Spiritual Reflections from a Former Vegetarian
Humans are heterotrophs. We always have been, and probably we always will be, unless we figure out how to photosynthesize. To be heterotrophic means that we get our food from other beings. That we must kill to live. We’re in good company – many, many of the creatures we consider to be “living” are also heterotrophs, from single-celled amoebas, to insects, to fish, to amphibians and reptiles, to birds and mammals. Most members of the plant kingdom are autotrophs. They make their own food from sunlight, water, carbon dioxide in the air, minerals in the soil. They still take in order to live, but they are not directly killing other creatures we consider to be living.
I am providing this simplified explanation as context for my basic point: I used to be a vegetarian, and now I am not. And I think I am doing better by the earth now than I did before, even though “stop eating meat” is a common prescription for climate change, even though the animals whose lives I take have nervous systems that feel pain in death. Let me elaborate.
I went vegetarian at 15, in a day. My mother taught grade school, and her class had hatched chicks that had been lent by a local farmer. I came to visit the chicks one afternoon, and held the peeping balls of yellow fluff with scratchy feet… and discovered several hours later that I was appalled by the idea of chicken for dinner. And every day after that, for decades. Chicken, beef, pork, fish, cephalopods. Shellfish. Everyone. I did not want to kill to eat, it felt wrong. I knew that eating meat was bad for the environment, that the oceans were being overfished, that animal farming created significant greenhouse gas emissions. In law school I worked on litigation against concentrated animal feeding operations, pigs and chickens crowded into cages, living their lives like prisoners, their vast poo lagoons poisoning the earth and air and water. It was horrible. I knew I was doing better by the animals, by the earth, with my lentils and tofu and veggie burgers. I hassled people about their eating habits a little, but after a while realized my example was worth more than my words. Friends would come up to me and announce that they’d made a vegetarian choice because of me, and that was enough. Little by little, right?
Every so often something would happen to test my confidence in my lifestyle choice. I’d read about soybean production and start thinking about where the tofu and fake meat came from. I’d hear something about mice getting caught up in legume harvesting equipment. I’d get bloodwork done and the doctor would talk at me about anemia. My then-Korean in-laws would lament again that I was disrespecting my elders by not eating the food they’d prepared – actually, this was not that bad, I was proud of myself for holding out, even though it was another thing for my ex to hold against me.
At 35, I was divorced, in a new relationship, exhausted and burned out and trying to get pregnant. My doctor chided me about my anemia and my age and my fertility window, and said maybe you could just try some salmon – as though vegetarians throughout history had never had babies! I gave up. I bought the least-terrible seeming wild salmon I could find, and cooked it, and ate it, and nearly threw up, and cried a bunch. I was sorry. I was so, so sorry. I moved slowly into the least-terrible seeming meat products I could find at the fancy grocery store. I was learning to turn off the sadness and the guilt. I got pregnant.
With the baby came the beginnings of a disintegration. My job was ridiculous; society was ridiculous; I was falling apart and everything around me seemed like it was falling apart. We had to get out.
I started reading about farming. Maybe if we could produce our own food, we could make a pocket of safety while everything fell apart; maybe it would be okay. I found a book by a farmer named Gabe Brown called “Dirt to Soil,” and he explained regenerative agriculture – the idea being that there is some land that can’t or shouldn’t be used to grow corn, soybeans, vegetables, but a rotation of deep-rooted, carbon and nitrogen fixing cover crops, which can be grazed down by cows, turned over by pigs, scratched through by chickens, can actually build soil up instead of wearing it out and washing it away. It’s not restoration agriculture – it’s not putting the prairies back – but it is trying to mimic how prairies work. It is taking carbon out of the air and storing it in the soil. Cows who eat grasses and other plants produce much less methane than ones who are forced to eat corn on feedlots, and their poop fertilizes the fields directly and helps the plants grow – and also (this is gross) provides a home for lots of insect larvae, which are a bonanza for chickens that follow after the cows are done with a field. It’s heading toward a closed-loop system. It’s how earth wants to work. Industrial tofu and veggie burgers and even lentils are not, really, how the earth wants to work. The soil still runs off into the streams and rivers, and needs fertilizer brought from someplace else. It’s still a monoculture – it has to be, because otherwise the food costs too much and no one will buy it. Was I buying artisanal tofu? No, I was buying what I could find in the grocery store. It’s still produced in a factory and trucked long-distances; it might even come from overseas.
There were farmers within a couple of hours of me practicing regenerative agriculture, building the soil, storing carbon, growing calories for heterotrophs like me and my family. If I supported them, I was helping to build this agricultural model, and in my tiny way, to dismantle the industrial one.
It seemed like the carbon balance was more positive, too. But I was still killing to live.
But then I realized that even as a vegetarian, I was still killing to live. The other part of the disintegration was more directly spiritual – I realized that I wanted to raise my child with some kind of spirituality, but I couldn’t find one that resonated. I went directly to the earth, because what is divine if not this unbelievable masterpiece on which we all run around. I started talking to trees, who told me, basically, to chill out. I found animism. I realized that I couldn’t distinguish anymore between eating chicken and eating kale – the lack of a nervous system as I could define it did not mean that the kale did not die when I ate it, that the kale was not aware of being cooked and eaten, that the kale did not have its own experience.
When I slowed down and tuned in, I could feel the kale’s experience – from a tiny seed it grows. Sunlight in, building cells, reaching upward, reaching downward. Drinking water through roots. Breathing out oxygen in the cool of night. Reaching. Reaching. Then cut or ripped from the soil. Moving faster than anything even imaginable. Drowning. Cut into pieces. Covered in oil and salt, spread out on something impossibly smooth and flat, then heat, such heat, falling apart. The kale spirit returning to source and the body becoming part of my body, which will then all return to mama earth eventually. Think of the eeriness of a soybean field, where the tofu begins its life. Humans are heterotrophs. We kill to live. It is how this world is structured. If we take our food with mindfulness, with respect, with reverence, and if our food has had a good life by its own standards, maybe that is okay. Maybe, even, that is better.
I’m still barely keeping the climate panic at bay most days, but I’m no longer sure that “stop eating meat” is the right climate prescription for all humans – and I realize that for some people it’s easier, or easier to understand, to stop eating animals altogether than to find and pay for regeneratively grown meat. I haven’t done the carbon math, but I’m reasonably confident that the chicken and beef I buy from Walter and Greg don’t produce more emissions than the industrial monoculture legumes I was eating before, especially when I can make one chicken last for 3 or 4 meals. I grow as much of my own food as I can, which isn’t much yet, and I’m heading toward growing more of it.
And I am trying to treat all of what I consume with the respect I think it deserves. I don’t always manage it, but I try to slow down and acknowledge that all of the food I eat is a “person” too, and that I will myself be food for others eventually. To be human is to be part of the big web of life, try as we might to forget it. It is in fact that forgetting that has brought us to this environmental crisis – that we have thought of ourselves as other, separate, when we never have been and could not be. It’s much easier to do right by one another when we really see one another. When I slowed down enough to really look, I could see that for me, at least, mama earth had the answer all along.
Joseph Campbell wrote that “Originally Artemis herself was a deer, and she is the goddess who kills deer; the two are dual aspects of the same being. Life is killing life all the time, and so the goddess kills herself in the sacrifice of her own animal. Each life is its own death, and he who kills you is somehow a messenger of the destiny that was yours from the start.”
