Veganism (or, Ohmygodanotherpostsosoon?)

[rax]

(The following is an excerpt from a forthcoming first-coming[0] email.)

So I go vegan for Lent every year [1] or at least have for the past few years. Easter happened recently. In previous years, the first day I could be not-vegan I immediately starting scarfing cheese and was like ``Oh thank God, I can finally eat food again.'' This year my response was more ``Oh man, but I don't _want_ to stop being vegan!'' I thought about this for a while and decided that I can always stop being vegan later. I don't expect it to last forever, but until my body really starts complaining, I'm going to stick with the veganism. If this is forever, OK.

Why? Well, the tongue-in-cheek but not untrue explanation is that I enjoy dietary restrictions. The answer by someone else that I most resonate with is one Mr. Schmidt's ``I was vegan yesterday, so I am vegan today,'' but that's a bit sassy as well. It's almost easier to take some common reasons for veganism and explain why I don't share them and see what's left, so that is what I am going to do:

* I am not vegan because I believe it is wrong to eat animals or animal products. Things eat each other; I eat things whose relatives will, ultimately, eat me. (Can I be buried under lentils?) Being able to choose what I eat to the point where I eliminate large swaths of the grocery store is a privilege caused by my having money and being near grocery stores in the first place. That doesn't mean the right thing to do is throw my money in a fire and move somewhere without stores, but it's worth keeping in mind.

* I am not vegan to protest the meat industry. I've read both evidence I trust and shock pamphlets about how bad the meat industry is, and I'm confident that I am not comfortable what happens to the animals raised as food sources. However, the meat industry and the farm industry and the shipping industry are all exploitative of _humans_, which is (on most days) more important to me. Eating avocado picked by migrant workers who don't make a living wage or benefits is, if not worse than eating meat packed in a plant, at least on the same order of magnitude of increasing suck in the world. Buying organic and local helps some, but I don't always do that and if that were my main goal I'd be limiting my diet by sustainability and human rights rather than by whether or not it came from \textit{animalia}.

* I am not vegan because I don't enjoy food that isn't vegan. While I don't enjoy most large hunks of meat and have never really liked egg, I'm a huge fan of cheese and in the past years of vegetarianism have really missed eel and prosciutto.

* I am not vegan because being vegan is cool. Being vegan is mostly annoying; while occasional random dykes[2] and such will be like ``Oh my god you're _vegan_ that's so _awesome_ I did that for a while'' I am not really interested in hitting it off with people on the basis of what we each choose to not eat.[3] Except maybe to exchange recipes. I'm not interested in using my diet as a statement about my personal politics; I'd rather use my personal politics as a statement about my personal politics.

* I am not vegan for spiritual reasons. ...except inasmuch as ``performing randomly selected rituals that are not tied to any actual spiritual background'' is as close as I come to spirituality. There are a number of spiritual/religious traditions that embrace veganism and other dietary restrictions, and while their practitioners and I may be getting some of the same benefits[4] and vitamin deficiencies from the experience, I think they're coming from a different place than I am.

* I am not vegan just to be weird. I know a lot of people who are intentionally weird at the world around them for no apparent reason other than to push back against the world seeming weird to them. I have mixed feelings on this and have done my own share in the past, but not eating animal products isn't meant to serve that purpose. (The stripey socks might be.)

So what's left? ``Because I feel like it,'' mostly.[5] Well, that's a fine reason. :) I don't think being vegan is any worse than not being vegan, nor do I think it's any better. It's just what I'm going to do for a while. It helps me eat less junk food, too, though I recently discovered that Oreos have been reformulated to be vegan. TEMPTATION IN COOKIE FORM.

Stay good, Rachel!!!




[0] first-coming is a mailing list where I write long-form about my life: Horribly casual essay-ish updates on the project of being me. (Do you see what I did there? I think I understand how academics use the word "project" now.) I pull many fewer punches there than I do on LiveJournal since potential future employers are much less likely to find it. Hi, potential future employers!

[1] I don't celebrate most (all?) other Christian holidays, nor do I really consider myself Christian, though I grew up steeped in the traditions and theology. I just find Lent really useful to me and so I practice it.

[2] Dyke is not intended as a pejorative; I call myself a dyke periodically. ``You're allowed to do that with language, right?'' Maybe what I really mean is ``people in line at the Diesel.''

[3] If I turn on the Imagination Machine and try to picture myself dating a meat eater, though, it doesn't work so well; it seems like there would be _logistical_ problems if nothing else. Luckily I don't need to worry about this.

[4] Do you know how hard it is to get vegan food poisoning? :)

[5] Well, and it allows me to wander around the grocery store with a handful of vegan burgers saying ``Veganveganveganveganvegan'' like the bacon dog from the tele-vision. For some of us, this is sufficient reason alone.

Comments

[rax.livejournal.com]

I was planning to keep Kosher for Passover this year if I didn't stay vegan; I might still try but it's _severely_ limiting. Cassandra has threatened to eviscerate me if I try Ramadan. :) Let me know how it goes!

[maekern.livejournal.com]

You could try to be Kosher for Passover AND vegan, if you wanted a real challenge. What's for dinner? Matzo and water again. Yay!

[maekern.livejournal.com]

It is also convenient that the Twin Cities have a very high Jewish population. So while I will be trying to make most of my food myself (which is a separate ongoing project) there is also a ready supply of prepackaged Kosher food. A lot of which I already eat.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Also, since I'm already making a multitude of small replies:

What would be wrong with Ramadan? Isn't it just normal Halal eating (almost the same as Kashrut) but only while the sun is down? Or is there more to it that I haven't researched?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Not eating when the sun is up is Hard.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Well yes. I just wasn't sure if there was something else at issue.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Wow, that sounded like I was making a covert accusation of racism or something, which I wasn't doing at all. It just sounded like there might be even more harshness in Ramadan than I was aware of, based on the strength of her objection.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

The hardest part about keeping the Ramadan fast for me was fixing my sleep schedule. It felt like cheating to me if I woke up at 5 to eat, then went back to sleep until noon, and got to eat again at 5:30 or 6 or whenever sundown was.

Also, the Ramadan fast requires no smoking, no liquids (so no water which makes exercise hard), no sex, no music, and a whole pile of other restrictions depending on which imam you listen to (like, my father's imam says no t.v. or talk radio either, and when I was in middle school, books read purely for pleasure were also forbidden).

[rax.livejournal.com]

Wow, I didn't know about all of those. I guess not all of them were relevant the last time I looked at this seriously, which was high school. :)

The sleep schedule thing would work for me if other people I lived and worked with were doing the same thing. Having a spouse who isn't interested in shifting her sleep schedule for it basically makes it a no-go for me. (Obviously that wouldn't be the case if it were part of my religious tradition, but as a "recreational faster" I find that too much of a hurdle.)

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

I suspect your spouse might take issue with "no sex while the sun is up" also ;-)

[rax.livejournal.com]

We _are_ morning people... ;)

[maekern.livejournal.com]

That's surprisingly harsh.

Isn't is the case that many primarily Muslim countries with climates such that going from dawn to dusk with no water is downright dangerous?

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

Islam isn't some kind of heinous abusive cult that forces people to do things that are dangerous. And even if it was, given that an overwhelmingly large percentage of Muslims observe the fast, you'd think it if was that dangerous, Islam would have died out due to large numbers of dehydration deaths every year.

In most Muslim countries, everyone is fasting from sunup to sundown. Field workers and other manual laborers take/are given long breaks during the hottest part of the day, and most businesses run on severely reduced hours, if they don't shut down entirely. There are also exemptions for anyone travelling more than 50 miles from home (this was far more important before the invention of the car), pregnant women, menstruating women, anyone sick or taking medications.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

I was never saying any such thing about Islam. I was curious as to how that rule was interpreted and dealt with. I know religious laws tend to have limited flexibility, but also as you say don't tend to last long if the adherents all die out. Therein lies the interesting question of the theory and practice of religious law.

It seems as if you interpreted my question as an attack on Islam. Is there something about what I said that caused me to come off that way?

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

It seems as if you interpreted my question as an attack on Islam. Is there something about what I said that caused me to come off that way?

I did see it as an attack, or at least, a looking-down-the-nose at those poor ignorant heathens. One part of my interpretation was the overwhelming amount of Islamophobia and general white man's burden-esque bullshit I see every day coming out of our government, our politicians (even the presidential candidate I've been giving both time and money too :( ), the mass media, and at least half the people I talk to individually on a daily basis. So given someone I don't know I do the math and say the probability is that any random person I encounter is more likely than not to have unfounded prejudices against Islam. The second part of my reading of your comment was that in your first comment to me, you didn't write the nuances contained in your second question. If you had added something of the form of "I'm curious how fasting from water works and how the religious laws deal with the risk of dehydration" that would have gone a long way towards making your question sound less like the stereotype of Enlightened Western Cultured Person Explaining to the Ignorant Heathen Why They Are Stupid. Finally, since you are commenting on Rachel's journal, I read your comment in the same somewhat harsh, supercilious tone I expect from certain alums in our social circle. (If you know tibbetts or plitwack, you will know exactly what I'm talking about).

[maekern.livejournal.com]

I guess that makes sense. It is probably a worthy goal to give people the benefit of the doubt as not being hostile by default, but in the particular case of America's attitude towards Islam I can see how that would be rather hard.

For my part, I am an Atheist who finds all religions equally somewhat baffling, and equally extremely fascinating. Since in my local small social group there is no stigma attached to Islam (even though there aren't any Muslims in the group, merely by chance) so I'm not used to watching my words. If anything we stigmatize Christianity a bit (though we try not to) due to constant exposure to the dark and hateful side of Christianity in our culture.

I am more likely to ask stupid and simplistic questions about Islam since I have had less chance to ask basic questions than I have of Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism. Most Muslims in my part of the country are recent African immigrants who don't tend to interact socially with the rest of the population, so I haven't had occasion to know any well enough to ask the questions I would be inclined to.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

As a possibly irrelevant aside: The first person who I was aware of being Muslim who I did have occasion to know socially was a Pakistani friend of mine in college. After getting to know me for some time, and after a long conversation in which my theories for being a moral person and interacting with the world were discussed, he stated to me that in his (admittedly unusually liberal view) I was a Muslim. His argument was that despite not believing in God personally, I had still Submitted myself to His Will in the most important area of trying to be a good and moral person in the ways that my friend considered important to his own faith. As such, he argued, I was a Muslim in the true sense that I had "Submitted to God" in the manner that he felt was truly important.

Now, this is certainly not a conventional view, or one that I expect anyone to share. And I don't know enough about the theology of Islam (interpreted highly liberally OR more conventionally) at this point in my life to even really intelligently discuss his assertion, which is surely not a representative one.

The only reason why I even bring the story up is to make the point that I considered it to be one of the greater compliments that has been paid to me when this conversation happened. In November of 2001.

In short, not all Americans have bought into the post 2001 anti-Islam hysteria. In my experience, most thinking people are rather distressed by out culture's latest bout of frothing petty bigotry.

[capsicumanuum.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you didn't do this intentionally, but your last two comments just pushed a whole lot of my buttons. Please forgive me for bowing out of this conversation, but I won't bring drama to Rachel's journal.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Ah, I feared I might have done so, and come off horribly wrong. I apologize for giving offense.

If you do feel that I am being wrongheaded or ignorant about the subject under discussion, or am otherwise deeply in error, I would welcome you to email me at maekern@gmail.com at some point to discuss it privately, if you wish to. If you do not wish to, that is a valid choice. You're welcome to be openly rather upset at me as long as you're willing to try to be constructive and help me understand WHY.

I hasten to add that if I managed to inadvertently cause such a strong reaction it seems as if there is probably some deep-seated misunderstanding that I have that I am probably not aware of. If that is the case, I'd like to know about it so I can examine it more closely. The only thing worse than being a jackass is being a jackass and not KNOWING it, or knowing why.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Or if you prefer a public forum, as some people do, feel free to comment on my journal.

That said, I will now shut up and leave you alone. Again, sorry for giving offense.

[maekern.livejournal.com]

Of course, now that I read that back, it sounds like a much more elaborate way of saying the standard weaselly "No really, some of my best friends are foo..." that bigots like to hide behind. But meh; I know what I'm trying to say, and if I've butchered my attempt to say it, then at least I tried.