Nine days ago, I posted a diary here announcing I was going vegetarian, and I got so much great encouragement and support from so many great people in the Daily Kos community. Thanks to you all. I said then that I would try to start a blog, and I have.
Healthy Eating Healthy Planet shares the triumphs and trials of my journey, as I learn about vegan and vegetarian foods and products, recipes, and ways to handle cooking for family and friends and eating out, plus bringing other areas of my life into harmony with the planet.
More after the jump.
It was my cognitive dissonance over the suffering of animals raised for food that got me in the end. Long before now, I knew about PETA and their activism with their nauseating, graphic photos, and I recoiled. Their tactics repelled me even as their message resonated at my core. I guess that sort of guerilla activism is exactly what got me in the end, when I clicked on a link offering a free vegan food guide and found myself watching a horrific video Mercy for Animals shows on their site. As much as I hate that approach, that is indeed what reached me and pushed me from the stalemate between the savoring of tasty meat and the abhorrence of inflicting suffering of any kind and, for complex psychological reasons I scarce understand myself, animal suffering in particular.
The decision made, the stalemate resolved, I have found that eating dairy, although I intend to eliminate doing so and become vegan in the future, is making going meatless immediately feasible. There is always something on a menu I can eat and still have some protein. What I am learning fast is that there are aren't enough natural food restaurants where I hang out. So lunch today was a heavily battered and deeply fried chile relleno with Spanish rice oozing with melted cheddar, tasty but not so healthy. Dinner will be at home and will consist of quinoa and a veggie "chicken" cutlet. Dairy is not ideal and still awful in what it does to some animals in its production, so we only buy what my spouse and I have long called "happy eggs": those from free-range, vegetarian-fed and antibiotic-free hens; I use soy cheese at home and aim for organic elsewhere until I can eliminate it. No milk for me now since I discovered almond milk, and soy milk is good, too.
People's reactions to my going vegetarian have ranged from enthusiastically supportive to "Say what?" My spouse totally supports my decision but isn't prepared to join me, so that makes for challenging meals at home. We're getting it, though. I have been on one food plan after another as long as we've been together. In fact I had been a vegetarian for a couple of years when we met and soon gave it up. Wave a barbecued hot dog at me when I'm in love and I'm weak! Then over the years it was Weight Watchers, Atkins, The Zone Diet, South Diet Beach, Hamptons Diet, then a very unhealthy faddish plan I won't dignify by mentioning its name, and back to a version of Atkins again. So here I am changing how I eat again, but this time not to get or stay skinny but to honor my values, those values that have gelled for me as never before. Just as I do not condone the torture of prisoners of war, enemy combatants, or any other human beings in this country or anywhere in the world, I can no longer be a party to the torture of the non-human creatures with whom we share this planet. What had been a source of cognitive dissonance has became my solid and humane stance. And so it goes.