About Changing Your Diet

We've been mostly vegetarian for more than 25 years - maybe even 30. We used to raise chickens until a couple years ago, and I have butchered a few. Which I do not like one bit - but if you are going to eat meat you ought to know firsthand the realities that it entails. And I will eat a piece of meat now and then if the occasion arises. I had a bit of absolutely superb jamon near Ronda in Spain last year.

And we eat seafood now and then. In Madrid we shared an astonishing paella that was an invertebrate zoologist's delight.

I ate quite a lot of chicken, both very good and not-so-good in Ecuador this past fall.

But at home, we don't do meat. And do not miss it at all. I started avoiding it in 1978 when I realized that my then-daily five-mile run was considerably harder after a day on which I ate meat. And Joan stopped many years ago after visiting a feedlot. That gets your attention. It's not unusual to be a vegetarian these days, but it was when we began. Most people now know that meat is neither necessary nor particularly healthy. And more are realizing that it makes no ecological and environmental sense.

But I don't want to make those arguments here. I just have some anecdotal personal observations about another change we recently made that might address the general difficulty of changing your diet. Telling people what to eat is about as effective as telling them what religion to follow. Food habits are very deeply embedded in most people. And now it has become a political issue, since no country can afford the health care costs of a populace fed on processed foods. But even the slightest hint of government control of the slow motion catastrophe that is the industrial agriculture juggernaut causes revolutionary fervor among right-wing Republicans and libertarians. So it seems that since The Government can't easily force The People to save their own lives or those of their children, anything that can be done to clear the way for everyone to want to do it for themselves is worth trying.

My very modest purpose at the moment is to point out that changing your diet for the better can not only be easy, it can also be pleasurable. A couple of years ago Joan's diligent research made it clear that we were eating far too much animal protein, sugar and fat. We slowly phased these things out. I resisted of course, because it is my nature to do so, and in any case I like fats & oils and sugars. I was using far, far too much oil in just about everything I cooked. It was a habit. It was actually fairly easy to do without eggs and milk. We used almost no milk anyway since it causes obvious allergies in at least two people in the family. I had to train myself to stop with all the oil, and there are some fried foods I miss a bit (fried and breaded sliced zucchini is near the top of the list). Maple syrup is our only sweetener now, and that is fine in everything we make. It has the virtue of being rare and expensive (we used to make our own, but it's too much trouble) like refined sugar used to be, so we can't help but be sparing with it.

The point I want to make is that it slowly began to become clear to me that everything I was eating tasted better. I really started to enjoy foods that before I had mechanically tolerated, and only grudingly "liked." Everything tasted more complex, more interesting, even sweeter. I am confident that this happened because I was no longer myself saturated with fats and oils and sugars and salts. Your body becomes more sensitive to the pleasures of eating when you are not bludgeoning it with those few substances that we evolved to crave because they were rare and hard to find. I enjoy my meals more now than I ever have in my life and am far more sensitive to the subtle variety of flavors that exists in even the simplest diet. And on those rare occasions when a truly excellent piece of meat does present itself - as it did in Ronda - then the experience is magnificent indeed.

Oh, and I might mention that I also magically lost over 25 pounds, while eating more food than I ever have. You can eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and not gain any weight.