an experiment in veganism

So I'm reading this book right now - I'm about 50 pages from the end - called The Way We Eat, about the ethics of food and the choices we make about what we put in our mouths. It's been very compelling and very complicating, blurring lots of lines for me between the right and the wrong of organics, local food, seasonal food, meat-eating, GM foods, the environment, etc.

Essentially, though, what the book seems to be leading up to is the conclusion that the most ethical choice we can make - in terms of the treatment of animals, the treatment of people, and the welfare of the planet - is to be vegan.

So I've resolved to try to be vegan for a month, to try it and see what it's like. I'll report in as often as possible, mainly with the rundown of what I've eaten and my victories and defeats in this quest.

I'm on day two right now.

Yesterday after breakfast (eggs, bacon, coffee with milk, berries) I thought I'd try to make a go of it. We were at the cottage and drove back from Muskoka, making a stop at the infamous Weber's burger joint on highway 11. I dutifully ordered the garden burger (mushy beany blech), but then Jen got a hotdog that was waaaaay too big for one person, and Abby wanted a hamburger that she didn't finish. Ethically, I thought it would be worse to waste that food than to eat it, so I finished them off rather than throwing them away.

For supper I had three wraps with beans and salsa, a couple pieces of bread and PB, some hickory-smoked almonds, some apple juice, and cherries for dessert.

Today for breakfast I had more bread and PB and coffee with vanilla soymilk, and then for lunch we were out (Williams Coffee Pub at the harbour) so I ordered a grilled veggie panini with no cheese. They're pre-made, I was told, but the veggie wraps were good. Does it have cheese in it, I wondered? My server asked if I was vegan, so I explained I was trying it out for a month. A sympathetic vegetarian, she said she couldn't imagine trying to go vegan, and that the only other "sauce" I could have for my veggie wrap, besides the cream cheese they normally put in it, was mustard. Okay, I said, I could deal with that. When it finally came, however, it did have the cream cheese! I asked Jen what to do, and she pointed out, again, that it was probably more ethical to eat it than to send it back to be thrown out so they could make me a new one. So day two, halfway through, I've had to compromise twice already. I also had beer with lunch, and a coffee with soy milk, which they did manage to get right.

I'm hungry.

giving up

This blog went quiet for a couple weeks because I've been overwhelmed by the increasing amounts of terrible information about the state we're in.

I will press on, though: first, things I'm currently trying to give up, and then, an excellent essay I read last night about why changing your own "footprint" isn't really good enough.

The Current, on CBC radio, has been doing a season-long series on the state of water in our world, called Watershed, and on of these programs they talked about something called our "water footprint."

Essentially, your water footprint is the amount of water you as an individual are responsible for consuming (note the turn of phrase): for instance, the average kilo of beef takes 15,500L of water to produce, the average cotton shirt takes 2700L of water, and the average cup of coffee uses 140L of water.

It was that last one that struck terror into my very core. I had developed the habit (mostly at work) of drinking at least 10 cups of coffee a day, which meant 1400L of water daily before I even took a sip. I resolved to cut down and, if possible, cut out coffee entirely from my diet. it's been difficult, but a week ago I retired our coffee maker, replaced by a bodum which I use only once every few days... cutting my consumption from around 120 cups a week (16,800L of water) to maybe 4 (560L). Do I enjoy this? I do not. I am trying to drink more tea instead (30L/cup) and have taken to making cold drinks with the lemon balm we have growing in our yard (assuming a 1:1 ratio for water).

You may have noticed, though, that I also mentioned meat. According to waterfootprint.org, it takes 15,500L of water to produce 1kg of beef, 4800L of water for 1kg of pork, and 3900L of water for 1kg of chicken. Beyond that, the First Canadian Edition of Living in the Environment (G. Tyler Miller Jr., © 2008) says that it takes 7kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, 4kg of grain for 1kg of pork, and about 2.2kg of grain for 1kg of chicken... so all in all, meat production is wasteful and harmful to the environment, and if I influence the corporations by what I do and do not buy (supply and demand), then enough of us cutting our meat consumption may eventually send a message. So last night I had one soy burger and one lean portion-wise PC hamburger. Did I love the soy burger? I did not. But I could live with them if I had to.

Before bed, though, I stumbled my way over to Orion magazine, where an article entitled "Forget Shorter Showers - Why personal change does not equal political change" caught my eye. The basic idea that author Derrick Jensen puts forward is that a) we have been taught that our consumerist and capitalist attitudes are what really matter - that our private little crusades to eliminate waste and environment-harming products in our own lives are enough to make a real difference - but that in fact these simply lead to complacency and a false sense of piety, and that b) the major contributors to climate change and the destruction of the environment are the corporations, not individuals (see the article for exact numbers, but it's around 25% individual and 75% corporate).

But the thing that really hit home for me was this:

...the endpoint of the logic behind simple living as a political act is suicide. If every act within an industrial economy is destructive, and if we want to stop this destruction, and if we are unwilling (or unable) to question (much less destroy) the intellectual, moral, economic, and physical infrastructures that cause every act within an industrial economy to be destructive, then we can easily come to believe that we will cause the least destruction possible if we are dead.

...I had, as recently as this past weekend, begun to say out loud that I thought maybe the only solution to the environmental catastrophe was human extinction (which would make these people happy), and was feeling very depressed as a result. But Jensen offers a simple solution:

Simple living as a political act consists solely of harm reduction, ignoring the fact that humans can help the Earth as well as harm it.

So yes, DO try to curb your own habits, because it will help, but to really make a difference, we cannot continue to believe that harm reduction in our own lives is the ultimate act of environmental stewardship. Instead, we must actively become involved in reducing the harm that is being done by industry, corporations, and our governments.

Grocery Dilemmas

I have a problem when I go shopping for food: I evaluate all the pros and cons. all of them. I want to share with you some of the considerations I try to make:

• how far has the food travelled? our dependence on oil means that on average our food travels over 2400km (Barbara Kingsolver: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, p5) (see also this study by the Leopold Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State U.), using up 7 times more calories than the food yields (U. Michigan, Centre for Sustainable Systems), and even more - 11-15 times the yield - when we're talking about meat (Living in the Environment, 1st Canadian Ed., 2008)
• how much grain has the meat I'm buying been fed (7 kg of grain makes 1 kg of feedlot beef; 4 kg of grain makes 1 kg of pork; 2.2 kg of grain makes 1 kg of chicken), to say nothing of the antibiotics it's been fed to get it to grow bigger and faster than it normally would (Paul Roberts: the End of Food)?
• though it's more expensive, I buy non-clay cat litter for our cats, because the clay used is actually being strip-mined in a way that not only devastates local ecosystems and vast areas of land, but is also non-renewable
• what kinds of pesticides do I think may have been used on the produce? I don't know any specifics, but I have heard, for instance, that apples are grown with a ton of pesticides. Better to buy organic. Bananas, on the other hand, are reportedly dipped in gasoline to help preserve them and ripen them at just the right time (after their long journey).
• is it better to buy beans and peas dried and add water, thereby reducing metals used in cans and the preservatives we add, or is it better to buy the cans so you don't waste water and energy re-hydrating and then boiling them before use?
• how high on the food chain am I eating? Citing the second law of thermodynamics (energy is always lost during a conversion from one form to another), if I try to eat less meat and consume things lower on the food chain and closer to the ground (so-to-speak), I can reduce the amount of CO2 my consumption is contributing to the atmosphere...
• can I afford to buy fair-trade coffee this week? how much do I trust President's Choice's new organic & fair trade labels? How is it possible such a huge company is really making such changes? (see http://www.blackgoldmovie.com for an excellent discussion about the so-called "fair trade" coffee industry)

...there are more. Tonight I "had to" go to a grocery store further than our local one because it has longer hours, and when I got there I was really almost panicky about the obvious ignorance of the other shoppers around me, buying boxes of crazy processed foods with ingredients you can't pronounce, and apparently not thinking at all about how their lives are soon going to have to change because of the inevitable meteoric rise in the price of oil and the subsequently monumental decisions our fossil-fuel-dependent society is going to have to make about how we live. I find it hard to breathe in malls for the same reason.

So What?

But so why should you care, even though I've developed this slow-paced, fairly obsessive relationship with the food I purchase? Well, because, together with the decline in oil production (signalling and end to cheap oil) and our exploding population (worldwide @ 6.9 billion today, expected to double by about 2025), the Green Revolution is going to become a thing of the past - we are only able to get as much food from the ground as we do now because of petrochemicals; without them, our fertilizers and pesticides will disappear. And so, in short, we're entering an era when food is about to become scarce, and our methods of producing food are going to have to be re-thought. Additionally, all that fossil fuel energy we are using to produce our food is contributing to greenhouse gases (methane, CO2, ozone, etc.), which is warming our planet, creating a positive feedback loop. And that's just scratching the surface...