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Foodish thoughts

People who know me are aware that I drift back and forth over the food spectrum, from nearly complete carnivore during part of my "Atkins phase" all the way over to nearly complete Vegan during my "Low Fat phase." Right now I'm reading two books:
I have always been pretty repulsed by the idea of killing animals for my dinner, I've tried to get over that but the thought of killing really does bug me. Reading "The Ethics of What We Eat" has just served to make that worse. I hadn't realized just how brutal the treatment the vast majority of our food animals receive really is, and not just at the end when they are slaughtered, but the continuous misery they live in on factory farms. So I've decided I'm not going to eat meat or fish at all. If I'm not willing to kill it I can't justify my eating it. I doubt I'll go the whole Vegan route though, in a fairly short time this morning I did some research and found that there are a number of local sources for humanely produced dairy and eggs. Check out Wise Food Ways, and Organic Pastures for a start. These items, and honey too (Vegans don't eat honey because it's an animal product? Say what??), don't destroy the animals we get them from and the animals can be treated humanely during production, and since it is local I can go and check on it too. So, I won't need to totally give up all of those yummy things to do what I think is the right thing, although with the higher cost of the local, organic, free range production I imagine the amounts of this sort of food will be considerably reduced.

But I will be checking out a lot more Vegan recipes, eating lower on the food chain in general is a good idea for the planet I think, plus it's lower fat as a rule and that can't hurt one of my girth in the effort to reduce said girth... :-) I'm also focusing on trying to get local stuff as much as possible, reducing greenhouse emissions is helped some when your your produce travels 50 miles instead of shipping it 6,000 miles from South America.

Comments

  1. Lutheran LucciolaDecember 6, 2008 at 12:18 PM

    Speaking as someone who was Vegan for 10 years, I should caution you about one thing: having a diet that is very high in grains can influence sugar levels. Try to stay with whole grains, and ones that do not have high glycemic levels.

    Brown rice is good for you, but it is fairly high in sugar. Believe it or not, Uncle Ben's converted rice is the lowest glycemic level rice, and packed full of vitamins because of the converted process.

    Quinoa is also good.

    I ran into health problems from doing vegan, and just came to a conclusion that local humane meat (mostly chicken) and some fish and tofu, beans, is the way for me.

    And don't let the meat eaters get to you for feeling compassion towards animals. The average factory farm is enough to make most any person sick.

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  2. Larry DevichDecember 6, 2008 at 12:25 PM

    Yep, moderation in all things is the way to go. I know me, I would probably not survive on a full Vegan diet, so I'm not even going to try, but meat... that I can skip for sure. I do eat all whole grains, whole wheat bread made at home, whole grain rice etc. More veggies and fruit, less eggs milk and cheese and forget the meat, that's the direction and the goal, but it's not written in stone. Especially with all of the carnivores here in the house ;-)

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