I have mentioned a few times on this blog that P. and I have started to think of ourselves more as
ecotarians than vegans. I also added that for me that simply added a layer of complexity to my veganism, because I couldn’t see myself abandoning my vegan principles in favour of any ‘ecotarian’ changes.
Well, I have to report that this has changed somewhat.
I’m going to tell you about this the long way, because I think that any other way would fail to demonstrate the truly personal nature of my decision and may come across as judging other people’s consumption choices (vegan or otherwise), or may come across as asking for other people’s approval or permission to make these changes to my consumption habits, and neither of these impressions would be correct. (Of course, there is always the chance that both of these things will happen anyway, and, well, I will just have to deal with that. But please just know that it is not my intention.)
I think that it all started with my interest last year in locavore diets. After reading
“The 100 mile diet” and
“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (and
“The Ethics of What We Eat” before them), I started to have a seriously increased appreciation of the value of eating locally. Not only does eating locally cut down on emissions from the completely unnecessary transportation of food, but it also connects people to their local environment and their local food producers in a way that is lost when you start to rely on food that is brought in from elsewhere.
The connection to the local environment is huge. Alisa and James (100-mile diet) used the example of an oil spill in a local Vancouver river. The incident itself only attracted a short story on an internal page of the Newspaper. It was considered to be so minor that they may have missed it altogether. However, they were relying on fish that were caught from that river - fish that had now all been killed by the oil spill – and so suddenly the reality of the impact really hit home for them. Now I currently have no desire to eat flesh. It still completely creeps me out. However, I could really appreciate the message that if everyone – or even a decent minority of people – was eating locally-sourced food, then no local environmental incident would go unnoticed. The contamination of our local rivers and soils would really really matter to us and this would have an enormous impact.
However, this is not the only connection of value that shone through in both the “100 Mile Diet” and “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”. The other connection was a social one. Both families found themselves forming strong personal connections with the local people that produced the food that they consumed. This kind of connection is not only extremely valuable for our society, but it also has an environmental impact. Farmers whose customers visit their farms, and have a personal connection with them, are so much less likely to breach the trust of those customers – their commitment to sustainable farming and to the way in which they treat their land and the animals that live on it is constantly reinforced by the expectations of their customers (customers who are real people and not corporate entities).
This last point brings me to another important political impact of local eating – it undermines the growing corporate monopoly over food production and distribution. I could go on and on about this – about how it undermines it and why this is so incredibly important to the future of our planet, to the survival of many species of animals, and to the survival of many human beings whose livelihoods are currently being decimated by the corporate food monopoly, but this is really a post for another time.
OK, so you get the point though: I started to realise that eating locally was a really big deal.
Next step was when I started to realise that almost all of my big sources of protein could not be obtained locally. People don’t grow pulses locally. There is a gorgeous couple at our
local farmers’ market that makes their own tofu from what they describe as ‘local’ soybeans, but those soybeans are grown in Queensland. And they’re not organic. That doesn’t even begin to deal with the amount of processing and (cold!) transport that is involved in our Vitasoy purchases. All this gave me pause for thought.
Around this same time my next-door neighbour invited Lily and I over the fence to visit their chooks. Our neighbours have a huge, inspiring garden chock full of veggies and fruit, and a big airy chook pen containing three hens – who spend most of their time wandering around the garden stealing vegetables. My lovely neighbour showed Lily where the hens lay their eggs and then offered them to her to take home.
I was stumped. I stood there thinking “Well, exactly why wouldn’t we?” Here is a source of protein that has travelled almost nowhere to get to us and while it does come from animals, I personally have no objection to the way in which these animals are treated. Most of all, the over-all impact of this protein is better for the world and, therefore, better for animals who live in this world, than our current sources of vegan protein…
Around this time my little brain did a small explosion and I accepted the eggs.
I put them in the fridge and racked my brains for something to do with them. I could not think of anything. I had been a vegan since the age of 15 and, since then, all of my cooking experience (and almost all of my cookbooks) was vegan. I knew that eggs were used in omelettes and quiches, but, honestly, the thought of these meals made my stomach turn.
The eggs sat in the fridge for two days while I pondered and finally P. decided that he had better cook them up before they went off (we really knew nothing about eggs). He made an omelette with heaps of vegetables and served it up to Lily and himself. Lily sat down and carefully picked out all of the vegetables and left the egg sitting there untouched on her plate.
However, despite the anticlimactic nature of the event, something had clicked over in my head and I started to ponder the idea that maybe eating some things that weren’t ‘vegan’ would meet my new ethical criteria more than a strict vegan diet would. I basically started to think about replacing the criteria of ‘veganism’ with one of ‘ecotariansim’ and being open to the idea that one might trump the other.
I was surprised to find that I felt completely overwhelmed by the idea. I guess I realised that a whole bunch of my identity was wrapped up in being ‘a vegan’ and that I was extremely reluctant to completely abandon it even if I was starting to feel as if it didn’t meet my newly forming ethical commitments about consumption. And so I decided to just sit with these ideas for some time and, in the meantime, we started doing more about making our current consumption patterns a little more ‘ecotarian’.
We bought a
soy milk maker and ordered a 25-kilo bag of organic soybeans to make soy milk with. I decided that no matter what else I decided, I couldn’t (currently) see that methane-producing, soil-eroding, cows could be better than soybeans (even if they were local). So, instead, buying soybeans in bulk and making the milk ourselves meant that we were reducing the impact of the transport and packaging involved in our consumption.
We also bought organic bread flour, almonds, oats, rice and other grains and pulses in bulk from our
food co-op in order to reduce the packaging and opt out of the supermarket system.
Slowly, slowly we started to bring our habits more into line with our principles (an ongoing project that is bound to take a lifetime!). However, still the vegan-thing lingered.
In the end I just started to experiment. I bought some local, organic, free-range eggs from our co-op. The farm is not much of a commercial enterprise – it only supplies our co-op and I thought that I probably felt OK with that. I did my best to use the eggs in new recipes obtained online. I struggled with distaste at first, the smell and the flavour really turned my stomach, but, for some reason that I can’t totally explain, I wanted to keep trying. I waited for the psychological impact of the choice to hit me in order to find out what I thought. Slowly I realised that it felt right. To me.
We decided to add organic, free-range goat’s cheese to our repertoire. Again, it sat well with me.
And that’s where we are at the moment.
No doubt, whether or not you can relate to, or understand, my decision will largely depend on your own personal choices to date and that is completely understandable. That’s the thing. This is an extremely personal thing and that is why it has taken me some time to post about it. The last thing that I wanted was to be used as some kind of false ‘evidence’ for “why veganism is wrong” by some opportunist, defensive person who gives no thought to their own consumption habits but feels justified in attacking the carefully considered choices of others. I also didn’t want to come across as wanting anyone else’s approval or as seeming to attack anyone else’s choices. But, ultimately, I wanted to share with you where I am at, at the moment. So there you are.
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