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.

There are doubtless going to be questions from friends and family about what prompted the choice. I shall duly answer the six questions we were taught in grade school to ask about events in order to cover the bases:

Who?
Me.

What?
Vegetarian(ism).

When?
For about a week now, though still in transition. More on that in a minute.

Where?
Here. Everywhere. Also: me.

Why?
Well that’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?
As a quick bit of background, I bought the new Rise Against album, Endgame, and was flipping through the insert — the lyrics and notes — when I noticed a quick aside prompting the reader to read the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Intrigued by the title, I Googled it, and was immediately engaged by what I found. I bought the book shortly after, and have been reading it piecemeal since then as time allows.

As for the “Why?” itself… there’s no one, quick answer to that.
I’ve always known, as all meat eaters do, where the meat I’m eating comes from. Yet it’s very easy to forget that; meat becomes just another grocery item. But as I’ve been reading Eating Animals, I’ve been acutely reminded of meat’s source. And not just in the most basic of ways, but getting in-depth detail: how meat is produced on not just a large, but a massive — a global — scale. And it’s truly horrifying stuff. Not just on a moral level of what the animals are put through (the genetic modification to make them produce more viable meat regardless of (indeed, in direct contrast to) their own well being, the standard mutilation to prevent them from damaging each other due in no small part to the inhumane conditions they endure, the drugs they’re fed as a matter of course due to the illnesses generated by the living conditions they’ve been put in), but on a philosophical one (why is it ok to raise pigs and cattle for meat but not dogs? Why do the people profiting from these factory farming processes get to be the ones to set the laws as to how their practices are done and what does or doesn’t constitute humane treatment? How much of a creature’s suffering is too much for me to enjoy my burger or chicken strips? Why kill a sentient being for nothing but the brief enjoyment of its flavour?), and a scientific one (what are we doing to aquatic life, and the planet itself, when there are 145 other species routinely captured and killed as an offshoot of fishing for just tuna? Why use six to twenty-six calories of food to produce one calorie of meat? And most notably and concerningly: all flus are fundamentally avian-based in origin — by forcing so many chickens in such close quarters and feeding them ever-more powerful drugs to combat the new strains of illnesses that are invariably produced by the nature of the system we’ve put them in, mankind is setting itself up for a far worse flu pandemic than the one we’re already long overdue for).

Where one issue of opting out of meat eating may be settled with one solution (organic, family-style farming where the animals are treated well and allowed to live in as natural a manner as possible before killing them, for instance), it doesn’t answer another (why do I need to kill that sentient being for food at all when eating in this other way will sustain me just fine?)
And as been confirmed again and again by professionals, the fact is that a balanced vegetarian diet is at least as healthy as an omnivore diet. Other than liking the taste of meat, there’s no reason to eat it. And given everything involved in letting me have that taste — the ethical, philosophical and scientific issues — I’m ok with stepping out of that cycle.
As I said… there’s no simple answer to the question of why I’m doing this. Perhaps the best way I can put it is that, all things considered, this is what I feel I need to do.

How?
Carefully. As tempting as it has been (and still is) to just change these gears to feel better about myself, I know precious little about what a safe transition to vegetarianism involves, and as with other things, making sweeping changes without the proper knowhow can be dangerous. Until I have a solid grasp of what I’m doing to make this switch safely, my meat eating shouldn’t fade completely, but more appropriately be phased out (though I am trying to speed that up).

So there’s the bulk of the scoop. I’m wide open to any questions anyone has, but to cover what may be a few of them:

Won’t you miss the taste of meat?
Hell yes.

Does this mean you’re not killing anything ever?
No. While I often try to help out living things (ask Jackie — and our neighbours — about how many spiders and the like I’ve transported outdoors rather than kill them), there are times when circumstance requires it. We had a lot of little ants that were invading the kitchen last year and already this year, for instance. Left unchecked, they’d take over the place. The larger, black ants have been coming in lately, too. They’ve gotta go, as well. But that’s of course completely different: practicality vs. killing something to eat it.

Are you going to harass me if I don’t join you in this change (into a left-wing commie pinko hippie animal-hugging dreamer)?
Not at all. As with my choice a few years back to not support Coke and its affiliated products (see killercoke.org) and in the last few months to not support chocolate manufacturers who use child labour (i.e. a lot of the big producers; do an internet search for Is There Slavery In Your Chocolate?, among others), this is about my choices for me. To each his own.

Are you joining PETA, or anything of the like?
No. PETA does raise valid points (can anyone really deny that there are animals that are mistreated, and that they should be treated better?), but their methods are extreme and sensationalistic. Anyone who’s known me for more than a day will know I’m neither of those.

Is Jackie joining you?
While she supports me (albeit with due, loving mocking), Jackie’s not on board the Vegetarian Train. Yet, at least. She’s still breastfeeding, so we agree it’s best to not to risk shocking or forcing such a change on her system when Laila needs her to maintain a status quo.

Is Laila joining you?
While now on ever-new (liquified) solids, she’s not on meat yet. Jackie and I are going to do what research we can on long-term benefits or drawbacks to raising a child as a vegetarian from scratch. At the very least, we’ll do whatever we need to do to get her hormone/drug-free meat to raise her on, and let her make her own moral choices about continuing to do so later in life. In short, we want whatever the evidence suggests is best for her.

Are you giving up anything else? Drinking? Junk food? Sex?
No, no, still trying to cut down but indulging, and dear god no.

If you were on a desert island and could only survive by killing a pig to eat it, would you?
Tough call. I probably would. Hell, those plane crash victims in the mountains years back ate dead passengers to survive. The drive to live another day makes people do things they never thought they would, or could, do. Luckily, I’m afforded a lot more opportunities in everyday life. Here, now, I wouldn’t kill a pig to survive, because I don’t need to. Nor do I need to ask someone else to do it for me.

So does this mean you’re going vegan at some point? After all, dairy products and eggs, and such, come from animals, which must be farmed to some degree, and are therefore suffering to some degree for your overeasy or bowl of icecream.
Fair point. If I thought I could make it to that big a leap in one go, I probably would. As it is, I like milk, I like cheese and eggs, and I really like icecream. This change to vegetarianism by no means wholly clears my conscience as far as farmed animal welfare goes, but it’s now one helluva lot better than it was. As my best friend Alex puts it, small changes can make a big difference. And as a guy who’s turning 40 this year and who’s eaten meat all his life, I’d say becoming vegetarian would certainly count as a least a small change.

A philosophy isn’t an easy thing to change. We grow up being taught certain things (intentional or otherwise), believing certain things, and have opinions formed by interactions with the people in the world around us and our experiences - things that are right and wrong, things that should or shouldn’t be, and why.

It has long been my philosophy that while I’m a creative idea man - I have notebooks full of them, for everything from stories and characters to settings and isolated independent scenes, inspired at times by anything and everything I experience and hear - the fact that I see precious few of those ideas through to completion, always writing something only to be distracted, crow-like, by the sparkle of a new idea, means that I should protect what relatively little I do finish.

Protect it from what? In short, theft. Which sounds exceptionally egotistic put so bluntly, but truly isn’t so. My concern has never been that of course people will steal my material because it’s clearly so damn good, but rather that I’ve been writing stories of various kinds literally since I could put two sentences together, and so with a lifetime of writing to my credit and with a passion to make even a modest living writing my own material, that it would kill me if someone somewhere took any of my material and presented it as their own and had success with it when I hadn’t.

Then several years ago I came across the website of a friend of a friend (whose name I unfortunately no longer recall, with some embarrassment), who regularly posted new short story material on her site. It blew me away, in part that someone could crank out fresh material that quickly, but more because she was just laying it out there for anyone and everyone to see and for anyone and everyone to take. I contacted her in that regard: here’s my baggage, and aren’t you similarly concerned about people taking your ideas and using it for themselves? Her response was that she has more than enough ideas to go around, and that what she posted was the tip of the iceberg of her completed material arsenal. Intriguing!

Years later, part of my wanting a website of my own was to accomplish the same feat: to not only write stuff, but post it. This was around the same time I started pitching some of the feature-length scripts I’d been working on, so it was part and parcel with not just finishing material, but trying to start getting some attention for it and for myself. And you can’t do that by sitting on a (slowly growing) pile of finished material and not telling anyone who had the ability to do something with it; to make something of it and, over time and with some luck, of you.

That first point of the website failed when I found myself still unable (ok, unwilling) to post my material online. Same old reason. Despite the big steps toward going public with my stuff, I couldn’t quite step over the threshold and actually do it.

A few years later, cutting now to a scant month or two ago, I read an interesting, brief article which cited someone - I believe Cory Doctorow - who stated that writers shouldn’t fear pirates of their work, but should instead fear anonymity. An interesting outlook which truly struck a chord with me.

Then this last week, I followed a link from Bubble Cow on Twitter which hit even closer to home. Seth Godin’s point in his excellent article on how to protect your ideas in a digital age is to not protect them at all, but in fact get them out there as much as possible. You aren’t going to be successful keeping ideas all to yourself, but may find success in making a name for yourself as someone with a lot of ideas.

In that light, and inspired in part by Twitter followee Alan Baxter constantly posting and hyping new material, and by new followee Simon Later’s infectious love of writing and posting about it, my philosophy is at least in the process of changing, with a huge part of that being my taking that step over that threshold I spoke of.

My next post will be the first time I’ve let the public see a story I’ve entered in contests but have shown to precious few; my first #flashfriday entry; the first time I’ve posted something I was hoping to save for future print publication. And hopefully, far from my last.

I was listening to a podcast last week - called I Should Be Writing, which is excellent and should be checked out by anyone aspiring to write fiction - when I heard a commercial for The Amazing Meeting 7. It’s a conference on “critical thinking”, and says that among other things, it will “sharpen your skeptical skills”.

This is the second or third time in perhaps a year that this notion has been presented to me. A former was a podcast that had been recommended by some friends, which I found the urge to stop listening to in short order because it began with a group of guys sitting around and talking about how they’re all skeptics. Even more, they were lauding a member of their group (who wasn’t with them) who was, they all agreed, a great skeptic.

And I don’t get it. I don’t get the appeal of being actively skeptical. Certainly not of being a notably “great” skeptic. And really, how is being skeptical about everything you hear any better than believing everything you hear? How is one extreme better than the other?

Personally, I don’t know that any extremism of any sort is a mentally (nor physically) healthy thing.

Maybe it’s just me. I’ve certainly got a more temperate personality than many do, so extremism of any flavour isn’t big on my list of qualities, nor things I find appealing. And there’s doubtless an argument to be made for my spending a lot of time playing with story and character ideas in my head, so perhaps it’s just not in me to default to questioning if/how that this or that could actually happen so much as revel in the possibilities; enjoy the wide-eyed wonder of “what if”s.

Do we know everything? Of course not. We’re constantly building up our base of knowledge about ourselves and everything around us. So it smacks of hubris when “great skeptics” write off certain concepts as being impossible. Unproven is one thing. That it simply can’t ever be, or ever have been, the case is a whole other matter.

Do we know a lot about a lot? Absolutely. I just think that a healthy mind is one that’s open to possibilities and constant learning, even about things we think we know.

And for anyone who’d eschew the notion - dammit, we know what we know and what is and what isn’t - I’d remind you that at one time the best and brightest minds knew for a fact that Earth was the centre of the universe. Looking back, how foolish we were then…

So the race to be Toronto’s next mayor has begun. It was after David Miller folded and gave in to the Toronto Outside Workers Union’s recent strike demands - they who were on strike, who kept public pools closed, kept the island ferry shut down, and kept garbage from being picked up for several long, stinky weeks - that I’d concluded that his days as mayor were numbered. Not only would I be hard-pressed to name even one thing he’s done to benefit the city, but his standing firm against the union’s demands, having the bulk of the city’s population behind him, only to finally buckle and give the union most everything they wanted anyway, would seem to be his career’s death knell.

However, even more surprising than his giving into union demands after putting the city through weeks of smelly discomfort (and in the process losing untold millions from tourists who had caught wind of the city’s garbage woes and went elsewhere with their summer vacation dollars) was the announcement I heard last week: David Miller is throwing his hat into the ring and looking for re-election.

I’ve no idea who the other contenders are, but failing their being extremists or people with personal agendas the public finds particularly unpalatable, all I can say to you in your seeking another term, Mr. Miller, is good damn luck.

Holy CRAP! There are birds there now! It’s like they’re little winged heralds of irony, showing up mere minutes after I made that birdfeeder post.

Some little white and black-hooded birds came out of nowhere and started using the bird feeder, not only partaking in the (smaller) sunflower seeds from the side, but eating the seeds from the suet squares.

I don’t want to be an alarmist, but birds becoming eaters of meat byproducts may… MAY signify the end of days. Get the word out!

And if you have “beef, sheep, etc.” livestock, for the love of god, protect their loins and kidneys!

… I think toasted, buttered cinnamon raisin bagels and chocolate milk is the breakfast of champions.

That’s what I’m having, after all, and I’m a champion (in my head).

This is the first time I’ve sat in the home office and watched the bird feeder we put out on the back deck. It was a present from a friend of ours. It’s a pretty highbrow affair made of cedar, with a plastic-encased centre chamber for seeds, and two narrow fry basket-type deals on either end for suet and seed squares.

So there are these two little birds - they look like sparrows, but one is pretty red on the head and breast, so I’ve got no clue what they are - that have been hanging out on our deck lately. Thus far, it looks like they’ve only been sharpening their beaks on the berry bush beside the deck (so help me, that’s what it looks like) and eating the crusty snow on the deck railing. I wasn’t sure what they’re eating, but obviously they’re surviving on something. So I thought the bird feeder would be a big hit. In my typical cinematic way of envisioning things, I saw myself putting the bird feeder out and going back inside and turning around to see it alive with birds of all kinds looking to cash in on a free meal. Such wasn’t the case, of course.

So I’m sitting here and looking back there and it doesn’t look like there have been any takers yet, at least none taking any significant amount. And the two little birds just came by, sharpened their beaks on the bush branches, ate some snow, and then - finally - took notice of the bird feeder suspended over their heads. They went to check it out, and the first one up there, rather than noticing the tray of open seeds at its feet, looked like it clonked its head on the clear plastic siding, where all the seeds are stored. Apparently, birds aren’t caught up on the concept of clear plastic.

I was thinking, though, that the sunflower seeds we stocked in the centre silo may be too big for these birds anyway. It would be like a human getting a hamburger three feet wide. But the suet squares on the side cages of the feeder have various tiny little seeds in them. Much better for wee birds, I’d think.

But now I’m wondering about the medium. I could totally see interest in a pressed square of just seeds, but having suet as the glue holding them together? Isn’t suet some kind of animal fat? Yes. Ok. It is. I just looked it up. So offering birds the seeds they so desperately want in these lean winter days but only combined with “the hard fatty tissue about the loins and kidneys of beef, sheep, etc.” seems a bit of a cruel joke.

Birds, unless I’m totally off on my recollection, aren’t big on animal byproducts. Are flocks of sparrows ever seen swarming cows to get to that succulent kidney fat? Not that I’ve ever heard, which is pretty good news for cows (and really, with the lives they lead, any bit of good news will do…) So what makes people think that such a product would be a great substance to put seeds in for creatures that have no interest in it?

It strikes me as akin to marketing a treat product for cats that’s pieces of meat driven into a 2X4. Like, come on… it’s meat! Cats love meat! What does it matter what’s holding the meat together?

There’s also a distinct chance that I’m overthinking this. After all, the bird feeder industry’s been around an awful lot longer than I have, so presumably they’re onto something with the suet concept. All I know for sure is the empirical evidence that’s before me: wee birds who could use a good snack on these chilly days are going for the proverbial 3-foot hamburger instead of the smorgasbord of tiny seeds packed in (now frozen) animal fat.

More updates on this exciting topic to follow!

So I recently came across a publication called A Thousand Faces, which is geared to stories about real world (or perhaps more accurately, non-traditional-4-colour) superheroes. In the submissions, they mention that they want well-written stories which wouldn’t work if the superhero element were removed from them.

While smacking more than a bit of the TV show Heroes, it also struck me as a kind of cool idea to have anyone from anywhere write their own stories about their own characters, without adhering to an overall story arc.

I’ve come up with several story concepts to send in, of which I’ve nearly concluded one and have just started another.

Hopefully I’ll be able to pass along some good news on the publication front soon.