In the past six years, I have experienced much eye-opening turbulence in one of my closest and dearest relationships: My relationship with food. Over this period of transformation, I have gone from being a satisfied, care-free omnivore to an ingredient obsessed, organic loving vegan. It’s hard to say when the change began. As a kid I was an extremely picky eater and an animal lover, so maybe it is partly in my blood. However, I can remember a point in my life when my food and I started to get a little uncomfortable. When I was sixteen I got my first job cooking food at a local restaurant. I figured there are sixteen year old Americans everywhere that flip burgers, how bad could it be? I soon found out it is a much dirtier job than it appears. Every day I cooked pounds upon pounds of meat, often coming home with clothes caked with grease and blood. At first this didn’t bother me; it was nothing some soap could not get out. However, the longer I worked there, the more I realized the raw meat on the grill in front of me was part of something once living. This became an increasingly disturbing thought as day after day I cooked and distributed what I now identified as once living flesh.
Eventually I left that job, but I continued to think about my food differently. I still ate meat, but I began to find myself hesitant and sometimes cringing in front of a once delicious meal. I began researching information about the meat industry and I was stunned at what I found. I forget how many billions of animals were consumed in the United States that year, but it was enough for me to make the decision to stop eating meat. This was a major change in the way I decided what I ate.
During my first year as a vegetarian, I found that the difficult part is not abstaining from meat, but redefining your relationship with food and deciding what it is that you DO want to eat. I never realized the amount of complex questions that arise from our food. What are the differences between GMO and organic foods? Does location matter when importing food? Are there non-meat foods out there that still cause suffering and death? How can one find adequate nutrition in an alternative diet? All of these were brand new questions I suddenly had to face.
Today I feel healthier and more at peace with my food decisions, but the point of this blog is not to ramble on about the history of my dietary choices (although perhaps I have). When I started working in that kitchen, it was the first time in my life that I caught a glimpse of the reality of food beyond what it looked like on a plate, and that really changed my understanding of food. My shift in diet did not mean I changed my morals or beliefs; it was about seriously taking into account this new information and applying it to what I already believed. So I would urge the readers of this blog to take some time to learn about the food you eat, where it comes from, and how that applies to the beliefs you already hold.
