Rebirth

Over the past two weeks, there has been a strong shift within me with regards to the food I eat. Previously, I was very happily omnivorous, eating both plant-based and animal-based foods (without any discrimination between the animals I ate...if you can eat one animal, then why not another?). Now I have decided to avoid meat and, as far as possible, reduce my past intake of eggs and milk products  for good. I have also started preparing more of my own food, either raw like salads or simple cooked vegetarian food.

These are the specific events that caused this shift:

- Watching this documentary, Hunger for Change (the full video's been taken down...)

- Following Tara Stiles' tumblr and youtube videos...http://tarastileseats.tumblr.com/ and getting curious about making my own juices and smoothies, and when I actually got down to unpacking my blender and buying fruits and veggies and looking up recipes and nutritional info, discovering a whole world of raw food eaters like Chris Sims  (whose smoothie video I shared in the last post - http://www.youtube.com/user/MKrawpt) and Ka Sundance (http://www.youtube.com/user/rawfoodfamilylife). Chris Sims is a personal trainer and has interesting recipes and tips. Ka Sundance has open and lively discussions with others in the nutrition field, and I particularly like his discussion with Daniel Vitalis on raw foodism, veganism, vegetarianism and omnivorism (now I just add "ism" to the end of everything haha):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=x6eGRUbmuq8

- Reading "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Safran Foer and learning more about the factory farming industry and the related craziness which passes for normal on an everyday basis. I'm not an extremist. I'm fine with people and myself eating meat and animal by-products as long as there are some acceptable standards of treatment and safety and hygiene and care and respect involved in the farming industry. But there isn't, and the scale of the craziness is much higher than I had previously presumed. Animal husbandry has turned into production lines which are very ethically and environmentally wrong on such a large scale, and Foer's book illuminates the level of insanity at which factory farms and fisheries run. It highlights how far from nature animal farming has gotten in terms of the genetic stock of the animals, how torturous their lives and deaths are, how lax the regulation and there is an inherent conflict of interest with regards to the , how oligopolistic the industry is and also how bad for the environment and human health this whole system of factor farms and corporation-owned slaughterhouses is. Even the farmers who care for their animals well cannot ensure them a speedy death since slaughterhouses are not under control and for some reason they seem unable to set up their own due to regulatory requirements and the cost competition from existing slaughterhouses. I'm now reading Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Deliemma" which further pinpoints the baseline of this system being America's excessive corn production, which is also guzzling fossil fuels in terms of fertilizers. It all comes down to the government incentives, policies and economics being in favor of the industrialisation of agriculture (crops as well as livestock) rather than traditional farming methods.

And still, there are people on this earth starving. The price of meat is subsidised and yet we are paying the price in other ways. Talk about how inherently messed up everything is.

The more I read and learn, the more I start to see a bigger picture, and that picture isn't as pleasant as I'd like it to be. I question why the intrinsic downsides of the systems that the world runs on (financial, agricultural, goodness knows what else) are all so obviously flawed, and yet we are never taught the full truth about them, or not taught about them at all. These are basic things that sustain us as human beings, and are supposed to sustain our descendants as well. We have a right to know and control what goes into our bodies on a daily basis, for we are what we eat. What we eat influences the physical body, which is delicately intertwined with the mind and the spiritual body.

I'll admit that a lot of things were not perfect in the pre-World War days, but the few good things like natural, closed-loop agricultural systems seem to have been wiped out. Now we have open-looped, gas-guzzling, polluting, animal-torturing supply chains.

How did we let this happen? How is ignorance bliss? How are we so caught up all the time with the thoughts and feelings inside our heads, and so unaware of the things happening around us in the outside world? Where and when did we lose our connection to the natural world? With the discovery of fire and fuel and cooking and cleaning and constructing? Or is it something more recent - financial markets, excessive luxury, automation, GDP growth, profitability?

What can we do to change things for the better? Where do you even begin, when there are millions of people who knowingly sustain these systems? Good people, who just want to provide for their families and "fit in" to whatever the latest culture is. All of us are responsible. All of us are asleep. Sometimes I really wish this world was only a dream and not the reality. And yet, there are so many things which are good in this world. The trees and the birds and the crickets chirping and the ocean and the rain and flowers. We take time off from our factory farm unnatural stifling corporate cubicles from pushing unsustainable products to ever-hungry consumers to retreat briefly into the arms of Mother Nature when it all gets too much, disturbing more wildlife and sea creatures along the way. We let ourselves get fattened up with sugary foods and drug-filled, unhealthy, fattened up meat, we chase after products to put on our outside when really we should be worried about what's going on inside, attractiveness is measured in how well you respond to cosmetics and hair treatments and diets and intense, unnatural workouts, we allow the weak of mind and body to thrive and procreate thanks to our drugs which never really cure anything, we mindlessly drone on through our lives in a system which is doomed to fail (thinking we are great successes in the process), doomed to wipe ourselves and other animals out through war and disease and economic crises and overconsumption and lack of natural resources. What in the world are we doing? Why do we even think we know what we are doing?

I have so many questions, and slowly I need to find the answers for myself. These issues are so important to bring up with the people around me, but I sometimes can't find the right words to communicate them to others without sounding like a self-important douche. I think it'll take divine intervention to figure out a way to live without further perpetuating this crazy system. Not to sound overly negative, but these things have been on my mind and I just needed to put it down somewhere. Vegetarianism is the first step in the right direction, and so far it's been pretty good.