Of diet, interbeing, and too much of a good thing

On 5/9/03 "Dominic Gonzalvez" wrote:

It didn't "make my day" -- it fried my day. I was browsing your peace_passion of Wed 7 May, and hit the warisstupid site. The truths in many of the quotations were a blowtorch on my mind.

(and near the end of the same message)

Ooops ... Daphne has just yelled that dinner is ready. At least I personally didn't kill the fish I am about to eat!

That got me thinking about this whole business of vegetarianism, so I responded:

First, I think I know what you mean when you say the quotation site "fried your day." That is, if that's the same as what it did for me, which was boil my blood - the case is so clear and so forcefully and eloquently made again and again that you just want to grab people, one at a time, and shove their faces in it.

That said, I'd like to discuss the Buddhist vegetarian approach with you. I have tried being a vegetarian, but with very little success. Right now I'm focusing on a low carb diet (I'm a Type 2 diabetic) and I find it extremely difficult to focus on low carbs without relying on meat, eggs, cheese, etc. (Peanuts can only carry you so far ;-)

But I have read at least one Buddhist author. (Bhante G) who seems to argue that vegetarianism is philosophically futile in the sense that you have to draw a line somewhere and as soon as you draw the line there are creatures on the other side of it we continue to kill. To carry this concept to the extreme, should I avoid anti-bacterial soap? Bacteria are life forms. And why is the life of a plant (a carrot, a bean) less valuable than the life of an animal? (Or the life of a man more valuable than an animal - I think this is a core issue. In the Christian/Judaic ethic man is given dominion over the world. In my ethic - and I think the Buddhist one - man is just another creature in the world - currently dominant in a way on this small planet, but that dominance may be a delusion.)

I wrestle with this often. For me it vaguely comes together under the concept of interbeing. Nothing is born, nothing dies, it merely is changed - what is the word they use? Manifested? - and we all remain a part of the greater life of the universe.

In this approach there is a vast difference between killing for eating and killing for any other purpose.

No, you didn't kill the fish you just ate - nor did I kill the steer that appeared on my plate last night as hamburger - and that may be the problem. In our modern society we are several steps removed from the act of killing and so we may not treat our food with the proper respect it deserves. If we go back to a hunter-gatherer culture, such as the American Indian, then we find they respected the animals they killed. They didn't kill wantonly - well, at least that was their ideal. I think people in such a society can merely harden themselves to their acts and thus be as disrespectful as we are when we buy a packaged piece of meat.

But I wander. What I have been trying to do in my own mind is bring together what we know from science, the Buddhist concept of interbeing, the whole issue of life/death/manifestation - and make sure that all fits with my eating habits. I'm not entirely comfortable with my approach - and it may just be a rationalization- but again, killing to eat seems to me a natural part of what we do - killing for sport, for religion, for material gain, etc. is wrong because it is out of sync with interbeing and/or the golden rule.

And Dom replied:

Diet. My personal discovery is that ancestral food patterns are almost impossibly hard to kick. Let me give you an actual example. Years ago when we were living in Calcutta, food rationing was in force. On our ration card we got so many kilos of rice, wheat, sugar etc at a controlled price. We often used rickshaws for transport, and outside our block of apartments, five or six regular rickshaw pullers had their base. They gladly gave us their sugar in exchange for our rice. They explained that they were rice eaters for generations, and could stomach very little wheat. The ratio of rice to wheat in their rations was incorrect for them... they needed (I quote from faint memory) 6 rice to 1 wheat.

I am sure nutritionists and others will argue from very strong scientific logic that wheat is as good as rice. Scientifically perhaps "yes", but genetically/culturally/realistically "no".

Our bodies have an inbuilt logic of their own, and my experience with "scientific" diets is that if I have a silent, stubborn rebellion going on within, the diet crashes in days. The secret of success seems to lie in working around the ancestral diet... modify, innovate, reduce.

I'll have a word with Daphne on your diet problem in our morning walk in the next few days. She may have some ideas of value.

I have given up eating beef. Not because I don't like a steak and 'taters... no, because it doesn't like me. If I eat a good meal of beef, my gums bleed when I brush my teeth the next morning. No one has been able to explain why. It just happens. My theory is that the additives in the cattle feed get into the meat.

I agree with Bhante. Where do we draw the line on what is "alive"? The lettuce that I eat had life a few hours ago. And there are probably microorganisms on it that I eat alive. I think one has to draw a line of personal logic+comfort, and leave it at that. More of my thoughts on this within the next week.

My dad liked brain cutlets. (That's what we called them... to you it would be a hamburger). I can't remember whether he used beef brains or lamb brains, but I remember watching him shape the brains in a hamburger sort of shape, add his secret herbs and spices, roll the thing in crumbs, and then fry them over a slow fire till golden brown.

After reading warisstupid, my head felt fried like my dad's brains cutlets. The live coals of truth after truth sizzled me. I was too cooked to go to page 2.

Posted by Greg Stone at May 9, 2003 07:43 AM