Diet choices

by Louis Cox

Choice is the Crux of the matter. Anyone who has read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma will understand better what we mean. Most species on this planet don't have the luxury—or burden, depending on how you look at it—of choosing what they eat. They have evolved to take in and digest a limited range of plants or animals that are found in their ecological niches, and that's that. They don't have to worry about what they're going to eat, just whether there will be enough of it.

We humans stand apart for an astonishing range of items, from beetle grubs to whale blubber, that we might consider as food. Genetics may shape what some groups can or cannot eat, as in the case of Arctic peoples who don't seem to need vegetables and others who can't tolerate milk. Culture also plays a role in focusing our eating habits to a more limited range. But by and large, we grow up having to work out a lot of dietary choices for ourselves. School health courses try to tell us what ideally we should be putting in our shopping carts, but we are also heavily influenced by commercial advertising that makes us think of eating primarily as oral recreation, not as a means of staying healthy.

One of my earliest lessons about nutrition came when I was a Cub Scout, and my mom was the den mother. She showed the us how to make finger puppets, then she led us in putting on a puppet show about a king and a peasant: The king suffers from assorted physical ailments because of his rich but unhealthy diet of refined foods. He meets a peasant whose simple but nutritious diet of whole foods has made him healthy and fit. The king asks how much money the peasant would accept for the king to put his head on the peasant's body, and vice versa. The peasant replies there isn't enough money in the world to compensate him for that. When my mom packed lunches for me to take to school, she also regularly made my sandwiches out of whole-grain bread, and to this day I think that's how real bread is supposed to taste.

Another dietary lesson came when my junior Sunday School class studied the Old Testament story about Daniel and the other young Hebrew men during the Babylonian exile who were being groomed for leadership in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. They declined the king's invitation to partake of the royal court's dietary excesses, preferring to keep to their traditional simple diet of water, grains, and vegetables. At the end of a test period, the young Hebrew men had remained strong and healthy, while their Babylonian counterparts had grown fat and weak. (Hmm, do parishioners think about this Bible lesson when they're baking chocolate layer cakes for church potlucks?)

With early influences like these, it was natural that I would continue in life with a preference for whole, natural, and fresh foods. In my college environment very little of that was available, but once the natural foods movement got moving in the 1970s, I became an enthusiastic buyer and grower of organic foods. In the 1980s, influenced by the book, Diet for a New America, by John Robbins, I decided I felt called to be a vegetarian, mainly for humanitarian and environmental reasons.

In contrast to my upbringing, Ruah grew up a household that wasn't very nutrition-counscious. She still shudders at memories of bland TV dinners and unappetizing, overcooked vegetables that she was forced to eat. But when she became the single mother of three children, she learned that healthier food would to give her the stamina she needed to play that demanding role, while better nutrition for the kids would pay dividends in better moods and less fighting and complaining. Also, for mainly economic reasons, she joined a local food coop, which in the process opened her eyes to the benefits of less-refined foods grown without poisons and additives.

When I met Ruah in the mid-1990s, she too had been a vegetarian for some time, and this made meal-planning in our household much easier. But we both underwent a change of perspective about meat-eating several years later, during several trips we made to Central America and Cuba on Quaker business. We soon realized that for most Latin Americans good hospitality required serving meat if it was available. It would have been extremely rude for us as guests to refuse their generosity, so we retired our scruples about meat until we returned to the U.S. Meanwhile, we came to enjoy the flavors of the simple meals that our Latin American hosts shared, along with a conviviality that is often missing at American tables.

After these eye-opening experiences, we began reading books on ecology that emphasized the health and balance of the entire land community. The millennia-old practice of raising and eating animals can be seen as part of a complex of sacred relationships within a sustainable ecosystem. It has a lot in common with the interplay of predator and prey in the wild, which helps to sustain both species. As the late Jim Corbett noted in his book, Sanctuary for All Life, "All killing is life-giving." It is the modern industrialized food system, not the tradtional pastoralist, that has desacralized those relationships, turning them into repugnant and unhealthy exploitation.

This new perspective has blended into our recent involvement in the Localvore movement, where our support of local farmers has included sharing with other households a portion of a pig or lamb that was raised in a nonconfinement setting, without hormones and antibiotics, and slaughtered and processed by a local small-scale packer. Under this arrangement, we still end up consuming in a year only a tiny fraction of the meat that the typical American household consumes, usually without even thinking about where it comes from.

As "conscious eaters" (what we now prefer to call ourselves) we must wrestle with many complexities in making informed and responsible food choices. For example, if it is our intention to promote humane treatment of animals, does it make sense to buy dairy products, since most male calves have no place in this system and end up being raised for veal, usually under barbaric conditions? The same goes for eggs, which come only from hens. Even under cage-free, drug-free conditions, this system has no humane role for most of the males. But the larger truth is, most forms of agriculture are implicated in killing if only by displacing the habitats of countless wild species. So while we do our best to make sound, moral food choices, the questions we face aren't always clear-cut. •