Reay Jespersen

So why the change back?

The choice to become vegetarian in the first place, six months ago, was purely a psychological/moral one: People don’t need to eat animals to live, so why kill intelligent creatures to consume them needlessly? However, as many of you have heard when I’ve discussed it with you, it was always a struggle for me. I still wanted to eat meat, I just curbed myself from doing so because I’d decided for myself that it was wrong. But the temptation remained. It’s hard to overcome a nearly 40-year habit, after all.

However, one of my aunts is taking a nutrition course and mentioned in passing several weeks ago that her instructor told the class that, in his opinion, vegans may reduce their lives by as much as one third due to not consuming a proper, broad enough range of foods. Granted, I was never vegan, and the opinion is an extreme one I’d never heard before and could be wildly inaccurate, but the point of it stuck with me: what if, in seeking a higher moral ground and denying myself – my body – a specific type of food, I was actually doing myself more harm than good?

It’s clear that humans evolved over time to accommodate whatever kind of food they wish to eat. We have the range of tooth types to prove such accommodation (biting, tearing, grinding…), and our jaws can move to deal with whatever type of food we’re eating at the time. But that’s just it: we aren’t designed to eat any one kind of food. Not just meat, not just fruit, not just vegetables… but a variety of each. And recalling something that had already occurred to me many years ago, it seemed to me now a bit foolish to be second-guessing millions of years of evolution. We have come to be this way for a biological reason. So yes, we can of course choose to eat (or not eat) whatever we wish, such as meat, but physiologically speaking, should we?

The issues of eating meat I had were two-fold: the philosophical/moral question, and the health question. For the former, my friend Alex, ever-practical and insightful, suggested reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which in part touches on the moral issues of vegetarianism vs. omnivorism. The book goes on at some length as the author questions the morality of eating meat, but most pointedly, states that 1) even outspoken animal rights activist Peter Singer doesn’t feel confident about standing against eating meat from “good farms” (i.e. those where animals are allowed to live their lives freely and normally, without drugs or cages or crowding… without, that is, the matter-of-course suffering imposed by factory farming) because ultimately such a natural farm setting has created more animal “happiness” in the world than if the animals had never existed, and 2) that the same “happy life and merciful death” line is how Jeremy Bentham, “the philosophical father of animal rights”, also justified eating meat. So the philosophical question, for me, was pretty much resolved: eating “happy animals”, even to animal rights figureheads, is morally defensible.

For the issue of my health, I spoke with my friend Jenny, a holistic nutritionist. Her conclusion was that there’s no particular “best” diet that can paint everyone, as it were, with the same brush. It can’t be said that vegetarianism is (or isn’t) a more healthy diet for everyone, because each individual’s body will react to diets differently. Some people can’t handle meat well, while others don’t play nicely with lactose, or nuts, or grains… it varies according to the individual (perhaps even within the blood type group that the book Eat Right For Your Type explains). And while I can’t say six months of vegetarianism didn’t agree with me in any broad sense, my system certainly didn’t seem to benefit from it in any notable way. I didn’t have more energy (in fact, felt at times more tired), I didn’t feel “lighter” or healthier in any discernible way, my mind seemed to work no differently… and yet I was jumping through hoops not just daily, but multiple times daily, in order to maintain the vegetarian lifestyle in a house with a wife and baby who both eat meat. That, plus trying to stay on top of finding new, interesting recipes, plus the time to shop for the needed ingredients and then execute those recipes… all while being a stay-at-home dad for a one-year-old, and in accounting for a working wife who doesn’t have much time to make her own food.

Vegetarianism was, in short, demanding extra time from a lifestyle which simply doesn’t have the needed amount to spare, and was doing it without any clear health benefits. In fact, perhaps the opposite: eggs and cheese, two handy go-to protein sources I had initially counted on when I became vegetarian, may’ve had unhealthy effects on me. The Forks Over Knives Twitter feed recently posted a link to a study that found that men who eat more than 2.5 eggs per week increase their chances of prostate cancer by 80%. And cheese, as one of my uncles pointed out, is worse than meat for your body to process. All of which only added even more stress to a diet that was already proving stressful to try to maintain. And as Alex put it, yes, authorities and figureheads are constantly changing opinions on what food is good or bad for you seemingly from one week to the next, but the one thing they can all agree on across the board – one thing that never changes trends – is that that stress is bad for people. So all things considered, was I truly doing myself any favours by trying to maintain a vegetarian lifestyle?

All of this was crystalized for me when my father-in-law died unexpectedly in late October. He was suddenly taken away from his friends and family; from my wife, and most poignantly for me, from our daughter, his one-year-old granddaughter. A man who had taken care of himself all his life – a professional dance instructor and NHL prospect, whose fitness seemed unquestionable – still died unexpectedly. And it was made clear to me that if I wanted to be around as long as possible for my daughter, which I very much do, I’ve got to start taking better care of myself than I have been for… well, let’s face it, for the bulk of my life. I need to cut down on junk food, get more exercise and more sleep, and perhaps most important of all, eat a healthy diet… or at least a healthier one. One that, to say the least, cuts back on my stress.

However, even back to eating meat, I realize that in taking on the only eating “happy animals” approach, I’m still a far cry from being able to eat meat to the degree I’d become accustomed to up until six months ago. Most restaurants, of course, use factory farms for meat to keep their costs down. So unless I’m eating outside the house and can be assured that the meat being offered up came from “good farms” or that the animals otherwise lead normal lives and died quickly (and really, how often can that happen?), the vegetarian diet will still be applied wherever practical and wherever my health isn’t compromised by doing so.

Precisely what I will or won’t eat in a given situation is still being considered – if I’m handed a pork chop for dinner at someone’s house and don’t know where it came from, am I going to make everyone feel awkward by pressing the host on the issue (and then what, whip up my own non-meat meal on the spot or not eat at all)? Even if it came from a factory farm, the deed is done; I’m not supporting the system by buying meat from it, but is eating such meat that I didn’t buy still supporting that system? The animal’s suffering has come and gone; my eating the pork chop or not won’t change what’s already happened, but is not buying but still eating it knowing the animal’s suffering justifiable? In a world where people are literally starving to death on a daily basis, is it more globally conscious to eat the food I’m lucky enough to be offered, or turn it away (perhaps even risk it being wasted) despite its source? – but all that is being worked on.

I hope to post an update on how all that goes, this time shooting for less than six months from now. In the mean time, as always, your comments and feedback, good, bad, or ugly, are welcomed.