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Nature may be trying to tell us something via disease. Heart disease is an interesting condition because it is so obviously symbolic: the sufferer of heart disease dies of a broken heart. The simplest way to avoid a heart attack is to stop eating animal protein. Simple does not equal easy.
When I was in my twenties and vegetarian, I foolishly volunteered to clean up the mess left from the Easter ham. The melted fat from the ham was extremely stubborn. After the ham’s salvageable fat was saved, the remainder stuck to the pan, utensils, and plates like ugly on an ape. After a solid thirty minutes of scrubbing, soaping, rinsing, and re-rinsing, I finally got on top of the cleaning job. My hands stank of ham for the rest of the day though and felt sticky and greasy no matter what I did.
It does not take a genius to figure out that a substance as sticky and greasy as ham will clog a human heart. Cheese on pizza often pools with grease and eggs are salmonella and fat bombs, yet that did not stop me from eating either of those for two decades after I quit eating meat. Health is never going to be a compelling enough reason to stop eating a certain way. As tiny-brained humans, we lack the intellectual wattage to do what is best for our bodies most of the time.
Ad Plantarum or Plants are People Too
Ingesting pain and suffering causes pain and suffering, not just to oneself, but to everyone in the continuous arc. All things are connected. Roughly 99 percent of animals farmed in the US are factory farmed. The “lucky” one percent of animals who are not factory farmed are sent to the same slaughterhouses as the factory farmed ones. Under the best of circumstances, the life of a chicken ends in a bloody ordeal in the back of a barn. Eating animal products means maximizing the suffering of other sentient beings. As a vegan, when I mention this statistic, I am often confronted by people wielding what I call “ad plantarum” or the “plants also feel pain” argument. I agree, plants do feel pain. Trees do not like to be cut down and if grass could talk, it would probably object to being mown, chemically treated, and transformed into a suburban lawn. The ad plantarum argument is defeated easily by the requirements to survive. The human body can survive without meat, but it cannot survive without fiber. Fiber only comes from plants; animal products do not contain it. There is also the hard fact that all animals farmed for meat, dairy, or eggs either had to eat plants or plant-eating animals to survive. When a human eats a piece of cheese or beef, he vicariously eats all of the plants (usually GMO soy in the US) that the animal ate to get to a size where she could produce milk for a calf or be slaughtered for her flesh. If plants feel pain, then the most sensible way to reduce their pain is to avoid eating gluttonously large amounts of plants by proxy.
Guilty as Charged
The most detrimental part of eating animals and their secretions, however, is neither the ecological impact nor the health problems incurred by the habit. The number one issue with eating animals is the place of ungratefulness and entitlement it comes from. When I ate animals, including when I consumed their lives as a dairy and egg eating vegetarian, it by default meant I placed myself above them in an imaginary hierarchy. Just as modern human slavery exists in the form of human trafficking, sweat shops, and organ harvesting, I can choose to what degree I partake in any of those schemes. There is no way I can completely free myself of my involvement: right now, I am wearing a sweat shop made polyester blend dress that I bought from Goodwill. Underneath the dress, I am wearing stretch pants that I bought new, meaning they were created in a sweat shop that I directly supported when I bought them for $10 at JC Penney. Only heaven knows in what other ways I have been complicit and complacent, supporting business practices I vehemently disagree with. Nobody is perfect. When I eat avocados, I understand perfectly that they most likely were distributed by a violent avocado cartel. When I drink almond milk, I do so knowing that almond farming is extremely destructive to the environment. I use and eat all sorts of products containing palm oil, which is egregiously bad for the environment, specifically orangutans. Much of the food I eat and products I use is besotted with plastic packaging. There are frequent occasions where the only difference between my carbon footprint and a non-vegan’s footprint is paltry and barely noticeable. That said, if I were to go back to eating chickens and their eggs, it would put me in a club of people who essentially do not care that animals have feelings, lives, and souls. When they were given a beautiful array of choices of vegetables and vegetable products to eat, they chose to enslave and kill animals instead. I see Mama Earth or whatever you wish to call her as a sentient being. When I eat her copious plants, in the scheme of things, it is easier for her to replenish and replace them. Some plants actually depend on animals eating them for survival, for instance fruit trees that need animals to eat their fruits and fly/walk/poop their seeds far away. Other plants need us to cultivate them: my Jerusalem artichokes would not exist in the area had I not mail ordered them from some woman in Idaho. When I eat her animals, I take responsibility for pain and slavery that did not need to happen. I can try to run away from the responsibility, but sooner or later, it is going to force me to face it. At every meal, I can choose to be grateful and make do with the bounty of vegetables and fruits Mama provides for me to eat. Yes, it means some slight deprivation. I firmly believe I would weigh about 50-75 pounds more (quite dramatic when you’re under five feet tall like I am) if I chose to eat animal secretions and flesh in my region of modern day America.
Johnny Appleseed is an interesting character. For those non-Ecosophia readers, Johnny Appleseed was a real person in 18th century America who got turned into a myth. He was a wandering preacher of Swedenborgian Christianity who taught people how to create apple nurseries wherever he went. He was a vegetarian, animal loving mystic who was said to be able to charm the birds off the trees. Native Americans and settlers alike marveled at his relationship to animals. He was like Dr. Doolittle with them; both respecting them and speaking their language.
Whisper
When I was a child, to say my relationship with animals was fractured would be an understatement. I loved animals like most children do but of course I was raised eating animals, and that put up a wall of dissonance of being able to feel for them but not able to reach them. A friend of my aunt’s gave me a beautiful kitten when I was about eleven named Whisper. Whisper was the first cat I had who I felt truly close to. She was very sweet and liked to ride around on my shoulder. I took her to bed every night and sang her songs. For a lonely, nerdy eleven year old, Whisper was a life-saver. She gave me a place to pour all of the affection I could not ladle on any other human being. Her presence was healing. One day, I went to a birthday party for a friend of mine and when I returned, my mom told me Whisper was dead. Our family dog, Lucky, had snapped her neck when she got too close to his food.
Whisper’s death sent me on a spiral of suicidal depression that got worse and worse until I finally sought psychiatric help at age seventeen. I don’t think it is a coincidence that my worst depression happened in tandem with being forced to dissect a pregnant cat in high school, nor was it a coincidence that I went vegetarian and began serious study of the occult at that time.
I am a product of my times in many respects and my warped relationship with the animals was not uncommon.
As long as I ate animals, I refused to see the similarities to a highly-intelligent pig and my beloved, dead Whisper. I understand perfectly why my mind nearly broke at age 16. Many parts of my world were coming to an end, including my childhood and my naivete about the world. I could no labor under the delusion that I did not know any better.
Veganism and Sensitivity
There's an argument that a vegan diet makes ritual magic dangerous because of sensitivity issues that can throw the body-mind into a hyper-sensitive state. As someone who does ritual magic every day while maintaining a strictly plant-based diet, it is my anecdotal experience that this is not true in my case. Instead, my primary issue as an animal-product addicted, severely-depressed young adult was oversensitivity. I was oversensitive in every way, from the most obvious ways in not being able to withstand hot and cold weather for very long without becoming profoundly irritated to a constant psychic state of acute over-alertness. From my own experience, it seems to be the intake of fat and calories that causes imbalance of sensitivity. Too much body fat plus caloric excess and the bodymind risks becoming obtuse and insensitive to any and all messages from non-physical entities. This is not guaranteed to happen, but it can easily happen and is likely. Too little body fat and caloric deficit increases sensitivity until one suffers the problems I did as a skinny, perpetually-underfed teen girl.
No matter what arguments I come up with, I have accepted that humans will eat animal flesh and secretions until the last hundred homo sapiens on Earth resort to cannibalism rather than give up one mouthful of precious meat. We began eating animals as a product of our own worst instincts (I have my theories that the stories of the Fall from Eden are symbolic where eating and enslaving animals is concerned) and to our worst instincts, we shall always return. I see myself as having a choice. I believe my choice matters. As usual, I could be wrong.
