Goodbye to vegetarianism

So I've decided that I'm done being a vegetarian.

I'm in the middle of reading The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith, which offers a lot of compelling reasons for eating meat, plus a lot of evidence that agriculture is one of the most environmentally destructive practices humans have ever come up with. She addresses moral vegetarians, political vegetarians and nutritional vegetarians separately and offers reasons for each of those groups to stop eating meat. I've only read the moral chapter so far, but it resonated with me and lined up well with a lot of the thinking I've been doing over the past year or so.

I became a vegetarian in third grade because I thought the idea of killing animals for food was terrible. Over the years, my thinking shifted to more political reasons for being vegetarian. I said I would eat meat I caught or killed myself, but I didn't want anything to do with industrial meat production and factory farming. By the end of high school, I had decided I didn't think there was anything wrong with killing animals for food--that's a natural part of life. But, it is wrong to not treat those animals like animals when they're alive.

Meanwhile, I had been reading about sustainable farming in books like The Omnivore's Dilemma and visiting Thundering Hooves, a farm near Whitman that raises grass finished cows. These books convinced me that eating meat from producers who let their animals live the way nature intended was fine, but I still had no particular impetus to change my life. I figured it was easier to keep eating the way I had for the last decade than to do a bunch of research finding sustainable meat producers and bother the dining hall staff with questions about sourcing.

Except then I started thinking about the alternative. Tofu is the classic vegetarian protein, and while I don't eat a ton of it, I eat enough that I worry about how sustainable it really is. Tofu is always processed and packaged. It's shipped hundreds of miles to the stores I buy it in. The soy it comes from is grown as a large monocrop, often genetically engineered. Monocrops destroy topsoil. They destroy genetic diversity. Clearing land to grow them kills countless ecosystems and is a large contributor to deforestation in many developing countries.

Most veggie products are manufactured, packaged and owned by large food conglomerates. Kraft owns Boca burgers. ConAgra has a ton of "natural" food subsidiaries. Where do I want the money for my food to go? To them?

To be considered sustainable, something needs to be able to be sustained indefinitely. Eating outside my landbase is not sustainable. Eating food the landbase cannot support is not sustainable. Eating anything which gives Cargill, Kraft, Monsanto or ConAgra more money is not sustainable.

So last night, I had meat for dinner. Clive and I decided to make dinner, and we made it out of 100% organic ingredients derived from inside our state. We had squash, onion, garlic and pepper stir-fried with flank steak, plus a salad mix. All the veggies came from the farmer's market. The meat was from a butcher down the street who has grass finished natural meats and a book showing the farming practices of their various suppliers.

And here's the thing. It tasted like food. It tasted absolutely amazing. It tasted like hard work and love had gone into it, and it felt like a truly sustainable meal. And I decided--this is how I want to eat from now on.

So I'm not a vegetarian anymore. And I'm a little bit sad, mostly because I like that word. I like the idea of conscientiousness is conveys. I like having a label that means, "I think about what I eat."

I still won't touch factory farmed meat. I'm not going to eat meat all the time, and when I do, it's going to be the good stuff. But I want this to be a step towards making more of an effort to think about my food, instead of just assuming everything organic is sustainable or everything vegetarian is sustainable. But we need death to sustain our life. I'd rather that death was a cow that lived in a functioning pasture ecosystem instead of a few hundred acres of Brazilian rainforest.