I’ve been thinking a lot about my assumptions about food, and especially my assumptions as someone who has read 60+ books on vegetarianism and factory farming, and not much about an other related agricultural topic.

These are things I believe to be true:

1. Factory farms treat animals abhorrently in a variety of ways, including (but not limited to): being unable to live their lives naturally expressing their own instincts and behaviors healthfully, cruel handling of the “healthy” animals but also exceptionally cruel handling of the fallen, an unnatural diet that often makes them sick, and a death that is at least terrifying, if not drawn out and downright torturous.
2. Factory farms are horrible for the environment as a whole, but especially damaging to their own regional ecology, causing sickness in surrounding communities, and polluting local soils and waterways.

(Seafood – a connected topic that I have thoughts about, but I’d like to concentrate right now on the farm animal industry and talk about seafood at a different time.)

Those are the 2 main reasons I’ve wanted to go vegetarian for so many years. Because I believe it’s possible, and because I believe it’s morally wrong to support an industry that causes so much needless suffering and environmental degradation.

Based on this, it’s clear that the values I feel strongly about here are:

• Diminishing suffering.
• Diminishing environmental impact as much as I can.

So, based on my education, and combined with my values, what are my assumptions?

1. Eating a vegetarian diet will keep animals from suffering.
2. Eating a vegetarian diet will keep me just as healthy as eating meat would have.
3. Eating a vegetarian diet will be a net positive for the earth because it has less environmental impact than eating factory farmed meat does.
4. It’s very possible for a significant portion (like, say, around 90%) of the human population to live quite healthfully and happily without eating meat, it’s “just” a matter of changing tastes, habits, and transitioning from one cultural norm to another.

These are assumptions I don’t regularly question, but am starting to now. Specifically:

1. What is the environmental impact of industrial agriculture? What are the costs and benefits? Who are the big players, what’s being done to the land, how is it being done?
2. I know where my beef comes from (literally I do – the name and address of the farm), but where does my brown rice come from? Where do my barley and soybeans come from? Why isn’t this question just as deserving of scrutiny as the source of any meat I might want to eat?
3. What is the environmental impact of animal-based agriculture where factory farms don’t exist, where animals are raised in the open, where the impact to the land is minimized?

You might be asking why I’m not questioning whether we should animals at all. I’ll write about that more later, too, but that would be a pretty huge post and I want to think about my feelings on that more. I wanted to get this stuff down while it’s fresh.

When last we left, I was reading a new book about a diet based in low-fat veganism, and I was commenting on how ridiculous I think the Atkins diet is. When the author of a diet book advises you to eat all the bacon you want and then dies from a fall, overweight, with heart disease and high blood pressure, it should go without saying that this isn’t a diet you want to try.

But what about Paleo diets? They aren’t “low carb” in the Atkins sense of the phrase, they’re a whole different story, chock full of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grass-fed meat. As someone who loves anthropology, the story is fascinating. Paleo diet proponents claim that we aren’t evolved to eat grains, and a diet stocked with them (refined grains are obviously out, but they’re talking about whole grains, too), leads to disease.

The Paleo Diet

The low-fat vegan diet proponents (T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Joel Furhman, John McDougall), whose books I’ve read and studied, are all medical doctors with multiple articles among them. Their diets have been the subject of numerous studies. Ornish and Furhman have both reversed heart disease, and I recently read that McDougall’s specialty is bringing women back to health from breast cancer.

The Paleo diet proponents are still new to me, but the most popular writer seems to be Loren Cordain, who wrote The Paleo Diet. He’s frequently referred to as “Dr. Cordain”, but my search to uncover what his doctorate is in has been unsuccessful so far. In his book he calls himself an avid researcher of “health, nutrition, and fitness”.

Paleo dieters are all over the web now, and they’ve brought a lot to the discussion. Put “Paleo Diet” into Google, and you’ll find a wealth of links to sort through. Both the low-fat vegans and the Paleo proponents are very concerned with heart disease – the statistics they quote match up throughout my books, and both sides claim that their diet will keep you from developing it. The low-fat vegan proponents claim (and have proven, in several studies), and their diet will even reverse it.

The general Paleo viewpoint, from my reading:

• The genes of modern humans haven’t changed significantly from their stone-age counterparts.
• These stone age people were short-lived only because of trauma (injuries, falls, etc), and were otherwise extremely healthy; “Arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia and cancer are absolute rarities for them.” (1)
• In modern hunter-gatherer societies…..”10-20% of the population is 60 years of age or older. These elderly people have been shown to be generally free of the signs and symptoms of chronic disease (obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels) that universally afflict the elderly in western societies.” (2)
• These paleolithic humans at a diet composed of meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and that is what we should be eating today.
  
• Grains, beans, and potatoes, are all toxic when raw and retain some of that toxicity when cooked. They’re also low in nutrients and have a high glycemic index. (1) Replacing them with fruits and vegetables is the healthiest alternative. Incidentally, raw food advocates say the same thing.

Paleo dieters claim that by eating this way, they’ve recovered their health and lost weight.

Where To Go From Here?

I’d hoped to write all day, picking pieces out from both sides of the debate, but my life is just too busy with other things right now, including teaching myself how to cook (let’s get some more recipes on here!), finding out what the weird smell is in my office, teaching my daughter to read, and getting our household ready to move back to Seattle in a few months.

INSTEAD, what I’ve decided to do is to just pull out conversation points on all this as I go along, post them, and see where we end up.

On the Dangers of Becoming a Google Scientist

One of the Paleo blogs I really enjoy is Son of Grok. In a post on 7/14/09, called Where Has the Motivation Gone? , he said:

Another thing that kills me is all the Google Scientists around. I don’t mean scientists employed by Google, I instead mean the guy who Googles a topic, does a bit of reading on it and suddenly thinks he is the Sir Isaac Newton of the topic. Also in this group are the micro-nutrient micro-analyzers and the people who try to way over science the approach in my opinion.

I don’t want either myself or this blog to ever assume it has all the answers. I love learning, I love reading, and I love sleuthing out information. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but whatever I end up doing the most of, I never want to give the impression that someone doing it differently is, by definition, doing it wrong. No matter what anyone says, I deeply believe that every BODY is different, that what works for one person isn’t going to work for every person. If anything, I think that’s the missing ingredient in all this. What if A LOT OF THINGS are right? What if it isn’t just one thing?

Isn’t that more exciting than one side having all the answers?

Questions? Comments?

Do you have questions you want answers to? Are you befuddled by any of this stuff? Or do you feel like you have answers you want to share? Comment away! I’ll make a list and address everything in future posts.

Links on this page:

(1) Introduction to the Paleolithic Diet, by Dr. Ben Balzer, family physician

(2) The Paleo Diet – FAQ – Loren Cordain’s website

One of the things I haven’t uncovered yet is why I’m still so sore, why I wake up with my joints hurting, and why I hurt when I’ve been sitting longer than a few minutes. The only time this ever went away was when I tried Eat to Live, by Joel Furhman. I only lasted a week, thanks to a total inability to fill up on vegetables, but I did feel great at the end, and I remember springing out of bed without pain. The only real difference between that diet and my elimination diet has been meat. Could meat be causing the muscle soreness? I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve wondered about.

The low-fat vegan way to health and longevity….

Enter a friend of a friend, who wrote me a few days ago thanking me for this blog, that it was inspiring them to do some more thinking about their own diet strategies to get healthy. They said they were going to use a new book that just came out entitled, The Engine 2 Diet: The Texas Firefighter’s 28-Day Save-Your-Life Plan that Lowers Cholesterol and Burns Away the Pounds, by a firefighter and world-class triathlete named, and I love this: Rip Esselstyn. If I’m gonna be saved from a burning building, I really want it to be by a guy named Rip.

The book follows the low-fat vegan crowd, which I’ve been a fan of for years, whose proponents include T. Colin Campbell, Dean Ornish, Joel Furhman, and John McDougall. Yes, I’ve been a fan of something I find difficult to follow. Why? If eating a lot of veggies seems this hard for me, why did I keep at it for so long? Because, these guys have serious credibility. Each one of them has personal experience reversing heart disease in their patients. EACH ONE. Dean Ornish’s articles on his hundreds (if not thousands?) of these diet-based reversal proliferate in peer-reviewed medical journals. T. Colin Campbell’s book, The China Study, is a fascinating and evidence-filled tome indicting meat-eating, and has been called the “grand prix of epidemiological studies”.

That said, I’m not a scientist. While I do read the studies, and I do follow the science, I also tend to just look someone up and down and make some gut assumptions, and what you’ll notice about all these guys is that they’re all healthy, they don’t have any chronic health problems, they’re not overweight, and they’re aging very well. You may have heard about Atkins, who “slipped and fell” outside his clinic, and ended up dying while apparently hugely overweight.

Atkins’ medical records were released by accident to a doctor in Nebraska, who discovered in these records “a hand-written note that Atkins had a history of myocardial infarction (heart attack), congestive heart failure, and hypertension (written “h/o MI, CHF, HTN”). While fans of Atkins rush to point out how the injustice of these records being given out by mistake, they don’t have any response to the facts: the guy was dying of heart disease. Atkins’ family vehemently denied any autopsy, which I find ridiculously irresponsible. If you’re going to build an entire empire by advising people that slurping down cheese, cream, bacon, and hamburgers is good for you, then I think letting the public have a look at your arteries after your SUSPICIOUS UNTIMELY DEATH is the least you could do.

So what about the Paleo diets?

That’s next up! I’m fascinated by the paleo diets and their very healthy-looking advocates, and I’m especially fascinated by the claims that both sides make about the other. I’ll write more about that tonight or tomorrow, depending on how busy it gets around here. Right now, the kids just got home from their overnight visit to Grammy and Papa’s house, and it’s time to go have some fun with them.

Listening to Tom Standage talking about his new book, An Edible History of Humanity this morning I was reminded of a paper written by the anthropologist and author Jared Diamond in the late 1980′s.

Diamond described agriculture as, “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”.

Farming was, he argued, a catastrophe from which we have never quite recovered. With agriculture came “the social and sexual inequality, disease and despotism, that curse our existence”.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the “paleo diet“, the idea that we’ve been evolving for six million years, but have only been sowing seeds and eating grains and dairy for about 10,000 years, a fact that proponents of the paleo diet see as evidence that we aren’t evolved to eat these foods at all. They advocate a diet of meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and that’s it. No grains, no dairy.

I’m currently reading a forum for paleo eaters, many of them “recovering vegetarians” who are experiencing dramatic positive health changes after eating this way. It’s really fascinating stuff. Katelin will be pleased to know that I’m also trying to slog through Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. This could take awhile.

I want to note that while I have tried some “paleo meals”, I’m not changing my diet dramatically at the moment. I’m just exploring one end of the nutrition debate, one that I hadn’t really looked at before. One of the hard things about writing this blog has been that folks frequently seem to interpret my interest in alternative foods as an indication that I don’t know what the word “moderation” means, or that I’m dieting all the time and trying a bunch of weird eating plans; none of which are true. My diet changes happen about as slowly as glaciers move, and my interest in “alternative nutrition”, if you will, is like history buff’s interest in warfare, or an art fan’s interest in the Renaissance. If my local university made a degree just for me, it would called a Bachelor of Science in Nutritional Anthropology. So please take my posting information as I find as me indicating, “Hey! This is kind of interesting!”, not as me announcing that I’m now on a new diet.

Despite the one-word title, the subject was much more specifically aimed at sustainability topics; we talked about sustainable agriculture, the environmental cost of eating locally versus eating food shipped in from around the world, organics versus commercially raised produce, seed saver organizations, the Farm Bill, laws regarding food labeling, gleaning programs, food banks’ handling of and need for more fresh produce, canning and putting food away, root cellars, gardening, and taking care of our food supply as a community “in these tough economic times”.

There were five guest panelists:

• A woman who worked for the public health department, and whose husband is a chef about to open a new restaurant here in town (WOO HOO!). I regret not writing down her name.
• Boots, a friend of my mother-in-law’s, who runs a local ranch that sells humanely raised chickens, cows, and pigs, as well as hosting two guest cabins where people can stay with their families (and even their horses!).
• Dean, who runs The Fourth Element, helping other businesses “go green”.
• Rolf, who owns our much-beloved local bookstore Jerrols, on the panel because he and his family are trying to eat locally and grow most of their own produce, and he reports much of his experience in his blog.
• Gregg, a local farmer who raises seed crops through his business Irish Eyes Garden Seeds.

The panelists sat in chairs at the front of the room, facing the group, and our host asked them all three questions:

1. What is good food?
2. What do you see as a big problem facing our access to good food?
3. What do you think we can do to keep good food in our community?

The structure was pretty loose, and he introduced people and then asked them to answer the questions, which meant that the answers were often lost in their own biographies. Some were more specific than others, but everyone seemed to share a few basic ideas:

• Good food was unprocessed, nutritious, and nurturing.
• Threatening our access to good food was agribusiness, the difficulties faced by small farmers, misguided government regulations, and the steadily climbing cost of distribution – which will hopefully have the effect of turning a lot of people into small-scale urban gardeners.
• Keeping good food in our community could be accomplished by networking meetings where growers could meet buyers, encouraging people to keep shopping at the Farmer’s Market, and general public education on gardening and putting food away.

My interest in the event, besides spending some nice time with Julie, was mostly in meeting people who I hoped would have a more liberal bent than I’m used to encountering in our small town (a joke about “that one” met with loud laughter and proved I was among kindred spirits), and seeing what they had to say about a topic as diverse as “Food”. Part of me was curious to see if veganism would come up, but it seemed clear after a few minutes that something that specific was unlikely to get discussed.

Or so I thought – we did a have a brief couple of minutes when Boots talked about life on her ranch, and movingly described her devotion to the animals she raised for food. She makes sure they live the most natural lives possible, the cattle are all grass fed and spend their days roaming the pasture, the chickens get to wander around, the pigs wallow in the dirt.

“They live a happy life with one bad day,” she joked, and everyone laughed.

The business is totally open, anyone is welcome to go up and see how she raises the animals, and she even described a workshop where she taught thirty people how to kill and prep chickens. “A lot of heads were rolling that day!”

I was sincerely touched by her obvious devotion to caring responsibly for the animals (hopefully this doesn’t sound disingenuous appearing right after the head-rolling comment). When asked whether any vegetarians ever visit the ranch, she said that many had, and a lot of them bought meat from her after seeing how naturally the animals got to lead their lives. I know that for a lot of people who might otherwise become vegetarians, eating humanely-raised meat is enough. My question was, would it be enough for me?

In the past, our family has jumped at the chance to get local meat from farms we trust, and for years we’ve made the choice to spend a little extra for the eggs from cage-free hens (although I’ve since learned that “cage-free” isn’t always more humane). This year we were able to get most of our eggs from a local farm, whose owner I met and did business with personally, and her obvious love for her chickens (or “the girls” as she called them) was, and I try not to use this word too often because it makes me feel a twelve-year-old from the 50′s: delightful.

When your current diet feels unsettling, when your heart and politics collide with your palate, you look around at other people who have made choices in this situation, and you notice a continuum. There’s the general continuum, of people who eat meat, to people who eat humanely-raised meat, to people who just eat certain types of meat, to people who eat no meat, to people who are vegan and eat no meat or dairy and generally shy away from animal products of any kind.

Then you have the “vegan continuum”, where you’ll find people with surprisingly different perspectives on how we should, as human beings, think of our fellow earthlings, the animals. Some people don’t like factory farms, but still think it’s okay to use animals for food, whereas at the other end you’ll find folks who not only eschew factory farms, but any animal-derived product, from shoes to furniture to cosmetics and vaccines.

You start to ask yourself, where do I fit in? And why don’t carrots taste good? Okay, that last one is probably just me.

Since this is my blog, presumably everyone wants to know what I think, what I’ve decided, what my politics are. Drumroll please……..

I don’t know.

Wouldn’t it be easier if I could just make a decision, order the t-shirt, and be done with it? I think so. But I have a lot of questions, and a lot of feelings. I don’t think it’s okay to tell everyone in the world they shouldn’t use animals for food. It’s impractical. I think people like Boots should be praised; look at the example she’s setting! What if everyone made the switch from factory-farmed meat to locally-grown humanely-raised meat? What if the humane treatment of animals because something the majority of people cared about, and were willing to use their dollars to support? Do people have to become vegans to be humane?

Honestly, I’m not sure. Despite my years of vegan groupie status, I’m still muddled on many issues, in part because I find it so hard to become a vegan outright. If I were one of those people who loved vegetables, I think it would be easy to make the transition and never look back, even stand there and wonder why others didn’t – just like it was easy for me to say that every mother should try to have an out-of-hospital birth until I did it myself, and my son almost died.

But it’s not that easy, and while some people are able to turn their principles into hard stakes they can drill into the ground and anchor their new behaviors to; others (like myself), find that instead of feeling anchored, they just end up falling back into old habits while using their iron principles to beat themselves up.

I’d like to treat myself more humanely, as well as the animals.

Which means exactly what I’m doing. Small, but important steps. Lots of thinking. Lots of reading. Lots of talking. Lots of writing. And a commitment to following the journey through.