The Time for Wheat
May 31 — June 4, 2021; Amherst, MA, USA
Seasonal Memoir #6
Living in an empty home (first in Dubai and now in Amherst) for the better part of eight weeks is hardly a hardship, but it is indeed a bizarre and slightly unsettling experience. Unsettling in that you realize that your ‘stuff’ is more like a security blanket than a necessity. It’s amazing how little one truly needs to ‘live’: eggs and toast, peanut butter and jelly, pizza and salad; walks outside. Who needs anything more? I suppose my ‘good life’ simplification is just pre-gaming until we are eating lab-created fortified ‘paste’ not too long from now, and exercising in our sleep. (“GRÜÜL: All your vitamins and minerals, and proteins and fats — in assorted flavors!”)
As we settle into our routines here in the Pioneer Valley, we are picking up on our own faux pas, such as being too suburban chic: wearing Lululemon and Hokas instead of jeans shorts and Birkenstocks. We are loving the area and the vibe, and glad we chose it over Concord. Being back in my college town thirty years later is definitely a trip, to say the least. Walking by the bar that is still there brings up a myriad of emotions (embarrassment, curiosity, guilt… ha).
A new routine for me, unrelated to the region, is my pescatarian diet. It hasn’t entirely come out of the blue, but I’ve stuck with it for nearly five weeks now, and it hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be. After reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, which was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, I made the following pledge (to myself):
I, Paul Richards, renounce all industrial factory-farmed beef, turkey, chicken, and pork, based on ethical and environmental reasoning. I will also refrain from eating ‘humanely-treated’ animals in order to promote a healthier lifestyle. I will work to limit or cut out entirely fish and dairy in my future.
I won’t get all preachy here, and I won’t promote this latest entry in my seasonal memoir on social media, but I nevertheless want to put this choice into print.
Our instincts (if not always our judgments or decision-making) are usually spot on. It comes from millennia of evolution. While many feel it’s perfectly natural to eat slaughtered animals, and I don’t begrudge their choices, I’ve never been in that camp. I’ve always felt an unease. And while I love the taste of a good barbecue, or a lean piece of chicken or pork in a stir-fry, I nevertheless have been haunted by a single question:
- How is it that the price of food staples (meat, grains, milk, eggs, cereals, chips, etc.) in supermarkets over the years has remained pretty much the same (and what have been the implications of this flattening)?
Inflation, increased costs of doing business, and the vagaries of supply and demand, would surely result in a steady increase (or at least fluctuations) in prices, like we see with automobiles, housing, and other ‘vitals’. Yet prices stay flat. A little bit of research surfaces the truth: farmers are no longer ‘farming’ due to the necessity of factory farms, the environment is absorbing the waste (literally) of the factory farms (polluting residential areas), and animals can no longer live into adulthood before their lives are ended for human consumption (or otherwise); in fact, an animal living on a factory farm is hardly living, but rather is confined in a space that restricts movement, is being pumped full of drugs, and cannot reproduce — all to maximize yield and minimize costs. Farmers suffer, the environment suffers, and most disturbingly, animals suffer (living a short life of suffering in an inhumane and polluted hellhole). If you believe in the maxim, “You are what you eat”, then this exposė should profoundly trouble us all, as we, too, the consumers, ultimately suffer. You can jettison the moral argument to give up meat if this is where you are stuck, and simply focus on the human, environmental, and economic arguments.
The thing is that we don’t even need meat, nutritionally, I mean. Protein can come from many plant sources, and all the unhealthy fats are found in animals (probably for an evolutionary reason). It’s a bit unsettling to realize the USDA’s Food Pyramid is mostly a farce, driven by food (i.e meat, soy, and corn) lobbies rather than nutritionists. This one from Harvard is a step in the right direction.
Eating meat is a deal with the devil, and the devil is already collecting on that debt, each and every day. In eating meat, we each have made a choice: look the other way; keep our heads stuck in the ground; believe that this is too big a problem to solve; and simply not respect or care enough about the lives of animals (this last one requires a hard look in the mirror).
But I digress… and I recognize and own my privilege and hypocrisy in deciding to give up eating animals. Millions are starving in the world, and meat is a viable food option in many places (though millions in developing nations live both below the poverty line and on a vegetarian diet, by choice). It’s a start, however. I can unplug from the farmed meat continuum, still be healthy, feel better with my decisions and impact, and quietly lead by example (hopefully nudging others to follow suit). I do believe in the Butterfly Effect.
