and a biotech way of programming microbes with animal rennet genes. Any of these seem acceptable to me from an ethical standpoint - microbes are so plentiful that we may breed them and slaughter them at will with negligible [observable] effect on the food chain (hence their excellent use in microbiology - thumbs up!). But the real problem has been identifying the source; most cheeses don't tell you how they're made! I'm thinking life might be easier to stick with products marketed to vegans, which sadly limits me to soy cheeses. If you haven't seen a piece of sheese or cheeze, it usually has a certain aesthetic oddness about it.. and don't think of trying to melt it.







There are other foods that challenge me, like chocolate, butter, and baked goods in general. Eating out is also a simple thing that becomes very tough since I'm not really all that keen on salads. Restaurants, unless they cater to veg eating, aren't generally very understanding, though some servers can be sympathetic. And I don't think many of my friends and relatives understand why I'd want to do this to myself, either -- I think it seems extreme to them. I answer that particular charge with a quote:

I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
-Dean Ornish, MD

But how "natural" is all of this and how can such a diet be "beneficial" for one's nutritional needs? Couldn't you argue that choosing such a contrived diet is to artificially remove myself from the food chain, the very chain that evolved to spawn humans? And wouldn't that be unnatural and dangerous to my health and the survival of my descendants?

Let's think about it. Currently, an interlinked and dynamical "food web" is favored over a linear "chain" in discussion of living producers and consumers. I become a primary or secondary consumer if I choose plants only, and I therefore have a greater supply of food available to me because I am not dependent on animal meat which requires lots and lots of plants. I am no longer one of the few "on top" and have more built-in resilience during times of animal disease or supply shortage. Now I'm feeling pretty superior, pretty on top of my game.

You can also break down conceptions of nutritional need to consider the forces behind them - why do we think milk is good for you? Separate it from the media advertisements adorned with celebs and you might begin to suspect.. it's a myth, propagated by man! Still, go even further out, place yourself out in the countryside away from even telephone lines and cellphone coverage. The idea of gulping down what came out of some cow's teat, intended to nourish its young, is more than a little heinous. So then where to get enough calcium? I'm going to need a source, especially once I am past menopause and osteoporosis becomes a real threat to my health. And what about protein? I like a good tennis match and biking around when it's nice out, so my muscles need some fuel too.

Plant sources. Yep. Some kind of alchemy, right? Nope. Plants provide all of this and more -- minus the added fat and cholesterol. And they provide necessary doses of trace minerals that allow humans to have a full complement of amino acids. Freaking sweet, I'm converted. More information on this is available elsewhere. After reading a little, I must know more.

- Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine's "The Protein Myth"
- SoyStache's Protein Nutrition Chart w/info from the USDA nutrition database
- And of course, SoyStache's Calcium Nutrition Chart

The biggest nutritional issue would seem to be where to get vitamin B-12. Fortified cereals and milk alternatives and the ubiquitous and infamous nutritional yeast seem to be the best sources of this vitamin, but I'll keep an eye out for some others. I'm not the best at remembering to incorporate a B12 source into my daily intake, but I can learn to choose wisely at the grocery store. And a little sprinkle of the nooch on my breakfast granola never hurt.

Also check out some vegan food blogs:
- FatFree Vegan Kitchen
- Vegan YumYum
- Ethnic Vegan

To move back into reasons and motivations, the most interesting aspect for me of choosing veganism is the exercise of learning something, making a choice to change because of it, and self-modifying behavior. It's analogous to an arbitrary social experiment, but with actions that have powerful ecological benefits to back them. I'm willing to stretch myself, and I find myself doing it more and more -- and I don't plan to stop until I find my boundaries. Then I might turn on my inner overachiever and step right over them. Two jobs is a stretch on time. The Peace Corps service stretches cultural practices, communication, standard of living, and more. Being green, for me, stretches the way I think about and use "things" and my surroundings. Family therapy challenges my way of life since, well, forever. Sometimes trying new things is tough, but it's all necessary because I want more than anything to grow and change. In college, I got some book smarts and some teamwork practice, but was it really a stretch? In terms of sleep, yes -- but that's about it.


My conclusion? I feel better than ever on an animal-free diet. My digestion system is happier with me and I avoided catching what was going around at BOTH of my workplaces without an army of sprays and wipes and hand-washing. Coincidence? I don't know, but I won't complain..

I can't say whether or not I intend to make strict veganism a permanent habit - banishing all cookies and pizza from my presence, but I can still be my foodie self -- and now there's a whole new realm for me to explore.

Go Veg! This writer finally takes the plunge.

The Serious: Switching from a meat-based diet to a vegetarian diet does more for the environment than switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a hybrid car.
(University of Chicago geophysicists, from Veg For Life)

The Silly: The Meatrix: "It is all around you, Leo Hamderson. Take the red pill and I'll show you the truth."

Think about this the next time you're about to order a steak. Livestock farming is super inefficient, using up 8lbs of grains to produce each pound of meat that appears on the shelf -- but meat doesn't have any nutritional advantages, so there isn't any good reason we persist in doing it, other than meat's comfortable position in the status quo (and on take-out and fast-food menus nationwide). Not only that, over 70% of American grain and corn is fed to farm animals, instead of people! That same amount could feed 800 million hungry people.

Switching to a vegetarian diet has broad health benefits: statistics on a variety of issues, from heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer to osteoporosis, meat-related proliferation of resistant "super-bug" microbes, and food-borne pathogens support cutting out meat entirely. More on nutrition here. The tragedy of livestock animals' short, pain-filled lives and the damage they innocently wreak on our soils and our waters is an epidemic. Personally, I have ignored it for convenience sake for too long, and it's time to make a conscious choice to stop. Recognizing the consequences of one's actions is a necessary step to being a conscientious citizen and to work toward changing for the better.

"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
- Dean Ornish, M.D.

There are even more potential benefits of vegetarianism related to the state of the environment. Factory farming, the majority source of milk and cheese in the U.S., produces such concentrated wastes as to pollute the land beyond the ability to rebound naturally. Animal meat provides a very concentrated source of accumulated human-created toxins, which get stored in their fatty tissue. Eating the plants they feed on instead makes people less likely to suffer from ailments that have arisen as a result of our landfill-happy culture and the subsequent leaching of endocrine disruptors, heavy metals and cancer-causing agents that permeate the water that Daisy the dairy cow or that your Christmas ham end up drinking.

And let's not forget the fish. Overfishing has resulted in a complete imbalance of the oceanic food chains, and with the nitrogenous and phosphoric farm waste flows contributing to the problem, dead zones dominate once-vibrant waterways. Oxygen-depleting organisms have made waters even more uninhabitable for complex, higher organisms that work to keep smaller ones in check. Algal blooms (also known as a "red tide") are more common now than ever, and the drought will surely have an amplifying effect for the eastern United States (see notes from new hampshire for more on that). Farmed fish aren't any better; they consume 3 pounds wild fish, from already-barren oceans, to every pound produced.

My conclusion is that my meat consumptions stops, now. I will try to eliminate dairy products as well, but my primary priority is to start treating the flesh of animals like the sentient beings they are, and let them be. I'll leave you with a quote:

"Kindness and compassion toward all living things is a mark of a civilized society. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."
-Cesar Chavez

Channeling that North American Alchemy

In A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design, Nancy Jack Todd whips up an amazing how-to/history on practical solutions to ecological and social imbalances, focusing on key biological details to the same degree that Affluenza focuses on the theory. The forces behind New Alchemy's gaian Ark-home cum greenhouse and industrial strength wind-powered pond-scrubber are convincingly identified as none less than healing powers of nature. How did they get there? The New Alchemy Institute members started by asking the question, "Was it possible to support Earth's population over time while protecting the natural world? And if so, how?" and conclude with an outlook of great hope that bodes extremely well for the you and I, assuming that such great ideas could amass the necessary will to broad scale action.

The greatest accomplishments of the holistic approach detailed in the book are often achieved in the context of a naysayers (who ranged from amused to desperate) through the tireless and continued efforts of an ever-growing community of scientists, artists, students, and children. The community approach was probably as integral to New Alchemy's success as was the vision of their leader (and the author's husband), John Todd. Also present as supporters of the Alchemy Farm in its beginnings were such idealogues as E.F. Schumacher and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, who were both important for their work in the domain of philosophy of environment; at the Farm, these and all others who participated left their mark as a part of a beautiful synergy, much like the integrative work itself. Other books, like the Sierra Club's "Compost This Book!" impressed me with its practical and earth-friendly projects that solved challenging problems of equal ecological importance. However, New Alchemy leaves behind not just a nice mechanistic solution but an entire breathing biome, all its cycles restored and in harmony with living needs, including those of modern people.

Frightening fact: The World Health Organization estimates that 70 percent of cancers are caused by environmental factors. Cancer rates continue to rise despite Billions of dollars spent on research and treatment. Through ignorant or otherwise unintentional exposure to byproducts inherent in a corporate-controlled and economics-driven world, people are finally becoming a victim to what society has wrought. But Ocean Arks International, the contracting offshoot of New Alchemy's residual faith in natural efficiency, is working directly with these destructive entities and reclaiming unsightly waste pits as lush, abundant sanctuaries. They took stock of a sewage canal in crowded Fuzhou province and made it into a pond/walkway uniting bordering apartment communities, and they dared to transform the runoff from a Tyson, Inc. chicken farm into an energy-producing greenhouse replete with solar energy-storing fish tanks. No single person could have dreamed up the elegance of nature's own nutrient recycling program that drives these awesome solutions, but the Todd's have been imaginative enough to harness it for urgently necessary purposes. Their story comes to a close having learned and accomplished so much, and the timing is just right for renewed efforts by the next generation - yours and mine.

More Info:
John Todd's CNN Biography
John Todd and the New Alchemists on Design Outlaws

I'm happy to say my list of influential and important folks grows longer, along with great resources for further inquiry and exploration!

Affluenza: Treatment

Here are some poignant quotes I wanted to share from the book that started from a PBS series called Affluenza. This particular quote is from a chapter entitled, "Political Prescriptions."

"What if Americans started buying smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, driving them less and keeping them longer? What if we took fewer long-distance vacations? What if we simplified our lives, spent less money, bought less stuff, worked less, and enjoyed more leisure time? What if government began to reward thrift and punish waste, legislated shorter work hours, and taxed advertisers? What if we made consumers and corporations pay the real costs of their products? What would happen to our economy? Would it collapse, as some economists suggest?

"Truthfully, we don't know exactly, since no major industrial nation has yet embarked on such a journey.

"...But as economist Juliet Schor points out, there are many European countries (incl. Holland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway) whose economies have grown far more slowly than our own, yet whose quality of life-- measured by many of the indicators we say we want, including free time, citizen participation, lower crime, greater job security, income-equality, health, and overall life contentment-- is higher than our own. Such economies show no sign of collapse. And their emphasis on balancing growth with sustainability is widely accepted across the political spectrum. As former Dutch Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers, a conservative, put it:

'It is true that the Dutch are not aiming to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say, there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time.'"