Resolving health and ethics in diet (how the decision to be a good person caused me to move on from veganism)
I spent 7 years of my life vegan. It's not something I "quit" or "gave up", but moved on from. From a health perspective, it wasn't sustainable. From an ethical perspective, I realized there is complexity to the situation of animal welfare and meat; there are other options that sit outside the two incumbents of conventional meat consumption and abstinence from meat.Both from the health and ethical perspectives, the decision of what to eat is highly individualized. But it should be known that there is a dietary perspective based on reflection, introspection, and consideration of ethics, that includes consumption of meat. And it definitely doesn’t accept the status quo of modern animal welfare and meat production. Actually, it is finding a line of inquiry that doesn’t settle for the isolated questions of health or ethical, but instead brings them together - being a good person necessitates having a healthy body.
7 years a vegan
At some point in my youth, I realized I was highly disturbed by meat, that I could barely stomach animal flesh. A decision was made to systematically avoid animal (by)products. There was also a pseudo-moral component to this, and it became convenient to link my genuine concern for animal welfare with eating. Though I didn’t use the term often, I ate a vegan diet, and considered myself slightly superior to the traditional vegan, as I refused to push my values down anyone's throat.Over the years, I began a steady descent into exhaustion, overtraining, and nutritional deficiency. I didn't recognize it at the time, but there was a persistent fogginess, depression, and serious regression in my training.It would be 7 years before the idea to eat meat entered my anemic brain.
Confrontations with myself
I sat at a boardwalk overlooking the bay. Machiavelli was expounding, via "The Prince," the weakness of his contemporary culture (a description that I believe aptly fits out current existence), and the courage of ancient pagan societies, especially regarding the defending of personal liberty."The pagans, because they believed worldly honor to be the highest good, showed greater fierceness in their actions. This is demonstrated in many of their customs, as compared to ours, beginning with the splendor of their sacrifices… the extremely bloody and fierce act of sacrifice in which hordes of animals were killed. This savage aspect of them tended to make the participants savage too."Essentially, it was this kind of relationship to the physical world that kept man good. I don’t intend to promote bloody sacrifices, but I do agree with Machiavelli when he identifies the loss of moral virtue in mankind as a consequence of a divorce between mankind and the physical world. Savagery is what kept man aware his physical existence and responsibility to the world.I am not making the point that bloody sacrifices should be brought back. But this observation caused me to consider the possibility that our relationship to the world around us is not so simple as I’d have liked. I realized I would have to reconsider the place of meat in my life.
Thought experiments
I began with a simple thought experiment: if consumption of meat made me a better person, would I consume it? This question, a taboo of veganism, ignores whether or not meat actually confers such a benefit. But I needed to answer it, to know my true motives.This revealed to me a disturbing truth: I was not avoiding meat because I believed animal welfare benefited from my veganism, but because meat disgusted me. This is a very high form of hypocrisy; I wasn't being morally superior, I was simply being a coward.If I was avoiding meat because it disgusted me, and if I did not believe truthfully that veganism promoted animal welfare, then… I was simply vegan by a habit of aversion, and not a commitment to an ethical practice. And moreover, if consuming meat made me a better person, I had a responsibility to overcome this aversion, even if it meant undergoing a process of exposure to what was repulsive to me.
Implementation
So I decided I would test this idea - I would tentatively introduce meat into my diet. I would maintain a sense of the tragedy of meat, in part by turning to Jewish prayers that provide reverence to the eating experience, and a general sense of gratitude to the animal on my plate.I began my excursion from the holy land of vegan-ism with a can of bumblebee tuna. I awkwardly forked the tuna into my mouth; lightning didn't strike. (It's a singular experience, that moment when a 7 year habit is turned on its head). Next was a can of sardines.The improvement in health was obvious. I was finally able to support my training regimen in a sustainable manner. I started sleeping normally again, the cloud that had settled in my mind was gone.But more importantly… I have since become a better person, in many many ways that would not have been possible with the mental limitations I experienced under the influence of a vegan diet. I see this as relating to mindfulness; meat provides substrates necessary for supporting mindfulness, which is so important in overcoming personal demons (including those relating to being a good person).In a way, looking for the way to eat that makes me (function as, not simply see myself as) a good person looks beyond ethics or health as isolated concepts…
Paleo and Beyond
The transition to eating meat would come with some nuances. I had informed myself on the "paleo" view of nutrition, and found it convincing. Not necessarily the evolutionary model, but the biochemical and physiological arguments were compelling.I subsequently began experimenting with various approaches. After a while, I realize I was caught in the same prison that kept me vegan for so long; my habit became an identity, and it was dogmatic in nature. So I decide to break that dogma. After several years of a strict paleo approach, I decided to reintroduce certain foods. Some produced negative effects, some were not bad for me at all. So I created my own approach, based on this individualization.
And beyond the beyond
But I was still prisoner to some ideas. I began to wonder… what if I broke all the rules, now that I set them for myself?The result was unexpected. Nothing changed, except I had a new fire born of the realization how independent I was of the foods that entered my body. So I went back to my strict approach, but with the freedom that comes from knowing that you don’t rely on a particular food or diet.