I unknowingly raised my daughter in a cult. This cult told me (and then I told her) what to eat and what to wear and people who were acceptable vs people who we should no longer talk to; or if we did talk to them we should at least let them know they were living a life of “sin” (they used a different word) and that they should change their ways. Basically, we were taught to judge them. But it was okay because we were doing them a favor, guiding them in the right direction, and perhaps we could save them if we kept on educating them on what they were doing wrong.
It sounds so incredibly terrible now, looking back on it. And my daughter is still in this cult; she is convinced it is the right way to live and she may never wake up to the brainwashing, judgment, and well, misinformation this cult promotes. And I do blame myself because I’m the one who got her into it in the first place.
The cult of veganism.
Does this sound terrible? It really is. And I talk to other ex-vegans who totally get it. We were duped. We were brainwashed. We parroted what we were taught by those gruesome PETA brochures. We refused to believe PETA was (is) actually responsible for killing animals. We couldn’t see that the issues going on with farm animals are not black and white issues and factory farms and local family farms cannot be lumped together. We just thought it was all bad. All meat is sad. All farm animals are treated poorly. All farmers are cold-blooded killers. All animal farming is bad for the environment. Etc.
I was in the cult of veganism/vegetarianism for ten years. My daughter, now sixteen, has never had a bite of meat in her life and doesn’t intend to. Ironically she isn’t an animal person and doesn’t give a hoot about their well-being, but she’s so sold on the idea of meat being bad and farmers being cruel that she won’t listen to any other ideas.
In truth, even being vegan isn’t a black and white issue. There are vegans who live on processed food that tastes like meat but the body cannot even break it down properly–talk about never pooping again–and also the amount of processing required for this processed food is just ridiculous. Then there are the macrobiotic vegans eating a diet of rice shipped across the world, beans that cause intestinal distress (I still have gut issues from all the meals of beans I used to eat even though they were soaked overnight as is suggested), seaweed (let’s not say eating meat is unnatural and then go diving deep into the ocean for what is very unlikely to be anything close to a real human diet), etc. And a raw food diet, one I was on quite a long time, in which the almonds (your dairy-free milk staple, likely!) come from California (one huge cause of the bee population decreasing in size–read more about that here) and the coconuts and avocados and pineapples and mangos come from across the globe unless you’re lucky enough to live in a tropical climate. A vegan who eats a local diet is a rare person because it’s just so darn hard to live in one place where enough grows to keep people nourished (again, unless you live in, say, Hawaii, and survive on only fruit).
We cannot state that shipping foods across the globe makes for a sustainable diet for our planet. The fuel is causing global warming like crazy! Can you imagine? Not to mention this is a “rich man’s diet” because people in most parts of the world do not have access to such foods–in many areas even growing vegetables is close to impossible and some people require animal products just to survive because animals live on rocky terrain and plants do not.
The best diet for the planet? The food that grows in your own backyard. (See book recommendation below.) And if you’re a city dweller then that means it’s grown within a 100 mile radius (the definition of “local food”). Note that the chocolate made locally and sold at the farmer’s market is not actually a local food since the cocoa beans came from halfway across the world. It’s about what actually grew here or was raised here. And sometimes you can pull that off as a vegan, depending on where you live, but most of the time you can’t.
Honestly I have not eaten factory farmed meat in 15 years, except for one accidental and one Sonic incident. You can avoid it if it’s that important to you. You can choose restaurants that support local farms. You can choose the local salad rather than the factory farmed burger. The beauty of living in our culture is that you do have a choice.
I wish I could explain to all the vegans out there who judge us that it’s not the same. I wish I could explain how much their diet is killing the planet. I wish I could explain that everything dies so that we live and like it or not, we are part of that cycle, whether it’s an animal, a tree, or a vegetable.
Mostly I wish I could forgive myself for being easily brainwashed into it all–for refusing to see the gray area in between and most especially for judging others when I a) did not even feel good eating what I was eating but I was not going to admit that to myself or to others because it went against what I believed at the time and b) had no idea what it was like to live in someone else’s body–that may be one of the worst things: to tell someone else how to live just because it works for oneself (or doesn’t, in my case!).
(I am aware that not all vegans are judgemental assholes like I was, but my family members who are vegan are, and gosh, so many vegans do give me grief about my “lifestyle choice” of homesteading. I guess in a way it’s nice that I’ve been there myself so that I do understand where they’re coming from and how easy it is to parrot without thinking or doing research outside of what those brochures tell you.)
Choose nature-made products for your health, not synthetic materials that off-gas chemicals into your body (jackets, belts, boots) and not processed food that isn’t even food anymore (fakin bacon, tofu “meat,” bee-killing almond milk). Give thanks for all those that died so that you may live. Don’t waste your food! Be grateful. Say a blessing. Plant a tree. Hug an animal. Treat the planet kindly. Respect the balance.
And if you thrive on a plant-based diet, work on a) eating more local foods, b) eating less processed foods, c) stop eating almonds from California!, d) recognize that food grows better with animals products on it, like manure for fertilizer which is so much better than chemicals, e) always check in with yourself rather than others to make sure you feel the best you can!
Book Recommendation: “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver
Documentary Recommendation: “Biggest Little Farm”
