What We Can Do
- Do not hate yourself for wanting to eat.
- Celebrate nutrition choices that are new to you.
- Do not carry your support of industrial farming as a burden. You did not have a choice to be born into this reality.
- Be strong when family and community tell you your choices are against your culture or heritage.
- Do not label the choices you make to nourish your body. Do not “go vegan,” but think vegan.
What does think vegan mean? Well we are all getting good at this because of the answer to all things wrong right now… It’s a supply chain thing.
Thinking Vegan means thinking about the supply chain. An individual’s awareness of the ‘beginning’ or ‘source’ of any given product’s supply chain is unique to them. The whole supply chain is real regardless of what you know about it.
A good and challenging practice is to think about the family tree of the 55 billion animals that will be killed this year. Start the supply chain at one of their births. The food we feed that baby. The water, the antibiotics, their housing, the amount of liberties given to them. The moments they are alive. The moments before their death. The materials used to package their body parts. The energy resources used to refrigerate the product, to transport the product, to collect the left overs and transport them to the dump…
It’s easy to learn and easy to forget because it feels like it will never change.
Thought Exercise: Can you force your grandmother to sacrifice for a cause.
Think Paradoxically. Thinking paradoxically means to care with all of your heart and soul about making a choice you know to be right, and to give yourself grace and understanding when you make choices that go against your heart.
Pour your heart into what you see to be beautiful, but do not care too much.
You are you, a single entity who is mainly responsible for your survival and dare I say it happiness.
Next time you eat a cheesy from Micky-D’s or some Drive-thru, do not give yourself an ounce of self pity. Do remember this number though: 55,000,000,000 lives.
You should not feel sucidial urges for wanting to eat. We were all born into this world, and brought up in a certain unique way.
In that same sense, your culture is not what your ancestors did. Instead, it is an combination of your family’s and communities traditions you choose to keep living. When you learn something your community or ansestors did not know about a tradition and its invasive impacts on the ecosystem, stopping that tradition is honoring your family alive, future, and past.
All of our anscestors made sacrifices for ‘their people.’ So a sacrifice of self for another is as a tradition is noble.
Answer to Thought Exercise: No. You cannot force consent. Only grandma can choose to sacrifice a part of grandma.
So what next?
Next time your are enjoying a food product provided by the industrial farming of the Animal Kingdom, and you are giving you thanks, do not thank the animal whose bodily food product you are consuming.
Instead, thank yourself for remembering to think paradoxically.
You can remember the impact of continuing to give money to a system that is making ‘Homo Sapians Sapians’ technically fall under the classification of ‘invasive species.’ At the same time, you can also remember that you are under pressures that may be keeping you in your pin, eating the food accessible to you.
You are beautiful. You are worthy. You make choices knowing they are wrong. You get as many choices you allow yourself in the time you get here. At some point, you may choose how to honor your culture and community.
Thanks, for reading. Keep your chest out and heart high. There will always be some one screaming for your liberty whether you can hear them or not. Feel that cry through eternity, and be a beacon for others, if you choose.
Have a good day at work Sexy, and keep it real.
Love,
Adam Warren George
