![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rambling about diet
Sep. 30th, 2007 09:29 pmI spent a while in Oregon watching the DVD that comes with this book about the RAVE diet (psst... rave = vegan). It was pretty dreadful, featuring blanket statements of dubious quality like "animal foods feed cancer, plant foods kill cancer". Even so, it got me thinking a little bit about how I have been wanting to remain conscious of eating lower on the food chain, maybe do it more consistently. I'm also kind of interested in reading The Vegan Diet as Chronic Disease Prevention... even though I KNOW it's not going to get around to talking sensibly about diets that don't perfectly toe the vegan line, it's supposedly filled with references and should contain some good nutritional information about the foods that do.
By the way, I didn't eat meat today -- as far as major ingredients go, I haven't even eaten animal products. I've cut down, and given the nutritional value of what I tend to eat when I don't eat meat, I'd like to cut down more. But I really think that even if I eventually cut meat out of my diet, I won't bother calling myself a vegetarian, because there are too many different diets that fall under that umbrella, and I just doubt I'll ever be that absolute about it. I can imagine it being like the way I generally don't drink soda and haven't for 10 years, but once every year or two I'll end up having one somehow (say, a locally-brewed root beer at a party in the North End, like I had a few months ago when everyone was raving about it and it did sound like it would go nicely with pizza). I think most people would still count me as a non-soda-drinker with this basic MO... and in fact some of my friends call me a non-alcohol-drinker despite my weekly Friday night drink... but if I called myself a vegetarian and ate an occasional burger? Not so much.
Dietary issues are so oddly polarizing. I am interested in eating locally (for the environment and the local economy), healthfully (for me not getting cancer), and low on the food chain (again for the environment), and I'd like any animals affected by my decisions to have good lives and humane deaths, but I'm really not getting the value placed on the absoluteness of some people's dietary restrictions. It's like it's a religious thing, and I don't mean that in a good way. It's a shame that those people seem to write so many of the books.
By the way, I didn't eat meat today -- as far as major ingredients go, I haven't even eaten animal products. I've cut down, and given the nutritional value of what I tend to eat when I don't eat meat, I'd like to cut down more. But I really think that even if I eventually cut meat out of my diet, I won't bother calling myself a vegetarian, because there are too many different diets that fall under that umbrella, and I just doubt I'll ever be that absolute about it. I can imagine it being like the way I generally don't drink soda and haven't for 10 years, but once every year or two I'll end up having one somehow (say, a locally-brewed root beer at a party in the North End, like I had a few months ago when everyone was raving about it and it did sound like it would go nicely with pizza). I think most people would still count me as a non-soda-drinker with this basic MO... and in fact some of my friends call me a non-alcohol-drinker despite my weekly Friday night drink... but if I called myself a vegetarian and ate an occasional burger? Not so much.
Dietary issues are so oddly polarizing. I am interested in eating locally (for the environment and the local economy), healthfully (for me not getting cancer), and low on the food chain (again for the environment), and I'd like any animals affected by my decisions to have good lives and humane deaths, but I'm really not getting the value placed on the absoluteness of some people's dietary restrictions. It's like it's a religious thing, and I don't mean that in a good way. It's a shame that those people seem to write so many of the books.
