Blogs don’t get much worse than this, aka Apologetics for dummies

Recently I made it to 16 pullups in a set,  and while it’s not quite the twenty pull-ups I set as a New Year’s resolution, it’s more than thrice the number I could do before I came to Nairobai and I’m very glad to be over 15, anyway I feel all vital and energetic, and I thought, if it would be OK, that I would write a bit about my stupid diet. Now, before you groan and call me a preachy knob, let the record state that I’ve never written about vegetarianism before, and since people often ask why I follow this retarded hippie/Hindu diet that clearly makes me weak and anemic, I thought I’d get it down on paper (screen) so I can like, not have to talk about it again. It’s a really little thing that I do that shouldn’t define me, but it gets a lot of attention, so.

So like I don’t eat meat, and that’s often equated with douchebaggery, and while I am of course a complete douchebag, I wouldn’t want people to think I am just because of this. Just as if I said I were a Muslim you wouldn’t instantly equate me to Al Qaeda, or if I were a Republican you wouldn’t instantly equate me to Bush, being a vegetarian shouldn’t equate someone to a militant PETA carnivore-basher who throws paint on people in fur coats and protests Obama swatting that fly and complains about hearing your lunch screaming as you eat a burger.  There are literally squillions (sic) of reasons why different people don’t eat meat just like there are lots of reasons people vote for a particular candidate or whatever. I know a guy for example doing a PhD in Economics and he eschews meat for the economic reasons, which are very interesting and valid, but aren’t really why I avoid it, just like a lot of vegetarians’ reasons aren’t mine.

I used to think (and might have said/implied a few times – retroactive apologies) that not eating meat because I couldn’t kill an animal made me a 100% consistent human being and that I now wasn’t a hypocrite in any way shape or form, but of course that’s not true. Like, animals get chewed up by crop harvesters for my food and cotton harvesters for my t-shirts, and I eat eggs and milk during the procurement of which animals often suffer, and I don’t really make any effort to try to make sure I buy lipstick that wasn’t tested on animals, I use paper which would have annihilated countless animals and animal habitats in its production, you know. Plus every time I go to the fuel pump I’m supporting whatever Middle Eastern war we’re at, when I pay taxes my money is going toward enforcing some laws I don’t agree with, I buy some tweezers from a chain supermarket and I’m supporting a big conglomerate that would have forced the closure of local family businesses and caused pain and sadness when it didn’t have to, I watch The Simpsons and my viewership goes toward Fox which funds warmongering Fox News and Bill O’Reilly’s paycheck (“and we can’t watch Fox because they own those chemical weapons plants in Syria!” complained Homer about the ethics Lisa enforces in one episode),  etc etc etc So it’s not as though I think the not eating meat thing means I’m completely consistent and perfect. The only way to totally be consistent is to live in a commune and grow and make everything yourself and be cut off from the rest of the world, and while I respect the people that are committed to their ethics enough to do that, like, I’m not going to do that. I’ve got shit to do. Like I also totally understand why someone would be a vegan, but I don’t want to give up milk and eggs. I’d have to stop eating cake and pasta. And cheese kicks ass.

(If it has no rennet.)

Pretty much no one is 100% consistent, I’m not, and because of that I have no right to judge or look down on other people for not doing what I do – not that judging people would be OK even if I did live in a commune, because judging people sucks. So yeah not eating meat is just this teeny tiny little thing that I do that is a personal choice and doesn’t involve anyone else. Like, I get mad at myself if I don’t exercise or meditate or read enough, and I certainly don’t get mad at other people for those reasons, that would be insane. You have to be hard on yourself and soft on others, right?

A friend got mad at me for these inconsistencies once a long time ago, back when I thought not eating meat made me awesome. We watched Lethal Weapon and when a fish tank was destroyed in a gunfight, someone said “He just killed all those fish!” and I went “He probably eats meat and doesn’t care,” which is pretty up there with the tool-iest things a vegetarian can say. As though nothing I ever do hurts animals. Anyway this friend got mad at me when I admitted that I wasn’t completely consistent after being so judgmental, and while he was right to do so because I was being a judgmental dick, I think as long as you keep it to yourself and don’t judge, stay humble, vegetarianism is alright. I mean it’s hard to say that it’s a negative thing to do, even if you think there are no positives. I bought leather shoes for work, right, which I won’t deny I felt conflicted about, but I think getting mad at a vegetarian for not eating meat while they buy leather shoes is sort of like running after the guy who gives a dollar to World Vision collectors and telling him he’s a hypocrite because he’s not selling all his belongings and moving to the Congo to install sewage systems, you know. Like just because you’re not doing everything you possibly can for a cause doesn’t mean you can’t contribute a little, as long as you don’t preach about how it makes you a complete angel. Before you point your fingers, make sure your hands are clean, rar rar.

Also, yes, plants are alive too, but I do need to eat something, I don’t have to hold down an apple as I stick a knife into it, and while there are lots of definitions of consciousness, I try to be as scientific as I can and base what is (or could be) conscious and what’s not on what has a brain and what doesn’t (screw you, bacteria in my yoghurt, I’ll kill you good!). Sometimes people try to convince me plants and animals are the same thing because of their “life force” (?) and that they feed and they respond to stimuli, but let’s be grounded, taxonomy splits up animals and plants pretty quickly. I mean, they’re pretty different. Looking into the eyes of a potato and the eyes of a dog are pretty different experiences. Anyway, I draw my line at brains.

A big thing people often get at me for is that I can’t possibly satisfy my body on this diet, and it’s weird because in the real world all your friends tell you it’s unhealthy and in the academic world everyone tells you that it’s really healthy, but I don’t really think it’s either. A while ago I decided the primary reason for not eating meat was health, instead of ethics or whatever, because I thought that at least was quantitative, you know science and facts and percentages and statistics and stuff are a bit less infirm and wishy-washy than ethics. While studies do say there’s less saturated fat and cholesterol and sodium in a vegetarian diet, I could theoretically eat a Pizza Hut Veggie Supreme™ every night and have a heart attack at 40 while following a vegetarian diet. I think the idea that vegetarianism is by definition/practice “healthier” is a bit flawed, the studies showing vegetarians as healthier and having less cancer and heart disease and such are because people in the

Terrifying looking 80s bodybuilder Andreas Cahling is a vegetarian. I don't know, you see what I'm getting at.

West who wind up vegetarian are generally a little more protective of their bodies and are non-smoking middle/upper class people who are a little educated about how we shouldn’t eat fast food every day. I mean if  the only meat you ate was fish and skinless chicken and lean everything else and you didn’t eat it too often, you’d be as healthy as a healthy vegetarian. That said, I got healthier when I went off meat because I reacted to meathead friends saying vegetarianism is unhealthy by doing a lot of reading on nutrition and I wound up a lot more conscious of what I eat as a result. So in regards to the health aspect of vegetarianism, I’m more trying to make the point that while it’s not automatically healthier, it’s very very far from an inadequate dietary choice. Everything the body could want can be found on a vegetarian diet (please do research if you don’t think so), it suits the needs of athletes and bodybuilders, the trainer from The Biggest Loser and the winner of The Ultimate Fighter 6 are vegetarians, Tobey Maguire was when he was all ripped in Spider-Man, like every dietetic association there is approves a well-planned vegetarian diet, it’s really, really weird how many genuinely smart people think that trained medical professionals are wrong and that you can’t get any/enough protein or iron or Omega fatty acids or b12 or folate or whatever without meat.

Anyway, I get protein from dairy, eggs, nuts, soy, lentils (I’ve started making dhal lately), wholemeal everything, seeds, oats, quinoa, amaranth, et cetera, ad nausuem… (these all have iron too, except dairy and most nuts, cashews are good iron though) In terms of amino acids, people think veg protein never has all of them, but here’s the thing with amino acids. First of all this thing called the Protein Digestibility Corrected Amino Acid Score, a scale which is generally regarded as the best way to judge a protein’s suitability for human consumption re: amino acid composition, says the only things that score a perfect 1.0 on the scale are egg white, soy isolate, casein, whey and milk, which are all things I eat. Lately I stumbled across quinoa and amaranth in the supermarket, these funny sort of crops that are really high in protein and iron and calcium and contain all the essential amino acids as well (even lysine! Lysine, u guyz!!!), they’re the funniest things, they’re thinking of using quinoa on space stations it’s so nutritious. Also, I think Quinoa would be a cool name for a kid. Quinny. “Because she completes me and quinoa is a complete protein. Get it?” you would get used to saying. And then there are also other vegan sources of complete proteins (complete meaning they have all the amino acids) like buckwheat and lupin and even chia (gnaws on Obama chia pet), but see with amino acids, you can also combine incomplete proteins to make a meal with all the amino acids, like mixing brown rice and beans, or hummus and pita, or eating Ezekiel bread (whose combination of millet and barley and wheat results in a complete amino acid profile) BUT the thing is you don’t actually need to have all the amino acids in a meal anyway, you just need them all in a day. So, quit worrying about amino acids so much, because I knew you were.

Some people also think that iron intake is low among vegetarians because of a lack of iron or a lack of heme iron (iron that comes from blood) which is meant to absorb better than non-heme iron, but I get an average of 4 eggs a day and egg iron is heme, but also if you get vitamin C with your non-heme iron (and we should have soem vitamin C with all our meals anyway) the absorbability of heme and non-heme iron is the same anyway. So quit busting my balls on non-heme iron, you jerk.

Vegetarians aren’t always healthy though of course, just like not all meat eaters (meaters?) aren’t always healthy either. Going to India was good for me because before then I was like “rar rar vegetarianism makes you healthy” but then I found myself in a country of hundreds of millions of vegetarians who just eat a ton of white rice and ghee every day, and like, aren’t healthy, a lot aren’t

Brown rice with dhal I made from mung beans, tofu and chickpeas packed about 70 grams of complete (vegan) protein. I ate an assload though.

anyway. You know you can eat Skittles, pasta and butter all day and that’s vegetarian, but you won’t be healthy, vegetarianism and health are basically separate subjects, I’m not writing to say veg. is absolutely healthier, I’m just saying you can be healthy without meat, which a mind-bogglingly large amount of people I meet don’t think is true. It is a real shame how often people decide to try going off meat, get protein/iron deficiencies and run back to eating meat again while telling everyone that vegetarianism is an inadequate diet, like it’s truly heartbreaking. If you’re taking meat out of a Western meal that’s designed to have meat as the protein and iron, you have to replace the protein and iron, or make a different meal with protein and iron, or at the very least have a glass or two of milk with your salad, and lots of fledgling vegetarians don’t. My Dad is the smartest guy in the world, but he experimented with vegetarianism and bailed after a month, saying he was always tired, because he didn’t – sorry, Dad – do the work you need to do if you’re going to take up a freak diet that isn’t normal or well understood in your culture. The protein/iron/B vitamins/Omega acids etc are all there, there are literally zillions (sic) of non-meat sources (The Omega acids in fish you can get in eggs and olive oil and avocado and some seeds and nuts, you know), it’s honestly not that hard to have a high-protein vegetarian or vegan diet, you just have to do a bit of reading, but as vegetarians are often hippies and hippies are often skinny and lazy, this stereotype of the skinny vegetarian arises. I only use a protein supplement right after exercise (like most guys do, on any diet), other than that I get all my nutrients from real food. And I can do 16 pull-ups in a row (did I mention that?), like I feel and function pretty well on this diet.

After those arguments, people usually start throwing out known logical fallacies to attack vegetarianism, like the appeal to nature (that animals eat meat is not a reason to eat meat – animals rape and kill and cannibalise each other, they are not moral compasses for humans!) or the appeal to tradition (that people have always done something is not a reason to keep doing it – see how long women/blacks have had equal rights to white men, how long it took people to abolish capital punishment etc. for examples), or they ask would I starve on a desert island if there was only a cow to eat (no, I’d kill the shit out of that cow, but I’m not on a desert island right now). Or then they say that we have canine teeth for eating meat and that we’re apes and apes kill animals, except that gorillas are in the top three closest relatives to people and they have big canines but are herbivores, the canines are for crunching bamboo and for show (sometimes they eat ants, but it’s not like the canines are for that). But again, we shouldn’t base our actions on what animals do. I couldn’t justify killing my new girlfriend’s son that she had with another man to establish my dominance in the relationship because chimps do that and I’m just a primate. (Believe me, the judge did not go for that defense.) Sometimes people say the fact that we can eat meat means we’re “designed” to eat it, even though we can’t eat it raw like every carnivore does, then people say well cooking meat is an evolution of tool making so it’s natural, then the others reply that we don’t metabolize the fat and cholesterol anywhere near as well as animal predators, which some people think means that we shouldn’t eat meat, and then other people argue that point, then other people argue that point and other people argue that and blah blah blah. But the whole what we “should” or “shouldn’t” do, the whole what’s “natural” and what we’re “designed” for things I don’t like to talk about because all those words are super loaded and way too debatable and unproveable to base a lifestyle on. You can argue all day and night and the only conclusion you can really reach is “leave each other alone.”

The main thing for me is, eating is really, really intimate, right? Like the only time I ever put anything (apart from breath) in my body is when I eat, for girls and gays it’s when they eat and when they have sex, it’s a really intimate thing to do. Plus, everything you eat becomes you, like my finger is a bit of broccoli and my eyelash is a bit of, I don’t know passionfruit or something (even though the body only renews itself every 7 years and I haven’t been off meat for that long, but you get what I mean). Absolutely every bit of us, probably including our consciousness (depending on whether it exists entirely in the physical brain blah blah blah blah blah blah) is made of what we’ve eaten, it’s nuts. Like all we’ve got is our bodies, these vehicles that are strapped to our minds, they’re with us 24 hours a day, they’re everything we are. Anyway yeah, that’s why I think eating a bit of animal is a much bigger deal than wearing an animal or buying toothpaste that might have been tested on animals, like while almost everything I do causes pain or death or whatever in some way (farting depletes the ozone, right?), actually putting in my mouth pieces of something that’s been strapped down and killed and released its bowels in the death shudder, you know blood squirting over my tongue that I use to say things and to kiss with, and bits of mashed veins and nerves swimming around my stomach as I walk around and actually becoming me and becoming part of my organs and my brain and the neurons that my thoughts travel on (we think with our food, did you know?), it’s just a bit much, like a bit too intense, it’s too close. Like I can’t get past that a chicken leg is a chicken leg, a chicken used to command that leg with its brain to make the fleshy bits we eat expand and contract and walk over to its babies and regurgitate up food for them. It’s too much for me, because I am a hypersensitive, overanalytical git who thinks too much, but it’s not too much for other people, and that’s okay, because my standards aren’t for anyone else, just like yours aren’t, and plus there are heaps of other things I’m totally inconsistent with that other people are more consistent with: I’m not very political for example, and should probably do more political things/demonstrations/whatever about things I disagree with, but I never do; I probably buy clothes made from sweatshops sometimes; I watch pirated DVDs which is straight up stealing. Anyway that’s wound up being pretty much the main reason for my being a vegetarian, that other beings’ carcasses and deaths becoming a part of my body and mind creeps me out (is it over-the-top to use the word ‘carcass’ It just means ‘dead body,’ right?). It’s a little reason, but being vegetarian is only a little thing anyway, that I’m only writing so much about because it’s so easily misinterpreted.

It’s sort of like how I decided not to go to celebrity gossip webpages anymore because I saw this documentary about the paparazzi I support by visiting those sites, and that is a creepy, amoral profession that I don’t want to support. Does not clicking those pages make me a perfectly ethical person? No, of course it doesn’t, it’s just an easy thing to change, like not buying meat. Not eating meat is just a little thing that’s easy to do and contributes a little to a cause that doesn’t suck, plus it keeps me away from McDonald’s. That’s pretty much it. I could always change my mind, though.

Anyway there are lots of myths about and lots of idiots who follow vegetarianism, but it’s alright, really.

Does this make any sense at all?