Vegan month: the official verdict

My vegan challenge has been over for a few weeks now, but the usual chaos of school and being a reporter have prevented me from writing something about it. My apologies. Without further ado, here’s what I learned from a month of eating only plants. (Ok, plus a few food additive chemicals. No one’s perfect.)

The most surprising part of vegan month was that it was pretty damn easy. I’ve always heard vegans say that giving up eggs and dairy isn’t a huge deal, and I’d never really believed them. My twelve years of vegetarianism have largely been spent convincing die-hard meat eaters that it’s not that hard to go without. Still, something about the pervasiveness of dairy and eggs in our food had me convinced that going vegan is a challenge on an entirely different scale. Once I got in the swing of it, though, it wasn’t that hard. You do have to be more vigilant about what you eat, but I found that doing so is actually a pretty rewarding and healthful process.

One of the awesome things about being vegan was that it got me reading food labels in the grocery store. There were many times I picked up something to read the ingredients and double-check that it was vegan. Often, the item in question wouldn’t have any animal products, but would be full of oils, chemical additives or something else that made me pause and think. There were a lot of junk foods I ended up not buying, not because I couldn’t eat them, but because a closer look made me realize that I didn’t actually want to.

Another health benefit came from the challenge of finding vegan junk food. While it’s not that hard—potato chips and French fries are totally allowable—vegans are definitely pushed away from many of our worst offenders, like ice cream. I’ve noticed that gatherings with excessive amounts of junk food are a hallmark of both American culture and college life. Meetings, newspaper production nights and the like are often accompanied by a smorgasbord of pizzas, cookies, brownies and other sorts of sweet, fatty deliciousness. Most people eat a ton in these situations because they’re stressed and the food tastes good. Most people who pig out on junk food have eaten plenty of calories for the day—the junk food is a completely empty addition to the diet that isn’t nutritionally or calorically necessary. Because I couldn’t join in the pigging out, I ended up steering clear of a lot of excess food that I otherwise would have eaten. For me, this was the biggest benefit. I wish I could say that vegan month made me better about this, but since I’ve stopped being vegan, I’ve more or less returned to my usual cookie-inhaling ways.

Of course, not everything was perfect. My largest source of frustration with being vegan was that I became one of those people: obnoxious hipsters who go to the local sandwich place and stare pensively at the menu board for ten minutes before asking, “Do you guys have anything vegan?” I did this once and immediately hated myself so much that I swore off any further dining out, making an exception for Walla Walla’s relatively new vegan café, the Garden. I attended potluck brunches with friends and forgot to eat beforehand, an omission which left me lightheaded as I tried to walk home after a meal of orange juice and cantaloupe slices. I found myself turning down pastries offered to me by a visiting alum and realizing that there’s no way to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’m vegan” without sounding pretentious. This, of course, is about cultural associations with veganism rather than the diet itself. But the further you remove yourself from what society considers “normal” eating, the more you open your choices up to scrutiny.

The fear of being judged as a pretentious hipster and the difficulty in finding places which served vegan food made me more proactive about cooking meals. I planned days in advance, making giant pots of soup on Sunday nights and planning to eat leftovers all week. I solidified my repertoire of a few solid dishes—lentil soup, red lentil curry and chili. (I did manage to adhere almost perfectly to my no-soy-based-fake-meats-or-dairy rule, though I snuck a bite of two of my vegan housemate’s tofu stir-fry one time.) I essentially cemented my understanding of “food” as “home-cooked meal”, which was a welcome transition after spending a semester abroad and having little control over what I ate.

It’s a little hard for me to pin down the concrete effects being vegan had on my body. I got a cold midway through the month—nothing unusual in the winter—but took over a week to recover, which is a long time for me. However, I can’t attribute this to being vegan. It could just as easily have been a particularly nasty virus, the fact that I was overworked and stressed, a lack of vitamin C in my diet or some combination of factors. I definitely lost weight during this month, but a lot of that could have just been me shedding the fat that grew out of the insane quantities of rice consumed in Ecuador. Chester (the temperamental adolescent dragon who lives in my stomach) was also noticeably happier during vegan month than he had been in a while, though I think a lot of that was just transitioning back to the U.S. Though since I’ve started paying attention more to what sets him off, I’m starting to think I may be mildly lactose intolerant.

I  didn’t feel tired or lacking in energy during vegan month, though I did find myself craving food more, especially sweets. I’ve heard that this is pretty common, and that not feeling “full” leads vegans to snack a lot. I think this could have been managed perfectly fine if I’d decided to do this for longer and invest the time in monitoring my nutrients, but since it was only a month, I figured I wouldn’t kill myself if I just played it by ear.

Ultimately, I’m really glad I decided to try being vegan. I came in thinking I’d be miserable, and I found out that veganism is pretty damn legit. My usual rants about individual choice being an ineffective weapon for change still apply, but I think veganism actually can have health benefits, in the sense that it reduces junk food and fat consumption. This is something that could also be accomplished with good self-control, incidentally, but I personally find it harder to stick to rules I made up (don’t eat junk food) as opposed to rules that are part of a larger thing (be vegan). I’ve noticed a few permanent changes in my eating habits since then. I’ve stopped eating so much cheese, and my consumption of animal-product based meals has definitely declined. I’ve renewed my appreciation for lentils and beans as protein sources, and stopped making yogurt my default breakfast. I’m definitely eating less dairy overall and being more conscientious about what I do eat.

My next food challenge is going to be a month without processed foods or added sugar. I’m waiting until the summer, when I have the full bounty of summer harvest at my disposal, and my goal is going to be to eat almost entirely local stuff I buy at the Walla Walla Farmer’s Market. I think that my biggest health problem is my addiction to junk food, and while vegan month flirted with addressing it, real food month will hit it head on. I’m excited to report back.

Food showdown, part one: the vegan challenge

I’m headed back to Whitman tomorrow, and as soon as I get there, I’ll be starting my first food challenge for the year: one month being vegan.

I’ve been a vegetarian (or pescatarian, more accurately) for most of the last twelve years, with a brief hiatus this past year to travel (Ghana and Ecuador are not veggie-friendly countries) and explore the world of local, grass-fed beef (which is probably a better choice than processed soy in the long run). Being a vegetarian is incredibly easy for me—while I like the taste of meat, it’s not something I crave or feel that I need to be healthy. I get plenty of iron and protein from other sources, and I pretty much subsist on beans, lentils, yogurt and cheese. (I try to steer clear of soy because of its role in deforesting the Amazon, the way it’s usually grown in monocultures and the way it’s processed using a neurotoxin which can cause severe health problems in workers. But sometimes, you need to have pho or pad Thai.)

Being vegan is a whole different ballgame. I love cheese. It’s like, my favorite food. I recognize that being as outraged as I am by factory farming while conveniently ignoring where my cheese and yogurt come from is hypocritical, and I’ve tried to get better about that in the past year. While I’ll eat cheese when it’s served to me, I try to only buy happy local cheese when I’m in charge of my own food. But the majority of the animal products I do eat come from the same factory farmed sources I’m always complaining about.

I’ve gone into detail about my food philosophy a million times on this blog, but quick recap: I don’t think being vegan is particularly healthy for most people, I think framing veganism as the solution to factory farming is really disingenuous and alienating, I think the ability to be vegetarian or vegan is often a function of privilege (knowledge, cooking facilities, time, money) and I don’t think individual choices are a valid solution to anyenvironmental problems, especially not something as complicated as the industrial food juggernaut. BUT, I’m also a person who thinks and talks about food and food politics a lot, and if that’s a thing I’m going to be doing for my life, I think I should at least know what it’s like to actually be vegan. I figure a month is long enough that I’ll get an idea what it’s like and won’t just spend the entire time counting down to my next quesadilla, but short enough that I can stick it out without being miserable or unhealthy if it doesn’t agree with my body.

I’m interested in exploring how I feel during this month, especially since I’m following it with a no processed foods and no added sugar month (and then going back to being a regular pescatarian). As many of you know, I have an adolescent dragon named Chester who lives in my stomach and likes to throw temper tantrums and/or loud parties. So anything which makes his life a little easier works out well for me too. I’m going to be recording general impressions (do I feel healthy? full? hungry? craving certain foods? well-nourished?), as well as weight (I’m guessing I might lose weight, but probably not much, given that Tim’s Cascade Chips are vegan), energy levels and anything else different that I notice. My hope is that I’ll use this month to explore new recipes and come out of it with some healthier and more conscious eating habits. Stay tuned…

Back to veggie

After a year and a half of thinking about meat, I’ve made my decision. Starting when I get home from Ecuador, I’m going back to being a vegetarian.

When I first went vegetarian, I was in third grade. I was motivated by moral absolutism and fervent idealism. I believed that animals should not be killed to feed humans when we were clearly capable of living without taking life. Over the years, my reasons shifted to a general protest of factory farming. I read Fast Food Nation sometime in middle school and was so grateful that I was largely absolved of responsibility for the horrors described by Eric Schlosser as he toured slaughterhouses and food chemistry labs. I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals, the exploitation of a largely undocumented Latino workforce, the carbon emissions that come from beef, the overflowing waste lagoons that border CAFOs.

Now, I’m returning to the same label, but with a vastly different underlying ideology. I’m fully cognizant of the horrors of agriculture. I know soy is an environmental nightmare that’s clear-cutting Amazonian rainforest and supporting the Cargill-Monsanto empire. I know that the prairies of the American West have been destroyed to feed the world, that a field of wheat is ecologically no different from a barren, eroding hillside that was once home to an old-growth forest. I understand that animals are necessary for sustainable food production, because the only way we’re going to be able to keep feeding the world is with permaculture, designing systems based on natural processes. And I know that while Americans eat more meat than is healthy for them, humans were designed to eat flesh at least occasionally.

But I also know that the world isn’t black and white. I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs, that solutions aren’t as simple as they seem, that an action can be good, bad or somewhere in between depending on timing and context. And in the food system we have right now, I believe that eating meat does more harm than good for the world as a whole. Most animals, even happy local ones, are fed crops that are grown in the same problematic ways that cause so many environmental problems around the world. Unless they’re managed very specifically to avoid this, cows and other livestock have a dramatically larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. And because I have the means, knowledge and physiology to be a healthy vegetarian, I’m going to do it.

I’m switching back fully aware of another uncomfortable truth—my individual choice to be a vegetarian will never end factory farming. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the left demonstrates an ability to think beyond personal choices as a venue for activism. But I don’t believe that the impotency of our individual actions as tools for change absolves us completely from personal responsibility. I own a cell phone which contains coltane, a mineral that’s found mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has been ravaged by war and conflict for years, largely because of desires to control the country’s lucrative mineral resources. Would choosing to not buy a cell phone end the rape and murder that shapes the lives of so many people in the DRC? No. Does that mean that there is no blood on my hands? Absolutely not.

The modern world is rife with stories like this one, and the modern consumer is often painfully aware of the horrors they’re supporting. The socially conscious youth of my generation have been bombarded with guilt-inducing facts about sweatshops, toxic manufacturing processes, the horrors of resource extraction, climate change and social justice. We know that most things we buy are killing the planet, and we also know that trying to avoid buying anything problematic ever is nearly impossible without making a full time job of it. Most of us aren’t willing to invest the time and energy to be perfect—something I don’t believe is the mortal sin many would make it out to be—so we pick our battles, choose the few we really care about, and promise ourselves that we’ll work to build a better world to make up for it.

For me, factory farming is one of those battles. When I was eight, I didn’t want to be complicit in this system. Now, at twenty, I understand that even as a vegetarian, I’m still guilty. Even if I choose to go without meat, I’ve never done anything to challenge the industrial meat infrastructure, whether it’s liberating animals from a slaughterhouse or writing a letter to Congress asking them to make changes to the Farm Bill. Which isn’t to say that factory farming is our fault, collectively—the road to hell has been paved by a very specific set of people with very specific goals, and most of us weren’t among the lucky few. But as long as our society continues to say that these institutions and systems are acceptable, anyone who doesn’t exhaust every available effort and resource to stop them bears some of the burden for their existence. Plus, we (almost) all eat industrial agriculture. Even if you remove the burden of meat, I’m still complicit in pesticides and horrible labor conditions and absurd farm subsidies and the existence of Monsanto.

What this all boils down to is a vegetarianism based on premises of moral conflict rather than moral clarity. Last time I made this choice, I was saving the world. Now I know I’m not, but I’m still unable to close my eyes at the sight of a feedlot, unable to turn away and pretend I don’t know what I know when I eat. Part of me is humble, knowing my actions won’t make a dent in the problem. Part of me still craves the moral superiority of knowing that no animals are directly tortured to provide my food. Part of me wants to lecture and evangelize. Part of me is afraid to go back after tasting and loving my first steak (age 18), my first chicken breast (age 20) and my first bacon in over a decade. Part of me still can’t decide if fish are going to count, if I’m willing to give up my absolute favorite food (sushi) just to make a statement that almost no one will hear. I’ve spent hour after hour of my life thinking about these things. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while have seen me write the equivalent of a full-length novel about the ethics and politics behind meat production and vegetarianism. At the end of the day, though, my choice is simple. I think about cows lined up for slaughter, waiting to have a bolt driven through their brains before they’re hoisted up by one leg to have their throat slit, and something deep inside me just screams no. It’s not the most well thought out argument in the world. But for me, it’s enough.

Hacienda Ilitio: week one

I’ve completed my first (of two) weeks working on an Ecuadorian permaculture farm. As it turns out, my fears in the last post about starving to death were completely unfounded—this week has involved some of the best overeating I’ve ever done in my life. I’m spending the weekend in Baños, which is a super-touristy town in the Central Sierra region of Ecuador. Plans for tomorrow include hiking and some Spanish lessons, plus writing and working on my archive of Semester in the West journal entries, which I’m going to be putting up on the blog sometime soon.

I’m too tired to post anything philosophical about agriculture, so, in no particular order, here’s a list of stuff I’ve done this week:

1) Spent twenty-five hours harvesting oats by hand. As a result, I now have four slivers and three callouses on my hands, plus a ridiculous farmer’s tan.

2) Milked a cow, then drank the milk from said cow less than ten minutes later.

3) Witnessed a burro escape from its fenced-in field three times in the same day. This is the same burro that apparently tried to eat its own child, and is consequently in solitary confinement with three horses that seem to think the burro is an inferior creature. Needless to say, this is the saddest looking burro I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, because I love Winnie the Pooh.

4) Lived in the shadow of Mt. Cotopaxi, which is one of the most active volcanoes in the region, if not the world.

5) Eaten enough fried yucca and fried plantain to give at least three people heart attacks.

6) Baked bread without a recipe in a wood-burning oven.

7) Drank raw alpaca milk. Which is less fatty than cow’s milk, and consequently less delicious. But still. RAW FUCKING ALPACA MILK! So many foodie points.

8) Watched Sebastian, the owner/manager of the farm, make cheese from fresh milk. Then we got to take some of the non-aged cheese. Which basically tastes like if you took raw milk and then made it even more awesome by adding salt and stuff.

9) Seen quinoa growing in its native habitat. Quinoa is actually an incredibly gorgeous plant—bright red-pink flowery on really tall stalks.

10) Fallen in love. His name is Santiago. He’s very tall and handsome. I’ve been told that he’s half llama and half alpaca, but I’m still not clear on the difference between the two. Anyway, he’s white and gorgeous and I want to take him home with me.

Local isn't about the carbon footprint

I just posted my problems with the local movement, namely that a focus on choosing local foods can ignore the fact that the same crops have very different environmental impacts when grown in different places. That said, I’m a huge believer in eating locally. I’ve heard some criticisms of the local food movement recently that have bugged me because they seem incomplete, so I want to address them.

The most common criticism of local eating that pops up on various blogs has to do with carbon emissions. Some people claim, as the Freakonomics blog crew did a while ago, that the efficiencies of large-scale agriculture can mean that stuff shipped in from really far away actually has a smaller carbon footprint than local food. They tell you to picture one large steamship or cargo plane compared with dozens of inefficient diesel pickups driven by individual farmers.

The other carbon footprint argument is made by people comparing the transportation footprint of food to the production footprint of meat. Because of the huge amount of greenhouse gases released by animals, particularly cattle, eating meat and dairy gives you a much bigger carbon footprint than eating food shipped halfway across the world to your plate. Sometimes, this argument ends with the claim that if we really care about saving the world and reducing our impact, we should go vegetarian or vegan instead of worrying about local food.

I have two big problems with the carbon footprint argument. One: it’s not uniformly accurate. The generalizations that are relied on to make claims like, “x produces more carbon emissions than y” mean that those statements have to be taken with a grain of salt. The carbon footprint of a piece of food depends on literally thousands of factors—what it is, where it was grown or raised, where the water to irrigate it came from, how power is generated in the area it’s grown, how it was shipped and how it was packaged, just to name a few. Cows can be managed in such a way that they increase the organic content of soil, meaning the soil sequesters carbon and the beef being produced has a greatly reduced or negative footprint. I’m willing to concede that most of the time this isn’t the case, but to generalize about “the carbon footprint of beef” ignores the reality of farmers who are working hard to do it right. There’s simply no accurate way to know the exact footprint of anything, especially if you don’t know the person who produced it.

Secondly, these arguments are assuming that the only point of eating local is reducing your carbon footprint. A lot of foodies care about that, but most of us have other reasons we want to eat locally too. I personally don’t care much about my individual carbon footprint—I’m much more worried about the Keystone XL pipeline and stopping coal plants from being built than agonizing over how many cow farts it takes to destroy the planet. For me, local foods are about community. Buying directly from farmers keeps money in my area, where it has a greater multiplier effect. It supports hardworking average people, rather than shareholders and executives at big supermarkets. It allows me to have the awesome experience of strolling through the farmers’ market with no shopping list and buying weird-looking vegetables on impulse because the farmer who grew it was right there and told me how she cooks it at home.

Local foods are a function of privilege and wealth, and they’re yet another indicator of the sad fact that low-income people are much less likely to have access (geographically and financially) to healthy, fresh food, much less the time and knowledge required to cook it. As far as I’m concerned, this is the biggest problem with the local food movement. Choosing local can’t be called a choice if most people aren’t in a position to make it.

Ultimately, though, we need local. If we’re going to live on this planet well into the future, we’re going to have to do a better job of building resilient communities where members support each other. We’re going to have to grow more food closer to where we eat it and pay better attention to taking care of our soil and water. Local isn’t about carbon footprints. It’s much, much bigger than that. It’s about nothing less than reshaping our entire relationship to food.

Sometimes, this sounds like a daunting task to me. But then I remember that the current food infrastructure hasn’t been in place for very long. My great grandma knew how to can food. My grandma remembers what real tomatoes taste like and doesn’t want to buy the ones in the supermarket because she says they’re just not the same. Another world is possible, and its close relatives have existed in living memory. Industrial food on this scale is a post-World War II invention, and the seeds of resistance began sprouting a few decades ago, when organic food became a thing. I spent much of my time hopelessly depressed, lamenting the state of the world and politics and social injustice. But food is one thing that leaves me smiling. We’re up against the biggest, most entrenched special interests in the history of civilization. But time, dedication and ecology are on our side. It’s going to be hard, but we’ll get there. And when we do, there won’t be bloggers asking questions about whether local food makes sense, because local will be the new normal.

Beyond local

Note: This is a column I wrote for the Pioneer last fall while I was on Whitman's Semester in the West program. The column can also be found on the Pioneer website. I'm planning to post in the next few days about some common reasons people argue against local food and why they're missing the point, but I thought it would be relevant to post my own critique of the local idea, as well some thoughts on the shortcomings of food package labels.

The importance of eating local foods has been a prominent theme in the environmental movement for the past few years. Eating local makes sense for many reasons—buying close to home is a way to connect people to the farmers who grow their food, and a shorter transportation distance generally means fewer carbon emissions. As we develop local food systems, however, it is critical to remember that not all crops are created equal.

Consider California. About half of our nation’s fruits and vegetables are grown here, mostly in irrigated valleys which rely on the importation of water. In Southern California, much of this water comes from the Colorado River, which has been dammed dozens of times to provide cheap water for the desert farms and metropolises of the American West. California has the largest share of the Colorado’s water, and it uses about 80% of what it takes to irrigate crops. Unfortunately, the Colorado is overallocated—shared between seven states and Mexico, depended on to feed the growth of Las Vegas and Phoenix and subject to increased water loss as climate change warms the West. With water shortages looming on the horizon, California’s farmers may move to mining groundwater, pumping it from underground aquifers at rates that will take centuries to replenish.

A concerned environmentalist living in Los Angeles could easily find local produce to eat. Go to the supermarket, and you’ll find California-grown avocadoes, tomatoes, oranges, carrots and artichokes. But how sustainable is it to eat vegetables grown in a semi-desert with water pumped to them from hundreds of miles away? If local eating requires taking so much water from the Colorado that its waters have failed to reach the ocean for the last three decades, what are we accomplishing?

This is not to say that local foods aren’t a worthwhile goal. On the contrary, some degree of local food production is essential for solving climate change. But locovores need to do more than look at the distance their food has traveled to get to their plate. The same food produced in two different climates can have dramatically different environmental effects. Cattle grazed on Virginia pastures, where it rains, are good for the land and can easily be rotated between pastures to allow grasses to regrow. Cattle grazed in the desert canyonlands of Utah trample biotic soil crusts, increase soil erosion and allow non-native plants to take over the ecosystem. If you live in Utah and want to eat beef, getting it from Virginia might be the more sustainable choice.

Environmentalists are used to screening food by labels. If something is organic, local, grass-fed or all-natural, it’s automatically assumed to be better for our health and the Earth. If we want to succeed in building a more sustainable food system, we need to move beyond these labels and look at the actual impacts our food has on the land it’s grown on. If a crop can be grown in the area where you live without pumping a river dry, building a dam to divert subsidized irrigation water or permanently depleting the soil of its nutrients, it’s a good candidate for sustainability. If not, get it from somewhere that can grow it sustainably or go without it.

Obviously, this approach is not universally applicable—many crops are unsustainable no matter where they are grown, and there isn’t enough choice or transparency in our food system to answer all of these questions. Being in a place to consider your food choices this carefully is a function of education, environmental awareness and affluence, all of which are privileges many people don’t share. But to the extent it’s possible, everyone who cares about the health of the planet needs to ask difficult questions when they to go the store or sit down for dinner. Looking at the package will never tell you everything you need to know about your food. Talk to the farmer, learn what grows well where you live and pay attention to what you’re supporting when you buy food. Our existence on this planet depends on its ability to produce food for us. We need to start taking better care of it.

The meat question (an update)

After stumbling across this story last week, I realized I’ve been skirting the meat issue a bit on this blog, so I thought I’d take some time to address where I currently stand.

I’ve read a ton of articles arguing for or against meat. My final podcast from Semester in the West touched on the fact that the label “grass-fed” alone doesn’t say much about the impact meat has, just as “organic”, “free range” and “natural” can mean next to nothing. Even when you look behind that label, sides aren’t always clear. I’ve heard people argue that cows contribute more to climate change than the entire transportation industry. I’ve heard people say that cows can sequester carbon and have a net positive impact on climate when raised properly. Killing animals is wrong, but monoculture agriculture kills animals (and people) too. Ranches destroy habitat. Ranches save land from being bulldozed and developed. And with China and India’s rising middle class, the decision that a handful of largely privileged Americans make to go without meat isn’t going to tip the scale, change the world or end factory farming.

I think everything I’ve read, all the arguments I’ve had with my strongly vegan friends and my militantly pro-meat environmentalist friends, can best be summed up by this article’s title: Reasonable People Disagree About Eating Meat.

After flip-flopping for a while on meat’s environmental impacts on Semester in the West, I basically came to the conclusion that eating animals does more harm than good for the planet and the food systems I want to see. Major exceptions to this generalization would be game animals (shooting a deer sucks for the deer, but doesn’t do much harm to the planet since the deer was wild and would have existed independent of your desire to eat it) and animals raised at home (me having goats in my backyard and feeding them food scraps seems unlikely to destroy the planet). Given that I don’t own a gun or know how to hunt, and the fact that Whitman College has a policy banning pets which can’t survive being submerged under water for at least ten minutes, neither of these options seems to be feasible in the near future. On the flip side, I’m well aware that factory farmed meat is an ecological nightmare for literally dozens of reasons. So when I refer to eating meat, I mean meat produced by someone else in a grass-fed, contentious way (think Thundering Hooves or Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm).

My reasoning behind this came largely from the energy, water and oil needed to grow hay and other feed crops for cows (even grass-fed ones), the global warming issue and the fact that grass-fed cows don’t seem to be scalable to the extent required to feed growing world demand. Yet even after concluding this, I kept eating meat. Not much (1-2 times per month), only local beef, and never anything factory farmed. But still: I wasn’t a pescatarian/vegetarian anymore.

Where do I stand now? Basically, in a number of somewhat contradictory places:


-I believe that eating meat on average does more harm than good for the planet as a whole.

-I don’t believe that raising animals specifically for the purpose of killing them for food is wrong. I do object to not treating those animals like living beings who can feel pain while they’re alive. I believe we have a responsibility to be decent to each other (humans and non-humans alike), and that that responsibility is all the more true for a living being you’re intending to eat. I also believe we have a responsibility to ensure the continued survival of the communities of any living things we’re eating (whether they’re plants or animals)—traditional salmon fishing tribes in the Pacific Northwest made damn sure salmon didn’t go extinct from overfishing.

-Animals are an essential component of sustainable agriculture; without them, you don’t have fertilizer (except the kind made from fossil fuels). So some animal involvement in food production is necessary, but eating those animals doesn’t necessarily follow, and even if it did, those animals wouldn’t come close to satisfying global demand for meat.

-While I didn’t grow up eating meat and don’t “need” it, there are occasionally times in my life when eating a small piece of dead cow satisfies me in a way no other food would at that moment. Beyond feeling full, I feel nourished, which means I’m much less likely to binge on chips and cookies later.

-Dairy production is almost as environmentally destructive as meat production, and it seems like avoiding the issue to examine meat in this much detail without critically examining industrial dairy production as well.

-Given that my individual choices won’t change anything, I’m fine being 100% non-vegetarian while traveling, for the sake of cultural immersion (you can’t sample traditional Ghanaian cuisine very extensively as a vegetarian), sensitivity to hosts (if a Ghanaian/Ecuadorian/insertothercountryhere-ian has graciously prepared food for me out of an income which is several orders of magnitude below mine, the last thing on earth I want to do is refuse said food because of reasons that have more to do with American industrial agriculture than anything else) and practicality (with language and cultural barriers and the lack of familiar foods available in Ghana, finding something that’s safe to eat, filling and enjoyable is hard enough without excluding meat from the list). That said, I still get vegetarian food whenever possible, mostly because after 12ish years of eating that way, a lot of meat just weirds me out.

-While my individual choices won’t matter, there are ripple effects to any behavior. The increasing use of the label “vegetarian” has caused a whole lot of people to re-think their meat consumption who otherwise might not have. And as a vocal person who thinks, talks and blogs about food, I feel responsible to set some kind of good example about what I eat. So even if I’m ultra-conscientious about when I do eat meat, my visible choice to eat it at all lends support to the idea that eating meat is ok, which is not true 99% of the time given our current food system. While the screening processes and limits I have are clear to me, they’re often not to outside observers. I got home from Semester in the West and had various relatives, who had read all my blog entries about meat/food, offering to take me to steak dinners. When I explained that I wouldn’t be able to eat anything there, I got responses like, “But you eat meat now!” The fact that yes, technically I did, but only beef and only from one ranch in Eastern Washington took about five minutes of explanation.

Given all this, I’m not sure what to do when I’m back in the US. The fact that my one sustainable ranch, Thundering Hooves, has closed, adds to the quandary. Since I won’t really be home for more than a month until January, I’m not going to worry too much about choosing a “side” or finding an acceptable middle ground. I do know that I want to look much more critically at dairy and egg production, which will probably provoke another dozen blog entries. But until then, I’ll keep eating my way through the menu at Koforidua’s famous Linda Dor restaurant—meat included.

Sustainable agricultural development

Over the past two weeks, I’ve read a bunch of articles written by African agricultural experts, and talked to government officials and NGO representatives about the best way to develop Ghana’s agricultural sector. Most of the experts seem to agree about a few basic points, namely that Ghanaian agriculture suffers from low productivity due to low soil fertility and farmers using sub-optimal practices and insufficient inputs for their crops. Common problems include a lack of irrigation (which restricts growing to the rainy season), the small/inefficient size of farms (85-90% of cultivated land is on farms of two hectares or less), lack of fertilizer and pesticide use, and farmers using saved seeds rather than hybrid, improved varieties. (Improved seeds, incidentally, are not the same thing as genetically modified seeds. They’re just seeds bred for certain climatic conditions; GM seeds are effectively illegal in Ghana due to government regulations and the amount of time it takes to get new seeds approved by the government.)

With problems defined this way, most agricultural strategy I’ve come across, both from the Ghanaian government and assorted NGOs, seems to focus on building a more industrial agricultural system. Publications point out that the vast majority of Africa’s farmers are subsistence level (1% of the US population farms, and these farmers grow a surplus of food; meanwhile, 70ish% of Ghanaians farm and the country still imports staples like rice). As far as I can tell, this is seen as a bad thing. Most strategies for agricultural development suggest that the way forward involves larger farms, fewer farmers, more efficient distribution, irrigation, increased fertilizer use and improved seed varieties.

Certainly, the desire to increase agricultural productivity makes sense. The world population continues to grow, and more and more people are thinking, talking and writing about the coming food crisis and what it will mean. The world needs to grow enough to feed everyone who’s here, plus the 3 billion people who are coming by the end of the century. Inequality of distribution is a huge part of the picture, as are the inefficiencies of meat production (industrial/factory farmed animals, which account for virtually all meat production, are fed about nine calories of soy or corn for every calorie of their meat we end up eating).

I’m not convinced, though, that the agricultural strategy being pursued by the international development community is the best way to do this. Some inefficiencies in Ghanaian agriculture are well worth addressing: farmers could make better use of organic fertilizers if they were priced more affordably and distributed more efficiently, for example. But the tone of the policy documents I’ve read seems to suggest that Ghana (along with other African countries) needs to modernize quickly and move people away from farming if it wants to lift its people out of poverty. This isn’t a bad idea in moderation, but if you take it to its logical conclusion, you’re going to end up with a food system like the US. Which, to my mind, is not a good thing.

American agriculture is incredibly efficient. It’s very good at getting cheap food to people, and has allowed us to grow into a country where poor people are often obese. Many American diets are deficient in critical nutrients, but almost all have enough calories to keep people from starving.

This is the success story that the architects of American agricultural policy like to tell, but it comes with a lot of external costs which we’re becoming increasingly familiar with. E.coli, bird flu, cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, animal torture, substandard agricultural working conditions and identical tomatoes which can be shipped across the country but don’t taste like anything—these are all costs we pay for cheap food. We don’t pay consensually, or often knowingly, but we do pay, sooner or later.

There’s a huge debate about whether or not cheap food is worth it. Industry and government reps have been known to defend the system, saying that these risks are exaggerated and the alternative—starving masses—is worse. I believe we have other choices, and there’s been a good amount of research showing that organic farming techniques can produce as much or more food than their industrial counterparts. But ultimately, it’s a pointless debate to have. Cheap food is built on oil. Agricultural chemicals are petroleum- based, synthetic fertilizers require oil to produce, and huge transport distances are unsustainable in a world with finite oil reserves. There’s debate about how long we have left, but we’re using up a finite resource, which means we’re going to run out eventually. And when we get close—when oil prices go up, and instead of spiking, they keep climbing—food is going to be expensive. This has already started to happen around the world, and I don’t think it’s going to stop anytime soon.

So in a world of uncertainty, with rising food prices, it makes sense to grow more food. But it also makes sense to be cautious, to build models that are resilient and sustainable in addition to being high-yielding. For Ghana, it will probably mean improved seeds, better irrigation technologies, more organic fertilizer and fewer farmers. But that doesn’t have to mean emulating the US’s industrial system. It doesn’t have to mean growing cash crops for export, like cocoa, at the expense of crops which are consumed locally. Right now, I can walk two blocks from the Burro office to the Koforidua market and buy pineapples, cassava, yam, tomatoes, onions, ginger, garlic, oranges, limes, lemons, eggs, peppers, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers and eggplant, all of it grown locally by small farmers. You’d be hard-pressed to find this much local variety in any American supermarket, even in California. I believe that Ghana, and other developing countries, will be able to figure out a way to meet the challenges facing their agricultural producers. But I also hope that the changes required won’t replace the Koforidua market with something that looks like Wal-Mart or Safeway.

Poverty and food choice

A quick note, before I get started: this is by far the most important post I’ve ever written. It’s also quite long, since it’s a summary of most of my thinking about poverty and food choices from the past year or so. This stuff is incredibly important to me, so I hope you’ll take the time to read the whole thing and let me know what you think. Thanks :)

Why do poor people eat unhealthy food?

This question has been analyzed to no end by a variety of people, most of whom are rich, privileged and white (for an excellent take on privilege in the food movement, see Racialicious). I am all of the above, to be sure, but I still want to share my insights on this topic. I spent an hour or two every week from age 5 to 13 volunteering at a food bank. I’ve worked at a major grocery store for the past two years. I volunteer at the Walla Walla co-op. Food and food politics, whether consciously or unconsciously, has been what much of my life is about. I’m pretty set on writing my thesis about some of these issues, but I want to take a stab at addressing it all now, based on my current understanding.

This post has been a long time coming. I’m aware that there are problems inherent with people in my position addressing this question, and with the question itself. Framing the issue this way essentially comes off as “why do poor people make bad choices?”, which places blame on people who have virtually no control over the food system. When I talked to my advisor (Aaron Bobrow-Strain, a Whitman politics professor who focuses on food politics) about doing my thesis on this topic, he suggested that I focus more on the food industry and larger systems. He felt, and rightly so, that by framing the question as an individual choice, I was reinforcing ideas about deservingness in social policy (eg. poor people aren’t “worthy” of food stamps if they’re going to make these unhealthy choices) and further scrutinizing the choices of poor people in a way rich people are never subjected to. But it’s precisely because the issue is so often framed as a choice low income people make that I want to address it. As I talk about these issues, I’m invariably going to display my own privilege, bias and ignorance. I’ve tried to be open about the assumptions I’m making, my background and my experiences, so feel free to call me out on anything you think is wrong or incomplete.

I should clarify that I’m not talking about food deserts (if you’ve unfamiliar with the concept, see here for a personal take and here for a NYT article). Obviously, in situations where people have no access to healthy foods, they’re not going to eat them. I could write another post entirely about why food deserts exist and how we should go about fixing them, but I’ll save that for later. Food deserts are clearly an issue of access, not individual choice. I’m fairly certain that my life will be spent working to eliminate them, but for now, I want to talk about supermarkets.

In the store where I work, we sell fresh produce and other healthy foods—beans, lentils, cheese, etc. So access (in the sense of geographical proximity) to healthy foods isn’t the issue. After two years behind the checkstand, I’ve become convinced that what many people eat, regardless of income, is not very healthy. However, I’ve also noticed a definite correlation between income and food choices. There are some items that primarily seem to be purchased by people receiving food stamps, such that I will frequently look at a shopping cart and think, “This customer is probably on food stamps.” Nine times out of ten, I’m right.

Some of this is no doubt due to my own imperfections and biases. I’m much more likely to remember the carts piled high with junk food that are paid for with food stamps and to forget the less frequent instances when people who are not visibly low-income buy the same things. Equating food stamps with class misses a lot of low income people anyway, since not everyone is on food stamps, and not everyone who is pays with food stamps every time they go to the grocery store. And I’m absolutely biased. Walla Walla is about 20% Latino, and many Latinos in the area are farmworkers, a job which rarely pays well. That, combined with the fact that many (but not all) of my regular Latino customers are on food stamps and many (but not all) buy a lot of junk food, leads me to lump most of my Latino customers into the low income group, which is probably not a wholly accurate assumption. This is the clearest example I can think of, but I’m sure there are other instances where I’ve been biased in my assumptions.

However, I’m fairly sure I’m not wrong about my underlying point. It’s been well-documented that low income people and people of color have higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, and that much of this has to do with food. There have been enough laments by well-meaning foodies to the effect of “How do we get poor people to make better choices?” that I feel ok saying that my experiences behind the checkstand confirm a larger societal trend, albeit one that’s often addressed in insufficient, paternalistic ways which rely on stereotypes of the poor (something I’ll get to in a minute).

So back to the original question: why do poor people eat the way they do?

Many of the social factors that create food deserts shape the “choices” low-income people make in supermarkets. Grocery stores assume poor people don’t have the money to buy their products, so they avoid low income areas; meanwhile, in areas where poor people do have access to grocery stores, they often can’t afford produce and other healthy foods. Before I went into the grocery business, I thought cost was the entire issue. For sheer caloric value, it’s hard to beat ground beef that costs 99 cents a pound, or $1 bargain frozen entrees. You can buy white bread for less than a dollar a loaf; meanwhile, good loaves of whole grain bread are $4.19 when they’re not on sale. Cost is a huge issue. The US subsidizes corn and wheat such that processed carbohydrates, sugar and factory farmed meat are almost always the cheapest ways to get full.

After a few months behind the checkstand, most of the evidence I had observed supported the cost theory. When produce goes on a huge sale (like 50 cent mangos or $1 bell peppers), everyone buys more of it, including low income people. And the produce items I see bought with food stamps tend to be whatever’s cheapest at the time (often bananas). So there’s a clear price elasticity of demand with produce and other healthy foods.

But cost isn’t the full story. It’s a nice, simple explanation, and I wanted it to work for everything, but it clearly doesn’t. A glaring piece of evidence contradicting my cost theory, at least in my eyes, was soda. People drink a ton of soda. Across all income levels (as far as I can tell), many, many people buy way more soda than I thought was possible. And people buy more when it’s cheaper, to be sure. Soda is often disgustingly cheap. Two liters of generic brand soda are frequently on sale for 69 cents. You can get four twelve packs of Coke for $13.98 when they’re on sale, and when not on sale, generic soda twelve packs cost $3 or $4. Soda is frequently cheaper than bottled water, which defies all logic I know of (except capitalist logic, in that people are willing to pay more for bottled water, I suppose).

Even controlling for all these factors, buying large quantities of soda is a pretty good predictor of whether someone is on food stamps, at least in my experience. When I first noticed this, it seemed incredibly illogical to me, largely because of my background. I was raised in a family where soda was never in the house, and the only time I had a can was at special occasions (like family reunions, where I could usually avoid Mom’s watchful eyes long enough to get into the cooler), or on airplanes. Soda was simply not a part of my life in any significant way, so I viewed it as a non-essential item. It’s not addictive, like cigarettes, and it’s incredibly unhealthy when consumed in the quantities that people seem to purchase it in. Buying it at all made no sense to me, but buying it when you couldn’t afford to feed your family seemed like throwing money away.

I’ve talked about the soda issue with a few friends, and seeing people’s reactions has been really interesting. Several friends of mine (liberal, pro-social welfare people) have expressed shock that soda is covered on food stamps at all. I’ve heard things to the effect of, “If they want to buy that crap, fine, but we shouldn’t be paying for it.” Underlying this belief, I think, is the idea that by excluding soda from food stamps, we can make a statement that we, as a society, don’t believe that this food is good for you, the recipients of social welfare. In short, we will educate the ill-informed poor people about making healthy nutritional choices.

I waffled on this for a while. I know from talking to friends and coworkers on food stamps that they don’t cover anyone’s actual food for the entire month. Almost all of the time, people and families on food stamps end up paying for some of their food out of pocket. Given that, it seemed like excluding soda wouldn’t actually damage anyone’s finances much, since they’d be paying for some food anyway, and it might encourage them to switch to healthier beverage options. But if you ban soda, where do you draw the line? Are juices with tons of added sugar ok? What about energy drinks (also currently allowed)? Vitamin Water? Otter Pops? Chocolate milk with high fructose corn syrup added (aka virtually all chocolate milk)? The slippery slope argument seemed like a good reason to avoid bans, not to mention the fact that food lobby groups would never let a soda ban go through in the first place.

Beyond the logistics of banning soda, though, I began to think about the assumptions made when people talk about a ban on certain types of food. No one was talking about programs forcing rich people to reduce their soda consumption, so health couldn’t be the only reason. The idea behind the food stamp program is consumer choice—people whose incomes are low enough that they can’t afford to feed themselves and their families receive help from the government in order to make up the difference. Yet in practice, we’re deeply uncomfortable with extending the poor the same level of choice we give the rich. If a rich person wants to spend their money on soda, lottery tickets, or cigarettes, that’s their choice because they’ve earned the money. But if a poor person takes government money, we still see that money as “ours”. Because it came from our taxes, we feel entitled to dictate policy. And while food stamps is, in theory, an income support program, it provides well-meaning people the opportunity to tell the uneducated poor what they should and shouldn’t be eating.

[[Somewhat tangential, but still interesting: This paternalistic approach underlies the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, the other large government food assistance initiative. Food stamps provides people with a fixed amount each month which can be spent on any food items (alcohol is not a food, but just about anything else you can eat or drink is fair game). In contrast, WIC aims to provide nutritious foods to low-income mothers and their children, ages 0-5. This is accomplished via a series of vouchers, which specify certain quantities and types of food which may be purchased. A standard WIC check lists the following things: 2 gallons of milk (organic not allowed), 36 oz. breakfast cereal, one dozen white eggs, one 64 oz. plastic bottle of juice and one pound of domestic cheese. Other checks provide for fresh produce, baby food or formula, peanut butter, dried lentils or beans and whole grain breads. This list, of course, is as much a produce of agribusiness lobbying as it is a true reflection of healthy foods for mothers and young children.]]

The other assumption underlying our scrutiny of food stamps is that poor people are ignorant of proper nutrition and simply lack the information to make good choices for themselves. This is no doubt true in some cases, and applies to people who are not poor as well. Many people could stand to make better nutritional choices (myself included), and many people would benefit from education about healthy foods. But to simply write the soda issue off as a lack of education seemed simplistic and patronizing. If a few low income families consistently buy soda and drink it all the time, maybe they could use some education. When (almost) everyone does it, there’s something bigger going on.

I came across a great blog post which provided a very interesting explanation. Sadly, I no longer have the link, but the gist of the argument was that food insecurity is responsible for many of the “unhealthy” choices poor people make. If you’re not sure where your next meal is coming from, you’re going to feel like you’re constantly on the brink of starvation, which means you’re going to eat as much as you can when you can. As a matter of evolutionary survival, you’re going to go after foods which are high in sugar and fat, because that’s what will fill you up quickly and provide the most energy.

I thought this argument made sense, but it seemed a little far-fetched to attribute so much of what I see at work to evolutionary responses to hunger and stress. And then, finals week hit. Finals week, of course, is a very stressful and busy time. I was working constantly, and even when I didn’t have tangible work to do, I was just thinking about all the tests I still had to take and papers I still had to write.

Guess what I ate during finals week? Soda, ginger beer, salt and vinegar chips, cookies, sweet bread and (occasionally) kale or salad greens, because I felt bad about all the sugar and fat. But when I’m at my most stressed, I pile on the unhealthy food. Consistently, throughout the semester, I ate the most and the unhealthiest on Wednesday nights, because Wednesday is production night for Whitman’s newspaper.

Being poor is incredibly stressful. You have to worry about putting food on the table, paying rent and scraping together some money for unexpected problems (a medical bill or a car repair). You’re one paycheck away from being broke, and you have no safety net to fall back on.

It’s also exhausting. In spite of what Reagan and his administration seemed to think, almost all poor people work—often multiple jobs with long hours. Many of my coworkers are on food stamps, because we simply aren’t paid enough to live on. (Starting checker wages are $8.77 an hour, ten cents above minimum wage, which works out to about $8 an hour after Medicare and Social Security come off. If you pay income tax, you get even less. And we have to pay $50 per month in union dues.) Once you factor in unpaid lunch breaks and taking the bus to and from work, a full 8-hour shift can easily eat up ten hours of your day, eight of which are spent standing up in a small, confined space. And when I get home from work after a full day, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour cooking a healthy meal from scratch. So yes, lentils and dried beans may be the cheapest way to feed a family. But they’re not a realistic option for many people working low wage jobs. Add in the fact that knowing how to cook fresh vegetables or dried beans is not self-evident, and might require research, and frozen entrees make a lot of sense.

These generalizations are just that: general. This doesn’t apply to all low income people everywhere, and many low income people are trying to make healthy food choices to the extent that they’re able to do so. But I believe those people are the exception, not the rule.

How, then, can we encourage people to make healthier food choices? Education is important, certainly—people aren’t going to cook something if they have no idea how to do it or don’t know that it might be beneficial. But education won’t solve the problem, or even come close. In order to ensure equality of access of healthy foods, I think we need fundamental changes at a societal, not an individual, level.

First, we need to break the stranglehold that agribusiness has on our political system and provide alternative food options. A variety of people have discussed this issue in depth, and usual solutions include ending or reducing subsidies for corn and other unhealthy foods, subsidizing fresh produce, getting food stamps and WIC accepted at farmer’s markets, increasing access to farmer’s markets and community gardens in low income areas. These are all great ideas. But I think we need to do more.

After two year behind a checkstand, I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not going to be able to solve the unhealthy foods issue without going after poverty itself. Alternatives are great, but people need to be in a position to take advantage of those alternatives. People need to be able to come home from work and not spend the evening worrying if they’ll be able to feed their children breakfast before school. People need to know that an accident or serious illness in the family won’t cause them to lose their home. Low income people make choices about what to eat, but those choices are made within the context of a system in which few options are really possible. It’s not as simple as getting people to make different choices. It’s about expanding the range of choices people have. It’s not about dictating what the poor should eat through policy. It’s about creating a system where people have agency to truly choose for themselves.

Agricultural chemicals, population and environmental justice

I’ve been researching the agricultural inputs market in Ghana for my internship, and I’ve realized just how easy it is to buy agricultural chemicals here. Within a block of the Burro offices are at least two shops selling a variety of pesticides—everything from organochlorate insecticides, which are broad-spectrum neurotoxins, to atrazine, a common herbicide which has been linked to birth defects (see the excellent New York Times story here for more information). You can even buy glyphosate, which is the active chemical in Roundup, Monsanto’s famous broad-spectrum herbicide that kills anything with green leaves. Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate expired a few years ago, meaning that any company can manufacture glyphosate herbicides. So if you want a liter of Roundup in Ghana, all you need is $4 and the ability to walk around the corner.

Virtually every farmer in Ghana uses these broad-spectrum herbicides on their fields, and as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as organic produce here (at least not in the Koforidua market).There are sometimes adverse health effects experienced by people applying these chemicals, though more with insecticides than herbicides. There’s also a long history of associated environmental problems with agricultural chemicals (see: Silent Spring and the Bhopal chemical plant disaster).

The chemical issue, to me, is less an example of the wealth-environment paradox (see last post), and more an example of environmental injustice. Ag chemical exposure, as I understand it, it pretty directly linked to wealth around the world. It’s not like American farms don’t use these chemicals, it’s just that farmers can pay people (who usually happen to be low income people of color) to apply the neurotoxins for them. Or it’s done by machine. On the other side of the equation, well-off people live in places where organic produce exists and can afford to buy it; the rest of the world gets a healthy dose of toxic chemicals along with their fruit.

So why do farmers use these chemicals? In short, because they tend to increase output. Large, industrial farms in the US tell us that without them, we couldn’t feed the world. (“If everyone ate organic, you’d have a few healthy people and a lot of dead people” is what a Walla Walla wheat farmer told us on an environmental studies class trip last spring.) Small, Ghanaian farmers need that increased output to feed their families, and all the data in the world about neurotoxicity and birth defects won’t change that reality. In the long run, I believe industrial agriculture will collapse. Eventually, we’re going to run out of oil to make these chemicals with, our soil will run out of nutrients, our farmland will salinize and turn to desert, and we won’t have cheap, government-subsidized water to irrigate California.

But in the short run, I think they’re right. How could grass-fed, local meat ever replace the perverse efficiency of a factory farm (assuming people keep eating meat at current and growing rates, which seems like a pretty healthy assumption)? How could we produce enough to feed the world on small-scale local farms?

I’ve read so many environmentalist laments against the toxicity of agricultural chemicals, most recently by Sandra Steingraber in Orion. Many of them seem to assume that if we knew what these chemicals were doing to our soil, water and bodies, we would stop using them. But what if that’s not true?

As I’ve come to realize just how toxic civilization is (and I mean that literally: modern civilization is largely sustained by a variety of carcinogenic and toxic chemicals), I’ve also started thinking that the logic underlying environmentalist appeals might not hold water. Sure, the world responded to Silent Spring by largely banning DDT. But if we laid out chemicals on a balance sheet—you get enough food to (theoretically) feed the world, a variety of convenient consumer products, electronics (one of the most toxic manufacturing processes on earth) and cars, and for all this, you run the risk of getting cancer, having a child born with birth defects or experiencing lead poisoning—would we choose to go without? Increasingly, I don’t think so. Would you give up the Internet if it meant your cancer risk went to zero? What about cars, or cheap food?

Of course, I’m oversimplifying. It’s possible we could retain some of the benefits of technology without so much disease and destruction. But I don’t think it’s likely, especially in the case of agriculture. Insecticides are a perfect example. By definition, they’re designed to kill living animals, and they’re designed to work on a variety of different organisms. It’s not a question of whether these chemicals could affect humans; it’s a question of at what dosage, or at what level of accumulation?

We’re at seven billion, headed to nine in the next few decades. Do we want people to starve, or do we want them to get cancer? Because the classic refrain—that most, if not all environmental problems stem from overpopulation—is not going to make those people go away.

If I could redesign the world from scratch, I have a decent idea of what it would look like. But given what we have now, I have no idea how to proceed. I want to know what chemicals are doing, and I want them regulated. I want environmental justice—if we’re willing to pay the price for civilization, that price should be evenly distributed regardless of gender, race, income level or country of birth. I’m aware that this might be impossible, and that it’s the very people least likely to have any of civilizations “benefits” (laptops, cars, or even access to medical care) who are most likely to experience its ill effects. I know that we overproduce food in the US, and that we’re eating all the wrong things, and I’m hoping that if we fix that, we’ll be able to find a better food system in the process. I know that I have no right to tell Ghanaian farmers what chemicals they should or shouldn’t use, but I want to make a world where they don’t need to use them and no one needs to starve because of it.

PETA, sex and vegetarianism

PETA has a long history of objectifying women in their ads. In addition to the charming billboard at left, they've been known to dress women up as chickens, pigs and other animals (always in bikinis) and leave them outside in cages. In one case, they made giant styrofoam trays like the grocery store meat ones and saran-wrapped bikini clad chicken women to them, supposedly to illustrate the evils of factory farming.

So I really shouldn't have been surprised when they came up with this. It's the casting video for their rejected Super Bowl commercial, featuring a bunch of conventionally attractive, skinny women in bikinis "playing" with vegetables.

I think the video speaks for itself, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time ranting about objectifying women. Obviously the claim at the end, that "studies show vegetarians have better sex" is deeply flawed. Vegetarian are far more likely to be well-educated, liberal, feminists, health-conscious and a host of other things which are correlated with better sex lives, so implying that vegetarianism is somehow responsible for this is shaky as best.

Mostly, I'm angry about the way PETA chooses to promote their message. By focusing entirely on external reasons for being vegetarian, PETA does nothing to make people think critically about what they eat. Marketing vegetarianism as another way for women to lose weight plays on existing female insecurities about attractiveness and conventional beauty standards, and it does nothing to make people think about the problems with meat production. By blindly promoting vegetarianism without engaging in critical dialogue about our food system, PETA is making two unfounded assumptions: that being vegetarian is always better for the environment and animal welfare than eating meat, and that opting out of the system will somehow improve it.

These are both dangerously simplistic assumptions to make. There are many cases in which eating meat is sustainable and a good idea--when it's local and responsibly raised, when you're in an environment where herding has evolved over thousands of years and is better for the land than agriculture would be (eg. the Masai in Eastern Africa), when vegetarian food is grown with pesticides on land which was formerly rainforest  (eg. tofu in many cases). Even if being vegetarian is better in most cases, there's nothing sustainable about gardenburgers or any of the other processed, packaged fake meat products that so many vegetarians rely on for protein.

Even worse than this, though, is the idea that going vegetarian will change factory farming or the industrial food system. I'm not saying that acting conscientiously doesn't matter--there's personal value and discovery to be had in efforts to be aware about your own consumption. There's a reason I eat the way I do and try to buy used books, used clothes and not consume at levels that many American do. But with global meat consumption growing every year and the industry spending so much time marketing itself and convincing people to buy its products, people going vegetarian is not going to make a huge dent in the system. If you personally want to be vegetarian, go for it, and more power to you. But far more important than that personal choice is a choice to actively work towards ending factory farming. And that's really what PETA should be talking about.

Freedom to choose food

After almost two months of trying everything I could think of, I am finally off my school's required meal plan. Whitman requires students to be on a meal plan for two years, so this semester was going to be my last. Our plans cost $2620 per semester for the cheapest option, and for that amount, you get either 21 meals a week, or 14 meals a week plus $150 "Flex dollars" which can be spent on individually priced items in our cafe. Most people can't eat 21 meals a week, so they pick the second plan, and if you do the math on it, it works out to $11.27 per meal.

My reasons for wanting to be off the plan were numerous. Obviously, it's absurdly expensive. Beyond that, though, it's incredibly difficult to be a vegetarian who doesn't eat soy-based products and tries to avoid processed carbs (eg. pasta). You're going to end up eating a lot of plain black beans and salad bar stuff. And, I love milk and meat, and I wanted to be able to eat them without spending half of my wages from Safeway on raw milk (which costs $5.50 for a half gallon over here). And my schedule is such that trying to structure my life around dining hall hours is really stressful. I work on weekends during brunch most of the time. I have classes that overlap with most of the dinner hour. I'm busy from 11am-4pm solid on Mondays, so I can't really grab lunch. Feeding myself last year was a complex task involving three days advance notice and lots of Tupperware to get me through my weekend shifts at work.

I didn't want to petition to be off the plan, because I've heard horror stories from other people who have tried. Bon Appetit, the company Whitman contracts with for food, is absurdly invested in their image as a good-doing, sustainable, accommodating company, and they want to make money. It's far better for them if they can work with you to provide for your needs while keeping you on the meal plan. I've heard of them allowing students to take raw ingredients and cook for themselves, or specially preparing meals for students with very specific medical conditions, rather than letting them off. Based on talking to friends, the only cases where students seemed to have been successful in petitioning were based on completely false grounds. One made up a psychological condition where he couldn't let anyone else touch his food; someone else made up a gastrointestinal problem and got a doctor's note for it.

I didn't want to resort to lying, so as my options narrowed, I decided to petition on honest grounds. I told them that meat and dairy are important parts of my diet, and that the only ranch I feel comfortable eating meat from is Thundering Hooves. I told them I only drink local, grass-fed milk, and that my milk is unpasteurized whenever possible. I was told by the Bon Appetit staff person whose job it is to deal with special requests that they made efforts to get Country Fed Natural Beef from Eastern Oregon, and I explained to her my objections to public lands ranching. I was told that most people who've petitioned successfully had religious grounds. I told her that the reasons I eat what I do are rooted in a ethical framework that I believe as deeply and take as seriously as most people take their religion, and that the fact that I didn't have 3000 years of tradition or millions of other followers behind me shouldn't make my beliefs any less valid. I was told that the college works to accommodate special requests, but that they can't do a perfect job with everyone. I said that I understood, and I didn't expect them to provide these foods specially for me, but that the college is obviously willing to accommodate some special requests (vegetarians and vegans), and that my requests were no less valid, just less common.

And I got her to admit that Bon Appetit was unable to provide for my dietary requirements. The next day, I got an email from the Residence Life office informing me that my petition to be off the meal plan had been approved.

I was so happy that this actually worked, especially after so many people said no to me for different reasons or told me that trying to petition on ethical food grounds would never work. I firmly believe that everyone should have the right and ability to control what they eat, and I think that interacting with Walla Walla's incredibly diverse food system is a crucial component of my education. I work at Safeway, volunteer at the co-op, write articles about food banks and stay up until 2am on the weekend talking about food justice.

Of course, this whole experience has also served to underscore how privileged I am to be able to make these choices for myself. I feel better about what I eat now than I have for most of my life, but the only reason I'm able to do this is because I'm a) absurdly conscientious of the impacts food systems have and b) bankrolled by my parents. And that's the crucial problem with food. You shouldn't need a ton of money or a degree in environmental studies to know what to eat. You shouldn't have to be a white, upper-middle class college student to have access to good, healthy food. You shouldn't be able to buy factory-farmed milk for $2.19 a gallon in the grocery store while cows, soil, agricultural workers, American taxpayers and streams pay the true cost. Meanwhile, real milk that doesn't externalize these costs is $6.50 a gallon at the co-op, putting it out of almost everyone's price range. If you want it unpasteurized, the cost goes up to $11.

So it's great that I can cook for myself and keep learning about food. It's great that I can support the co-op and tell everyone who comes through my line at Safeway that they should stop buying our organic milk and go to the co-op instead. It's great that I'm surrounded by people who understand that the industrial food system is killing people, land, living beings and the planet as a whole. But it's not enough. It never will be.

I don't know what a truly sustainable food system would look like. It would involve a lot more gardens. Monsanto and Safeway wouldn't exist. Most people would produce some or all of their own food. Washingtonians wouldn't eat oranges or bananas, and people living in Utah and Nevada probably wouldn't eat much beef. People would spend more time feeding themselves and their families. Food would taste better, be better for you and involve a lot more work. People wouldn't go hungry. Agricultural subsidies wouldn't exist. Organic permaculture would be standard, and Union Carbide wouldn't make pesticides anymore. We wouldn't have a giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico because of chemical runoff from fields. Pregnant women would be able to drink the water in Wallula, Washington. People wouldn't live in Phoenix, at least not in the numbers they do now. We wouldn't overpump our goundwater to grow wheat and alfalfa. Everyone would eat meat, and everyone would eat less.

I have no idea how to get there. But that's where I'm headed, with as many crazy life-loving, tree-hugging, anti-industrial capitalist people as I can drag along with me.

What I want to eat

I’m back home now, which means I have a ridiculous amount of free time and much more control over my day-to-day life. And now that I’m able to decide what I eat again, I’ve been thinking about food and food politics even more than usual. So here are my thoughts on what I care about and where I want to go from here.

I’m interested in food because I think it’s at the core of so many issues I care about—human health, environmental degradation, animal rights, habitat preservation, climate change, environmental justice, toxicology, community resiliency, poverty and our increasing lack of self-sufficiency, to name a few. Through chance and circumstance, much of my life has been spent indirectly around these issues. I volunteered at a food bank weekly starting when I was five and kept it up through middle school. Now, I work at Safeway, which I credit with partially igniting my interest in these issues. Reading Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma was one thing, but seeing how most people actually eat was something else entirely.

My own eating habits shifted during high school too. I was lucky enough to be raised by a stay-at-home mom, which meant I could count on a freshly prepared dinner at least five nights a week at home. Mom got a job towards the end of high school, though, and my extracurricular routine frequently meant that I got home from school between 8 and 10pm. Suddenly, I found myself eating frozen pizza or grabbing a burrito on the go a bit more than I felt comfortable with. I’d never learned how to cook beyond the basics, and even those came late (pasta—sophomore year of high school). I wanted to do things differently, but I didn’t have the time or energy to make it happen.

Since the end of high school, I’ve been slowly working to teach myself useful skills. I can make a few basic meals now, and I shop for groceries I know I’ll actually use, so I don’t panic and fall back on frozen food. I’m hoping to petition to be off of a meal plan this spring so I can cook for myself and learn more. For now, I mostly want to do a better job of eating well. “Well” is something I take seriously, and it includes my health, as well as supporting local producers and good treatment of animals and land. Here’s my current thinking on how that breaks down:

Good Food	Stuff to Avoid	Never, Ever Eat
local, organic produce	out-of-season produce	tropical fruits and vegetables
local, ethically raised beef	chicken, pork and turkey, even if from a small, local producer	any meat killed at a conventional slaughterhouse
game animals	fish (sadly including sushi)	factory-farmed meat
eggs raised humanely by someone I know	conventional eggs, including “cage-free” and “free range” ones
raw milk	conventional milk	milk from rGBH treated cows
yogurt and cheese (ideally locally made or homemade)	tofu	soy-based fake meat and dairy products (soy burgers, soymilk, etc.)
beans, lentils and quinoa	carbohydrate-intensive meals (pasta, etc.)	white bread and prepackaged bagels
homemade baked goods	processed snack foods	soda and other sugary drinks
homecooked, fresh meals or raw food	dining hall prepared foods	frozen dinners

Beyond just eating, I want to learn how to garden, compost, preserve food, make twelve different dishes with kale and have a goat or chickens in the city. And obviously, changing how I eat will do absolutely nothing to fix the food system. So in the next week or so, I’ll be writing a longer post about what’s wrong with the way we eat now, and hopefully some ideas for fixing it. In the meantime, check out my final project from Semester in the West—a podcast about grass-fed meat and what that label really means.

I was wrong (about eating meat)

After eleven years of vegetarianism, I started selectively eating meat again this summer. Since then, I’ve had a steak, two hamburgers, a piece of bacon, chili with beef, lamb, elk, elk sausage, beef jerkey and chicken enchiladas. And once again, I’m questioning the most ethical way to eat.

I stopped being a vegetarian because of a growing realization that most vegetarian diets involve a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of soy products. Carbohydrates aren’t very good for you, and they’re almost entirely grown in monocrop fields which rely on pesticides and a variety of other chemicals, not to mention genetically engineered seeds which are controlled almost entirely by one corporation (Monsanto). Pesticide manufacture kills people, animals and the planet everyday. The single largest industrial disaster in history was the Bhopal gas leak, which occurred in a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India and killed 20,000 people. Soy is also not very good for people to eat in the quantities many vegetarians, including myself, do. It’s grown in a similar way, and in developing countries, planting field of soy often means cutting down rainforest. The process used to extract protein from soybeans relies on hexane, a neurotoxin byproduct of gasoline refinement. Workers exposed to it in “natural foods” plants which make things like veggie burgers have chronic health problems from breathing too much in. And companies that make “natural foods” like Boca burgers, tofu and a lot of other things vegetarians rely on are generally owned by agribusiness giants like Kraft and ConAgra. Eating meat from a small local producer seems like a more ethical and environmental choice.

Since arriving at this decision, I’ve gotten a better look at meat production. I’ve learned a lot about cattle grazing on Semester in the West, and I’ve also read Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer, which is a very eloquent condemnation of factory farming. And I’m no longer sure that being a selective omnivore is the most ethical thing I can do.

Mostly, when I think about sustainable meat, I think about cows. Cows are the only animal raised for human food production on a large scale which still have a somewhat “natural” life, in that they get to spend a year outside grazing before they’re shipped to a feedlot and then to slaughter. It seems easy to retool this system—cut out the feedlot, let the farmer slaughter cows individually, and you have a sustainable system. One of the classic vegetarian arguments is that eating meat is inefficient—cows consume about nine calories for every calorie we get out of them. But if cows are fed only grass, they’re eating something we can’t and providing food for us without us having to completely destroy the land by plowing it and planting irrigated monocrops. Grass-fed cows seem to work their way around many arguments for vegetarianism.

But even grass-fed meat has enormous environmental problems. In the West, cattle grazing has completely transformed native ecosystems. Many ranchers planted nonnative grasses at the beginning of the century because they provided better forage, and overgrazing has allowed invasive species to take over many former grasslands. Entire portions of the West are covered in Russian thistle or sagebrush without a blade of native grass in sight. Ranchers have also been the interest group most responsible for the work of Wildlife Services, a branch of the federal government which kills “problem” animals. Last year, they killed over 20,000 coyotes and hundreds of wolves, bobcats, cougars, beavers and several hundred other species. Cattle grazing is the largest obstacle to wolf reintroduction. Healthy Western ecosystems are not incompatible with cattle, but they are difficult to achieve and maintain for even the most committed ranchers. The death toll of beef can be measured in more than cows—coyotes, wolves, beavers, switchgrass, aspen, willows and stream channels should be added to the list.

In addition, even grass-fed cattle require agriculture to sustain them. During the winter, cows are fed hay and other similar crops. Growing cattle feed takes up a huge amount of land—the majority of agricultural land in production in California is used to grow food for cows, not crops for people. While it’s better than sending them to a feedlot and feeding them corn or soybeans or other dead animals, growing hay takes up a lot of land and a lot of water. California uses more water from the Colorado than anyone else, and pumping that water to irrigated valleys where food is grown requires a ton of power. Glen Canyon Dam and the Navajo Generating Station owe their existence in part to California’s demand for water to grow crops. And while all of these problems apply to agriculture too, eating less beef, even grass-fed, allows this land to be used more efficiently to grow food for people. If I have to choose between eating plants grown unsustainably or eating cows fed hay grown unsustainably (nine calories of it for every one I eat), I’m going to go with the plants.

There are two other problems I see with grass-fed meat. One: it’s not scalable. The things that make small, conscious producers better than factory farms also mean that grass-fed will never be able to produce enough meat to meet current global demand. And global demand is growing. Which means even if we accept grass-fed as sustainable, everyone needs to eat less meat to make it work. Since I have the means to be relatively healthy as a vegetarian, I’d rather people eating factory farmed meat switch to more sustainable producers. If all the sustainable meat revolution accomplishes is that a bunch of ex-vegetarians go back to eating meat and feeling environmentally conscious, factory farming will never go away. The other problem is that no matter how you raise them, cows are an incredible contributor to global warming. Their methane production is reduced when they’re fed grass instead of corn, but even then, they’re doing more to warm the planet than transportation. Global warming has gone beyond the point where it’s an environmental issue—it directly affects human health, national security and the very existence of some countries.

This is not to say that eating meat is always wrong. I would eat something wild I killed myself, and I would like to learn how to hunt elk or deer. But eating meat in our current food system, meat I didn’t produce for myself—I can’t justify that anymore. So I’m returning to being a vegetarian, but with a more conscious look at the foods I eat. Soy products and monocrops are incredibly environmentally problematic, and I want to make better choices as a vegetarian about the foods I do support. In an ideal food system, I would eat animals. Sustainable food systems rely on local permaculture, and if you aren’t going to use fossil fuels as fertilizer, you need manure. But I don’t live in that world. When I’m in a position to grow and raise my own food, I will, and I’ll make my choices accordingly. But for now, when I buy food from other people, I’m sticking with the plants.