Straddling the Fence on Nutrition: Part II

Last week when I started contemplating nutrition I had to ask the question, if we can thrive on a vegan diet, why shouldn’t we? I began to wonder, is there something inherently unhealthy about eating vegan? I jokingly wondered aloud, are vegans running into walls, drooling, are they somehow inferior? But my reading and research has shown, so far, just the opposite.

According the The National Cancer Institute,vegetarians celebrate lower cancer rates. They say that women who eat meat every day are nearly four times more likely to get breast cancer than those who don't. By contrast, women who consume at least one serving of vegetables a day reduce their risk of breast cancer by thirty percent, according to the Harvard Nurses Health Study. Studies done at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg Germany suggest that this is because vegetarians' immune systems are more effective in killing off tumor cells than meat eaters'. Studies have also found a plant-based diet helps protect against prostate, colon and skin cancers. Maybe the Hallelujah Diet isn’t as nutty as it sounds, I began to think.

When I started reading last Saturday, I expected to find a real controversy about dietary benefits of meat versus soy raging out there on the web. I didn’t expect to be so one-sidedly persuaded that returning to a life of meatless eating would benefit not just my health but the cleanliness of the planet. As if I wasn’t convinced enough, I came across this bit of information about how meat eating directly takes food from people who most need it.

Right now, seventy two percent of all grain produced in the United States is fed to animals raised for slaughter. It takes fifteen pounds of grain to get one pound of beef. But if the grain were given directly to people, there'd be enough food to feed the entire planet. In addition, according to the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, one acre of land could produce 50,000 pounds of tomatoes, 40,000 pounds of potatoes, 30,000 pounds of carrots or…just 250 pounds of beef.

I consider myself something of a social activist. Of course, as a mother, I’m a less active activist. But I am passionate about the world water crisis and world hunger. Who when really faced with the question of world hunger isn’t passionate about it? “Do you want kids going hungry?” Of course not. No one with a heart does. The problem is we are so removed from the concept of food shortage, its hard for us to grasp the reality that right now there are people, children around the world who are hungry, suffering from one of the most basic needs of human survival, and they can’t satisfy this need.

In America food is an industry. Food is actually marketed to us. I don’t know that there are many other countries in the world that need to have commercials for food. If there is one product in the world that sells itself, isn’t it food? Yet here in the US, the TV waves are filled, packed with food advertisements. Most of us are not just faced with the question: are you going to eat tonight? We have the luxury of being asked: Where will you eat tonight?

Yes times are tough here in The United States of America. Unemployment is on the rise, salaries and bonuses are down, yet a great many of us, even those of us who have lost jobs or had our hours cut back are still lucky enough to have enough. And that means we’re a lot better off than a great many people around the planet.

So when I consider my choice to make a pot roast, I can’t just weigh the impact that red meat has on my health, or the likelihood my children and my husband will consume it. I think, as an inactive activist, I also have to consider: at what cost has this meat come to my super market? At what cost will it come to my table?

I used to feel that if I bought meat from my co-op and if it had a special sticker on it declaring that in its life, this former animal was fed only grass and was given the privilege to roam freely before it was slaughtered for my gastronomical pleasure, and if it was raised within a hundred miles of my door, I was free to consume with guilt free pleasure. After the reading I’ve fallen into these past four days, I feel it would be irresponsible to not also consider that this pound of beef I just bought required fifteen pounds of feed, and produced seventeen kg of CO2 emissions. But my questions don’t stop there.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know that the world water crisis is a cause very close to my heart, so naturally I also wanted to know, just how much water is needed to produce a pound of beef. Noteworthy ecologist Georg Borgstrom, stated twenty years ago that production of a one pound steak requires 2,500 gallons of water. Of course this is a hotly debated number. Some ecologists have more recently stated that the amount of water required for a one-pound beef steak is closer to 6,000 gallons. Meat producers argue that much of the water is returned to the soil through the cattle’s’ urination.

As a person passionate about this urgent issue, I feel that whether this number is 2,000 or 6,000 or even as low as 1,000—it’s too much! According to the December 1999 issue of Audubon, “Nearly half the country’s consumption of fresh water is for the production of cattle.” This is a shocking number.

(For more on the world water crisis, watch this amazing documentary Blue Gold).

When I was in elementary school, the advent of Earth Day made school children more aware of the “Green House Effect” and how important it is to conserve energy by shutting our bedroom lights off when we went downstairs for dinner and turning the water off while we brush our teeth. We learned mind-blowing figures like the fact that leaving the water running while we soaped our hands, could waste as much as five gallons of water. We dutifully took these shocking figures home to share with our parents and siblings. We crafted artwork that reflected our passion for saving mother earth. Nowhere in these presentations do I remember hearing that the pot roast that was going to be dished onto my plate that night took upwards of a thousand gallons of water to produce. Not once did the teacher mention that when we went down to the cafeteria for taco day, we were going to be standing witness to hundreds of thousands of gallons of water wasted to produce the tiny pearls of meat floating in dark gravy in our crunchy taco shells.

There is something about eating meat, which—even since those days of elementary school leading up to my big announcement to my parents—seemed fundamentally wrong. Why is it, I often wonder, that the idea of eating animal products has always repulsed me on some level? I know I wasn’t taught this thinking by my parents or teachers and certainly not by the food advertisers who control the cultural climate of eating. But I realize now as I think about it that even in the eleven years following my teen pregnancy and my reintroduction to meat, the act of eating meat and dairy was never second nature. Rather it was a logical decision. Each time I purchased, prepared and consumed meat it was a choice I made because I believed it to be the most nutritious choice. Indeed it felt responsible to prepare meat for dinner. On a visceral level though, there was something I had to overcome each time I made the choice to consume animal protein. Over the course of eleven years, hurdling this barrier became well rehearsed and an act I no longer gave any thought to.

But a certain few instances over the last eleven years shed light on the reality that there was something deep in my wiring not okay with the exploitation of animals as a commodity; a source of protein and entertainment for people.

When Ryan and I got engaged, we were in Spain. In the weeks that followed our engagement we traveled to several cities in Spain, visiting museums and familiarizing ourselves with the local night life. It was a great draw: the night club in Madrid with a tiger. There he was right by the door, lying caged in a booming dance club. He was a huge and majestic creature and he lay splayed on the floor batting at his water dish, impotent and bored. The music thumped and blared hurting my own insensitive human ears. I couldn’t dance at all. I stood watching him, fighting an irresistible urge to reach through the thin chicken wire and rub his ears. The man standing guard said I couldn’t, no matter how many times I asked. But I’ve never stopped thinking about him, wondering where they got him, where he is today.

When I was pregnant with Jada, I took Twila to the Minnesota Zoo. There was a special cow milking demonstration while we were there so we decided to attend. A great big black-and-white Holstein was ushered out onto a high cement platform about eye level with the audience. The cows’ eyes flashed round and huge as they rolled around their giant sockets trying to size up the group of people watching her. Her udders hung low, and heavy; clearly full of milk. The handlers corralled her into a metal labyrinth through which her udders hung and over which her head could look out. It resembled a short jail cell, big enough to contain her large muscular body but not big enough for her to move away from the oncoming milking device.

The handler thumped on her udders with her fist, “simulating the head butting of a hungry calf to make the milk let down,” she explained. The handler quickly dipped all six udders into an iodine solution to kill any possible bacteria then clamped the pumping device onto each nipple. A moment later milk was gushing from the cow’s udders. One gallon, two gallons, five, seven. The milk poured into a large collecting beaker nearby. We were amazed at how fast the empty glass container was filled. As the Holstein was milked she defected on the stage. A low rumble of surprise rose up from the audience and the handler with a speaker attached to her head explained that this sometimes happened when a cow was being milked.

As she finished the milking she took questions. One person asked where the milk from this demonstration went; she said it would be sold to stores. Twila asked if she could pet the cow and the woman said no, that it might scare her. As a breastfeeding mother, I had only one question on my mind. I raised my hand, feeling anxious as I always do when I draw attention to myself. The woman recognized me and I asked: “Where is the baby? Do the babies get some of this milk?”

The handler smiled and said that the babies are mostly kept away from the mothers so they don’t contaminate their udders with bacteria from feces or their mouths and that the babies are given a milk substitute.

Leaving the zoo that day, I felt low. With a baby in my womb and a little girl holding my hand, I felt the dull sting of an injustice being done to this mother cow. And I felt like I was contributing to it. It felt as if watching the mother cow’s fear and humiliation as she was milked, was an even worse exploitation of her than stealing the breastmilk from her baby. I thought about taking her breastmilk for myself while her baby was given formula. Something about it felt profoundly out of whack.

But we went home to cow’s milk in the fridge, because that’s what everybody does. Because kids are supposed to drink milk—aren’t they? Because I had recently read that soy milk has estrogen in it that shrinks the testicles of males and increases the breasts of little girls, and it just seems sometimes like there is no other option but to follow the current of mainstream culture.

It surprised me to realize that day how much worse it felt to watch the milking of a cow than to participate in the skinning of a deer. When I was pregnant with my birthdaughter, her birthfather, an avid deer hunter, brought home a huge eight point buck. His mother and step dad were big hunters also and didn’t bat an eye at inviting his six-month pregnant girlfriend to step into the garage and help yank the pelt off of a deer hanging from the rafters. Not being one to back down from a challenge, I stepped in and took hold of its fur. I focused on the mechanical aspects of the task, removing my thoughts from the reality of what I was doing. Afterwards I was not traumatized. In fact, I have thought much less about that deer over the years than I have about the mother cow milked in front of us.

On some level, the death of the deer felt honorable, justified. He was a strong and healthy male who lived a long life in the freedom of the outdoors. Besides, I was a meat eater then. I have long believed that unless one is a vegetarian, they have no right to protest hunting. To hunt and kill meat for yourself instills a person with a much deeper respect for the animal who gave his life to be eaten than the person who picks up a plastic wrapped pound of ground beef raised for slaughter in the midst of deplorable, disgusting and depressing conditions.

So I skinned the deer and ate venison for the first time. Yet I still bite my nails over pouring cow breast milk into a sippy cup. I still agonize at the grocery store weighing an eggplant in one hand and a chuck roast in the other. I still think about the gorgeous tiger lying behind the flimsy cage in Spain. And I keep thinking about those baby dolphins filmed in The Cove, trapped, separated from their mothers awaiting slaughter. Because the whole issue isn’t just about whether or not to eat meat, it’s about how we care for and honor animals and the planet. It’s about the impact our nutritional habits and our desire to be entertained by animals have. So it’s complicated.

And here I am, falling deeper down the rabbit hole of nutrition than I imagined I would. Here I am, more confused than ever but mainly because I’ve been given much more clarity than I expected; perhaps clarity I didn’t want yet. But here it is.

So last night I made a wild and brown rice blend with vegan chili beans and sautéed red bell peppers. And I fed the girls chicken nuggets, because we moms walk a tightrope of responsibilities; and sometimes, for a while, we have to straddle the fence.