I have been struggling with something for the last few years that has tested my beliefs and undermined my instincts, so I am now coming clean…
I LOVE FOOD, ALL FOOD!
I have always been a meat eater and never hid this, although I have had my doubts about whether this is the ethical choice, instinctively I have known that I need meat to survive, I need the proteins found in red meat.
My dilemma has not been about this but about dairy. You see I have a dairy intolerance to full fat cow dairy products but can still eat eggs and low fat cow dairy products and goats/ewes milk products, however I have been fighting with myself on that ethical dilemma again.
You see I know a lot of vegans and I keep hearing lots of stories about how the animals no longer wish to be eaten and how by turning vegan we are saving the earth and I have let a lot of these opinions outweigh my own intuition/values on this.
You see my ethos has always been one on ethically sourcing meat and diary so that it is organic and free range and sourcing as much locally grown produce as possibly including meat and fish, but yet again I began to undervalue my ethos, giving more credence to the other voices and not listening to my own.
Also it was always my belief that all life should be respected and I found it hard to reconcile the voices of animals and plants and the balance of life and death on the planet with the voices that told me it was wrong to consume animals as I felt there was no balance there.
It wasn’t until I read a blog post about a lady in Saudi Arabia that had to give up veganism for health reasons that suddenly I began to see the tangled mess I had tied myself in and finally saw a way through.
I believe that I have now made the right choice for me to eat local and ethically sourced meat, dairy and vegetables. This does not lessen my repect for those who choose their own pathway, be that vegan or otherwise, and I still respect their voice in the world.
From now on I will respecting all life and honouring my own values as foremost in my life.
Here is the part of the article that really spoke to me and allowed me to relax and just allow myself to enjoy food that made me feel good and healthy… if you want to read the rest of the article please go here: http://voraciouseats.com/2010/11/19/a-vegan-no-more/ it is definately worth the read 
Part 3 – Rethinking my Beliefs
3 years of veganism didn’t just leave me exhausted, depressed, and very sick, it also filled my head with doubts and questions about the ethics of veganism. If I actually need to eat animals to be healthy, how can it be so wrong? It has been a complicated and eye-opening journey, and I now find myself in a much different place than I was 3 years ago, a year ago, or even several months ago. Perhaps if my health hadn’t improved so dramatically upon the reintroduction of animal flesh I wouldn’t be so sure, but it did improve remarkably, and now that I have my life and my happiness back, I will never give it up again. Ultimately, I can no longer think it is wrong to eat animals.
Several years ago I believed veganism fit in perfectly with my determination to drastically reshape the world. As a revolutionary feminist and anti-imperialist, veganism seemed to be yet another way I could fight the injustices we are facing. But as the years wore on and my body began devouring itself for the sustenance that my vegan diet couldn’t provide, I began to lose the will and the energy to do the vital work I had so loved. I no longer had the mental clarity to write my famous scathing exposes, or the physical energy to teach, organize, and build solidarity. I was sputtering out, grinding to a screeching halt. I realized that veganism, my choice to buy ‘cruelty free’ foods, was quickly becoming my only avenue for activism. It was the only thing I really had energy for anymore. As a staunch radical I’ve always been opposed to capitalism’s emphasis on the personal solution, I refuse to buy into the mainstream myth that we can shop our way out of catastrophe. And yet…with my dwindling energy reserves and devastating health problems I realized that was exactly what I was doing. When I stumbled along this quote about veganism by Megan Mackin it seemed as if it had been written for me: “It begins, eventually, to look like a very effective way to co-opt a movement: take the most passionate activist-minded, girls especially, and get their focus on a way of living that drains energies and enforces conformity in others. The Big Boys still run things, but now even more freely – with out much interference.”
I eventually forced myself to apply the same ethics I had used to analyze animal foods to the analysis of plant foods, and tried to calculate the macro impact of my food choices. I soon realized that I had to make a serious change. As I’ve written about before, the foods I was eating as a vegan saved no more animal lives and were no ethically better than the foods I am now eating as an omnivore, with two main differences. First, I now no longer lie to myself about the fact that life requires death. Second, I am now healthy. Just like always, I still care intensely about the environment, the well being of animals, and the politics of food, but my ideas of how to do the most good and effect the most change have drastically transformed. I reexamined the party line of veganism, that it is the moral baseline, and admitted to myself that I had never been comfortable with the arbitrary declaration of drawing a line in the ethical sand. In fact, during my time as a vegan I never stopped searching for an even better solution and a more ethical way to live. I definitely believe I’m on the right path. My new thoughts don’t have veganism’s catchy slogans like ‘Meat is Murder’, but here’s a quick wrap up:
In one of those strange circumstances of serendipity that life is always throwing our way my veganism induced health problems coincided with a period of intense food justice activism in my own life. During this time in my work as a food rights advocate I had many, many discussions with agronomists, farmers, agroecologists, and global south advocates, and I learned how very wrong I was in my previous conviction that veganism would save the world. While veganism presents a very simple and easy to understand solution to the world’s problems, and has therefore become the go to politically correct strategy, it is at best a band-aid for the ecological and world hunger crises we are facing. The need for the entire world to go vegan in order to stop global warming or prevent chronic hunger is simply and irrefutably false.
As I learned while sitting at the metaphorical feet of the world’s leading revolutionary ecologists and food rights advocates, the only way for humanity to survive in any meaningfully sustainable way is for us to live entirely within our local food systems, eating the plants and animals that naturally live on our immediate landbase. And this most definitely does not include millions of acres of grains, the cultivation of which is amenable to only very small parts of the globe. To produce the vegan foods that I used to consider so cruelty-free; modern, industrialized agriculture forces land to grow crops that are alien and unnatural to it, robs the planet of its resources, destroys whole eco-systems, wipes out entire species of plants and animals, and creates a chaos of death and destruction as more and more wild land is needed to replace the devastated cropland.
This planetary devastation (and the resulting socio-cultural ramifications) has been going on far longer than the advent of factory farms, which were only introduced in the past several decades. Of course, just like any decent human being, I abhor the evil that is factory farming, and I stand opposed to their slavery, torture, and abuse. I also recognize that the massive production of grain is what led to the creation of factory farms in the first place; they simply would not have been possible otherwise. We do not grow so much grain because we want to have factory farms; we have factory farms because we are growing such an avalanche of grain. Veganism, while coming from a decent place of compassion, is ultimately short sighted and does not fix our problems. Truly local, preferably wild food is the only way we can live without causing devastation to this planet. And living truly locally, without massive consumption of monocrop industrialized grains or soy, in almost every part of the world necessitates the use and consumption of animals for us to be healthy.
As a vegan I didn’t like to think about the fact that without animals’ waste products, bones, and blood, farming is literally a zero sum game.
It broke my vegan heart to learn how unavoidably essential it is for humans to stop the use of fossil fuel fertilizers and reintegrate animals back into farm life. As a vegan I didn’t like to think about the fact that without animals’ waste products, bones, and blood, farming is literally a zero sum game. Without organic matter to feed the plants and the hungry soil, the precious topsoil will die and nothing can grow, a fact of life we are seeing play out around the globe as the millions of fossil fuel dependent farms collapse. When we expend resources like water and food on animals we are repaid tenfold. Not only does the water and food get used again in the form of manure that nourishes the soil in a way simple water never can, but the animals are eaten by us, and the remnants of their bodies used to feed the hungry earth. It was shocking to realize I had been expounding on the need to transform agriculture and farming without even knowing the bare minimum of what it takes to keep an ecosystem healthy. I now realize that the statistics I used to quote about environmental devastation, grain and water consumption, pollution, and ill health, were all based on numbers from factory farms, not from the realities of traditional land base specific farming, which is the only kind of farming that can heal our planet and us.
From now on I will choose the deaths that keep me and the planet healthy.
When I stopped merely talking about food advocacy, and started listening to people living on the front lines of the global food justice struggle, I had my eyes irrevocably opened. I realized that in many ways veganism removes us from our place in the natural scheme of things, denies our necessary participation in the food cycle, and makes the natural world into an alien realm that we can no longer fully understand. Vegans like to say that it is our intentions that matter, but I ask ‘matter to who?’ I now believe that instead of arbitrarily deciding that the deaths caused by veganism are okay, while the deaths caused by omnivores are unforgiveable, and that some animal deaths should be prevented at all costs while others are a necessary evil, we have to abolish the entire fabricated hierarchy we have constructed and come to terms with the cycle of life and death. We are all of us on this earth connected, and ultimately, death is a necessary, unavoidable part of life. Whether it is the animal deaths caused by a vegan diet that forces the planet into an unnatural and unsustainable cycle of production while failing to provide many of us with necessary nutrients, or it is the deaths caused by a close looped animal integrated farm cultivated to grow its natural bounty in traditional ways, there will always be death on our plates. From now on I will choose the deaths that keep me and the planet healthy.
I do not believe the planet cannot support 7 billion people in any meaningfully sustainable way, vegan or not. Therefore, an integral part of us being able to live in a genuinely environmentally respectful way is not for us all to go vegan, but for us to lower the birthrate and the population so we can live truly locally. First and foremost this will require the advancement of women’s rights and the global empowerment of women. (It really is amazing just how much feminism can accomplish!) As for world hunger, all of you who have read my world hunger articles know there is already more than enough food produced to feed everyone on the planet generously. Capitalism has turned food, and especially grains, into a commodity, a weapon of war, and a way to make a profit, instead of the inalienable right it should be. The way to prevent hunger is not to feed the starving masses the food we currently feed to animals (excess food production and the resulting food dumping is one of the causes of hunger in the first place), but for the chronically hungry people to throw off the shackles of neo-imperialism and to gain back control of their local food systems.
Most ecosystems on this planet simply cannot support annual grain agriculture, and the urging by vegans for the inhabitants to adopt a vegan lifestyle anyway is damning them to an eventually desiccated land base and inevitable starvation.
In my own life, my decision to return to my omnivorous ways is drastically shrinking my carbon footprint. The truth that as a vegan I did not like to face is that most places on this planet are not suited for annual grain agriculture, but for a mix of plant and animal husbandry. Most ecosystems on this planet simply cannot support annual grain agriculture, and the urging by vegans for the inhabitants to adopt a vegan lifestyle anyway is damning them to an eventually desiccated land base and inevitable starvation. Saudi Arabia, where I live, is one of those places. Now, instead of relying on grains and beans grown overseas with pesticides and seriously unsustainable farming methods to form the bulk of my diet, I can now turn my focus towards local animal products, such as goat, lamb, or chicken. For example, I can go to the local market and buy goat meat from goat herds that graze just a few miles away over the open desert, herded by Bedouins from oasis to oasis in a centuries’ old tradition. These goats make use of the dry and scrubby land that would be completely unsuitable for crop farming and they drink ancient artisanal well water. If the land they use was transformed into huge swathes of crop fields it would require staggering amounts of synthetic fertilizer and imported water, and it would wreck the delicate ecosystem that currently exists in the desert. Not only do I feel better physically and mentally as an omnivore, but my choices are much more consistent with my conviction that we need to live as ethically and sustainably as possible within our local community.
Whether it is the staggering destruction caused by factory farms, or the slightly less staggering but no less devastating destruction caused by vegan agriculture, our planet is being irrevocably annihilated and we must stop treating the symptoms of this disease and abandon short term solutions. We can’t shop our way out of this crisis, personal solutions are not enough. Presenting veganism as a panacea that will stop global warming, save all the animals, and feed the starving masses is nearsighted and unfounded. And it shames me, as an academic, that I ever let myself believe it. We must instead focus our efforts on a complete reimagining of the way we live on this planet. Anything less is suicide.
