Why I’m Not Vegan
I’ve never gone vegan, or vegetarian, though there have been times when I intentionally ate plant-based meals and felt good about it. I remember in my late teens, working at a coffeeshop, being healthy and having a bottle of “juice” and a whole grain muffin on break. I was jazzed that I presumably just ingested more fruit than I ever ate at a time. The label informed me I was consuming 2 3/4 apple, half a banana, and a bunch of tropical fruit, so I felt great. More likely, I was energized from a sugar high thanks to the 4 and a half tablespoons of sugar I just drank, not including the pastry.
I respect my friends who are vegetarian and vegan — they’re conscientious, aware that how they eat affects other living creatures and the world we live in. They seem to be generally healthier than the average American (to be fair any amount of mindfulness in regards to diet is better than standard).
Along a personal health journey, I found Nourishing Traditions. Having recently been enamored by the magic of fermentation, this “cookbook” expanded a newfound world. Ancient techniques of food preparation, in harmony with nature, that made food more delicious, nutritionally beneficial, and in some cases even preserved it. It was nutrition that led me to the ancestral diet, though health isn’t what kept me interested, or what I’m sharing about today. If you’re interested learning about the nutritional importance of meat, there are many great resources out there by much more informed people that are yours for the searching. An excellent comprehensive article is Vegetarianism and Nutritional Deficiencies by Dr Christopher Masterjohn.
“Eating is an agricultural act.” — Wendell Berry
What resonated with me most as I learned about how indigenous populations all over the world followed similar practices of food production and preparation was how in tune it was with natural cycles and systems, and how it resulted in superior health for those involved (imagine that!) It blew my mind, and changed the way I look at the world.
It also formed the single most important, enough if it were the only, reason why I choose to not live a vegan lifestyle:
veganism is not sustainable for people or the planet.
Possibly, if you were fruitarian and living in the tropics, you may be able to get by year round. You would not be thriving. In 2019, being able to fulfill (most) of your dietary needs without (direct) animal input is only possible through industrialization, warehousing, and global distribution systems. It is a personal principal of mine to rely on these as little as possible, and in my lifetime I’d love to see them at least become the exception in our world rather than the rule. It’s hard to see this when our food system as a whole is so fragmented: growing crops requires fertility, and that fertility is from animals.
In our current broken agricultural system, we separate animals from plants, then stockpile them. In concentrated animal feed operations, with nowhere for massive amounts of manure to go, what should be a blessing becomes a curse on our land, water, and communities. Then, on the other side of town we have countless hectares of mono-crops depleting the soil, so we truck in fertility that has been mined far away. This is craziness.
Humans all over the globe, have experienced abundant health in every land ecosystem. How have we been able to migrate and flourish all over the globe? Whether the savannas of Africa, North American temperate rain forests, or the frozen tundras of Greenland, we have made the entire planet our home with the help of livestock. I’ve read that civilization itself could be attributed to both the domesticated chicken or cow. Year round access to the most nutrient-dense food available — milk and all the wonderful products of milk, eggs, and meat of course — is far from the only benefit of keeping livestock. Rendered fat from animals preserves food. Native American pemmican can be stored for up to 10 years and provides full sustenance. Pemmican fueled the Canadian fur trade, many explorers, and there was even a war about it. The fertility from herds of large land mammals is sadly missing from our landscape, in North America we’ve extracted the topsoil gifted to us by generations of buffalo, and we are not pasturing any replacements with our modern factory farms. Additionally, in my opinion we have yet to create in a lab a material more wonderful for clothing than wool.
From the desserts to the grasslands, the north to south pole, our animal friends have grown and evolved with us, sustained us, clothed and sheltered us, and provided fertility for crops. Today, the most local food available to me (and only local food available to me year round) is grass-fed beef and pork, milk from a local family farm, and my own eggs. When I choose these over commodity grains and processed mass-transported “food”, my body receives superior nutrition, but even more my community benefits economically, the animals have been able to live their lives as intended doing all the wonderful things they do, and I’m building the most important ecosystem: the soil web below us.
