Nature comes first (On a primarily plant-based diet)
Why you should make delicious food at home, eat less meat and continue learning about how Nature comes first.
Here is a picture of my lunch today. It consists of cooked broccoli and fresh arugula mixed with sauteed carrots, onion and leek, topped off with a liquorice-tasting plant, which grows in Denmark and is NOT an obergine, that I don't know the name of (write it in the comments if you know!). The burger patty is from Beyond Meat and sprinkled with sesame seeds. I used cumin, curry, ginger-powder, salt and pepper to season the dish, which took around 20 minutes to make including pan-washing.
The plants are all organic, many of them local and the meal is 100% plant-based. The burger, the oil and the spices are processed. Otherwise, all of the ingredients were plants in original form.
All sounds really good, right? Well, yes, this meal made me proud. It gave me success on a number of small points:
It's part of me eating less meat
I resisted snacking and eating before finishing the preparation of the meal.
It tasted good, filled me and included 20g of protein.
Contrast this with me stuffing my face with duck this Christmas. And me realizing there's meat in it while serving myself a piece of keish in the cafeteria, but then letting it slide, placing it on my plate even while telling myself to put it back because I SHOULD be vegetarian. And me literally throwing ingriedients into a bowl of müsli that I make and finish eating in less than 4 minutes while standing up before running out of my apartment.
"Oh, so you're not perfect either? You mean not all your real meals look like that?"
No. And no, I'm not vegetarian. I try to eat less meat. I do this because of both ethical, environmental and health reasons. When people ask if its because of one or the other of these classic categories, I always wish I had the time to go through each of them. And I love imagining how I would smash my opponent rhetorically on each issue because of all the science I know of combined with my powerful, incisive reasoning and good looks as well.
After being asked why I don't eat meat, or why I'm a vegetarian after untruthfully saying I was one, of course this egotistical fantasy never unfolds. I find that almost all conversations about this topic ends without completion, conclusions or a feeling of fullness. Instead it feels partial, like we didn't have the time, the patience or the emotional energy to go deeper. Not that this is all bad. Completion is a dangerous concept, since you can't step into the same river twice and everything is in flux (Heraclitus) regardless of the milestones we establish in our narratives. But its hard to have really high-quality conversations that feel full. And it's hard to perceive the fullness of fragments.
Today, I see these fragmented conversations distributed through time as part of something bigger. These fragments are part of my personal learning process about how to live more in harmony with nature. And part of my interpersonal participation in the networks and communities of my life. And even bigger, part of society's global learning process, as human culture increasingly wakes up to it's complete dependency on Nature as global civilization suddenly is running out of excess space to externalize the effects of polluting, fossil-fuel based, linear and extractive methods of production.
What I eat, as well as how I eat, is how I participate in this collective waking up. Sometimes
I'm more mindful while eating (help by eating with other people and the app Eat Right Now),
often I make my own food (inspired highly by Michael Pollan's talks: short / long), and
I educate myself by reading in reports like
Livestocks Long Shadow (2006)
Food Planet Health by the EAT Lancet Commision (2019)
Special Report on Climate Change and Land by IPPC (2019)
Livestock and Climate Change by World Watch (2009)
Livestock -- Climate Change's Forgotten Sector by Chatham House (2014)
At other times, I eat meat, I eat fast, I eat fast-food, I eat while reading and many other things. But no matter where I find myself on the pendulum swing between what I consider to be my good and bad habbits, I believe that Nature comes first. Nature is the ground layer, the earth itself, and all her gardens support life. I, We, Human Culture, are the stewards of these gardens and every aspect of our lives is connected directly to how we manage (and un-manage) Nature. We have to take care. Saving the planet begins at breakfast, as Jonathan Safran Foer writes in his new book, We Are The Weather (2019).
Have a great next meal!
(That's the first book I'm reading after I defend my thesis on wednesday. You can get it at Saxo (DK), Guardian Book Shop (UK) or Indiebound (USA). If you want to buy things on Amazon, consider reading this and this and this first.)