Smoke, part 3, Why Organic?

Travelling and being a strict vegan are a great combination. If you want to starve to death. In case you don't know, a vegan is sort of an executive vegetarian, eschewing not only animal meat, but all animal products as well, including: eggs, cheese, milk and in some cases (like my own, at the time), fringe animal products like honey and even wearing leather.



In 1994, I was a couple of years into the vegan thing, and dead serious about it, but after about a week on the roads of America with a rucksack, a very light money belt, and little more than a sense of adventure, saying no to free food became, well, silly. I tried sticking to the salad bar in Vegas, eating lots of trail mix, finding Chinese restaurants in obscure places where the soy protein was supplemented by a healthy dollop of vitamin MSG. I even lived for days at a time on bread dipped in olive oil. After a while, though, the vegan thing definitely started to wear thin. Traveling alone is not easy when you are young and poor. Traveling alone when you love social contact as much as I do AND you happen to have weird food restrictions can be scary as hell. Which is, of course, why I was doing it.



‘The Journey’ is a time honored tradition, at least according to Joseph Campbell, in which a person can test oneself, and find out if the structure of his or her belief system can actually stand up to the rigors of reality, kind of like Luke Skywalker following Ben Kenobi, or Superman slipping off to the South pole... As a literary device, or even as a teaching tool, ‘The Journey’ is the story of a person who takes a risk, goes off on their own, and comes to terms with some piece of knowledge, which transforms them. For some, it is the move to college, joining the military, fishing in Alaska, or the ubiquitous backpacking trip to Europe. For me, it was a giant move to San Francisco, to work (somewhat ironically) in a vegan restaurant. It was a little strange, realizing that I was losing my religion while I was on the path to Mecca, but it was definitely what was happening.



I kept thinking, on that trip, about how some of my core values; things like friendship, family, community and sharing, were starting to conflict with some of my other values; things like not doing harm, or honoring life (by not killing it to eat, for instance...). I even started to feel a little selfish for the times I had turned up my nose at food that had been offered to me with good intentions and love. I knew, in my mind, that my snubs were not meant as insults, but I was also beginning to understand how easy it would have been to interpret them as such. It’s easy to think about these things when you’re hungry.



I did move to San Francisco, and I did go to work for the vegan restaurant. I even managed to maintain a vegetarian and mostly vegan diet for another few years. You see, and this is hard for me to admit, the last two years of my vegan life had become a sort of exercise in ‘more vegan than you’ posturing for me. My incessant thirst for knowledge had forced me to face the nasty truths about the presence of animal byproducts in so many places in my life, and each new bit of knowledge became on one hand another restriction for me, and on the other hand, a weapon in my arsenal of how much better I was than those around me. It was a manifestation of my own insecurity. Part of my transformation, on my (capital ‘J’) ‘Journey’ was that bit of realization. I have never lost my belief in eating healthy foods, or in my desire to feed healthy foods to others; what I lost was the religious fervor and the deep rock solid belief that I was right.



Many vegetarians and vegans are also motivated by the environmental impact eating meat has on the world we share. Therefore, most have at least a passing familiarity with the concept of organic agriculture; now much of the world seems to be waking up to it as well. During this time, I became more and more familiar with its nuance and meaning. The restaurant where I was training purchased much of its food directly from organic farmers. Over the years of working there, I got to know and like them and I began asking simple questions about how these small farmers managed without the chemical pesticides and fertilizers used by the factory farmers. The answers were surprising. Instead of pesticides, they relied on biodiversity, or the keeping of many different crops and different types of even the same crops (‘the bugs won’t get all of them’), which, you may note, is the same system used by Mother Nature. And instead of chemical fertilizers? They used compost, sure, but also manure, bone meal, blood meal, even fish meal. In two words, animal husbandry. Many of these small farmers kept animals for their own food, and knew volumes about both meat and livestock handling and especially, how much well-cared-for animals made for better health for the farm. As a practicing vegetarian, and a vegetarian chef, charged with the work of bringing strict vegan meals to a passionate clientele, I was horrified. I mean, how could a responsible vegan eat organic food? And where did it go from there? What was next, eating only wild harvested foods? Air-itarianism (read it again, you'll get it...)? I was thinking myself into a corner and I knew I had to reassess my ideals. It may sound silly, but I honestly felt like I had to choose between organic and vegan. I guess I was transforming.



There was one other important part of the transformation that lead me back to barbecue. Forgiveness. Much of my overwrought thinking and philosophizing were the products of my single minded ambition. Like many ambitious young men with good intentions, I was determined to be pure and perfect. To fix myself. Like some sort of religious zealot, I felt like I was driven to achieve some sort of higher state through constant and unflagging self discipline, but the fact was, all of my experiences were leading me to an inevitable conclusion: I was never going to get there. And neither is anyone else. It is the same mistake being made everyday by factory farmers and war hawks with their ideals of a perfect, pure, neat and ordered world. The same mistake. We are never going to conquer nature, least of all our own, and we will always fail if we try. Oh, we won’t stop trying, and we can easily be better people, and being good to other people around you has a tendency to draw people who like to be good and be surrounded by good people to you (get all that?) But we will never be perfect. And the only way to be happy is to realize that and forgive it. To say, ‘I tried, I’ll keep trying, and that’s worth something, but this time, I didn’t make it.’



I guess it all really started on my trip to San Francisco. You see, I ate a pancake in Vegas. I knew it had eggs and milk in it. It tasted pretty good, it was free, and I forgave myself (later) and began to accept that I will keep trying to do the right thing, will keep trying to do the best things, and that in the end I’ll fail sometimes, and things will still turn out pretty good either way. And after years of arguing with myself over the political, environmental, and spiritual implications of a meat based diet, I came to some honest conclusions. You see, I like meat, I like the way it tastes, I like the people who raise it responsibly, and I like the idea that when I purchase it, I can choose to purchase responsibly. I like that when I do, my impact is probably a more successful form of activism than my holier-than-thou vegan rhetoric. I like that when I purchase it, handle it and cook it I both have and take the oppurtunity to treat the whole animal with respect and with gratitude.



A couple of years after my move to San Francisco, I found out about an organic barbecue joint in the suburbs of Oakland. Nicole and I went there for my birthday and enjoyed some of the best brisket I have ever eaten; I asked the guy, ‘Why do you use organic beef?’ He said, ‘I work here and eat here every day, and so does my family.’ Sounds like a good enough reason to me.