Herculodge

The Top 10 Obstacles to Becoming a Vegetarian

You’re a conscientious person with a good heart and the more you learn about the way animals die to become a meal on your plate, the more you want to be a vegetarian. You know from reading Eating Animals that “factory farming” killing of animals is an inhumane system so horrendous that anyone who sees what goes on inside the slaughterhouses (their owners want to keep you in the dark because the truth would not be in their best interests) would never eat meat again. You also learn that “factory farming,” a pernicious euphemism of there ever was one, is a relatively new phenomenon, less than 80 years old, and that someday, as Jonathan Safran Foer states, it will be looked upon as a thing of shame, a blight on the human record.

You’ve also read that a vegetarian diet can provide optimum health and nutrition, but you find there are impediments to your “conversion” from meat-eater to vegetarian. Here are the 10 Biggest Obstacles to Your Conversion:

1. Your family, on your side and your spouse’s side, are not vegetarians and to reject their meaty meals is in a way to reject your family, its traditions, its intimacies. You may even be scorned, shunned, and looked at as a “weirdo,” a misfit, and a malcontent.
2. Your spouse eats meat so your not eating it carries implicit condemnation of his or her eating habits. Eating is part of your intimate bond with your spouse. You don’t want there to be a wedge between you two in this regard.
3. Not eating meat and its place eating rice and beans and such, you find yourself eating more calories a day because a vegetarian diet doesn’t fill you up as much as a much as a meat-eating one. While some lose weight when they convert to vegetarianism, you blow up and become rather pudgy.
4. There is the whole soy issue with some warning of its dangers, which are analyzed in detail; however, you also know that these findings are disputed. Nevertheless, not knowing who to believe, you are concerned about the dangers of soy.
5. There are those who write that from an evolutionary standpoint, you need to eat some meat, including Nina Planck, Lierre Keith, and the Weston A. Price Foundation.
6. You suffer from meat lust. Your most indelible food memories are the salivations that occurred during childhood barbecues. To this day, the smell of barbecued meats intoxicates you to levels of euphoria that you cannot deny.
7. You realize that milk and eggs result in animal cruelty so that vegetarianism, a relatively easy “lifestyle choice,” doesn’t fully absolve you of your guilt. You must be a vegan, and this entails an effort and a circumspection that you find too rigorous.
8. You and your spouse want children and read literature about the need for some animal protein to maximize fertility.
9. You hate to acknowledge this, but like Lierre Keith, you feel better when you eat some animal protein.
10. In the end, you find you’re agnostic on the meat issue, but eat meat only twice a month or so because you want to minimize your support of an industry that is cruel to animals. This flexitarian stance makes you feel better and minimizes the guilt that might compel you to become a full vegetarian. One thing you're not agnostic about: Factory farming is unacceptable. 

Once You Become a Vegetarian, Where Do You Draw the Line?

Elizabeth Kolbert writes "Flesh of Your Flesh" for the New Yorker, a fair critique of Jonathan Safran Foer's nonfiction offering Eating Animals (ranked number 27 on Amazon as I post this). 

Near the end of her book review, Kolbert suggests that Foer's intellectual conversion to vegetarianism isn't consistent with his premises until he not only becomes a vegetarian but a vegan (Kolbert is not as far as I can tell either). And then she suggests that even veganism doesn't address the "cost of consumer society." She writes:

"But is even veganism really enough? The cost that consumer society imposes on the planet’s fifteen or so million non-human species goes way beyond either meat or eggs. Bananas, bluejeans, soy lattes, the paper used to print this magazine, the computer screen you may be reading it on—death and destruction are embedded in them all. It is hard to think at all rigorously about our impact on other organisms without being sickened."

Kolbert seems to be using a slippery slope argument here. If we want to be moral about our food choices by examining how we eat affects the planet, then we have to look at all our consumerism and once we examine the "cost of consumer society" honestly, we realize that it is impossible to behave in a way that would clear our conscience. 

I'm torn by this argument: One one hand, I agree with her. On the other hand, once we shrug our shoulders and dismiss ethics on the grounds that we can't be consistent, are we not surrendering to nihilism? 

You’re a Victim? Gosh, Herc, You Disappoint Me

 

Well, Herc, I’ve been putting up with your indulgences for some time now but today you’ve outdone yourself, arguing, rather pathetically I might add, that watching what we eat is futile because we live in an Agricultural and Technological Age in which food has become the great Comfort Mamma rendering us helpless before the alter of overreatting.

Herc, I’ve got news for you. Food has always been a source of comfort and people have always loved to eat. Please don’t try to paint yourself as a helpless victim in the face of your modern food temptations. If you wish to blather up some pretentious anthropological, psycho-babble about why you’re a glutton who is resigned to being thirty pounds overweight, so be it. Just don’t come crying to me.  Go tell it to your mamma. 

Your Snarky Ombudsman, Max

 

Do We Live in the Epoch of Inevitable Fatness?

When I do my daily hour of power yoga, I imagine myself weighing forty pounds less than I actually do, a ripped 190 pounds, performing my routine on a cliff looking over the Pacific Ocean. I am tanned and chiseled. Hip trip-hop plays in the background. I do the voice-over, of course. My workout is on DVD and sells millions.

My power yoga workout is extremely hard to do. My dentist tried to follow it, but he almost fainted and he had to stop. Others who thought they were in great shape could not follow me through my routine.

I started the yoga five years ago. Before that I had been going to the gym since I was twelve. I’ve always worked out, have always been in shape. However, in my early thirties my metabolism slowed down significantly and I no longer hovered around the 200 mark. As I write this I am forty-eight years old and I weigh in around 230. I’d love to get down to 210. But I eat too many calories a day, about 3,200 a day, perhaps more. If I could keep my calories around 2,500, I’d probably be at a weight I’d be more happy with.

As vain as I am (and I consider myself extremely vain), my vanity cannot match my love of food, my strong emotional attachment to it, and my compulsion to eat it. I know I am not alone. Most of us are consumed by our appetites and are helpless to our proximity of relatively affordable, calorie-dense food.

I recently heard a scientist on NPR say that our stage in agricultural, industrial society is actually harmful to our evolutionary development. We’ve hit this Epoch of Inevitable Fatness. Our bodies are not compatible with the food abundance that results from living in an agricultural society. All the nutritionists, personal trainers, self-proclaimed experts, dieticians and so on are feebly fighting against the tide. Some of them tell us to reject agriculture, to go back to our Hunter and Gatherer lifestyle, but this isn’t practical for many of us.

Here’s another powerful force that compels us to eat more than we should: In our Agriculture Age, we find ourselves at the same time living in the postmodern Technological Age where alienation, anonymity, and uncertainty compel us to look to food as the Great Comforting Mother.

Of course, all these forces notwithstanding, not all of us are doomed to a life of corpulence. There are those genetic freaks who are skinny and there are those who make their living at being skinny so that they have motives for limiting their caloric intake that go deeper than the rest of us.

But it seems we devour diet books the way we devour food because these diet books are merely a frenzied albeit feeble attempt to reverse our current place in evolutionary history: The Epoch of Inevitable Fatness.

My power yoga DVD remains where it belongs: in the recesses of my vain imagination.

 

I'm Looking Forward to a Dialogue Between Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Pollan

With Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals and his disagreements with Michael Pollan on the topic of what is ethical to eat, I'm hoping Pollan responds to Foer and that an exchange will develop.

Mario of the Slaughterhouse Confesses He Had a Hard Time Killing a Cow That Licked His Face

In Jonathan Safran Foer's provocative Eating Animals, a book that in part chronicles his conversion to vegetarianism, perhaps one of the more moving passages is when Foer interviews Mario Fantasma, the owner of a slaughterhouse and asks the owner if he ever had difficulty killing the animals. Fantasma mentioned one instance when it was very difficult: The cow licked his face several times and leaned on him before he killed the affectionate beast.

Top Chef Goes Vegetarian with Special Guest Natalie Portman

Last night's Top Chef preview showed Natalie Portman as special guest and they left out her preference as a teaser, but it's well known she's a vegetarian so we can safely assume Top Chef won't be featuring animal proteins next week. 

Nutritionism Creates a League of the Falsely Educated

Analyzing the causes behind all the confusion about diet in his book In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan brilliantly dissects the misguided conclusions of self-serving scientists, government authorities, and journalists who have joined forces to promote the pseudo-science of "nutritionism," which focuses on isolated nutrients interact with the human body rather than whole foods. This obsession with isolating nutrients has made even "educated" people falsely informed, resulting in worse and worse health. 

As I thought of all the people (myself included) who have taken the false lessons of nutritionism over the last three decades, it occurred to me there are three groups of people:

1. The Ignorant

2. The Rightly Informed 

3. The Falsely Educated (perhaps the worst category of all)

Michael Pollan Wages War Against Nutritionism

Everything we've read from the so-called authorities on nutrition has been wrong, especially the low-fat diets and all the low-fat processed foods that have been spawned by this false doctrine of nutritionism and others. Pollan correctly points out that Americans have become joyless worried feeders as opposed to happy healthy eaters. Paradoxically, the more we follow the rules of the nutritionists, the less healthy we become. 

Michael Pollan wages war against the false information of nutritionism in his fine NY Times article and in his book In Defense of Food.

Another crusader against the nutritionists (and mentioned in Pollan's book) is Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories. 

Should We Believe the Research That Condemns Soy as a Lethal Food Product?

There are a lot of people proclaiming the dangers of soy, especially in its refined form, as a danger food causing reduced testosterone, cancer, Alzheimer's, crapulence, etc. 

One book that comes to mind is The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Food by Kaayla T. Daniel. 

I've talked to two doctors, one a vegetarian, the other an omnivore, in recent months about soy and they both say the research is not conclusive. Until I find out for sure, I'm trying to eat soy in moderation.