Yesterday, I decided to give myself a day off to do whatever I wanted. Except spend money, of course, since I don’t exactly have any. This is a problem because transportation is more expensive when you don’t have a car, so I found myself in my room watching YouTube videos all day. At first I kind of got into it but I wasn’t really trusting that I was allowed to watch YouTube all day and I was kind of waiting to get in trouble with myself for procrastinating. Then it turned out to be pretty much the best day ever. However, some of my video-watching turned serious. As anyone who has been reading my blog for over a year will remember, I wrote this post ( https://apostateturtle.com/?p=167 ) about veganism ages ago, and ever since I got out of the hospital, I have been doing my best to be vegan. By this I mean, I didn’t buy animal products for myself, with the exception of a little treat here and there. I mostly supply my own meals except for dinner, and dinner usually involves a little bit of meat. However, CosmicSkeptic had a lot to say about eating animal products, and he was not wrong. Everything I’ve ever seen about how animals are treated shows that even on “humane” farms, animals experience a ton of suffering. Cows get put into these crazy machines that pick them up and move them around like inanimate objects, and they don’t even fight it. It’s as though they’re so used to total powerlessness all the time that they’ve just given up. Then I watched chickens being “processed,” an they actually do fight. You can see how much they want to live even as they’re being hurled toward certain death. Maybe my years and years of suicidal ideation and its fallout have made me view life and death differently. But unnecessarily ending the life of someone who wants to live just cannot be acceptable.
So I finally asked staff if I could just not have the meat on my plate today. Previously I had tried hinting at this by stocking the fridge with tofu, but today I just actually asked for the meat to be omitted. My logic is that I have vegan protein sources in my room so I don’t really need a protein source with the evening meal because I get it with my other meals. This probably would have been less confusing to staff if I had just told them I was vegetarian when I first got here, but honestly I didn’t want the accountability. Now I feel like it will be a good thing.
Anyways, I’ve been looking and looking on the Internet with the goal of finding an ancient vegan culture. My thought was that if there are people who have been doing this for hundreds or thousands of years, they would surely have the nutritional issues worked out. It has been slim findings. Some sources say that Chinese Buddhist monks are mainly vegan since the Chinese don’t eat a lot of dairy, but there’s not a lot out there (at least in English) about their diet. I found a cookbook but it has mostly modern, Americanized recipes. The closest thing seems to be diets that follow Ahimsa guidelines, which are concentrated mainly in India. However, even these cultures consumed dairy. I suppose it makes sense that it would be hard to find an ancient vegan culture because veganism is a response to modern problems. The ancients could have had perfectly happy dairy cows and never thought twice about the environmental impact because the human population was much lower. The problems that veganism is a response to (cruel factory farming, overpopulation, climate change, etc.) are new, so it’s understandable that they require a new way of eating.
However, it would be too bad if I managed to spent all that time on YouTube without having a few treasures to show for it. I managed to come away with a little bit on the history of veganism:
I find it noteworthy that whenever I search for a particularly advanced culture, some indigenous tribe in Africa turns out to be the one group of people who figured things out before anyone else. This also happened when I searched for ancient cultures that included atheism, and when I searched for non-sexist languages.
Anyhoo, I usually don’t list health benefits as a reason to be vegan because I’m just not convinced. To me, it seems like veganism requires a lot more thought an effort than eating animal products and at best provides the same level of nutrition. However, we are not living in an ancient culture and the realities of modern farming make meat less appealing from a health perspective, as noted here:
So there you have it. A couple of days of YouTube videos later and all I have to show for it is the confirmation that I was right 14 months ago and should have gone into action as soon as I graduated from the hospital rather than “thinking about it” for all this time. I marked the occasion by buying another used cookbook. I already have cookbooks but I always have trouble deciding what parameters to look for. For example, I have multiple cookbooks that are supposed to be vegan AND low-carb. The latest one is vegan and all the recipes could be cooked in a dorm room. This seems much more realistic. And I paid $5.73 for it so it had better be good! I said at the outset that I had forbidden myself from spending money and now look. The little animals will appreciate it though.
EDIT to add: I should have included this video in the list. CosmicSkeptic actually has a ton of videos on both veganism and atheism so it’s hard to pick just one, but I’m going to limit it to this one for now.
References
BiteSizeVegan.org. (2015, Apr 29). Vegans In Ancient Times | The History of Veganism Part One [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 24, 2022 from https://youtu.be/BXlR8if5hok
ATTN:. (2020, Feb 19). The Surprisingly Black History of Veganism [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 24, 2022 from https://youtu.be/mquWUNiwzVo
Biographics. (2020, Sep 3). BSE: Britain’s Deadly Disease Scandal [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 24, 2022 from https://youtu.be/Cli673N5fUQ
CosmicSkeptic. (2019, Nov 22). Why It’s Time To Go Vegan | Animal Rights Speech 2019 | Alex O’Connor, Tel Aviv [YouTube video]. Retrieved October 26, 2022 from https://youtu.be/gcVR2OVxPYw
