My Manifesto on Food

All right, people – here it is: My Manifesto on Food. “Finally!” you’re thinking. I know. So after much reading and researching and gnashing of teeth (I really need to start wearing my night guard), I’ve decided to purposefully ingest poultry. Now, I’m not breaking up with vegetarianism, we’re just reassessing our relationship. It all started with an inkling. Actually, the whole vegetarian thing started with an inkling back in college. A vegetarian roommate, the mystery meat in the dining hall, and the dizzying heights of being an individual left to my own devices all got me thinking that maybe I should give this vegetarian thing a try. Here and there I might have the rogue meatball, but I remember the moment when I couldn’t finish my chicken quesadilla at a nearby eatery. “No more!” I declared in my mind. It didn’t taste very good, and moreover, it didn’t feel good. With vegetarian fare, however, I found that I could fully enjoy and indulge in every crunch, chomp, and moosh of buttery asparagus, or mashed potatoes, or lovely mixtures of couscous and curry. Truly, vegetarian foods are varied and so tasty, packed with flavor and invariably healthier. That is, if you’re managing to avoid the weeknight shuffle of “Eh, let’s just get a pizza” or cobbling together of various starchy cheesy chemically bits and pieces.  After a full day of work, I find myself more often in this predicament than in one where I am measuring my protein, B12, and Omega 3 intake. Energy levels go down, coffee intake up. Now, coffee is a wonderful and delicious ritual, but I’d rather it give me a bit of a buzz rather than keep me simply puttering along. When I first switched to a vegetarian diet, I enjoyed numerous benefits of clearer skin, feeling lighter all around, and yes, a bit of pride and moral righteousness. Now I find myself more easily run down and it is very difficult to feel sated even when I’m full.

              

     The ideas posed in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle turned my mind inside out. After eight years of vegetarianism, I was finally forcing myself to pin down why I was eating what I was eating, and Kingsolver brought up a point about the basics of nature. Put simply, there is no food without demise of some sort. Even in my garden at home, worms get accidentally chopped in the well-meaning planting of a vegetable. Mass production of soy beans for my delicious sausage replacements take over entire ecosystems, kill various creatures (wasted deaths), and propagate the use of pesticides while their shipping across the country uses up polluting fossil fuels. It suddenly made the most sense to compromise with myself. Desirable food = as local as possible, as simple and whole as possible, and as healthy and natural as possible. I also decided to trust what my body was telling me. A new intense concentration on the memories of roasted chicken plagued my mind. Could I really do this? Kingsolver brings up a point about local farms producing animals that have had happy lives, access to fresh air, and far better deaths than they would have at the hands (paws?) of a wild animal in a less-agricultural setting. Things started to click. Here is my current list of ideal foods:

 

Vegetables and fruits – locally grown, in season, eaten with wild abandon while the gettin’s good.

Mild fish – sustainable, low-mercury, wild, rich in Omega-3s…generally this will involve eating as low on the food chain as possible (i.e. sardines) and opting for less popular choices (so long tuna and flounder).

Poultry – free-range, pasture-raised, organic, local chicken mostly. My vegetarian lifestyle has prepared me to settle for nothing less. I don’t need meat so badly that I’m willing to have another being suffer its whole life away in a cramped dirty cage for me. I’m voting with my money as to which farming method I prefer for this country.

All of these things are ideally provided by a local farm that has figured out its own natural process of self-sustenance. If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend that you read about the process of Polyculture farming. To give a basic overview, sing this to the tune of “Dem Bones”: The grass grows in the pasture, the pasture feeds the cowsies, the cowsies poop on the pasture, the chickens eat up the poop seeds, the poop gets spread as manure, the manure in turn feeds the pasture, dem farms dem farms dem farms.