In October, I, along with several other staff members here at Village Books, will be taking the 30-Day Vegan Challenge, partly guided and/or inspired by the book of the same name. Actually, the full name of the book is The 30-Day Vegan Challenge: The Ultimate Guide to Eating Cleaner, Getting Leaner, and Living Compassionately, by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. We hope to blog here on our progress, and I hope some of you will join us.
For me, trying a vegan lifestyle has little to do with my health and everything to do with politics. After all, I smoke, I sit in front of a computer most of the time, I don't get much exercise. Trying vegan for 30 days is, literally, the very LEAST I can do to improve my health, while at the same time, I have become convinced that it is the single GREATEST thing I can do to make human civilization sustainable here on this planet Earth I love so much.
I was raised outside of Santa Cruz on a small plot of grassland where my father and mother raised sheep. Every year, we would have a crop of lambs -- the cutest little things you'd ever want to see. They'd frolic, they'd play, and then, after a few months, they'd become adolescents, and we'd separate the ewes from the rams and call in a specialist with a scope on his rifle.
One summer, I remember having this man come to slaughter two of our teen rams, and he brought a rig not unlike a tow truck -- a portable slaughterhouse. For two hours, I sat on our front steps and watched the butcher gut, skin, and parcel the flesh off a bloody carcass hanging from a meathook on the back of a bright red truck parked in front of my parents' garage. It was glorious. I felt so fulfilled when I ate that meat. We even had the hides tanned to decorate our living room chairs, and I loved to sit on them. Because I knew that lamb never knew what hit him. That lamb was happy, playing, free-range, all-organic, practicing his head-butts with his ram buddy, and the one minute he was alone, and the next he was mutton.
Is that the kind of meat I get when I buy something out of the frozen foods aisle? When I eat meat at a restaurant, I really have no idea what that cow or pig or sheep or chicken went through to get there. I don't know what kind of conditions it lived in. Besides the meat, what else am I eating? And knowing the way industrial livestock factories are run, can I really put money into a system like that? I mean, concentrated feed lots are so far from picture book farms it's ghastly. God, do I really hate animals that much?
The other thing that keeps rolling around in my mind is the idea that ten billion people aren't going to be able to live any other way. If we're all going to get to eat at McDonald's some day, then they need to get their McVegan Filet going and get it on the extra value menu quick.
The Vegan Challenge, I'm sure, won't have a prize other than its own dilligent pursuit. I don't expect to go 100% free of cheese or the occasional canned latte -- I am not going to pick Parmesan off my pasta salad -- but I do expect to make my main meals vegan, and to find vegan snacks.
Luckily, I live in Bellingham, where Vegan is done almost everywhere, and I work at Village Books, which has two restaurants with vegan menus right next door.
--Andrew
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