Note: I am adding a new first paragraph that includes the comments I just wrote in response to a reader on 2/11/19.
How dare you eat meat?
I know anger isn’t effective. I’m also sympathetic. There’s no shortage of things to be angry about.
I have many friends and acquaintances who are vegan. Most are gentle. Some are not. I just received an agitated comment and decided to respond. I’m not trying to convince anyone. The book isn’t closed. I’m just trying to bridge a bit of understanding.
Would you agree that when we know better, we do better?
Would you agree that there are many mysteries and we don’t come close to knowing a fraction of them?
I believe that one of the existential causes of human suffering is this dilemma about our food. I understand and respect the personal imperative to make these decisions for ourselves and our families. I understand and respect the motivation to try to make sense of the world and one of these ways is by adhering to a personal food hierarchy. I understand just a tiny of the great complexity of these issues and try to resist judgment.
I am saddened by the lack of consciousness including in the way that our country feeds itself in general. I believe this manifests itself in a variety of ways that harms all living things.
I believe in the sentience of animals and plants.
I believe in purchasing, preparing, and receiving food with consciousness and deep gratitude.
I believe in making informed, educated, and values-aligned decisions. I believe in an open mind and self-reflexivity and always trying to do better.
I believe that the opinions shared with compassion and a desire for understanding go a long way.
I believe that the desire for a peaceful world starts with ourselves and it’s a practice.
Life is intelligent
There’s a growing body of literature about the intelligence and sentience of plants. Seems there’s a lot that we don’t know. You can mine the PubMed trove before deciding what you think about mainstream press coverage.
Sedate A Plant and it Loses Consciousness. Is It Conscious?” New York Times, 2/2/18
“A Mind Without A Brain,” Forbes, 5/9/18
“Research Shows Plants Are Sentient. Will We Act Accordingly?” Good Nature Travel, 4/7/15
The ethics of eating meat
Here’s the rest of the post that I wrote 2.5 years ago. It seems I’m evolving, too.
I eat meat. I don’t eat a lot of it but I know I need it to be a regular part of my diet. I’ve tried being a vegetarian. I love vegetables but they’re not healing and nourishing enough for me. I’m starving. When I eat grains and legumes for complete protein, I end up compensating and then I’m not comfortable in my skin. My digestion slooooows down. I gain weight and look puffy. I’m more tired. My joints hurt. And my blood sugar feels erratic.
I would not have been attuned to this, however, if my family hadn’t gone through strict dietary intervention for healing. We managed, and then eliminated, our boys’ severe colitis and other related health issues by first removing gluten and dairy, and then adopting the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. (This was about 12 years ago, before the explosion of information and support about GAPS and Paleo.) I was blown away by the transformational role that food. I enrolled in an integrative nutrition certification program, which affirmed the ideas of bio-individuality and food as medicine. It’s intuitive, really. Not everyone needs the same medicine.
I have a few friends who desperately wish they could be vegan — they try so hard, but every now and then they sheepishly “succumb” because they crave it and feel so much better afterwards. But they feel it’s wrong.
I have other friends who are vegetarians themselves but reluctantly prepare meat for family members.
As I wrap up Level 1 Kundalini yoga teacher training (and start on my prenatal certification), I’ve been thinking about meat… specifically, the ethics of eating it. Kundalini yogis don’t eat meat. Our studio is vegetarian and I’m pretty sure all our teachers are. If someone isn’t, no one is talking about it. Do yogis have to be vegetarian?
What does it mean to be conflicted about the food we eat? We already struggle so much with the pesticides, GMOs, preservatives, dyes, sugar, corn syrup, flavor enhancers, texturizers, and much more. It feels so… heavy to add “the meat issue” to the load. Shortly after posting about the meat farm on my Facebook page, juxtaposed with my profile pic in kundalini white, I realized that I needed to address it somehow.
And then my girl, Kelly Brogan, MD, did it for me. Yes!!! Read her latest post: On Being Right and Eating Animals. You might also enjoy Valeri Sewald’s Meat Me, A Former Vegetarian. Oh, and there’s this article from The Star that the Dalai Lama — who tried being a vegetarian in the 1960s — eats meat, too.
Medical dogma helps no one, and there are myriad paths we take to discover what and how we’re meant to eat.
Looking for healthier, more responsible meat?
So… we re-inaugurated our food co-op this morning with the first delivery from Wrong Direction Farm. I’ve been looking for a closer relationship with the farm that raises and butchers our meat and poultry, without sacrificing our standards — organic, soy-free, humane, free range, human scale, relatively local, with a more varied and far less expensive selection than Whole Foods:
- grass fed, grass finished beef (Devon and Angus cattle) with no cheats, like feeding sugar or other concentrates; grazed on fresh pasture during the green season and on hay (cut and dried grass) during the winter
- pigs and chickens on pasture and in the woods for most of the year, and in greenhouses and hoophouses with lots of wood chips and hay bedding in the winter, supplemented with certified organic grain, whey, and fruit/veggie trimmings
- no chemical or pharmaceutical interventions
- organic and by definition GMO-free — they are not certified organic but their practices would pass organic certification
- delicious
Wrong Direction Farm is on 100 acres in the Mohawk Valley in Canajoharie, NY, which is about 235 miles (3.5 hours) due north of my home in Central NJ.
I have no financial stake in this whatsoever… I’m just interested in making this more convenient for my family and other families. I want to directly support farmers with integrity by helping to cut out the middleman. We’ll have a few months to see if we can make it worth their while to add us to their stop so please forward this to friends and family.
Inquiries and logistics
The process couldn’t be easier. Orders and payments are processed online and Wrong Direction Farm handles all inquiries and concerns. You can reach Dave at 518-588-2633 and Rachel at 518-928-0019. You can also email them at wrong.direction.farm@gmail.com.
The farm delivers monthly on Fridays at 8:00 am. The schedule is available on their site.
Unlike many meat CSAs, you can order whatever you want and they have both bulk and small quantity options. The first step is to create an account here and place your first order.
When doing price comparisons, don’t forget to pay attention to weight. For example, bacon is sold in 1 pound packages versus 8 oz in stores. If you’re interested in sharing quarter/half beef or half/whole hog shares, or sharing bulk ground beef or pork, work out the arrangements with your friends or comment below to connect with other co-op members.
Since it can get very hot in the summer months, I recommend that you arrive very close to delivery time so you can get your food into your freezer. If you’re not able to pick up in the morning, you can either drop off a cooler with ice packs the night before or you can make arrangements with the Perozzi’s to purchase dry ice. Unfortunately, I don’t have space to store your meat for you.
If you haven’t participated in one of my co-ops before, get in touch and I’ll let you know where to pick up. Email info@fearlessparent.org.
Comment below!
I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. Share recipes!
I’m hoping to add raw dairy, organic maple syrup, and a veggie/fruit CSA option, too. Comment below if you have requests or resource suggestions.
Meet the Perozzi Family
You can get to know the Perozzi’s by checking out their website and Facebook page. They are lovely… knowledgeable, dedicated, patient, and helpful. Don’t hesitate to contact them.
I love this idea and wanted to do something like this! Registering now
Awesome, Cyndi. I think you will love it!
i can understand but if you wrote that you eat “animals” thjat might make yhou think more about what you are eating. they want to live as much as you do. the ag industry uses these other words so that you wont think that it is animals you are eating. the pig, the cow who loves its calf and loses it immediately after birth and the cow is forcibly raped to dcontinually have calves that are taken from her. the mother pig living in a fence so that she cant ever move and is constantly reped to keep pregnant. the chickens too. you are eating animals, not meat. and i understand how hard it is. how very very hard.
This is an important topic and one that people rightly wrestle with. How do we make the deeply personal decisions that balance the moral, religious, health, philosophical, scientific, and other parameters most important to us? If you know our blog, then you know we don’t shy away from tough questions. Rather than descend into ad hominem attacks and name calling, which do not serve anyone, least of all a more nuanced understanding of difficult issues — we dare to say the things that many may be feeling but are routinely shamed into disavowing or swallowing because there has not been a platform for these ideas.
I was having a soulful conversation with a beautiful artist and lightworker who said: “I believe the original sin is the agony and awareness that we must kill to eat (and therefore live).” I couldn’t agree more. We included both plants and animals in our ideas about food and expressed the view that the energy field of gratitude can transform the senseless and unconscious into the meaningful and even joyful
I believe in having deep and conscious reverence for our food. All of it.
I believe plants are sentient. We already know that plants can see, hear, and smell. They can perceive the world. We know of specific plants that have extraordinary capabilities — that alone should make us pause and wonder. Just because our science today cannot “prove” that they can feel pain does not mean they do not or even that our limited understanding of what constitutes legitimate life is all that matters. There are mysteries that we not yet be able to explain but that does not mean we should not bow before them.
It’s not useful to shame people. It’s an egoic exercise to identify a single dimension of behavior, privilege it, and then use it to bludgeon others.
It is useful to raise an idea, explain and defend it with compassionate awareness, and see what others think.
So I don’t believe there’s only one kind of “eater” that’s unconscious. I think there can be many kinds of unconscious eating but I’m not sure this is the path that will get us where we want to go.
Let’s try to elevate the discussion and hold each other as we wish to be held as we grapple with the difficult issues that our society faces.
You’re seriously saying ripping a cabbage out of the ground is the same as ripping a chicken’s head off? Go outside and do both and tell me if you see the difference. I eat both but I would never compare the two. And you don’t mention how your farm does the animal killing, you just speak of how easy it is to place the order and pick up (but not when it’s too hot!). If you really want to have a soulful conversation start with the butchering process, let’s really talk about the agony. Only then will you have awareness and can start giving advice. Peace.
Hi, Tara. I receive your message with an open heart.
Would you agree that when we know better, we do better?
Would you agree that there are many mysteries and we don’t come close to knowing a fraction of them?
I believe that one of the psychic causes of human suffering is this dilemma about our food. I understand and respect the personal imperative to make these decisions. I understand and respect the desire to adhere to a personal food hierarchy. I understand just a tiny of the great complexity of these issues and try to resist judgment.
I am saddened by the lack of consciousness including in the way that our country feeds itself. I believe this manifests itself in a variety of ways that harms all living things.
I believe in the sentience of animals and plants.
I believe in purchasing, preparing, and receiving food with consciousness and deep gratitude.
I believe in making informed, educated, and values-aligned decisions. I believe in an open mind and self-reflexivity and always trying to do better.
I believe that the opinions shared with compassion and a desire for understanding go a long way.
I believe that the desire for a peaceful world starts with ourselves and it’s a practice.