Dammit! On a short holiday this weekend travelling around the north-west of Scotland, I read a book my editor recommended, and it turned out to be one of those awful ones that changes your life. After reading it I can’t not know what it taught me. I was afraid this would happen.
I’m half-joking, of course: Since getting together with Craig, I’ve enjoyed learning how to cook, so this is just the next level of challenge — like someone’s replaced all my tools with unfamiliar ones and now it’s a game to figure out what to do.
The gist is “No sugar, no grains.” Like we ate in the Pleistocene Era, before food got technological. I am bound and determined to do it — but privately (after this), and not become a zealot about it! But the guy basically describes all the horrors that Craig sees in his patients every day, and that’s not the future I want for me or for him.
The biggest challenge is the outside world, where the food sold and served is the inverse of this, and where people can get quite angry and defensive if you eat differently — even if you don’t say a word about their choices but it happens to come up because you have to decline something or ask for alternatives. This is my experience of being a vegetarian since 1991, when I read another mind-altering book, John Robbins’sDiet for a New America.
…Well, vegetarian up until the last couple of years, when I acquiesced to eating fish as a guest in homes and restaurants where vegetarianism just didn’t compute. On this plan, I’m eating fish as a regular thing, just for now, then tapering that off after two weeks and going back to just plant-stuff. (It’s in phases.)
While I’ve experienced advantages from being vegetarian for so long, I’ve also slid into some unquestioned, dumb habits: Just because something isn’t meat doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. And now I accept how the converse can be true, too.
Still, I don’t want other beings to be killed on my behalf.
But then we’re into the argument, and I don’t want to have that argument.
It’s just that I’ve recently got my pension back in order because retirement age looms about 20 years away. Then it occurred to me that it’s really stupid to look after one’s money in service of a future I won’t be around for because I’ve been eating in a way that’ll make my brain or my heart explode right about that time.
Food-stuff brings up a lot of conflicts, eh?
