What was I going to do about protein this time to make sure what happened before didn't happen again? Yes, this was my question, too. The protein factor is why I continued to eat fish for years, rationalizing that a fish can't really feel pain or suffering the same way a cow does. Also, I was taken on a fishing trip when I was younger, and I watched my mother behead a wriggling fish on a table before barbecuing it. I'll admit, as a child, I was very frightened by how quickly life could be taken, and how red the fish's blood was, and how it just seemed to gush out like a river once the head was removed. Anyway, graphic and beside the point.
Another factor in my continued consumption of fish is a cultural one. I come from a Russian family which, while surprisingly liberal compared with other immigrant families, still has certain cultural traditions and habits in the kitchen. My grandfather eats meat with every meal, and my mother likes eating chicken legs because of the bones and marrow contained therein. Russians put meat in almost everything from pirozhki (stuffed rolls) to stroganoff (duh) to potato salad to sala (basically salted lard; the unofficial national food of Ukraine) to soups. Everything has meat, and it's considered very unhealthy to forsake red meat.
The way my mom describes it, there are certain cells available in red meat that are good for your body that you can't replace by eating beans or tofu or lentils or quinoa. I completely dismiss this argument because I think the science that backs up her ideas is either outdated or completely based in some kind of Soviet post-poverty propaganda that has to do with the inversely proportional relationship between high-calorie diets and freezing to death, and if there's one thing you CAN find in meat, it's a lot of calories. Also, something about me having type O blood and therefore needing lots of meat because that's closest to what the cavemen ate. Forget that the blood type diet has been completely debunked as utter hogwash and cavemen ate more raw grains and fruits and nuts than meat because a caribou is freaking difficult to chase down on only two legs.
Suffice to say that I didn't take my mother's advice on dietary matters but made up my mind to keep eating fish and cephalopods to avoid arguments and okay, they're pretty darn tasty. Seriously, I love some calamari and squid and delicious rubbery things and sushi and lobster (even though it's not kosher and breaks the hearts of my grandparents a little every day) and the taste of spicy tuna. Can't get enough of them. I thought that a land-animal-free diet was good enough, ate mostly tofu and seitan or yogurts as protein, and often indulged in fish.
More recently, I saw a video one of my friends had linked on the facebook to a speech by a very persuasive vegan activist. His name is Gary Yourofsky, and reader, if you haven't seen his video yet, you really should. In fact, I'll imbed it below, at the very bottom of the page. If you want to watch it immediately, go ahead. I'll still be here when you get back.
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After watching the video, I did a little research, and decided to go full-on veg. My reasons for this are pretty much outlined in the video, but here's a quick (SUPER condensed!) recap if you didn't feel like watching through the whole thing.
1. I completely and utterly oppose factory farming. Even if humans were intended biologically to eat meat, and even if you support the Biblical idea that God created animals to be used by man, there's no need for senseless cruelty, and that's all that happens in factory farms. If you're not convinced of this, do some research or go to PETA's website. While I agree that each factory farm is different, a chicken's life is already over when it's transported there, and the workers don't care much if they tear a wing or two out when grabbing chickens to be placed in the assembly line. Industrial milking is disgusting, and have you ever seen a cow that's been injected with Bovine Growth Hormone? Plus, milk contains a large amount of pus, and it's weird to drink the lactation that comes from another animal's teat.
- Parenthetically (and this will sound a bit crazy for people who don't know me, but indulge the insanity for a moment) I strongly believe that IF there are aliens waiting to make contact with human beings, they won't come near us with a ten-billion-lightyear-pole (completely official and scientific figure, I swear) provided they see the way we treat other animals. If we can't live peacefully as a community regardless of species on our own home planet, how the hell can we expect to live peacefully with some Interstellar Beings we have no ties with? Like I said, simply a parenthetical point.
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| A cow that's been injected with rBGH. |
2. Personally, unless it were a dire emergency, I doubt I'd ever be able to kill a large animal. I mean, I get squeamish about spiders and bees, and always release them rather than squashing if I have any control over the matter. I just don't condone violence towards animals. Seriously. Children are like this too when they're first born, and only become accustomed to the idea of eating meat and killing animals because of cultural indoctrination, very much like my reluctance to part with the training wheels on my attempted vegetarianism because I was SO indoctrinated into the cultural aspect of meat-eating.
3. It's unfair to select certain animals we like (cats, dogs, parakeets) and certain animals we don't (cows, pigs, sheep, salmon, etc.) and systematically destroy one group while punishing those who would hurt the other.
4. Producing meat on the scale we produce is unsustainable and, ultimately, simply bad for the environment, not to mention expensive and a poor allocation of our resources as a planet. I'm sure you've heard the statistic about 500 gram of meat versus 500 tons of grain, but this argument never seems to convince anyone. I included it anyway because it's a contributing factor.
5. Humans were not biologically designed to eat large quantities of meat. Truly, the human body wasn't designed to eat any meat. Our jaws are designed for grinding and chewing, and while canines can be found in any number of herbivorous animals (most obviously, primates), the ability to move one's jaw side to side, as necessitated by eating vegetables, fruits, and grains, is found only in herbivorous animals. We also can find all the necessary nutrients in cruelty-free products and in fact eating meat contributes to hypertension, clogged arteries, heart disease, and cancer.(http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/natural.html for information about the human body and herbivorous animals, http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/risk-factors-heart-disease for information about lowering heart disease. Right underneath smoking? Reduction of bad cholesterol, which is found in fatty foods like meat)
6. Non-meat or -dairy based products simply TASTE better. I'm serious. They do.
This is a round-about way of getting to my actual point, which is one part of my initial inspiration for creating this post. I watched the Yourofsky video with my boyfriend, who enjoys a steak every once in a while. I'm not the type of person to shove my ideals down someone's throat, but I was bored and wanted someone to watch the video with me.
Gary advocates a full-on vegan lifestyle for all people for the non-personal reasons I stated above. I know a lot of them are personal, but a fair-minded reader could easily read between the lines. Anyway, as a result, I decided to cut back on my consumption of dairy products and completely remove meat. We started buying dairy alternatives for milk.
I won't lie, a big contributing factor to buying the non-dairy milk is cost. When you start comparing side-to-side, you'll find that an average gallon of milk costs waaay more than the same amount in soy or almond milk, but that's another digression.
So David and I went out and bought our first carton of almond milk. It was cheaper than soy, and I'd never tried the store-bought kind. When we got home, we each tried half a glass and I think at that moment, David was hooked. It's hard to describe the taste of almond milk to someone who's never tried it, but the vanilla kind tastes exactly how you'd expect a melted marshmallow to taste. The milk is creamy, delicious, and refreshing. Personally, I prefer the taste of plain soy, but that's definitely something you have to acquire. Both alternatives have the same amount of calcium as cow's milk (or more!) and neither almond nor soy leaves you with the phlegmy feeling in the back of your throat that is the hallmark of cow's milk.
The other morning, David let me know he was out of almond milk and mentioned off-hand that he didn't think he'd ever go back. I started going off on how much better I felt about not drinking cow's milk and how great it was for the environment to have our household abstaining from dairy when he interrupted me before I could start waxing poetic about the joys of liberation from the cow's teat. What he said completely floored me, because it characterized the dearest hope of almost every vegan on the planet.
"Yeah, that's nice, but I don't care about any of that stuff," he said, dismissing all my elaborate, iron-clad chains of logic and appeals to higher reasoning. "I just care about the taste."
And there you have it.
Part two of this epicly-long rant will have to wait until a more fortuitous time. For now, enjoy the video below!
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Ok. Here I am. I have pulled myself to a proper computer. I do have lots of things to say about this. Mostly because I've been doing an outrageous amount of research on stuff like this since I recently was told that I have a serious B12 deficiency and will have to get monthly shots for the rest of my life because of my shit stomach/digestive system.
ReplyDeleteI generally agree with you - I share your emotions towards factory farming and the maltreatment of farm animals. I do have the same feelings that I should be able to kill what I eat, but I disagree with another point you've made in reference to this. I'm just going to go down your list, since I think this will get convoluted otherwise. :D
1. Already said I agree. And milk is pretty weird from an outsiders perspective, but so is honey. Bee barf, man. wtf.
2. I disagree with you on this point pretty strongly. It's cultural indoctrination to NOT be killing animals for food and to understand and be okay with it. We've been killing animals since before we'd yet evolved into Homo Sapiens and though I doubt the majority of humanity has ever LIKED killing animals, ours is a time where killing animals is distinctly frowned upon. (An argument that I find directly correlates to the level of sexual repression and hypocritical, weird way that people deal with sex and their bodies in the modern age, versus pre-Victorian era, or arguably, pre Early-Modern Era, depending on how you term sexual repression, etc, but this is mostly because I've been reading the History of Sexuality by Foucault lately and writing a research essay on it.) We have legitimately thought ourselves so civilized that we distance ourselves from the fact that as humans we do need meat (which I will address soon, and is pretty much the key point I disagree with you on, for a lot of reasons), and we actually have to take another thing's life in order to sustain ourselves. It's pretty fucking dishonest and when you think about it for too long you realize how much ethics and other forms of self-reflection may have forced us to become dissociated with ourselves and our community. I agree that meat-eating is a cultural aspect of our lives, but I argue the causal relationship - we don't eat meat because it's a cultural construct, we created cultural constructs around meat because we eat meat.
3. This is a key point in my argument about the fact that killing animals have become a weird dissociative process that we are rather hypocritical about nowadays. Back in the pre-history phase, and even through quite a few thousand years of recorded history - we ate pretty much anything we could catch and eat. We did have a weird early relationship with dogs, but we are essentially a sentimental race of beings and we're opportunists (if we can befriend a pack of dogs, they can run faster and kill more efficiently than us, so our hunting strategies changed dramatically. The argument goes that dogs were tools, and we no sooner eat a healthy, strong, friendly dog than randomly smash apart a flint tool or hand axe that's sharp and well made.)
Delete4. Agree with your point, but it's worth noting that strictly growing plants is unsustainable too, since a lot of plants (like soybeans) are destructive to their environment and create huge swaths of no longer arable land; as well as being almost entirely GM. (Interesting Article: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2008/07/cows_or_beans.html) Soy also has some huge implications for human health, though unfortunately, grossly understudied (despite that fact, I could still probably list about a hundred relevant studies that all say the same sort of thing: soy generally fucks your shit up and gives you hugely increased rates of cancers in women, endometriosis, lowered sperm count in men, a lot of masculine feminization - man boobs - and just kind of general yuckiness that we expect from animal products, but actually get fucked over by soy products. And I love me some goddamned edamame and tofu.)
5. My main point. I was googling around for the articles I'm going to use here, and found an article that looks oh-so-scholarly, but in reality is absolutely outrageous and uses pretty much every discredited study ever to say that we shouldn't eat meat. (http://www.rense.com/general20/meant.htm). Like the claim that drinking cow's milk leaches calcium from bones (which was proven, essentially, true, but you had to drink over a gallon a day for more than two years. Not exactly what we're doing when we sit down with some milk on our cereal), and the hilarious claim that drinking cows milk has been linked to iron-deficiency in infants (Seriously? That's not because the milk is stealing their iron, it's because you need to give human babies milk made for HUMANS). Anyways, the article does end up making some good points about being omnivorous (were people actually ever claiming that we were supposed to be carnivores? No. We know we need fruits and veggies, too).
Also, our jaws were made for some grinding and chewing, but look at some sagittal crests some time. Paranthropus and Australopithicus both had these MASSIVE jaw muscles that were meant for eating nuts and fucking stones and shit because they weren't crafty enough to be anything but scavengers. I mean, seriously. Check out the pictures of the Black Skull. That's some major fucking jaw muscles there. Our jaws and teeth became much more gracile and sharp and defined for meat-eating. We became omnivores, and thusly our teeth changed. We are as perfectly designed for an omnivorous diet as we ever will be and ever have been. I mean, John McArdle is a vegetarian primatologist, but he still publishes a SHIT TON of stuff about humans being naturally omnivorous.
Secondly, we have appendices. The appendix is theorized to have been a pouch for holding and digesting raw meat since we spent a loooong time without fire in our evolution. It's become useless and we've adapted to our fires and can no longer stomach large portions of raw meat that has potential bacteria on it (hell, we deep freeze sushi fish in order to kill all the bacteria in the flesh. So it's basically like cooking it).
I do sort of agree with the health issue thing, but there are a lot of factors that make animals so bad for us nowadays - one of them is that we no longer have to run after them and kill them. There's also been an influx of recent studies that say that we should be eating more animal fats for various health reasons.
DeleteBut, my key point of study here, and the main reason why we need to eat meat, for me, is B-goshdang-12. Created from a bacteria. The only way vegetarians get it is from 1. acting like a cow and eating a SHIT TON of dirt (which is bad for us because we weren't meant to eat bacteria-y dirt on a daily basis) 2. eat the cow that eats the bacteria-y dirt or 3. vitamin supplements and fortified cereals. We absolutely, positively REQUIRE B12 and we can't get it from anything but animal products (and modern vegetarian processed foods). This is kind of my key point in this debate. We both need meat (or supplements to replace the meat) and have adapted to actually requiring meat in our daily lives.
6. Dairy tastes so good though. But, the non-Asian populations of us have adapted to milk. Though there is definitely a lot of argument for avoiding milk. I don't drink a lot, and I don't see any reason to if I'm eating a healthy omnivorous diet (since I have to eat meat!).
B12 article: Institute of Medicine. Food and Nutrition Board. Dietary Reference Intakes: Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Folate, Vitamin B12, Pantothenic Acid, Biotin, and Choline. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1998.
Final point: I do agree that ethically, and intellectually, we should be eating less meat in our lives. But I think it is leading to say that humans aren't designed for eating meat or that we don't need it (or replacements for it). I mean, half the reason we made rice/soy/almond milk is so that we can get the proteins we need that we can't get from most other vegetables, and back in the day, whatever grew in one country stayed in that country. I also think that the medical community has been leading quite a we people astray as well - vegetarianism is fabulous for the sedentary lifestyles we lead today, but it's not the fault of animal fats that we no longer hunt down our food and run 10+ miles a day.
Drinking milk, though, is still pretty fucking weird.
And, I essentially agree with you. Just my inner anthropologist (aw, look how cute and sharp those widdle teefies are) and inner deficient person had to make a few points.
Also, B12 deficiency sucks balls: I have nerve damage! And could be all sorts of motor neuron disease/multiple sclerosis-y in, like, three years if they don't get this shit sorted. Meat, ho!
Recommended Reading, in case you haven't read it yet:
Eating Animals by Johnathon Safran Foer. Disturbing but absolutely great.
Hi Gill, appreciate the time and energy you took to go through the points and agree/disagree with some of them, but as I mentioned at the very beginning of the post, this is a seriously condensed version of Gary's argument. If you want a more in-depth (albeit skewed) opinion on this, I'd recommend watching the full video.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest issue I caught in reading your response was that B12 is available only in animal fats, and humans quickly get a deficiency if they don't consume it. Also, you think the cultural indoctrination occurs when we teach people that killing animals is bad, the exact reverse of what I wrote. Gary goes over the latter question in his video, as well as your note about the harmful nature of soy products, so I'll just look at the B12 thing for now.
Off the cuff, I haven't done too much research about this. Firstly, to supplement the few vitamins available in meat, you can obviously take food-based supplements. Supplements aren't the best course of action simply because a lot of them don't end up absorbing (even if you use an organic, food-based one) because the human body has gotten used to absorbing the vitamins little-by-little through food and if you take a pill, it usually goes right through you, creating what Sheldon Cooper called "expensive urine."
After I read your comment, I went to my fridge because I seemed to remember a lot of B vitamins in a drink I have. Sure enough, on the back of my Kombucha bottle, the nutrition facts say it has 20% of your daily recommended B-12 intake in one serving size. Now, this is bottled/mass-produced and probably not the best way to get your Kombucha. Many people home-brew, but I haven't yet started that. Kombucha is essentially any tea that you grow a specific fungus on top of. The fungus ferments the tea and creates an effervescent drink that is rich in vitamins, probiotics, and antioxidants. The taste takes some getting-used-to, but I've grown to love it.
My guess (again, I'm not a nutritionist) is that you could probably get a good amount of B12 from fungal foods. This guess is in keeping with your characterization of sources for B12 as "dirty." Also, caviar has a lot of B12, and isn't against the rules for vegetarians, though I'll probably try to phase it out within the next few years.
Looking a vegan sources, it seems like nutritional yeast has a lot of active B12, and soy milk and cereals can also have B12 added (http://www.vrg.org/nutrition/b12.htm).
I'm sorry to hear you're having health problems from what your doctor characterize as a lack of meat in your diet. I stand by my main arguments, and want to stress again that the impersonal arguments I expressed are very condensed versions of what I heard in Gary's speech and eventually looked into on my own. Rather than going point-by-point, I'd recommend you watch the full lecture.