Animal Writings

• Sometimes eat your vegetables before your main course. The idea is similar to starting dinner with a salad, which lets you get partially filled up on healthy greens and accouterments.
  
  You may be cooking a delicious, juicy, savory, zesty—and large—main course for which you're salivating, and as soon as it's ready, you dig in, and get filled up, and the nicely-prepared vegetables get downgraded to a marginal, sort of perfunctory afterthought. To safeguard against this, consider having a serving of the vegetable dish before your main course.
  
  Now, if your main course is filled with vegetables anyway, this isn't such a big deal. But if it's mostly protein and grains, e,g. red beans and rice or Gardenburger BBQ Riblets on a bun, it's a bigger deal.
  
  For instance, yesterday I had the-super-easy-cheating-way-of-mashed-sweet-potatoes and a vegan version of a bacon cheeseburger (I'll return to the specifics of each of these courses further on in the series). I kept the burger warm in the toaster oven while I enjoyed the sweet potato, which was piping hot and full of flavor.
  
  Anyway, by having some veggies before the main course is done, or perhaps before you even start it, you assure yourself of getting a healthy dose of the vegetables' nutrients and disease-fighting goodness.
  
  By the way, doesn't the picture of the kabobs in the Gardenburger link look great? Let's make that before the series is over. That'll be like the final exam, or the class picnic.


• My mom used to tell me that I would enjoy an activity if I had a positive attitude about it, but if I had a negative attitude, I would set up a self-fulfilling prophecy and probably have a lousy time as a result. With remarkably few exceptions, she was right.
  
  Don't think of vegetables as a chore, or as medicine that you "have to take" because your doctor—or your mom—tells you to. Vegetables are a wonderful thing—embrace them. No other food group has nearly the diversity of colors, textures, shapes, sizes, and flavors that you find in vegetables. We are blessed to live on an earth that has such a bounty of these wondrous foods. And through technology, we have access to a wide variety of them all year round.
  
  When eating vegetables, and when preparing them, feel how you're strengthening your heart, your lungs, your brain, your skin, your blood vessels and internal organs. Vegetables help fortify your heart, prevent cancer, lower your blood pressure, control your blood sugar, cleanse your colon, resist infection, and keep every part of your body working smoothly. Vegetables are more powerful than any wonder drug—and they taste good. They're a miracle. Savor them.
  
  Also consider the moral aspects. You have nothing to hide from yourself when eating vegetables. There's no deep-seated guilt or misgivings, no disturbing images of animal suffering and slaughterhouses that you have to push out of your mind; you don't have to engage in any rationalizing.
  
  Bruce Friedrich of PETA reminds us that one definition of integrity is refraining from paying others to do that which you would abstain from out of moral objection. Are you comfortable breeding animals to be so obese they have trouble walking? What about partially amputating animals' beaks, tails, and toes, and cutting off their testicles and horns with no painkillers? Crowding them into warehouses where they breathe in so much ammonia it damages their eyes and lungs? Forcing them to have babies, which you take away, so you can suck as much milk out of them as possible? Starving them for a few days? Loading them onto sweltering hot trucks in the middle of summer for a long journey with no water? Cutting some of their throats while they're alive and struggling? Suffocating them? Drowning them in near-boiling water? Causing them to scream and writhe in pain?
  
  No? Well, then don't pay someone else to do those things. With plant-based foods, you don't have to worry about any of that. You would most likely have no moral misgivings about preparing soil, planting seeds, watering and tending fields, and harvesting crops. In fact, you may do that on a small scale already in your back yard or patio or balcony.
  
  Yes, there is some impact to the earth and to animals in the growing of any food. That's unavoidable. You can lower your impact in many ways: Buying locally-grown food, preferring organic products, eating a variety of foods, growing a backyard garden, and making a shift toward participating in no-till agriculture.
  
  But step one is getting away from a mindset of creating animals just to kill them; opting out of a system where we severely manipulate animals' bodies—at great cost to their health and well-being—just so they'll have gigantic torsos and breasts, and the females will pump out insane levels of milk and eggs before we kill them. Walking away from that is the first step toward a diet that's compassionate and leaves you with a clear conscience. Eating meat hardens your heart; breaking free of that lifestyle allows you to have a more honest and meaningful relationship with the earth.
  
  These are just some of the many benefits of vegetables. In the next post, we'll look at easy ways to enjoy them in hot meals. Prepare to cook!

Labels: cooking, diet, slaughterhouses, vegetables