In the wake of thanksgiving dinner, a few thoughts about food and nutrition, and how their place in my life has evolved.

First, I'll say that despite previously expressed anxiety about the whole thing, today turned out not to be so bad after all. We had a good dinner with Yanthor's parents and other random relatives who showed up, with hardly an awkward moment at all, and the food was quite tasty.

Even though they're vegetarians, Yanthor even went out of his way to get pre-made turkey from the store for me. (Something he really didn't have to do -- in fact, I wasn't sure I even really wanted it, but since he bought it, I ate some, and it did taste good.)

(And yes, I did also make a big pot of spicy stew yesterday, using ingredients I had bought on Monday when I was doing contingency planning, so there will be plenty of that to last for a while too.)

It just so happened that while I was at work today, I managed to catch part of Democracy Now on the radio, during which Amy Goodman interviewed Jane Goodall, author of Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. Among other things, she talked some of the factory farming techniques commonly practiced by the agribusiness industry -- most of which I was already aware of, a few of which I wasn't, but all of which would make any sane person feel like wretching.

Also, they discussed the documented health hazards of genetically modified produce, on which the United States government has taken an especially backward stance, summarized as, "let industry do whatever it wants, keep consumers in the dark, don't require labeling of anything, and tell everybody not to worry because it's all ok".

Getting to the point. The question I've been asking myself for the past several months: "What am I?" Not in an existential sense, but in a nutritional one.

For example, some people, such as my housemates, could answer by saying, "I am a vegetarian." And everybody knows what that means. (Leaving aside, for a moment, a few dimwits in certain restaurants who might consider fish or poultry items "vegetarian".) Other people might say, "I am vegan." This is also a well-defined and understood term. When somebody says they are a vegan, you know not to give them anything containing milk or eggs.

What am I? I am not vegetarian. I am not vegan. Yet I no longer feel comfortable eating anything and everything that many people in this country commonly consider "food". I feel the need to institute a solid criteria -- something akin to the vegetarian/vegan label -- which clearly distinguishes between substances I am willing to ingest, and those I am not. Or even if I don't adhere to it super-strictly, I could say to strangers, "I am a ____," and they would know what I'm talking about.

So what am I? I dislike defining it in the negative (i.e. by stuff I don't want to eat), because that puts emphasis in the wrong place. I'd much rather define my diet in terms of what I like and want instead of stuff I'm trying to avoid. However, if we're going to codify this, it makes sense to write it like a set of rules. Rules typically say, "Don't do X", or "Don't do Y", because by defining in terms of negatives, all other options are left open. In other words, saying "Don't ____" is actually much more open than saying "Do ____", because the latter allows only one specified course of action.

So here's a preliminary list of don'ts, or things I generally prefer to avoid:

• hydrogenated oils. I would say "trans-fats", except the issue has been so muddied by the fact that the FDA allows manufacturers to lie about it by rounding down the per serving amount. So now you'll commonly find products advertising "0 grams transfat", when in fact this is patently untrue. A bag of chips could contain 5 grams of trans fats, and as long as there are more than 10 servings in the bag, they could legally say "0 grams transfat". The only way to know is to look at the ingredients. Any "partially hydrogenated" oil means transfat. Period.
• aspartame. Formic acid (i.e. red ant venom) and formaldehyde in my stomach and bloodstream? No thanks. The biggest mystery to me is why so many people would willingly gulp it down by the gallon. And then they wonder why they get headaches all the time. Crazy.
• high-fructose corn syrup. Worse than standard refined sugar (which isn't exactly great either), it creates all sorts of nasty imbalances, and will put you on the fast track to diabetes and obesity. And yes, between this and the previous item, that means I very rarely drink soda anymore. (And no, this doesn't leave me feeling deprived. Several years ago, it would have. But this is one instance in which I have successfully reconditioned my brain to respond appropriately to a harmful agent, so I find I am quite content to go many months without a drop.)
• more generally, I treat any artifically created or unbalanced chemical composition that does not normally occur in plants or animals with a high degree of suspicion, even if adverse effects have not yet been discovered. So stuff like sucralose, olestra, and other unpronouncable ingredients make me wince. I'm not saying I never consume such things, but given the choice between that, and something containing only legitimate "food" ingredients, I'll take the latter every time.
• factory farmed animal products. I suppose if I truly stuck to this one, I would almost have to become a de facto vegan in this society. For a long time, I was of the opinion that dumpster diving or otherwise consuming after-products of the factory farm system without monetarily supporting it was an ethical alternative. However, this does not take into account the harm (spiritual as well as physical) done to myself by integrating remnants of this horrific suffering into my body matter. More on this in a bit.
• pesticide-sprayed vegetables or produce. The reason here is obvious. They're designed as poison. Duh. Just cause they don't kill humans as quickly as bugs doesn't mean there's no effect.

A label. There is no label. I suppose the closest thing would be to call my nutritional ideals similar to those of the Weston Price Foundation, but 99.9% of people wouldn't know what the hell you're talking about anyway. So it might be that if I run into a situation where people are asking my why I won't eat something, I would have to spell it out at length.

I've said before that I don't want to be puritanical about it. It's what I call the "never say never" philosophy. It means that sometimes, if I get a craving, I might eat a factory-farmed steak at a restaurant, or eat something that I know contains transfats if refusing would be impolite, etc. There are two problems I've found with this approach though:

1. If you're going against the current, you have to paddle if you want to get anywhere. Drifting only works if you're okay with heading downstream. I'm wanting to go in a direction opposite that of most of the culture. Therefore, it does not work to simply let myself be carried along, and say, "ok, whatever." (To extend the metaphor, another possibility might be to find a stream whose current heads in a more favorable direction. That's why I like working at Open Harvest. When I'm there, it's a lot easier to just "drift along" while still remaining in accord with my guiding principles.)
2. People don't take you seriously if you aren't consistent. If one day, I'm ordering factory farmed mystery meat at a restaurant, and the next day, I refuse to drink rBGH-injected milk, I probably come off looking quite silly to anyone present at both events. I suppose a counterargument to this is that just because some harm has been done does not mean it's good to do more harm. Also, why the hell should it matter whether what I do makes sense to somebody else? It's my body, I'll do what I like, and to hell with what other people think about it. Counter-Retort: If I want to teach or help others, my image in their eyes does matter. (Of course, that's still a pretty big "If".)

I'm not saying I'm now becoming a food-puritan. However, I think it's a mistake to avoid hard limits altogether for fear of earning that label. I'm still constantly in the process of finding the middle path; a search which I doubt will ever end.

Finally, a question that maybe one or two out of my five readers have been thinking, but even if they aren't, I think it needs addressing. Why care about all this?

Or, to put it another way, here's how I might have phrased it five years ago: Why not just live life to the fullest while it's here, and eat whatever tastes good now? Wouldn't it be better to have 60 exciting years of yummy stuff than 85 drab years eating things that are healthy and bland? So let's drink that Pepsi, eat that 32-oz steak, pig out on potato chips, and top it off with cheesecake and pudding. A short good life is better than a long dull life, so why worry about it?

While I would still tend to agree with the premise of the last sentence -- I would still prefer a short life of enjoyment to a long life of drabness -- experience has helped me recognize that "healthy" and "bland" need not be synonymous. I think the reason I once equated them was due primarily to childhood conditioning by well-meaning parents, in which "special and fun" was almost always paired up with "unhealthy", while boring, dull, day-to-day dreariness and fake nut milk was "healthy".

Part of my reconditioning has been a direct experiential process (some of the best seasoned food I've tasted has come from the organic vegan kitchens of Food Not Bombs) while part has also come through intellectual realization. Reading Fast Food Nation was an epiphany. Did you know that highly processed foods, in pure form, are the blandest morsels around? It is only by injecting artifical flavors designed in chemical plants in New Jersey that they gain any distinguishable taste at all. Wake Up Neo.

The sweet, juicy taste you get when you bite into a fresh apple. That's real. The flavor is an indication that it contains substances upon which the human body can thrive. However, the machines have conceived ways to deceive our senses, separating the sensory perception that naturally accompanies helpful (or unhelpful) raw materials from the materials themselves. In the grip of the machines, we are unable to tell the difference.

In some cases, with a bit of training and rewilding, our senses can learn to recognize the difference. I can no longer drink a can of cola beverage without feeling the subtle corrosive effects on my teeth within seconds. In other cases, where the deception is especially devious, our bodies are incapable of recognizing the difference at a sensory level, so we must rely on our intellect. (Hydrogenated fats, a mutation entirely alien to the living world, taste identical to natural ones on the tongue. Maybe if we lived with them for a million years, we would evolve a way to detect the difference, or our bodies might adapt to be able to use them without trouble, but right now, we're stuck reading ingredients lists, hoping the FDA doesn't abandon enforcing truthfulness in even that minimal level of consumer disclosure.)

Why concern myself so much with eating foods whose entire experience amounts to a forgery? Because I'm tired of living in The Matrix. I want to reacquaint myself with my true nature.

The body cannot live without the mind. The mind cannot live without the body. When the body is polluted, the mind becomes polluted. I have been learning this through direct, first-hand experience lately. Likewise, when the body is filled with goodness, the mind more easily reaches a state of higher compassion, sensitivity, and enlightened understanding. No longer just platitudes or words from a book. I know this from experience.

So what am I going to do with it? Do I now enforce upon myself a code to live strictly by the ideas outlined above? I hate rigidity. So no, I don't go all-out puritanical about it. At the same time, I would be cheating myself if I were to break my unenforced code at every little nudge or suggestion, whether it originated from cravings inside, or social suggestion outside. The perfect solution for every situation cannot be arrived at ahead of time without experiencing each situation in all its specific detail.

This is more like a guide, a roadmap, a rough outline. Or a set of tips, to remind me. I think I may revise it a bit soon, and perhaps put up a more permanent version for frequent referencing.