For starters, it is because you cannot. Most people today are not capable of merely willing themselves to be healthy on any diet they decide in their mind is best. Maybe there are a few highly advanced yogis like that. Eventually, your body will complain if you impose your beliefs on it without considering its needs. Some people can, and indeed do, have such powerful beliefs and will power that they literally kill themselves by depriving their body of the nutrients it needs. More often, this kind of ignorance leads to disease.
People evolved with the ability to respond to changing conditions and food availability. But it took generations, and the mechanism was that you died if your body was not getting what it needed, so you did not end up passing on your traits to the next generation. The people who coincidentally had genetic traits or spontaneous genetic innovations called mutations that could adapt to the new diets and available food sources did survive to reproduce, so here we are.
Would a person try to be vegan and then go back to animal foods out of mean spiritedness? No! People go in with loving high minded intentions, but things go wrong. Their bodies tell them to go back to animal food. Some people thrive on more animal sourced food, others have genetic traits that enable us to thrive on plant food. Some must have sea food, other body types can process the fats they eat into the nutrients they need.
These facts have led people to believe, with great devotion, in the world view that supports the diet they are best suited for. People who have tried the vegan diet only to persist in it far beyond their body’s ability to thrive on it, evangelize ferociously to warn others against the mistake they consider their vegan diet to have been. They contemptuously scorn the clueless kale eaters who unknowingly kill the field mice in the wheat farms from which their vegan pancakes are grown. Newly minted vegans walk around with a superior attitude, bludgeon you with shame, and seem to think they have all of the answers. And we old vegans can hardly stand the smell of cooking animal food.
Some of us do fine without animal food. And it is understandable that whatever genetic variations one has, you know viscerally, you feel it in your body, that the food you live and thrive on is good and healthy, and that other stuff is surely out to kill you. You just want to warn everyone!
And you find a way to rationalize whatever you are doing. I remember so clearly from my meat eating childhood how easy it was to completely separate my awareness of killing the cow from the yummy steak on the plate. And eventually it does dawn on vegans that our food does not grow in natural food stores; our plant food, like any other food on the planet, is connected to many other systems. And it is complicated.
Whether you eat plant food or animal food, you are participating in systems that cause harm to beings. Is is much more important to consider the how of it all than the what.
The fact is we could have a society today where no one would have to eat animal food. Because we now know how.
But does it make sense? The answer is a resounding no! Not at this time, not quite yet. At least until more general environmental healing and repair happens. The reason is climate change. We need animals, in ethical farms, to save us all right now. Cows and livestock are not inherently bad for the planet at this transitional moment. Not if regenerative soil practices are used. They don’t have to be water hogs, they can actually restore the rains, heal the drought, and bring back the trees and streams, and halt global climate catastrophe! (Check out the documentary film, Kiss the Ground.)
Now, I would personally not want to eat meat or dairy, and obviously we would not want to encourage anyone to eat meat at all. But for those who want to stay with some kind of animal food, it is actually needed at this time, but ONLY if done by regenerative farm methods.
Becoming Veganish
That is why we need a new word, coined by me, “veganish”. Veganish concedes it is impossible, on this gross level of this physical world to never harm other beings, so it focuses on doing the best we can with where we are and moving forward to do better. If you drive cars, live in a house, even ride a bike, you are using animal exploitation products and harming habitat. If you even breathe, you are killing small beings!
Regenerative farming, forming ethical relationships of partnership with animals are a way of moving forward. Farming algae oil instead of fish. Ahimsa leather. Mushroom leather. Sustainable systems of energy and infrastructure. Learning from nature and natural systems. Veganish is a direction, a process, an aspiration, a deliberate intention. The rules are not absolute, but instead the goal is to move toward harmlessness, even if perfection is impossible at this level of this world. It is a philosophy, a way of life, and a political movement.
And no matter what kind of natural traits you were born with, you can become veganish. To be veganish is to consider how to live in ways that help systems of support for your body, and seek to avoid harm to your fellow beings, your environment, and your planet.
If you are eating a meal of plant food, how and where is it grown? Is it from a mega farm with row crops that have destroyed the habitat of the creatures who once lived there? Or a small farm that shares the space with them? Is it from an agribusiness that destroys topsoil, creates erosion, uses fossil fuels and releases more climate catastrophe gasses into the atmosphere than cow farts? Or a small scale diversified nearby organic farm that builds soil, partners with animals and bugs and adds to the local well being of everyone around?
If you are eating milk or cheese or eggs, do they come from a source that looks like a factory and tortures, enslaves and murders your fellow beings in a toxic chemical hell? Or that small scale diversified organic farm where the needs of the animal is considered and met?
And what about the male offspring of those chickens or goats or cows? Are they turned into veal, fertilizer, or even feed for other animals? This is an uncomfortable question! In the past, there was no satisfactory answer. It was just a grim fact of farming. You had to just accept that you would have to kill those unwanted males, grit your teeth, rationalize it somehow, and then chop their heads off. Death is just a part of life, you would mutter, shaking your head.
“If you think eating meat is just a personal choice, you are forgetting someone” (-unknown)
The Lab Test for Earth Repair
But today, in this age in which we accept all kinds of laboratory interventions, there is an answer. Most farm cattle today are conceived by means of artificial insemination to produce predictable gene lines. Sex selection is already in standard practice. Sex selection is also now possible with chicken eggs, before they hatch, so an excess of roosters need not happen. All that is lacking is the willingness of farmers, and those of us they feed, to demand it be done like that.
For those people who must have seafood to be healthy, and that is a lot of the population, we already have figured out how to make those essential fatty acids ourselves, in laboratory conditions, by growing selected algae. Instead of killing fish, raking the ocean floor like a clearcut, and imbibing mercury contaminated creatures, you can now get the food that fish eat to make those nutrients directly. You can buy this algae oil at your natural food store.
Soon, there may also be a way to get those actual literal animal tissues and fats, cloned, and grown in a lab, indistinguishable from a murdered meat product, without harming any animals, at your local food store. Before you dismiss this as just being another form of factory food and therefore, bad, consider those big brown eyes of that beautiful peaceful cow, looking at you with trusting love. I dunno. I would probably try it if I still had craving for meat, which I do not.
In a further step, a laboratory test today can reveal to you which genes you have, and save you the trouble of imposing your beliefs and concepts on the “soft animal that is your body” to quote Mary Oliver. You can now find out ahead of time, before you get health problems, which foods you would do best eating, and which ones you ought to minimize.
“When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need” -Ayurvedic proverb
Or you can listen very carefully to your body. And your mind. And your heart.
“You do not have to be good.
Great article!
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