/life/Pollan on Vegetarianism
In Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan has this to say about his dabbling in vegetarianism:
What troubles me most about my [recently adopted] vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience.
Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don't eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she'll make something special for me, in which case I'll feel bad. On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.
Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being, it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I'm not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpart, and family traditions like my mother's beef brisket at Passover.
I wrestled with my novel dietary changes a bit, but ultimately aimed for (and nearly succeeded at) a vegan Christmas dinner with my parents where I'm comfortable cooking for myself and no one is going to feel bad, but folded entirely to the traditional twelve course Ukrainian Christmas Eve dinner with my extenda-fam, where opting out of the perogies would have been exceedingly poor form.
I think that vegetarianism is common enough, at least among my friends and family, that I don't really buy his argument — it's not very often that I'm the only veggie at a party, and even if I am veggie and it happens that I forget to mention it, I don't think anyone feels really bad about it. But that's just social context — I think if you apply what he's saying to veganism or my special flavour of diet does seem like an imposition.
This is a weird line to walk; if I've decided that, for my day to day life, supporting conventional American factory farming is untenable, why would I let that slide? And yet, these traditions are important, and especially with the recency of my shift it hardly seems fair to induce this breakdown in the host-guest relationship that Pollan speaks of. It's a quandary that I resolve ultimately via social expedience but the rubric of this traditionalism is moderately more satisfying, though Pollan himself doesn't really resolve the issue.
Wow, that last sentence was rubbish.
In other news, I had a nice, relaxing Christmas — the quietest one I've had ever, I think, though my sister and her family arrive tomorrow to add the requisite snow-playing and children-screaming to the holidays. I got a bunch of kitchen- and food-related stuff, which is most excellent.
New Albums from the Gallery
/life/toronto/Home
For the first time since my parents moved away from Saskatoon (and perhaps before then: trips home had already started
to feel a bit weird as I grew apart from many — but not all — of my highschool friends), I have a Home. I'm
from Toronto now, in some incomprehensible sense, given that I've only ever lived here one year. Maybe in two
years I'll be from New York in the same sense, or from somewhere else entirely. But for now, as the overnight
Greyhound pulled into the city in the clean early morning light, it was with a strong sense of comfortable recognition
— the recognition of a journey I've done a dozen times: the tight curve of the Gardiner
offramp and the tower in the distance.
The buildings are tall here, but not even mildly claustrophobic like I find Manhattan to be some days. My initial aggressive approach to boarding the subway was both unnecessary and unwelcome, but my NYC layer sloughed off pretty quickly. People smile at each other as they negotiate the "who gets which seat" dance at the busy subway stops. And a friendly conversation was struck up as our train apparently struggled to make it between St. Clair and Davisville — a stop-and-start failure of no known cause.
Toronto, a bit like my SF trip is instantly filled with people to meet up with. And like my first few trips back to Saskatoon after highschool, it's a gathering place for people who went to Waterloo — the GTA is the main feeding ground for Waterloo. It's also full of Green Party people that I know. Just add beer.
I know the town, I know the people; I know the subway and the currency and the health care system and the neighbourhoods and how to get anything done that I need. I have places to stay, numbers to call, and even a reasonable sense of direction, sometimes. But I think it's mostly about the people.
Home.
Maybe I'll even move back here some day.
/life/Aim for Where You're Going
[Last bit of musings about environmentalism started during my flight to San Francisco]
When I was young, my dad got me involved in Soap Box Derby &mdash building small, aerodynamic, gravity-driven cars and racing them down a hill two at a time. There were all kinds of aspects of it that were important: rigidity of the car, oil choice in the wheel bearings, driver position, but at the end of the day bad steering down the straight track could ruin it all. If you found yourself veering off to the side, my dad taught me to not try to get re-centered in the lane, but just to aim for the center of the finishline — to aim where you want to go.
I recently had a discussion with my sister, who is writing about food and diet, about how at every turn there seems to be an environmental minefield. The topic at hand was local organic food still often having a higher footprint than the same foods bought en masse in grocery stores, because for some unprocessed whole foods the last-mile transport dominates. There are lots of things like this: polystyrene is incredibly low-energy while compostable sustainable paper cups are much higher; small-scale organic clothing operations often sell stuff at exhorbitant costs, which I can only assume is in part because that their small scale means high per-unit footprint along the way in terms of energy, transportation and space usage (think hours of lighting in the shop per unit sold). I support them anyway, because they're aimed where we need to go.
Sometimes things aren't clear, sometimes you have to make judgement calls, sometimes you have to give up on something you wanted to do 'cause it's too damn expensive or complicated, but what matters is that you're pulling things the right way, more than the average around you. In some ways it's a weakform of Gandhi's "Be the change you want to see in the world" that's less demanding when the change you want is really substantial and you don't feel strong enough to rise to that challenge in its entirety.
I think this pretty important, and helpful in navigating things: you should do a lot, but you don't have to do everything. If you're pulling the world in the right direction — and being at least transparent if not forceful about it — I think that's enough.
/life/nyc/One Hundred Fifty Dollars of Nom
That's from my first shop at the Food Co-op and in tune with my attempt at a dietary change. Nom nom nom. I bought some canned pumpkin and coconut milk and cilantro, which tomorrow will turn into a delicious soup with any luck.
When I got out of the store it was snowing, and by the time I had biked home with all that on my back and handlebars, there was a nice thick coating on the cars — snow is so pretty.
♥ food.
/life/Murder of One
And I have been to Paris
And I have been to Rome
And I have gone to London
And I am all alone
And I have been to Paris
And I have been to Rome
And I have gone to New York City
And I am all alone
I'm all alone
I am all alone
Counting Crows, Murder of One
Events and conversations finally have made me realize that I'm going to be lonely a bunch for a while (sense 1, hopefully not 2 or 3), that I need to become comfortable with something that I'm really unused to and a little fearful of. But just realizing this has made it something to take on, rather than an inevitable cloud hanging on the horizon. It's good to know what you're working with.
I've never actually been to Rome, either.
/life/nyc/Shrinking My Feet
At 19:29:55, I plonked down in a plastic chair beside my
sister at the Park Slope Food Co-op after riding straight there from work — "latecomers will not be allowed" the website said of the orientation session, so my timing was most superb.
My sister tells me that, as they went over the various rules of the co-op working system I was nodding vigorously at their excellent policy choices, though I don't remember doing so. Every co-op member has to work 2.75 hours every four weeks. You have to pick a fixed shift (mine is 7am Wednesdays on week B of the four-week schedule), and some shift schedules are popular and thus full, and if you can't take an open one you have to plonk your name on a waiting list before you can join. If you travel a lot they have an alternative, more flexible system; if you don't like your shift schedule you can change to any other open one; if you can't make a specific shift you can trade, but if you just don't show up you owe two. If you fall behind you get suspended, but you have 10 days from the first time you're told you're suspended (at the door of the co-op, to get in) to correct clerical errors or make up your shifts. All very excellent, fair, and accommodating without needing a lot of flexible judgement calls. Apparently it used to be a lot more lax, and the co-op nearly collapsed.
They now have 15,000 members and do $27M/y in business, so nearly $2000 per member per year, though it was unclear to me if that number included suspended and inactive members. It's the largest food co-op in the US, if I recall correctly.
They have a strong environmental policy, and thus this attacks one major prong of the food issue for me: where it comes from, how it's grown, and how it gets to me. The co-op is at a large enough that it's unlikely to suffer from small-scale issues like some farmers' market purchases can (driving a small truck of tomatoes is more expensive per tomato-mile than a large one), and it's careful enough that I hope I can shop there almost without thinking.
The other prong is what I'm actually eating. Thus, complementing this, I've now spent three days dabbling in the diet I've had in mind for a while: vegan plus eggs and dairy only if they're organic and only inasmuch as I "need" to enjoy my food. (You can also call this lacto-ovo vegetarian with all animal products being organic, but I think that description, while perhaps more honest, would result in more confused times when people kind enough to try to match my dietary preferences misunderstand the parameters — "vegan", despite being incorrect, sets the scene better.) My sister has been buying a lot of "know the farmer" meat and I've been dabbling (bacon is yum!), but the aesthetic (and, somewhat, environmental) arguments just won't go away — this is descriptive, not prescriptive, though: I support what she's doing, it's just not the diet for me. But it forced my hand, somewhat: I've never really felt okay about eating factory-farmed eggs and cheese, but I've ignored it as too inconvenient. However, if my sister is managing to find this stuff enough to be eating it reasonably regularly, there's really no excuse any more.
(Hah, I thought this "living alone" stuff might make me stop being a night owl, since the first couple "normal" nights were pretty early for me, but it's 2am and I'm blogging about feet.)
