Meditations on food

So, it seems I am beset by unforeseen consequences of an action I took for personal, moral, and spiritual reasons. I will admit, from the outside, it looks bad. I intentionally shot, killed, and ate two birds. I did not expect for this issue to become a matter of public discourse. My brothers, my Shifu, and others who are close to me understand my history and why I would do this.

For those who don't, I can easily understand your initial shock, disappointment, confusion, and even outrage. I respectfully request that you step back from your feelings for a moment and consider what this situation actually meant to me.

I have been a vegan for over two years. Growing up, I never gave much thought to nutrition or eating. I somehow grew up on a diet of mostly processed junk food and never thought twice about the ethics of eating animals. I think I met my first vegetarian when I was about 16, and in the closed minded self righteousness typical of that age, I dismissed the notion with contempt.

When I was 19, I became interested in health and nutrition. I read a variety of articles endorsing a multitude of positions on the issue, including raw foodism, vegetarian/veganism, neolithic style diet, and general condemnations of industrial food. It changed the way I thought about eating and food profoundly.

I found many of the arguments and evidence I read quite persuasive, and felt it would be ignorant if I neglected to experience eating in those ways and observing how my body felt. I started with raw foods, which I followed for 2-3 months, and then settled into a mostly cooked food, vegan diet. Over the past couple years, that's how I lived. That was working well enough for me in my previous life, and it worked well enough for me since I've been living and training at the YMAA center.

I got to thinking however whether well enough is in fact well enough. I recalled how part of my motivation for changing my eating habits in the first place was so that I could deviate from my norm and get a new perspective on how my body feels. If you grow accustomed to a particular state, after a period of time, you forget what other states are like, and any deficiencies or disadvantages might seem normal.

After two months of hard physical training, I started to wonder if I should conduct another experiment. Shifu talks about how while many monks in ancient times refrained from eating meat, some in the Shaolin temple did eat meat to complement their intensive physical training. I felt again that I should be open to experiencing that to see if its true for me.

However, two years of eating habits and countless hours of reading material made that much more difficult for me than it would be for most people. After reading and seeing pictures of industrial scale farming and meat production, I have no desire to participate in that system. It exploits animals and visits unnecessary pain and suffering on them, it harms the biosphere, it harms prospects for local food production, it creates a socially unjust allocation of food resources, and it produces meat that is chemically and nutritionally unnatural and unhealthy for the human body. As much as it would make things easier, I can't make myself unconscious to those realities.

If I'm to eat meat, it needs to be from a source that raises animals in a way that is as compassionate as possible, that empowers local/regional agriculture and business, and that respects all ecological and biological systems. In rural northern California, I found such a source. It would require me to drive an hour from my retreat center home periodically and its not inexpensive, but it satisfied my requirements.

However, I had one other problem with store bought meat of any kind. It externalizes the moral cost of the death required to produce that food. It's easy to drive to the store, by a nice, clean, sterile package of meat that bears no resemblance to any animal, and to eat it without consciousness of what happened to produce that meal. I do not wish to eat that way. I wish to cultivate mindfulness of where my meals come from and gratitude and appreciation for the work, resources, and potentially life force that I'm consuming.

In order to fully realize those two states of mind, I feel it is necessary to personally play out the entire food cycle and experience the moral, emotional, and psychological effects of every step. Yes, that means killing an animal, cleaning it, removing its organs, cooking it, and eating it.

Without a whole lot of free time for hunting, I settled for whatever wild birds I could find on our property. I was able to shoot two birds that turned out to be Robins, and forced myself to go through the rather disgusting process that starts with a dead body and ends with a meal. I took no pleasure in this. If you saw the picture on Javier's blog and observed that I looked unhappy, that's because I was. It's not an activity I wish to spend much time repeating in the future, and I'm satisfied that I learned my lesson and can never again eat animal products without a very conscious understanding of what it means to eat like that.

I'm not writing to defend my actions. I feel no need to defend myself. I did what was right according to my ethics, and anyone who has a very different ethical code probably won't change their entire mentality from reading a blog post. I hope that people who were initially upset will read this with understanding and forgiveness, but if your worldview compels you to judge me, so it goes. Please do not, however, attribute my choices to my Shifu, my Retreat Center, or to the YMAA organization. However, in the wake of many upset and angry emails and phone calls to the YMAA organization, I thought it prudent that detailed information of the situation be available, so that people aren't reacting without knowing what's really going on here.

I would also note that in this rural, mountainous part of America, many people here owns guns. Wild animals abound, and it's extremely common for people to hunt for food.

Feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions and comments.

Peace,

Zach