Thinking vegetarian

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What do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’

 

 

All right. Well, what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow.

 

 

So I sort of played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation.

 

 

I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.

 

 

 

(Lierre Keith, on gardening as a vegan; October 8, 2009 on Underground Wellness Radio)       I am not a vegetarian. I have eaten enough meat to feed a thousand third-world kids for ten years.  But I think about it a lot. I like the idea of eating only vegetables; I hate the idea of animals dying to feed my appetite.     However: chicken, and pork, and beef (and goat, and eggs, and cheese, and mutton) taste good from time to time.     I love the advice Mark Bittman gives: be vegetarian as much you can, but don’t go crazy. Meat can be a side dish, a flavoring; it doesn’t need to be a main dish.     But the Lierre Keith piece above (which I found on Tumblr) gave me pause.  She’s exactly right. There’s no escape from death. Plants love the death of animals; it feeds them. Plants love the waste and decay of the animal world.     Quite obviously, plants and animals feed on one another.     Sad, and creepy. But true. Even when you’re eating a salad.     I think the important thing is to be mindful of what you’re eating. Don’t not think about it. Don’t wolf down a cheeseburger without thinking about it. Same with a salad. Think about where the ingredients came from, and what nutritional requirements are being filled by what you’re eating.     It’s all about mindfulness.     (Oh what a priggish New Age pseudo-Buddhist nerd I have become!)

 

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The Vegetarian Times

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Last weekend I cooked a pork roast.  I also read the latest issue of the Vegetarian Times.

 

 

Yes, I know. 

 

 

But here’s the thing: I am not the carnivore I used to be.  I go meatless two or three days a week at least.  I like very much Mark Bittman’s compromise: be as meatless as you can be without driving yourself crazy.

 

 

There are some good recipes in the most recent issue of the Vegetarian Times. I intend to try the black-bean-and-sweet-potato enchiladas, and maybe the stuffed mushrooms, and the nice Hungarian crepe-and-jelly dessert. 

 

 

But there is also a whole mindset to this vegetarian thing, a fiery self-righteousness.  One reader wrote to complain that a recent article might actually encourage people to eat sweet corn, which – gasp! – might be genetically modified.  The editors duly apologized.  References to obscure food items – tempeh, kombucha, chaga, spelt – are everywhere.  It’s like any other club: the members really don’t want you to understand what they’re talking about. 

 

 

It’d be helpful if they relaxed a bit.  It’s not a religion, after all; it’s just a way of eating.

 

 

I was especially bemused by references to something called Quorn.  Evidently it was a meat substitute, but I had no idea what it was; I assumed it might be something like soy. 

 

 

But, oh my, it’s ever so much better than that!

 

 

It’s a mycoprotein: a substance produced by a fungus called Fusarium venenatum.  The fungus produces strands called hyphae, which resemble the fibers in meat.  If you grow this fungus in a vat and harvest it, you can moosh it up and turn it into a meat substitute.

 

 

I have no problem with this; I’m Polish on my mother’s side, we love to eat fungi.  But the nice people at Quorn were concerned that people might not like their product, so they started telling little white lies.  They said, for example, that Quorn was “mushroom protein.”  (Our friend Fusarium is a fungus, but not all fungi are mushrooms.  Fusarium, to be frank, is a mold.  It is probably not good for sales to say so out loud.)  If you haven’t seen Quorn much in the USA, that’s because a couple of other companies screamed loudly that Quorn causes dangerous allergic reactions in a significant percentage of consumers.  (It appears that the claim is vastly overblown, and that Quorn is no more dangerous than, say, mushrooms.  Or peanuts, for that matter.)

 

 

And who funded the anti-Quorn campaign?  Why, a company called Gardenburger.  You may known them.  They make meatless products. 

 

 

See?  Vegetarians aren't necessarily nice people.

 

 

This makes me feel better, because I know I will never be a nice person, vegetarian or not.

 

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