Food 03 Aug 2009 03:25 pm
My limited part-time strict vegetarianism
For a good while now I’ve been hearing what sounds like a call from both my conscience and my common sense to adopt a vegan diet, or at least a very much more vegan-influenced one. Some of that is for health reasons, some for treehugger reasons, and some is pure sentimentalism about animal welfare.
Now, I think there are many ways to solve that particular set of moral equations besides flat-out veganism. What I’m finding, though, is that the solutions I’ve been trying haven’t been working particularly well for me. I’d hoped that I’d rejigger my diet to be much more vegetable-centric. Mostly I haven’t. Given, this has been a particularly trying several months, and I did not completely fail. Still, I could have done more. And maybe with a firmer guideline I would have.
Unfortunately, I hear an opposite call from the summer sausage in the fridge. Oh, delicious summer sausage, you have made my blood a cholesterol dump, but you are so tasty. How tragic and outrageous it seems when Josh is eating summer sausage and I am not. How can summer sausage be here, but not be here for me?
I’m not ready to give up meat and dairy 100%, and I’m definitely not giving up eggs. (I keep three chickens who are in their egg-laying prime. Come on now.) But I’m taken with the idea of becoming fractionally vegan. One way to fractionate would be to play vegan on, say, every Tuesday and Thursday. Another way — the way I’m going to try — is to take a strict vegetarian half-day. For the next two weeks, I’m going to experiment: before noon, I’m eating like a vegan. (I might move that up to one o’clock for more vegan lunch action. We’ll see.) If I’m still craving the cheese sandwich in the afternoon, so be it.
My outs: if I have breakfast with friends and there’s really nothing at all vegan on the menu, I can swap the half-day from morning to evening. And I’m not bothering about honey, sugar made with bone char, finings, etc.
Fortunately, I like rice milk in my coffee, especially in summer. Seriously, it’s good — very light. It turns out I also really like that Red Star nutritional yeast. And agave nectar makes an ideal lemonade. Not that I’m worrying about sugar and honey, but still, there’s another example of a Weird Vegan Food that’s actually pretty great.
Today was my first day. Breakfast was easy: two cups of coffee with rice milk, and then pigging out on blueberries and apple chips. Hey, I didn’t say I was going to be eating only meals I didn’t have any regrets about…
on 03 Aug 2009 at 5:48 pm 1.paul said …
Hey, conscious eating is all anyone has a right to expect. Now about those blueberries . . . .
on 03 Aug 2009 at 7:23 pm 2.Barnaby said …
I honestly don’t get the “no honey” for vegans thing. Well, I mean, I get it…but it does start to get beg the question of what about fruits that require bee pollination, etc? Partially, as a bee keeper, and former keeper of food animals, and current omnivore, I find beekeeping to be a very different activity than other animal-husbandry as it where.
Fortunately, the vegans I know are of the honey-eating kind, so I can still gift them my honey.
-B.
on 03 Aug 2009 at 8:04 pm 3.Cam Sculpin said …
Paul: those blueberries were awesome. They were from Whitehorse Meadows Farm in Arlington.
Barnaby: yeah, it’s tricky. I gather that an argument has been smoldering among some vegans for a while now about whether there should be a no-honey thing and, much more to the point, whether vegans should make a big deal over it. I’m sure it’s been hashed out to the nth degree by people who’ve thought about all this more carefully than I have.
It does seem to me that when you get into the question of honey, you’re very close to also getting into the question of insecticides. Is it consistent to forgo honey but not seek out organic products? Or is the harm reduction of not eating honey what really counts here? Fortunately, this is no problem of mine. I’m just saying, from here it looks to me like it gets messy.
on 03 Aug 2009 at 10:14 pm 4.bemusedoutsider said …
I’ve been studying the Jain system for a long time. They do not eat meat, but do use a lot of milk.
Traditionally in India the cow was a member of the family, treated like we treat our dogs and cats. Now Jains make it a point to buy at health food stores from the dairies who have the best practices.
This encourages the better dairies and shows that we care about animal welfare — in a way that simply avoiding all milk would not show.
on 04 Aug 2009 at 8:11 am 5.Cam Sculpin said …
Bemusedoutsider: what’s the Jain take on the male calves that are a necessary byproduct of a dairy? It was my understanding that Jainism was very strict about ahimsa, and I don’t get how that works with modern dairy practices in even the better dairies.
I buy best-practices dairy products myself, but that means basically that I buy milk from local animals that range around and eat grass. I don’t think I’ve come across any dairies that have a policy of refusing to send male calves and older cows into the beef system.