Signals From The Earth

A friend I hadn’t seen in some time recently contacted me asking for tips on changing her diet. She wanted to start eating 75% raw food (after completing a juice cleanse), and since she knew that I was vegan, she wanted to know if I had any ideas on how to fight cravings. This was my response:

Although I eat a great deal of raw food, I wouldn’t consider myself a raw foodist; I am, however, a vegan, and have been for about five years. However, as you already know, there’s a lot of overlap: most raw foodists are vegan by implication.

My experience was drawn out. I first gave up fast food in college after reading Fast Food Nation, and shortly thereafter gave up red meat. After a few months, I went vegetarian, and stayed that way for about six months. Only then did I start to make the transition to vegan, which for me took about another six months. I’m a slow but steady kind of person, so this is how I do just about anything new.

I will say that I never missed red meat or fast food. But I did experience cravings. I remember there were nights when I would have dreams about eating pork chops. My theory (and I believe I’ve seen this corroborated somewhere) is that cravings are your body’s way of telling you you’re missing out on some nutrient. When I first went vegetarian, my diet probably wasn’t terribly balanced, and I think this is an issue for many people. The good news is that if you replace unhealthy food with nutritionally superior food, your cravings will fade and be replaced for a desire for quality meals.

Going vegetarian wasn’t hard for me, but going vegan was harder than quitting smoking. It’s not that my cravings were very intense, but rather that the food environment in which we find ourselves is fairly hostile. We are barraged from all sides by foods that are packed with many things you’ll be wanting to avoid. My suggestions are:

1. Change your environment. Sometimes we have little control over the kind of food that surrounds us. But there’s a lot we can do. For the first while, try to minimize your outings to unfriendly restaurants where you’ll be tempted to compromise. Purge your pantry of unwanted junk. Eat mostly what you cook. If you feel awkward about avoiding a social situation, you can just tell people why, and mostly they’ll understand– or even accommodate.

2. Treat yourself to health. It’s easy to see a healthy diet as a form of self-deprivation. But actually, it’s the opposite: you’re working extra hard to give your body what it needs and wants. The trick is to remind yourself of this in different ways. Get yourself a plethora of healthy foods you normally wouldn’t. Surround yourself with great options. Present things in a fun way. After all, the fun presentation of most junk food or cultural comfort food is half the reason we are drawn to it. This is especially important for meals you make at home or bring to work. Celebrate your new way of life.

3. Get some perspective. I can’t say I’m a believer in the juice cleanse, and I have my reasons. First, it’s unhealthy. It’s true that fasting removes toxins from your body, but that’s because those toxins have been stored safely in your fatty tissues. Releasing them rapidly has been demonstrated to shorten your lifespan. Your body just isn’t designed to deal with that much toxin at once. It’s a major strain. I think the reason the diet is so popular is that it creates the alluring fetish of a rapid reversal of unhealthy behaviors, leading to a new self in a few days of intense concentration.

But for most people, the problem with eating right isn’t short term concentration. It’s the long run. I have a friend who has been trying to quit smoking for years. Every time he quits, he is good for about two weeks. Then he gets bored. What is he going to do when he goes out and drinks, or is sitting at his computer at night? So he starts back up again, and is frustrated by his failure. What he doesn’t get is that even two weeks of quitting is a major victory. If he were to quit once a month, he would only be smoking half the time. I know that sounds funny, but it’s true: it’s really the long run average of your behavior that determines your lifelong health profile.

The same is true for food. I like the idea that you’re changing three-quarters of your diet. If you can eat right for half your meals every day, or even one meal, and stick with it for the rest of your life, that’s much better than changing your whole routine for a week, or even a few years, before giving up on health and eating the way your peers or family do. If you make slow, sustainable changes, everything will fall into place: cravings will reverse into a desire for good food, habits will work for you instead of against you, you will learn new things about food and your own body, and instead of fighting you, others around you will begin to learn from your example and follow your lead.

I hope this helps.

City dwellers have a long history of self-satisfaction. Even in Philadelphia, a relatively humble metropolis, I can usually smell the superiority around me at all times of day. And I like it. We may not be John McCain’s “real Americans,” but urbanites know they’re on the right side of history. Suburbs are an environmental evil, as we all know, so moving to the center of things practically makes us Planeteers. So I constantly find myself involved in persuading my friends to become more urban. Ditch the car, get an apartment, ride the train, get a life. But even though I’ve been vegan for several years, I rarely find myself proselytizing against the perils of meat.

A good friend recently asked me an interesting question. She knows I’m not a religious person, or even a big believer in traditional notions of morality and rights. What she wants to understand is how vegetarianism fits into my life, without the idea of animal rights. When I got to thinking about it, this question evokes many of the same reasons I live in a city.

1. Health

Eating dead animals kills you. This is the elephant in the utilitarian room. Cholesterol, excess fat, accumulated toxins, hormones, fatty acid imbalance. On balance, animals are not good for you. And urbanites want to be healthy. Many of us are type-A neurotics who never stop worrying about their life expectancy. Others just don’t have the time to be fat and sick.

2. Efficiency

Meat is wasteful. Even after all the government subsidies, it’s expensive. That’s because its production involves multiple layers of resource consumption. You could irrigate fields, sow them with wheat, harvest it, feed it to old cows, house them in stalls, impregnate them with tools, raise their children, kill them, clean them, butcher them, and package them. Or you could raise fruits and vegetables, and stop at step three. City dwellers don’t have the luxury of inefficiency. We have efficiency apartments, efficient locations, and efficient bags to carry our junk. Living in the city is expensive, and there’s no point in making it any more so.

3. Fashion

Eating meat is not hip. Vegans tend to be younger, trendier people. Progressive attitudes are always cool. That’s because the old way of doing things represents the establishment. I don’t eat at McDonalds, or some steak restaurant for overweight married professionals. I might be able to get something vegan there. But how cool would that be? Instead, I’ll eat where people wear clothes that weren’t designed by Brooks Brothers or Wal-Mart.

4. Politics

I’m not a Republican. I don’t think that a hamburger is a symbol of the American dream. I don’t idealize cattle ranches. I don’t consider excess to be a virtue. That includes excess gas consumption, excess ass fat, excess spending, and excess calories. Like it or not, the personal is political. The more meat you eat, the more similar you are to the kind of insincere cowboy hat wearing, SUV-straddling, war-mongering troglodytes that inhabit the various meat-producing areas of this country and others. Yee-ha.

5. Ecology

Unless you’re the president of Chevron, becoming a vegan is the single biggest decision you can make to improve the odds for our planet. Enormous amounts of water, land, and energy are wasted, and equally astronomical amounts of pollution created, by the raising of animals for food. And most of it falls under tidy exceptions to the relevant environmental statutes, thanks to our powerful agribusiness lobby. Many seasoned citizens of big cities would give the death glare to an irresponsible dog-walker who failed to scoop up their best friend’s bowel movement- and eating meat is the consumer equivalent of taking a dump on our shared environment.

6. Equality

I support animal rights. But what about the rights of human beings? Although this question is sometimes leveled as a counter to militant veganism (”I can do what I want!” or, more insidiously, “Isn’t vegetarianism a largely white, bourgeois behavior?”), the scepter of social equality rests firmly in the hands of the lettuce-munchers. Fast food exploits economically marginalized groups on the supply and demand side; “quality” animal products exclude them. If would-be refined luxuries like select cuts of steak or foie gras are emblematic of class, they operate to distinguish those who can afford to behave with such brazen disregard for practicality from those who cannot. The worst aspect of this fact is also the most apparent: the most economically disadvantaged members of our society share the greatest share of our health problems, and the worst of our health problems are caused in large part by the consumption of meat.

And there’s more. Vegans are sexier, which goes a long way in the city. And when you’re packed onto a subway train, you’ll be glad you’re not the tub with the Burger King bag trying to squeeze into a molded plastic chair. And, of course, there are many powerful ethical arguments as well. Perhaps most important of all, cities are filled with the kind of people who want to make things better; sometimes, that’s why they moved to the city in the first place. So do your town a favor and get with the program.

I’ve been frustrated recently by my inability to hit 100% of a few nutritional targets, despite sustained efforts. Today, I decided to double-check the targets themselves. A few months ago, I was banging my head against the wall: I couldn’t hit 1200mg/day of calcium, the FDA recommended daily allowance. As a vegan, it was hard enough getting around 800mg/day. But after I did some research, I turned up the fact that most other countries (including the UK) don’t think more than 1000mg/day is necessary for any adults, and that 800mg/day is sufficient for most adults under 50 years of age. (more…)

After my final exams are over (December 20th), I’ll be flying to Texas for a couple of weeks. I’ll be in Dallas for about a week, then Austin for a few days starting the 27th. Let me know if you want to get together.

I’m drinking a glass of the 2004 Peter Lehmann Barossa cabernet, and I noticed a distinct pattern in the fruit and tannin progression. It starts out almost sour, but balances out nicely. I made this graph to demonstrate.

This graph speaks for itself.

I think I can tell my future pretty clearly from this vegetable seasonality calendar. Awesome.

I am always looking for ways to improve my diet. I have come at this issue from many directions, but one to which I have paid relatively little attention has been the effect of the food I eat on my mental health. The idea that certain foods can optimize your ability to think and focus as well as elevate your mood is not new to me. However, I have always gazed upon such claims with skepticism. Now that I know more about nutrition than I have in the past, I decided to take another look.
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After viewing Richard Linklater’s Waking Life for the first time several weeks ago, I have found myself recalling dreams with unprecedented frequency (sometimes several per night). After doing some research, I determined that some of the assertions made in the film regarding the feasibility of lucid dreaming are scientifically based, and that there are established techniques (some of which are mentioned in the work) for increasing dream recall and dream lucidity.
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