Now that the week of obsessively documenting my food movements is over...

Since starting this blog I've been meaning to post more about the rules, how I developed them, how they shift over time, how much I stick to them (or, more to the point, don't), and why I have them in the first place.

This is all feeling extra important right now, because

1. in cataloging every single thing that passed my lips last week, I realized how very uncommitted I have been to my rules lately, mostly in the realm of where cheese comes from.
2. I have been craving meat, after about a six-month period of being grossed out by the very idea of it.
   

And I need to think really carefully about how I'm going to handle it. Periodically over the time that I've been eating this way, I realize that I'm either shifting my beliefs in a certain area, or drifting away from my intentions—and generally what I do in response is to shift my guidelines to be more in line with my evolving beliefs, or recommit to my rules and make a conscious effort to do better. Right now I'm having a lot of internal conflict over what's both realistic and ethical (as well as not overly rigid and full of self-denial, which for me—as I think I've said—is a really, really bad combination).

First of all, I want to point out that the rules can easily be divided into two types, and it makes a huge difference to me which kind of rule I'm breaking. There are the no-factory-farmed, local-only rules, which are about ethics: How is my food being produced, and what kind of impact is its production having on others (farmworkers, animals, the enviroment generally)? Obviously I don't think that eating meat or other animal products is categorically wrong; but I'm striving for a light footprint, and that guides my decisions. Then there are the as-unprocessed-as-possible rules, keeping me away from sweets and other stuff that makes me feel like crap. Of course, there's some overlap—and there's definitely a solid argument to be made that high-fructose corn syrup is part and parcel of an environmentally unsound system—but for the most part, I see these rules as about self-care rather than ethics, so breaking them is really just about whether it's worth it to me to maybe get a sugar headache from those Ginger-Os, or have a food-additive hangover from that snack mix.

So, on the first kind of rule: Why not just be totally vegan and be done with all the hairsplitting and hamster-wheeling about which cheese is okay when? Well, aside from the fact that I don't think I could stand to cut any one thing out of my diet completely (least of all some things I love love love and depend on nutritionally [more on that in a sec]: eggs, yogurt, or cheese), the fact of something's vegan-ness doesn't mean it was ethically produced or environmentally sound. (There's tons of vegan junk food that is overpackaged, overprocessed, and over-everythinged that's wrong with our industrially based food system.) So, basically, it fits in just fine with my ethics to eat some organic yogurt that came from pastured cows on a relatively small farm about 60 miles from where I live instead of some soygurt made from soybeans that were grown absolutely no closer to me than the Midwest—and maybe as far away as China. (Not that I don't use soygurt in the filling of my vegan lasagna—or that I always know where the soybeans that went into my tofu came from.)

And sometimes the rules conflict with each other: Meat substitutes are rilly frickin' processed, so where does that leave me when my choices are meat or fake meat? And what about French cheese? It's much more likely that French cheese isn't factory-farmed (not like all of Europe's agriculture is small-scale and sustainable, but it's a damn sight better than here)—but, duh, it violates the local rules pretty bad.

And then there's the whole nutrional-dependence thang. I really do think I need animal protein sometimes (usually eggs, less usually cheese, and, rarely, meat). Some people do well on a vegan diet, and some don't. I do well as a mostly vegetarian—but I know more than a few folks who get anemic, chronically fatigued, and generally nonfunctional if they don't eat meat often enough. Where's the right balance between needs, wants, and ethics?

Clearly (at least, what's become clearer to me while writing this entry, which by the way has taken three days—only partly because I've had more work this week than the last two), if I recommit to my animal-product-sourcing rules (i.e., quit eating at the Parkway and the Mexicali Rose so much and make a more serious effort to eat vegan when I'm out), then I can indulge these meat cravings at some of the lovely places near me that serve sustainable and humane meat.

Surely I'll have more—too much more—to say about this later.