The (very) long version: I've taken a circuitous path on my personal journey but have come full circle – though transposed for sure. A little back-peddling will lend a greater depth of understanding on a few levels. However, you could skip to Act V if you're short on time/attention/interest.
Act I
My "journey" began when I was 18 and working as a cashier at a mainstream grocery store. While certainly not able to vocalize these thoughts at the time, I began to realize the total lack of connection most people have with their food – where it comes from, what it's made of, how it affects them. On some level I noticed this with myself as well. I had a visceral reaction to coming in contact with packaged raw meat and having blood drip onto the counter; I connected that this flesh was once a living being, and that didn't sit well with me. These thoughts gestated for a few months, and I became a vegetarian after graduating high school in May of 2005. I wasn't 100% sure why I was doing it, but it seemed the best/right/healthiest thing to do.
Now to put this in perspective: I have always been an adventurous eater and even as small child refused to order from the childrens' menu at restaurants. I didn't reduce myself to gastro-philistinism, something that a large part of the current adult population never seems to grow out of.
I am lucky enough to have a mother who is knowledgeable and skilled in the kitchen, and during my childhood she put homemade food on the table most nights of the week. While her kitchen output didn't stem from a focus on healthy living, it featured a variety of fresh produce that I think set my palate for real food – once again something that, unfortunately, children more and more are raised without.
Because I was already a big fan of fruits, vegetables, ethnic dishes, and "healthier" eating (a micro example of my macro-gastronomy at the time: my favorite childhood cereal was Post Great Grains), switching over to a vegetarian diet wasn't that much of a shock and I enjoyed adding more and more produce to my diet. Besides a very very quick affair with Soyrizo and faux luncheon slices, I was totally over flesh analogs from the very beginning.
After three months of living at home and my surely stressed mother trying to adapt family meals around my new diet, I moved out of the northwest Houston suburbs to the free-thinking hub of Austin to begin attending St. Edward's University. Living out of a dorm room and on a pre-paid meal plan meant the majority of my calories came from the vegetarian lunch/dinner line and Odwalla drinks in the St. Edward's dining hall. Breakfast usually consisted of some combination of fresh fruit/nuts/seeds/dried fruits/sprouted grain cereal and soymilk or soy yogurt. Besides developing a distaste for zuchinni and yellow squash from the dining hall's rampant overuse and oversteaming, I was mainly pleased with their food. I would also go out to Mother's Cafe fairly often, overjoyed at the opportunity to eat at a 100% vegetarian restaurant.
However, as I entered the second semester of my sophmore year, I came across information regarding the cruelty and inhumanity of the production of dairy and eggs, along with more environmental-based literature about the deleterious effects of all animal-product production.
I began to feel that being a vegetarian for moral reasons, as I was, but still consuming dairy and eggs was contradictory since it seemed more suffering was caused by dairy and egg farming than by slaughter. Just following my instincts and without being 100% sure, I began slowly phasing dairy and eggs out of my diet without being totally zealous about it. During that same period I came across the works of Gary Francione, who rises far far above PETA's "Look at this; don't you think it's wrong???!! ... GO VEGAN" style and promotes a much better developed approach to animal rights. In his own words:
The Six Principles of the Abolitionist Approach to Animal Rights
- The abolitionist approach to animal rights maintains that all sentient beings, humans or nonhumans, have one right: the basic right not to be treated as the property of others.
- Our recognition of the one basic right means that we must abolish, and not merely regulate, institutionalized animal exploitation—because it assumes that animals are the property of humans.
- Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.
- We recognize that we will not abolish overnight the property status of nonhumans, but we will support only those campaigns and positions that explicitly promote the abolitionist agenda. We will not support positions that call for supposedly “improved” regulation of animal exploitation. We reject any campaign that promotes sexism, racism, heterosexism or other forms of discrimination against humans.
- We recognize that the most important step that any of us can take toward abolition is to adopt the vegan lifestyle and to educate others about veganism. Veganism is the principle of abolition applied to one’s personal life and the consumption of any meat, fowl, fish, or dairy product, or the wearing or use of animal products, is inconsistent with the abolitionist perspective.
- We recognize the principle of nonviolence as the guiding principle of the animal rights movement. Violence is the problem; it is not any part of the solution.
Act II
With a nutritional, moral, and environmental drive in May of 2007 (you might start to see a trend here), I became a 100% strict vegan – no meat, dairy, eggs, honey, or fish – while diving head first into the Thrive Diet approach to eating (see above).Finally out of the dorm room and with a kitchen of my own, I devoted a large amount of time to learning how to prepare all my own food. Most days included a smoothie with Brendan Brazier's Vega, a very large salad with homemade dressing, homemade Larabar-style raw bars for snacks, and then a simple dinner of beans, grains, greens, and/or vegetables.
I felt great, and during my first three months as a vegan I put on more muscle mass (see pic) than I usually carry around by lifting weights as my main form of exercise; however, I felt drawn to, if only by the sheer ridiculousness of it all, triathlons and signed up for a sprint triathlon in the fall. After I had my first taste, my body and mind screamed for more, and I pursued running and triathlons as a newfound passion.
Upon returning to Austin I discovered Casa de Luz, an organic, vegan, macrobiotic restaurant in Austin that quickly became my favorite place in town. I reveled in their super high integrity, commitment to health, and balanced plates. I also became heavily involved with a vegan community group, Vegans Rock Austin, and a raw food meet-up, which had me booked up with an endless stream of vegan meet-ups and potlucks and fueled my growing gastronomical interests.
I became a leader of sorts in the Austin vegan community, often organizing/hosting events for VRA and founding a veg student organization ("Hilltop Herbivores") at St. Edward's. I founded the Austin chapter of OrganicAthlete, a non-profit that promotes vegan athletics and organized events such as the Save a Turkey Trot and Tour d'Vegan. I became fairly well known in the Austin athletic community for competing in events wearing race clothing that boldly stated "Go Vegan!"
I stayed on that path for a while, diving more and more into raw food nutrition and sometimes doing trial runs of being "100% raw," but I usually came back to eating some cooked foods (couldn't resist the borsht at Casa de Luz!). However, I got fed up with the elaborate preparation necessary for and heavy nut consumption associated with raw gourmet meals and was drawn to a fringe raw vegan diet referred to as 80/10/10. This diet relies on carbohydrates from fruit as the main source of calories and includes large doses of leafy greens and other raw vegetables and a very small amount of concentrated raw fats/proteins. It bans "excitotoxins" such as strong herbs, spices, salts, oils, vinegars, supplements, and superfood powders. There is almost no prep time when your meal is 15 peaches or half a watermelon eaten by the spoonful.
Act III
In May of 2009 (see, I told you), after graduating from St. Edward's, I embarked on 80/10/10 and loved being able to eat all the fruit I could manage. Meals were easy, and a day might include half of a large watermelon for breakfast, 15 peaches or a 10-banana smoothie for lunch, and then a very large salad with a nut and lemon juice dressing for dinner. I learned how to support my fruit habit by getting "bro deals" – e.g., buying in bulk from farmers at the farmers' market and getting "overripe" bananas for super cheap – and my already established obsession with durian, one of the only acceptable concentrated forms of fat/protein on 80/10/10, escalated to new heights.
Act IV
I had heard horror stories of those who had "failed" on 80/10/10, but I generally felt very good and continued to compete in triathlons and running events. However, by the time the weather got a little colder in late October, I felt it was just the right thing to do and transitioned out of being strict 80/10/10 and incorporated more cooked vegan foods back into my diet while still eating rather large amounts of fruit and making monomeals of local persimmons and orange juice during the fall and winter. I did not go back to following the Thrive Diet to a "T" but took elements of it, 80/10/10, and macrobiotics and continued on an organic, whole-food, gluten-light vegan diet.
Near the end of 2009, I began working a full-time office job that I found lifeless and dull. To counteract my boredom, I began listening to health and nutrition podcasts, particulry those found on One Radio Network, where I was exposed to many varied opinions on nutrition and diet. I was especially intrigued by the interviews with Daniel Vitalis, whose well-spoken perspective on diet and overall health and life strategy resonated strongly with me. At some point in mid-spring I began to accept the idea that animal foods could possibly be a nourishing and acceptable part of one's diet – provided that the products come from animals that were fed their natural diet, are not from factory farms, and are not altered (e.g., pasteurized and homogenized milk).
On the nutritional plane, I was exposed to some ideas that were contradictory to not only my previous paradigm but to mainstream thought as well, such as the ideas that cholesterol is not only a good thing but that it facilitates all hormone production and that fat is our most efficient fuel source. While they differ on the details, the Paleo / Primal Diet and Weston A. Price offer some examples of this thinking.
About the same time I was making these paradigm shifts, The China Study – which many vegans consider their "big guns" (I'm guilty of this) – came under some very well-researched criticism.
On the ecological plane, I dug further into researching small-scale grass-fed/finished, pastured, and respectfully raised livestock and fowl as well as Big Ag's culpability in ecological devastation.
I appreciated the idea of small-scale animal husbandry, but even that marginally positive feeling about it bumped against my animal abolitionist approach. However, that didn't mean I was ready to begin consuming any animals products, and I still felt that it was morally unacceptable.
Act V
In the early part of May 2010 (ahem) I began to have a stirring in my heart of hearts, not quite an epiphany but an idea that rang so true I couldn't leave it be:
Life feeds off of life.
I felt that to remove myself from this cycle was almost more unnatural than the "natural diet" I thought I was trying to follow. I had been internally struggling with the animal abolitionist approach for a while, and it wasn't resonating as strongly with me anymore; the idea that any animal usage is categorically wrong looks good on paper, but it doesn't function too well taken out of the hypothetical and put into the context of the real world or my cognition.
How I stand now is that I recognize and respect the sentience of animals; at the same time I recognize and respect death and slaughter as part of life.
I still view it as morally unacceptable to either blindly or knowingly consume animal products that are produced on factory farms. If someone is vegetarian but still consumes mainstream dairy/eggs (even "organic" ones), they are just as "in the wrong" as an omnivore. That being said, I source animal products from local farmers whom I trust and know have the animals', planet's, and consumers' best interests in mind.
If I go out to eat or am put in a situation where I am not the curator of my meal and the animal products are not responsibly and appropriately sourced, I defer to a vegan meal. There is a growing number of restaurants that either partially or primarily source from respectable local producers. There are certainly others, but my current favorite spots in Austin are Odd Duck and East Side Showroom.
I know that the hunter/gatherer lifestyle is unattainable for most folks in modern life, but taking baby-steps toward getting yourself closer both mentally and physically to your food is of paramount importance, especially when your food is sentient beings. I am very excited to be part of a "deer school" event in early December where I will be instructed in hunting, selection of harvestable animals, renewable game management, shooting, field dressing of animals, game butchering, and cooking.
While I haven't been trying to eat in a particular nutritional style, I currently have not been drawn to consume much grain in my own kitchen and my macronutrient breakdown certainly leans much more toward the fat/protein side than carbohydrate. My meals most days this summer have looked something like this:
a) homemade kefir from raw local dairy with a fair amount of local fruit (figs or peaches)
b) local vegetables with eggs or meat (raw or cooked) with sauerkraut
c) an elixir (essentially tea + carbs/proteins/fats) usually made with some combination of herbal tea, Chinese tonic herb extracts from Hyperion Herbs, ~TB of raw honey, raw eggs or Sunwarrior protein powder, raw cream or coconut oil, other superfoods that seem to fit the drink, and soaked chia seeds.
I'm sure this will change as the seasons do – due to availability, my tastes, the weather, and the demands of my training. I would certainly consider myself a "locavore" if one were to put a title on me, as most of my calories come from the local food system. However, I'm not dogmatic about that and certainly incorporate a fair amount of herbs and superfoods that do not come from the local food system or even this continent; however, I view these as auxiliary foods and think it is key to find a balance.
If you made it all the way down here, congrats. It was rather lengthy and masturbatory, I'll agree, but I hope you got something out of it – I know I did.
Respectfully,
Benjamin
Epilogue
Considering the shear amount of conflicting information that comes out in the nutritional world, I think it's fair to say there will always be a debate and that taking a stance that assumes one diet will work for everyone all of the time is silly.
However, I follow a few guiding points that I think everyone could work toward:
a) eat real food;
b) eat primarily from your local food system;
c) physically and mentally feel good from the food you are eating – if you don't, change;
d) morally feel good about the food you are eating – if you don't, do more research or change.
If any of this rings true with you, I implore you to
1) read Michael Pollan's books The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food, Food Rules and see the films Fresh, Food Inc., and King Corn for a crash course in how/why the modern food system is totally fucked and how you can help fix it;
2) explore the links throughout this post;
3) and explore the resources below for the best food in the Austin area and beyond.
Edible Austin - list of Austin area restaurants etc. that use local producers
Austin Farmers' Market
Barton Creek Farmers' Market
HOPE Farmers' Market
Eat Wild - huge national database of pastured/grass-fed animal producers
Real Milk - national database of real raw milk – illegal in most states, but there are loopholes. Contact me if you are interested in raw dairy in the ATX area.
Chef Frank Giglio - Franky G has gone through a similar journey to mine and specializes in crafting wholesome, pure and nourishing cuisine. Visit his webpage or youtube channel for recipes and meal inspirations. Barton Creek Farmers' Market
HOPE Farmers' Market
Eat Wild - huge national database of pastured/grass-fed animal producers
Real Milk - national database of real raw milk – illegal in most states, but there are loopholes. Contact me if you are interested in raw dairy in the ATX area.
