Dear Stanford Students: Why I'm Not a Vegan

Dear Stanford Students...

Of all the paid survey sites I’ve found...Yougov has separate sites in other countries that operate by other rules, but Yougov US is the best survey site. They don’t collect personal information; they don’t use up your cell phone minutes or allow anyone else to do; they don’t sell your contact information to spammers; they don’t waste your time, as many sites do, loading screen after screen of personal questions and then telling you you’re not in the right demographic group to take the actual survey. Your Yougov demographic information is stored and used to filter surveys so you only open surveys for which you get points. They’re legitimate; if you don’t shop much it can take months to earn a giftcard, but they do deliver those cards. (I took one to Michaels again last week.) If you’ve not already joined Yougov, you can join all by yourself, but both you and I get points if you join using this link.

https://today.yougov.com/refer/brglBv6yISldXGeAQbYXBg/

Because they don’t exploit and abuse respondents, or demand information that respondents are going to falsify, Yougov is trusted by polling companies too. When I saw that Stanford students were using a Yougov survey to do a research project, I was chuffed. Yougov has arrived!

The actual project, however, left me with more to say than a survey form has room for, and I think it’s worth a post.

First of all, I don’t know whether a confrontational, judgmental approach was what the students intended. If it wasn’t, they must be awfully young students, and I recommend that they read Business Speak before they next communicate with full-grown adults.

Fun fact: Elgin didn't like the original cover of Business Speak and reworked the second edition into (almost) a different book, to go with its different title.

The survey began by asking participants to watch a very icky live video of the slaughter of animals for meat.

Fair disclosure: I’ve never been the one who went out and killed the steer or the rooster, but many’s the time I’ve cut up and cleaned his body. I know where meat comes from. If it’s fit to eat, it comes from a young healthy animal who was enjoying life before he was killed, probably by someone he’d always considered a friend. If the animal was not killed by a close friend at his home, however, he probably spent his last days in a filthy, crowded slaughterhouse, where he was undoubtedly exposed to contagious diseases and probably overdosed with antibiotics, may have been injured in a fight over crowded standing space, and was probably fed hormones at doses that probably made him feel sick. He wouldn’t be used for human food if he’d reached a stage where cancer became visible, but he may have had cancer. Slaughterhouses use machines to kill animals; they’re supposed to be humane and efficient, but if the animal wiggles about they may be inefficient and disgusting. And, in another shocking disclosure, all babies are made by adults doing things adults have told you not to do or think about.

After watching the video the survey proceeded to ask how often respondents eat different kinds of food, including the meat of which we’d just watched the ugliest moments of the commercial production. Then it asked whether our plans to eat those meat products had changed as a result of watching the video. If not, why not?

This is very similar to the “How could you...” vap discussed in Business Speak (new link for a newer edition). It’s a valid question, and since the questions pop up on a computer screen there’s no obnoxious spoken intonation to identify the “How could you” verbal attack. The words “how could you” weren’t actually used. Nevertheless, the effect of the survey was a lot closer to “How could you do such a horrible thing!” than to “If you (or ‘some people’) intended to do X, how could you/they address or accomplish Y?”

Partly that was because the survey included a few teenybopper questions like “Are you aware of the concept of eating less meat as a way to protest the disgusting, unhealthy, inhumane practices of the commercial slaughterhouses?”

Oh, children...I can’t imagine a literate adult not being aware of that concept. It’s older than I am; I’m only about fifty. When I was a child we never bought chicken at the grocery store. We ate chicken at family gatherings, where one of my older cousins would go out and call one of his tame animals into the back yard and kill it. We didn’t buy chicken from people who weren’t as kind to their fowl as we were. “Why Your Daddy Turned Down the Job at the Commercial Chicken Farm” used to be a bedtime story my mother told my brother and me.

I’ve phased in and out of being vegan. My body does not absorb protein from wheat; some years it seems to be getting enough protein from rice and beans and peanuts, some years not. Currently I buy chicken, turkey, and sometimes fish, when I can afford them, for the bonding ritual of Sharing My Own Food With the Cats. Often the cats eat kibble and I eat beans or nuts. I don’t complicate my life with any commitment to be a full-time vegan, but I have vegan days.

Because I’m one of those who find it easier to follow a McDougall-type diet (more complex carbs, less protein, minimal fat) than an Atkins-type diet (more protein, fewer carbs, lots of fat), I could be tempted to agree with Dr. John McDougall that a plant-based diet is The Way (for everyone) To Go. Research shows that either a McDougall diet or an Atkins diet is better than the restaurant-food diet advertisers want to sell us, either may work for some people, and neither works for all people. Grandma Bonnie Peters has been happily “McDougalling” for many years but some people say they become listless and depressed when they go vegan. I refer those people to Dr. McDougall, who will tell them to go ahead and have a fat-and-protein “feast” once or twice a month if they feel the need, but if I’ve learned one thing from the celiac gene it’s that humans are diverse. We are not all designed to eat the same things.

These recipes will lure carnivores over to the vegan table. And I can tweak this diet, easily, into something that works for me--though it's not cheap. I feel no need to lay a guilt trip on those who say they can't.

Human bodies run on different types of fuel. A majority of humans can digest wheat efficiently, as long as it’s natural wheat, not soaked in glyphosate, as most wheat sold today has been. A majority of humans can digest cow’s milk efficiently only in early childhood. The minority genes for the opposite of these traits occur separately, but in an overlapping area, in Britain and Western Europe. The “strong form” of the celiac gene fairly well proves descent from certain specific families in Ireland. There are also genes for about half a dozen specific patterns of alcohol intolerance, of which the most common is found in a majority of both Irish and Native American populations, suggesting that those ethnic groups weren’t separated as widely for as long as many people think. Some people think there are genes for fat tolerance, too. Some have even found correlations between food tolerance and blood type, and recommended four different types of diet...Much remains to be learned. I feel perky on a low-fat vegan diet, and so do all the people I’ve known well who’ve tried one. That’s no guarantee that other people will.

However, what we know about Stone Age cultures suggests that more humans are likely to have evolved to live mostly on plant products than to need a high-protein, high-fat diet. The explosion of “eating disorders” in the mid-twentieth century reflected several things; one of them was that many bodies instinctively rejected the high-protein, high-fat diet that had been “scientifically” recommended to American families based on the proportion that worked best for rats. Most of our metabolisms are not that much like rats’.

What I believe is really unhealthy is our cultural tolerance for Food Bullies who think everyone should eat the same thing. If people want to make it their mission to change the way Americans eat, I’d recommend that as the problem they should tackle. How can we become a culture where a conversation like,

A: “No, thanks.”

B: “Why not? It’s good! It’s good for you! Much healthier than that stuff I’ve seen you eat...”

—generates universal agreement that B should not be allowed to eat at the same table with other humans. People need to tune out this kind of obnoxious “peer pressure” and pay attention to what works for their bodies.

I don’t like bacon. I’ve observed living hogs and felt that, like possums, hogs are animals I don’t care to touch, dead or alive. I’ll agree that pork fat, like cat urine, smells yucky in its natural state but yummy when it just starts to burn, when some of its chemical components carbonize. The rich aroma of sizzling bacon doesn’t make me want to eat it, any more than the rich aroma of charring cat cage liners makes me want to eat those. If you enjoy bacon, fine. You can have my share of it. Just don’t ask me why I don’t want it, because I don’t want to become the sort of person who talks about this kind of thing at the breakfast table, and I will.

My body is my own. Your body is your own. None of us should ever allow anybody to tell us what to eat. Information about nutrients generally, and food contamination alerts, and recipes, are fine...but don’t even think about telling me how bad something that doesn’t make me sick is “for me,” and how I should be eating something that does make me sick, instead, even if it works for you.

A primary reason why I’m not a full-time vegan is that I do belong to one of those Irish families that have the gene for full-blown celiac sprue, which is even yuckier than it sounds. I can’t eat anything containing any form of wheat, or any kind of cheese, without being sick. Any exposure to glyphosate makes me sick. As a result the list of things I can safely eat has become very short, in recent years, and I’m not about to add any optional boycotts to a list of dietary restrictions that’s already unnecessarily, and non-negotiably, very long.

Ask anyone who’s been successfully living with the celiac gene during the past twenty years, and I’m sure you’ll get the same answer. If the people who raise food we can eat, without immediate physical distress, also run an abortion clinic so they can burn fetal tissue on their backyard grill and dance around it howling “Hail Satan,” probably most of us are going to continue buying from them. It would be nicer to buy more food from a nice local farm, but since Big Government has handed Big Agriculture enough regulations to strangle all the ones we used to know, we’ll probably continue buying from the Satanists. That’s just a fact of life these days.

I liked this book. I recommend it...to non-celiacs. I also blame it for 90% of all the unhappiness in my childhood, which came from constantly trying to eat things I was not built to digest and consequently feeling sick.

I first read Diet for a Small Planet in grade two. I learned all about how, if everyone on Earth could eat bread and cheese, there’d be enough for everyone who was alive in 1970 to eat bread and cheese every day. Nice theoretical thought! The fact is that everyone on Earth can’t eat bread and cheese. The majority of humans worldwide can’t eat dairy products, and celiacs can’t eat wheat products. For me bread and cheese is poison. I might as well try making lunch out of D-Con sprinkled with Sevin Dust. And I’m sure you food bullies would just love to discuss how bread and cheese affect my body right at your lunch table. Not.

I went to a Seventh-Day Adventist college. They used to serve those Worthington and Loma Linda soybean loaves and sausages and so on, at almost every meal. I ate those things. I liked them. In those days the soy wasn’t saturated with glyphosate and I had no idea that the wheat was what was making me so ill. It was the 1980s; we thought minor illness was psychosomatic and the cure was to deny it and push yourself to act perky. I denied, I pushed, I acted perky, I crashed and burned. I had mononucleosis for most of two dang years and, having been in Michigan when I got that disease, I hadn’t even kissed anybody. Mono is caused by a virus, and the strain that contaminated a batch of vaccine (that I didn’t need) against a trivial disease (that I’d already had) in Michigan was a particularly nasty virus, but I’m sure that that “healthy” wheat-based diet contributed to my “chronic mononucleosis, opportunistic hepatitis” experience.

I have lived through a lot of unnecessary pain that was caused by allowing anyone outside my own body to tell me what I “should” eat. At least I’ve learned, thoroughly, that there is no single diet for the whole planet. People are different. People absorb different protein in different ways. People have evolved to live in different places where different foodstuffs grow. I can safely eat some things, like (unpoisoned, non-GMO) peanuts, that are poisonous to some people. Some people can safely eat some things, like wheat, that are poisonous to me.

North America has long been, and is still, a place where delicious, nutritious vegetables grow well. Our problem is that big industrial-model farms want to nurture pest species by monocropping and try to control them by spraying poison on them. Possibly Americans would eat more vegetables if we hadn’t had reactions to the poisons humans have added to those vegetables. I like garbanzos, but since they’re often planted in glyphosate-drenched soil in rotation with wheat, I can’t eat very many garbanzos very often. I love strawberries, but since they have no peel to speak of and soak up poisons sprayed into the air like little sponges, I have to plan around the possibility of being sick for a few days after eating strawberries. I like corn, but when it’s been genetically modified to be more like wheat so that it can be saturated with glyphosate, I know better than to expect corn to like me.

Animals eat poisoned plant-derived food, so meat isn’t safe either...but generally the ratio of glyphosate to food is still considerably lower in meat than it is in grains and beans. In recent years, as farmers have been encouraged to spray this particular poison right on food, Americans who like vegetables are being conditioned to avoid vegetables, and eat more meat, by our own bodies.

I inherited the “strong” form of the celiac gene. I have that in common with approximately one of every ten thousand people of Irish descent and, for all practical purposes, nobody in any other ethnic group. A “weak” form can be traced back to other parts of western Europe, including Iceland and Italy, but it’s still a minority gene. Since glyphosate spraying and GMO crops have become common, though, we’re reading that one out of five, one out of four, even one out of three North Americans, not necessarily even those of Western European descent, are having celiac-like reactions to wheat, soy, and other glyphosate-soaked foodstuffs. Those people don’t always have any idea what’s making them sick, nor are their symptoms necessarily easy to identify as celiac-like. They just know they’re chronically hungry, chronically malnourished, chronically dyspeptic, and if they switch from eating more meat to eating more grain they’re much more of those things. 

I do not like this diet plan at all, but it works for some people.

So we have the Atkins Diet. Reading an Atkins Diet menu makes me queasy but some people choke down their turkey sandwich with mayonnaise and milk for lunch and then their beef jerky for a snack and then their porkchop for dinner, and they feel better than if they’d eaten a peanut butter sandwich with strawberries, a V-8 for a snack, and a big salad full of sunflower seeds for dinner. I imagine that that would not have been the case before 1990 but it is the case today. Even people who enjoyed being vegans before 1990 are getting sick after enjoying a delicious, comforting, vegan meal like Mother used to make, today.

No doctor, Euell Gibbons didn't even follow the special diet he needed, didn't live very long...but his "wild foods" are what I eat a lot of these days. If you live in the country and can trust your neighbors, these are a few things it's still safe to eat while Irish.

I don’t buy a lot of supermarket vegetables these days. I eat what grows in my own garden, much of which are not supermarket-type vegetables; they’re exotic native plants only Euell Gibbons and fans used to eat, but my mother happened to be a Euell Gibbons fan. I have a patch of violets in the not-a-lawn. When they bloom, I think “How pretty!” and then I think “How tasty!” I eat about half my violets. That’s my fresh vegetable for the day. Violets are so vitamin-rich that a whole bowlful would cause a Vitamin C overdose, which isn't dangerous, but people for whom I've cooked health food feasts have been alarmed by one.

I used to enjoy all the vegetables in the supermarket, though. I do not have childish tastes. I like raw or barely cooked veg; I like the different flavors, bitter, earthy, watery, pungent, and the crunchy textures. I miss them, now. But the last time I feasted on fresh corn, which was a big annual celebration for the old-time Cherokee, I was sick. The last time a farmer gave me some fresh juicy vine-ripened tomatoes, oh goodness gracious they were good, but I was sick. I am a human not a vulture, but the last time I ate chicken, even if that chicken led a miserable life, it passed through my body in peace and did not make me sick.

Stanford students...I picture them with their fresh young faces, pearly teeth, long glossy black or blonde hair. Who knows what Isaiah meant by saying “Ye are gods,” or what Jesus meant by quoting him, but there is something of what the ancient Roman Empire called divinity, the goddess of youth, Juventas, about that splendor of youth and health. Many of Earth’s population, past and even present, feel something like worship when they look at you. Many people want to do anything you ask them to. So whyyy do so many of us mean, grumpy older people not join your protest against the meat packers?

I’ve not even mentioned, nor do I want to go into, the political reasons some of my correspondents would have put first. I don’t think they’re particularly worthy reasons. Old Socialist drivel about separating people from family farms, homes, land, and animals, does tend to mix into some people’s embrace of a vegan diet; but not others’. I do notice some vestiges of Old Socialist religious thinking in Stanford’s course catalogue—home of the economics class titled “Love as a Force for Social Justice”!—and suspect the students’ young minds-full-of-mush have been corrupted a little bit, but wotthebleep, Stanford minds can get over a little corruption once they’re exposed to reality. I do think the students need to concentrate more on how individualism built the once-provincial United States and collectivism destroyed the once-mighty Soviet Union.

That is, technically, a separate issue. If Khrushchev or even Hitler said it was raining, that, by itself, did not necessarily cause it to stop raining. Even though socialism as a national policy is unsustainable, from time to time a socialist does get something right. A vegetarian diet could be one of those things. Many Americans eat far more meat than their bodies need, and feel better if they eat a well balanced vegan diet for up to two years at a time. (Vegetables don’t contain enough Vitamin B-12 for most humans’ needs but healthy humans manufacture their own Vitamin B-12 in the process of digesting grain.)

So here are my three positive recommendations to the Stanford students:

1. All life thrives at the expense of other life. Humans have the physical traits of animals that need a mix of plant-based and animal-based food. When we slice into vegetables they register an electrical shock that is probably more like pain than pleasure. So a productive discussion of cruelty to other living things needs to accept that we humans are predators. We kill other living creatures. The question is whether we mistreat them before we kill them. Try a focus on restoring the ideal of small communities made up of individuals who raise their own animals and vegetables. Emphasize how much longer, healthier, and happier cows’ and hens’ lives are on a small family farm than in a big commercial meat factory. In the twentieth century we as a nation went considerably too far in the direction of centralizing too many things. Your focus should consistently be on decentralizing, on small, on independent, on well separated. Cows are miserable when hundreds of them are packed into a barn or lot; they’re happy and healthy when two or ten of them are browsing through a few acres of grass.

2. If you are less than 100% sure that someone else is 100% unaware that something he or she is about to eat has been poisoned with something that’s 100% fatal, don’t question other people’s food choices. Ever. Try not to look.

3. Naturally, even if a totally socialist education had made you ashamed of it, you’d like to see everyone eating California-fresh vegetables—beautiful California children that you are. I do like that about you. So, focus on getting those vegetables glyphosate-free, and otherwise unpoisoned, so that everyone can safely enjoy eating them.

I've yet to read this one, but the evidence just keeps piling up--the title says it all.