Geoffrey Kleinman

This past week I did something I didn’t think I’d ever do again – I ate meat. After a 6 year run as a Vegan and Vegetarian I radically changed my path (again) by adding meat back to my diet.  This move was a long time coming, it’s something that had been brewing in my mind for a while.

So why did I do it? Why did I decide not to eliminate meat from my diet?  The answer to that is both pretty complicated and pretty easy. First the easy answer – because I can, and I did.  I’ve always held firm to the belief that a person’s dietary choices are theirs, that labels only serve to complicate things and ultimately when it comes to eating, we’re all hypocrites, at least I am. So I added meat back into my diet because I wanted to. It’s as simple as that.

Yet, it’s not that simple, and the road that lead me here is fairly complicated.  I’d like to think over the last 6 years of being veg that I wasn’t all that dogmatic, but that’s total bullshit. Of course I was dogmatic, I was even dogmatic when I said I wasn’t being dogmatic. When you make the move to eliminate all animals and animal products from your life it’s a pretty radical move and one which is nearly impossible to do with out a litte dogma. I’d always tell my friend, mostly truly, that my coice not to eat meat was my own and that I didn’t care what other people ate, it was my decision about what I ate that mattered. Well this was as untrue as it was true.  Of course there were times when I cringed at my friends as they scarfed down huge slabs of meat, crunched on bacon or tore into a piece of fried chicken, how could I not. After all I had put myself in a spot where I equated each piece of meat with the life that it was connected to.

The real reason behind not being dogmatic and be “the coolest veg person I (they) know” was more about bridging the immense chasm that was created between me and the rest of the world and a lot less about how I felt or what I thought. I don’t think at the time I was really able to put my finger on this chasm, it wasn’t for many years that the gap between me and the world became more and more visible and more and more present.

I think Michael Pollan captures this chasm better than I ever could:

What troubles me the most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people, and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I di tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manors.

One of the great ways to combat this disenfranchisement is to connect or bond with a local community of like minded people. In Portland the options for this for Vegans and Vegetarians are vast.  I found the Vegan community to be extremely welcoming when we first were starting to go veg. People seemed to go out of their way to give us tips, recipes, suggestions and even invite us out for potluck dinners.  This was a huge bridge over this abyss and for a while it did help.

When I first went Vegan, combined with near daily exercise I lost a ton of weight. I went from 233 down to 185. I looked and felt better. Naturally I credited it to my new diet. Also being veg at first was an adventure. It was a challenge to find ways to find, invent, create or recreate my favorite omnivorous foods into vegan creations. People often asked me if I missed meat, missed cheese or ice cream and I triumphly said “No!”  I think there was some sort of badge of honor which I wore which made me feel good to be veg.

Of course secretly I felt superior to everyone else. How could I not, after all I had tapped  into a progressive way of eating, I looked good, felt good and I was going to live forever. I was also 25 and deeply morning the loss of my father who was obese and died from esophageal cancer, so pulling it all together health wise was a top priority.  I didn’t really let on that I felt superior to everyone, that would make the chasm between us even bigger, instead I couched it all in health advice. Who is going to scoff at someone who recommends being and eating more healthy.  It was ultimately a good cover for a moral superiority that would  bite me in the ass.

The unfortunate truth was that aside from losing weight, being veg wasn’t really helping or fixing other health problems I have. It did nothing for my GRD (reflux), my sort back still gave me issue and I still battled low blood sugar when I didn’t get enough protein in the morning. I ignored anything that possibly pointed to any down side of being veg. When I was shaking and sweating one mid morning because I didn’t get enough non-carbohydrates into my system, I never thought that it could be a downside of being veg.   I ultimately solved my morning shakes by dropping coffee from my diet (yet another dietary restriction) and drinking shakes with scoops of hemp or soy protein powder in them.

I’ll never forget the day that I went into a sporting goods store and they had a free cholesterol screening. I proudly stepped up for my test knowing full well that OF COURSE I would do fantastic, after all I was veg. This unfortunately wasn’t the case and when I got my borderline troubled results back I quickly stuffed them in a file drawer never to be seen again.

Instead of stepping back I decided to go deeper into the rabbit hole. Slightly disenfranchised with the vegan community and in a search to do even better for my health I decided to explore raw foods. Again I entered the honeymoon period, new friends, new community and new results. I felt GREAT at first. This of course was the elixir of life right? Maybe not. Preparing raw foods takes hours and hours and hours, some things take days.  I wasn’t completely raw, although to raw foodists in my life I said I was “high-raw”, a fancy way of saying “while I am not completely raw, I’m pretty damn good”, and to fellow vegans I was ‘playing with some raw foods’.  Again I didn’t want to create any bigger chasm than I already have.

This came to a head when I attended the Raw and Living Spirit retreat.  It was an all day raw foods love fest complete with a catered meal. I took a ton of notes, met a lot of great people and then came home and got sicker than I ever had in my life. High high fever had me laid out for days. It didn’t compute, how could eating so healthy leave me open to getting so sick? I filed this in my little mental file cabinet and moved on.

It went like this for years. There was rarely any doubt about what I was doing and why and then we moved.  Moving from our little bubble in the suburbs to the city we were thrust into the ‘real world’. As we walked the streets of our neighborhood past local restaurants and made new friends we started to feel that gap more and more.  One of our neighbors brought by an amazing plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, a wonderful gesture and yet we agonized about eating them because they weren’t vegan.  It was my wife who said that she felt it was time to look at adding some dairy and eggs back into our diet. It was one huge step at bridging the gap and would open a whole new world of options for us. She did this, the kids did this, I did not.  I’m not completely sure why I didn’t make the step at that point, perhaps it took so much of me to stick to my dietary direction that the thought of changing that was almost unthinkable.

So we went on like that for a number of months. I was Vegan, my family Vegetarian and everything at home was prepared vegan. Then I went to India.  Prior to going to India I was told in no uncertain terms that it was going to be extremely difficult to not have food with dairy in it. India prizes dairy and almost everything they cook is cooked in Ghee (clarified butter). I was also told that Indians are so accommodating that if you ask for no dairy in something they will assure you that it’s ok and that they will take care of you even when they can not. It’s hard to put into words the impact of my trip to India. They say that going to India is a life altering experience, all I can say is, not all life altering is a good thing. My biggest take away from my trip to India (aside from the fact that I love whole milk chai) is that ultimately what we do here in the US with our lives is of almost no consequence in the scope of the entire world.

We do things like not eating meat or recycling because it makes us feel good, or it’s something we believe in. Ultimately it doesn’t even register on a global scale, not even a nano bit.  It was a tough realization, but an important one. One of the big reasons I had stopped eating meat was because I wanted to make a difference. I thought that I was making some sort of political statement with each bite, unfortunately it was complete and total sanctimonious bullshit. At almost no time in the near 6 years I was veg did I ever open myself to any opposing ideas. I took it on faith that being veg was something good and something that made a difference.

I don’t want to completely disparage being veg, for some people it’s something meaningful to them, it has a real positive impact on their lives and their identity. It’s their choice and I respect them for it. But as a whole vegans aren’t very open to dissenting views.  This became amazingly clear when two vegan activists threw cayenne pepper laced cream pies into the face of Lierre Keith author of The Vegetarian Myth. Now I’m not defending Lierre or her book, because I haven’t read it, but I think the reaction is indicative of the community.

But ultimately this isn’t about the veg community or the impact of being veg on the world, ultimately it came down to my family.  As I sat infront of a plate of red curry with tofu at one of my favorite local thai restaurants I realized something, I really couldn’t eat any more tofu. My system had been sending messages about the over abundance of soy in my diet and here, faced with one of my favorite dishes I just couldn’t do it. As I picked out the pieces of tofu, I had a feeling the end of being veg was near. But that wasn’t what ultimately did it.

One evening I was sitting in the audience of my son’s third grade play, fileld with pride and excitement. I love my son and seeing him up on stage with his class having fun filled me with joy. But that joy was seriously tempered by something, the unavoidable fact that he just didn’t look that great.  Pretty pale and horribly thin, my son wasn’t the face of anything happy or thriving. He looked drained and he looked tired and he looked fucking thin.

So after a long talk with my wife we decided the time had come, we were going to return to meat. I posted a tweet on twitter asking for places in town that would be good for a first non-veg meal and of course I was met with a symphony of veg tweeters who said ‘don’t do it’. We ended up deciding on a local BBQ place we had read good things about and decided to take the plunge. It was horrid. Not only was the food mediocre but I found it very difficult to dispel almost 6 years of aversion to meat. To make matters worse my system got completely trashed. Had I made a wrong decision?

The next time out wasn’t nearly as bad, I had an amazing pork dish from the chef at the Teardrop Lounge that put all my concerns to rest. After a week I noticed a clear difference in my son, he looked less pale, had more color in his cheeks and had more energy. Also gone were my mid morning shakes.  I began the road back with my first steak at Laurelhurst Market, my first burger at Foster Burger and so on.

An entire universe opened up to me. I went from being able to eat at less than a handful of restaurants to being able to eat anywhere and everywhere. I noticed how immediately the gap between me and the rest of the world closed in and how people who hadn’t invited us over for dinner suddenly offered.

For the most part I don’t regret being veg for the period of time that I was. For a lot of the time, for one reason or another it was the right answer for me, but now I’ve decided to move on, I consider myself a conscious omnivore. I still care about what I put in my mouth and what impact it has in the grand scheme of things, I won’t abandon my feelings but in the same respect I’m not going to feel bad eating meat.