One night when I was 14, my little sister asked my parents what that "red stuff" on our dinner plates was. My father flinched and said gently that it was blood. At that moment I had The Epiphany, and the abstraction in front of me suddenly resolved into muscle, bone, blood, and tendon: a dead animal, my dinner. I had never really let myself think about it before. I was horrified. I put my fork down triumphantly and announced, "I will never eat this again." That was 28 years ago, and I never have, but certainly nothing about that choice has ever been as simple as the pronouncement itself.
For one thing, I was initially so oblivious--in my defense, I was in eighth grade--that it took a few weeks to grok for that the "this" I was eschewing also included bologna and pepperoni, not just steak. I wasn't avoiding it; I just didn't actually make the connection. The cognitive category of "meat" only gradually came into focus, and as it did, I eliminated more items from my diet, and meanwhile learned how to find, prepare, and eat new ones (more about this later). When I was 15, I stopped eating chicken; the next year, fish. Some years later I stopped eating dairy, then started again, then stopped, then started (repeat), ultimately settling on a limited number of the most nutritionally-dense, delicious, and ethical dairy products, these criteria rarely appearing all at once. Greek yogurt and condiment-sized portions of cheese are staples; eggs I cook until burnt and still kind of have to choke down, but they are a good go-to especially when traveling or eating out (pancakes at brunch are not exactly an option for a hypoglycemic). I keep the quantities as limited as possible, and some things I've never reintroduced: milk is in some of the food I eat in restaurants, of course, but I haven't had a glass of the stuff in that same 28 years. I'm guess I'm still something of a wannabe vegan, though I fear it's not possible for this body, at least not now, and so I struggle to maintain some reasonable compromise.
As I got older and my hypoglycemia symptoms became more severe--including several terrifying experiences of blacking out altogether--I gradually, with a lot of angst and internal conflict, reintroduced occasional fish. After all the ups and downs, a casual observer might therefore see little difference between how I ate at 15 and how I eat at 42. But however similar it might look superficially, a lot of very noisy thinking has gone on inside, along with countless small-but-laden changes.
For example, my reasons for being a vegetarian (and I'm going to use this as shorthand; I recognize that this will horrify some people, but surely 95% of the calories I eat are vegetarian) have changed over the years. As a teenager, it was the idea of killing itself that upset me most. Hunters seemed like the lowest human life form. Dairy eating seemed more ethical than fish-eating. Now, I accept that there is a food chain and a life-cycle, that avoiding meat is a privilege supported by a decent income and an urban environment. It seems pretty clear to me that a life spent suffering endlessly on a CAFO is infinitely more horrifying than a life spent frisking around the woods and then suddenly being shot. My brother-in-law hunts, and what he doesn't eat he donates to a local shelter. It makes me cringe, I have to confess, but it's hard to pin it as unethical on a relative scale, since I figure that every pound of venison he eats is a pound of ham that he won't be buying from the supermarket. Myself, given a choice between eating fish and dairy, I will often choose the fish, because it seems to me that dairy animals suffer far more than fish do.
And so, I have come up with my own somewhat messy criteria of ethical eating, based on a calculus that (mostly) makes sense to me, though it's hard to convey or even to always feel confident in. Sometimes it's hard to eat a bite of food without thinking of it along some dizzying vector involving locality, environment, animal suffering, glycemic load, calorie density, and cost (if it ever turns out I can't eat gluten, just kill me). One could think oneself into starvation, or at least insanity.
That's not a fate that awaits me (well, maybe the insanity), because the truth is, I also love food: love shopping for it, cooking it, sharing it, occasionally even growing it, thinking about it, geeking out about it. I read food blogs, love going out to new restaurants, love trying new recipes, love thinking about the tastes of rich foods I love in the same way that I enjoy thinking about the tastes in a single malt scotch. When I make a commitment to something--e.g. "I will never eat this again"--I can display pretty single-minded devotion. But I'm not an ascetic and don't aspire to be one, though this too is complicated by the fact that I'd like to see myself lose 15 or 20 pounds without becoming a crazy person. It seems to me that living fully and eating wholeheartedly are deeply intertwined, and I want to live fully and wholeheartedly. But I also believe that there are ethical decisions behind every food choice I make, and since those are choices I make some six times a day (not three: remember, I'm hypoglycemic!) I want them to be conscious ones, good ones--at least as much as I can, given the vagaries of life, including my life. I think Michael Pollan has it mostly right, and so when in doubt I do eat food. Not too much. Mostly vegetables. That seems to work for the most part, but boy, I can make it complicated.
I've spent a lot of time delving into my conflictual ethics in this short history, but I anticipate spending just as much time on this blog talking about food and cooking as I do thinking aloud about how to balance the complexities of eating well, eating ethically, eating low glycemic, and eating lightly. One of the great benefits of discovering vegetarianism in 1984, in a suburb utterly untouched by vegetarianism, was that I had to teach myself everything, but above all, what in the world to cook and eat. Over the years, in addition to vegetarian and vegan American dishes, I've learned to make vegetarian Mexican food, Indian food, Middle Eastern food, Thai food, and more--and I've made most of these recipes low-glycemic and healthy. I've been perfecting some recipes for almost three decades now, and I'm going to share some of the best ones with you--to leaven the self-reflection, philosophizing, and over-thinking.
