This is going to be a short post and I apologize for that. I’m under deadline for an article I’m writing, and since the ID Project is blowing up, there’s a lot of work to be done to make sure that our awesome new nonprofit develops its awesomeness for the benefit of a few sentient beings.
For January’s low impact consumption month, in addition to my previous commitment to mass transit, and an attempt to compost in the urban jungle, and my continuing pledge to never use another plastic bag, I decided to go vegan. I am normally a cheese-and-ice-cream-lovin’ vegetarian, with a very occasional meal including fish (VERY occassional). So what the hell, go vegan, I thought. Practice longing for cheddar, you know? And not the kind of cheddar Jay-Z can never get enough of, either.

It hasn’t been that hard. I mean, real cheese is great and soy cheese SUCKS, but that ain’t very newsworthy, is it?
What the practice is revealing, somehow to a new level, is how touchy a subject FOOD is for everyone. Men and women are both touchy around this issue, but in different ways.
First, when you are a vegan, going out to dinner with a bunch of meateaters ain’t no fun. Even if you go out with a supremely nonjudgmental group of meateaters, like I did last week with my family, you feel like you’re ruining everyone’s good time and making everyone else feel very subtly guilty about their lamb shank. Second, the vast majority of restaurants that cater to the meatlovers crowd have very little clue how to present a vegetarian option, much less a vegan one. Better to just get a falafel (which fits much better into my budget anyway).
On the other hand, dealing with hardcore politicizing vegetarians and vegans, I’ve come to feel that many food activists have only learned how to turn people off who disagree with them. Case in point, when I went to a New Year’s Eve meditation at Jivamukti Yoga Center, the founder Sharon Gannon gave a lecture in which she blindly assumed that all 500 people gathered to meditate were in fact vegans, and where she spoke of animal rights somewhat obsessively with zero mention of human rights.
I feel like what we eat is the touchiest of all touchy subjects. Linking it to global warming is just a drag for most people. To complicate it further, it brings up body-image issues in many folks, and issues of liberty and choice and good old-fashioned American freedom to eat whatever the f*ck you want in others.
At the same time, it’s a crucial issue. If everyone who ate meat three meals a day in America just ate meat ONCE a day, that alone would have a huge positive impact on the planet, on global starvation, not to mention on America’s health and life expectancy. But talking to meateaters is one delicate subject, and the people who tend to do it most vocally tend not to be the supereloquent human rights’ activists, but the often less eloquent, animal rights hardcore folks, bringing an aggression to the discussion that never seems to capture the delicacy of the meat issue. So most meateaters seem to do their best to just avoid the issue completely.
What do you guys think?