Homework #11: Final Food Project 1

For the final food project part one, I decided to be a vegetarian from Wednesday night through Sunday – almost a full school week. I had tried being a vegetarian before, even a vegan, but the food that I cooked had never really appealed to me. On Wednesday night I was reading over the assignment and decided to give it another try. This time it would only be experimental, so I guess knowing that I soon was going to be allowed to eat meat again made it less intense. I was much more open to trying new things.

            Luckily Wednesday night my mother had already prepared a completely vegetarian meal of hummus, pita, spinach pie, and salad. But Thursday is when the struggle actually began. I had a yogurt for breakfast, but then went to internship where they order out everyday. They decided to have Subway sandwiches that afternoon, which I unfortunately could not take part in. I had to awkwardly state that I had become a vegetarian for school for a couple days, and that I would instead be going to Whole Foods around the corner. I arrived at Whole Foods confident that I could easily find something to eat. Instead I realized that over at the salads bars all I wanted was the chicken dosed in some delicious looking sauce. Sadly I had to pull myself away and after examining the odd looking rice, I settled for a mixture of different pasta salads. It tasted great when I ate it, but I could not help feeling like it was not the best choice, that if I was really going to keep this up I should not only be eating carbohydrates. I finished that night off with a tomato, mozzarella, pesto sandwich, which was delicious. The vegetarian thing did not seem all that bad.

            With Friday, it had already become sort of a routine. I had my yogurt again for breakfast, and then for lunch had avocado and cucumber sushi with a bag of salt and vinegar chips. That night I did not end up eating much, but instead munching on a little pita and hummus throughout the night. Saturday morning instead of my yogurt, I had an everything bagel with cream cheese. That afternoon after my soccer game my mother made me a vegetarian burrito with sour cream, guacamole, beans, corn, rice and salsa. Being a vegetarian still allowed me to eat a lot of the same foods just without meat. For dinner I had tofu that was lightly toasted with breadcrumbs and Sunday morning I started off again with a bagel. Overall, I honestly do not feel that different. But I guess that’s because I have probably gone four days without eating meat before, just without realizing it. I feel like if I continue this further, I might actually begin to feel healthier. But then if I were to do that, it would probably be best for me to set up guidelines for myself, so that I continue to have a balanced diet, not one solely based on one thing. Through this process, I began to understand the other side of things. I almost began to feel better about myself as a person, knowing that my diet no longer consisted of industrialized meat.

            Michael Pollan discusses vegetarianism in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He makes a good point that even though the vegetarian is eating vegetables and corn, animals like squirrels are being killed around the crops as to decrease damages to them. Vegetarians are then technically supporting the killing of animals. Maybe this leads us to create a different basis for vegetarianism. Instead of focusing purely on the death of animals, we can choose to not eat meat as to not harm our bodies with the chemicals and disease that rest in the meat. This base seems to make a lot more sense, because no matter how you eat, animals’ lives are still at risk.  But are we fooling ourselves. Who is to say too, that the vegetables vegetarians eat are not covered in pesticides? That would obviously mean that they would then only eat organic vegetables. But as we have learned from Pollan, organic does not always mean healthy. Our society is so set on industrial farming and mass production that the organic farms also feel the need to become industrialized. This has led so far to lower standards and bending the rules. One farm that Pollan describes has a lawn outside of the chicken house that the chickens never actually use. It is solely there for the purpose of demonstrating that the animals still have access to outdoor areas. If the organic farmers strive to find loopholes in the organic farming industry with animals, who is to say it is not the same for the plants that vegetarians eat? It is ethically hard to be a vegetarian, when the system is so corrupt. Our food system has become such an industrial atrocity, that it makes it hard to eat healthy anymore, even with eliminating meat from our diets.

            Although Pollan has proved that being a vegetarian in this food system does not always result in eating as purely as one wants, vegetarianism is still important. It is a form of protest against the industrial meat system; the refusal to fill our bodies with harmful chemicals, and also the refusal to eat animals that have suffered. As a meat eater myself I do not find it hard to stand the idea of eating an animal, but I do agree with the idea that they should not suffer, which rotational grazing at Polyface Farms has provided. But the more vegetarians we have, it is possible that slowly the system will change; nothing is impossible. When we were hunters and gatherers, we had a much more refined system with integrity. With vegetarianism, we are pushing for that integrity again, but this time without meat. It is not to say that eating meat is a bad thing, I myself eat meat, but the ethics behind the meat in our country are completely skewed. It has come to the point where we no longer know what we are eating and who prepares the food we eat. Being a vegetarian is a step closer to understanding our food and having a direct connection with the earth through the food we eat. The sun energy is being directly transferred from plant to body, instead of through our meat system that takes all value away.