why I started eating meat after 7 years
Obviously it came as a shock to many when I decided to start eating animals after being a vegetarian for the past 7 years. Not only that, but I just got a hunting license! So I wanted to write a detailed account of my experience and share my journey. When people have asked what brought this change it is hard to answer because there was not one simple trigger. In describing this transformation process many times recently, I have found clarity in the key catalysts and narrowed it down to a combination of three main reasons which I will go over here in depth. First, I think I need to explain why I was even vegetarian in the first place and what my stance was, and also if hunting is something you view negatively I encourage you to read to the end!
Becoming Vegetarian
I grew up eating meat and thought nothing of it, lunch meat sandwiches were a staple, corned beef and bacon were some of my favorites. Growing up my friends and I would even have outrageous hot dog eating contests on the 4th of July. The world where that meat was coming from was completely hidden from me like it is for most of us, animal agriculture and butchering, let alone factory farms and slaughterhouses. Unlike most people who become vegetarian from learning about those things, I actually fell into it from seeing a particular scene in the BBC nature documentary show Planet Earth! I was listening to music with the arctic episode on mute in the background when suddenly a scene caught my full attention. A lone polar bear was casually walking up to a massive herd of walruses and trying to attack them. The walruses brushed off the polar bear, I could almost hear them saying things like, “What the hell are you doing, get away from me,” etc. Of course since the episode was on mute, I hadn’t heard the narrator describe the polar bear being exhausted and starving. Either way this scene somehow struck a chord with me and I felt strong empathy towards the bear's prey. This moment snowballed into more thoughts, provoking me to question a part of everyday life I had never given much consideration. Was I contributing to the enslavement and mass murder of animals, animals that are just trying to live their lives with their families like us? And for what, just so I can eat meat when there is plenty of other food around?
After some research and discovering all the other common reasons for going vegetarian, it seemed like a no-brainer to me. Atrocious factory farms, torturous confined living, CAFOs, battery cages, grotesque beak/ear/tail removal, disturbing slaughterhouses and cruel killing methods were all just one part of it. There was also the supposed environmental aspect, the common meme that not eating meat is the biggest way to reduce your carbon footprint. The health reasons, the idea (or myth) that vegetarianism is healthier in many ways and better for longevity. And then for me, especially after living in Asia for 4 years and being heavily influenced by Buddhism and meditation, there is the spiritual aspect of compassion for all beings and reducing suffering in the world.
It is important to note that for the seven years I did not eat meat I was vegetarian, not vegan. From early on in my no-meat phase I learned how nutritious things like pastured eggs, grass-fed butter and raw milk are and how they can add back in some of the nutrients you miss on a diet without animals. I never thought you could be vegan and healthy without these things. At least without regular lab testing and an extensive supplement plan. I do think even with the knowledge it is unhealthy some vegans would still choose to do it as a matter of putting animals first and themselves second, but I don’t believe that would help the situation like they think. It's a lot to get into so I plan on doing another post in the future more in depth on veganism. I have learned an interesting point from Dr. Jack Kruse that it is possible to be a healthy vegan, but with a large catch - you must live on or near the equator, and this connects to one of my reasons below why I am no longer vegetarian.
What Changed?
This summer I gave a talk at Cleveland’s first annual Reeds & Roots Skillshare Festival about Biohacking. In the talk I covered topics including light, water, magnetism, air, movement, food, mood, genes, etc. I did loads of research in preparation and compiled a comprehensive powerpoint. The talk went well, and served to renew my interest and deepen my passion for these topics. In doing all this research this summer I learned a few points that really stuck in my head for months. The first point I learned from Dr. Jack Kruse, a neurosurgeon and leader in the biohacking community, as I mentioned above, which planted the seed, and the second two I learned from Daniel Vitalis, a leader in the “rewilding” community, and truly persuaded me into not just eating meat but living more of a hunter gatherer or neo-aboriginal lifestyle.
1. Eating Seasonally & Locally
As I was saying above, you need to live at or near the equator in order to have a completely plant based diet year round. The reason is because the equator is the only place on the planet that gets enough sunlight to grow carbohydrates, fruits & vegetables, all year.
“All that adaptation in order to survive in Northern Europe has meant Northern Europeans now have a hybrid system that needs to be respected. We eat like Eskimos in the winter and Africans in the summer: this has been going on since we've been here. Fats and protein in the winter and sugars and carbs in the summer - impossible to deviate from. During the summer we store fat and during the winter we burn it off in order to create the heat we need. The last 150 years have severely disturbed this process since the industrial revolution.” -Dr. Jack Kruse
Your body is constantly monitoring your environment and seasons in many ways through temperature exposure, through your eyes, through light receptors in your skin (which was discovered recently, melanopsin in skin in Nature 2017). Whether you are properly exposing your body to the natural seasonal environment or a non-seasonal artificial environment is another story. Dr. Jack Kruse is famous, or perhaps infamous, for proclaiming the impact that eating a banana in winter has on your biology, and I would encourage you to look into his work. Basically you want to have the same light exposure to your eyes, skin, and gut, meaning the food you eat is grown in the same light environment that you live.
Everyone has heard of the benefits of eating local, including freshness, reduced environmental impact, no gassing & re-gassing of produce for preservation, and supporting small local businesses. The environmentalism of vegetarianism, which I now believe to be overstated due to significant problems with plant agriculture, still can’t even compare environmentally to a lifestyle of hunting and gathering locally.
Ideally one would eat seasonally and locally, and it can be a great experience connecting with your local farms and learning about hunting and foraging. While it would be difficult to do completely, I view it as a spectrum rather than an absolute and will try to eat as local as I can which will mean a lot of animal food in winter.
2. Archeology & Human Evolution
Often in defending my vegetarian stance, I would say that eating meat probably was an important part of our evolution, however now we have reached a point where there are plenty of other good foods available, it is unnecessary killing.
Humans closest modern day relatives are chimps and bonobos, both of which are omnivores. Many people think of apes as herbivores, eating bananas and other plants, but Dr. Jane Goodall was actually the first to discover this was not true this when she observed chimpanzees eating insects, eggs and also forming hunting parties to hunt small mammals, including other primates and small antelope! Bonobos are less aggressive hunters and do not form hunting groups but they do still hunt similar prey as chimps. Though eating animals is a small part of both of their diets, it is telling that our two closest relatives are omnivores.
Something else I wasn’t fully aware of while being vegetarian, and is probably common with many vegetarians & vegans, is the fact that there are no vegetarian or vegan tribes anywhere in the world. Past or present, they were/are all hunters & gatherers. Going beyond our 200,000 years as humans, evidence for vegetarianism does not exist in the archeological record going back more than 3.6 million years in our evolution. The first vegetarians (not vegans) are thought to come around 1500-500 BCE when vegetarianism starts in India and Greece for spiritual reasons and non-violence towards animals.
Why does it matter what our native diet in the past was and what our closest relatives continue to eat? An overwhelming majority of humans living today are omnivores (97%), but I often thought we are living in a different age now, we don’t need to follow the past, we could transcend it. The problem is our DNA does not change that fast, and we still have the same DNA as humans from 40,000 years ago, therefore we are still biologically built to live as hunter gatherers.
Eight essential nutrients you cannot get from plant foods include: vitamin B12, creatine, carnosine, taurine, vitamin D3, heme-iron, the omega-3 fat DHA, and sulfur. Here is a very thorough article describing how these nutrients are not in plant food, how vital they are and links to many studies. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-plants.
This is not a comprehensive list either, as it is not currently known how calcium, iodine, selenium and more may also be involved.
Chronic diseases, which make up 8 or 9 of the CDC’s top 10 list of causes of death today, are extremely rare in hunter gatherer societies. These are diseases of civilization and agriculture (both plant and animal) which started around 12,000 years ago, and almost all of that agriculture was organic and local! So if we don’t have the agricultural diet right just yet in that span of 12,000 years, how could a diet without animals be healthy in a much shorter time frame? That is an even greater departure than our native diet. The only change in our genes since hunter gather times has been “lactase persistence” around 10,000 years ago which has occured in mostly people of northern European descent giving the ability in adulthood to consume another animal food, milk.
If meat is a necessary part of our native diet, is it possible to not eat it and just take supplements to fill that need? That is debatable. You can try, and that is what I did for a long time, even though supplements can be difficult to figure out (what kinds to take, bioavailability, price vs quality, potential for imbalances). I think I did a decent job of it, my labs were mostly normal and I felt fine. But who knows how much was due to reserves of fat-soluble nutrients I had from more than two decades of eating animals. In the context of human history, not eating animals is a very new kind experiment - this has never been done before. To undertake it with your own health and biology, how long is it sustainable and what are the long term results?
Of course in some studies vegetarians live longer when compared to others eating the standard American diet, or the SAD diet, a fitting abbreviation. Sure people are vegetarian for five, ten years and healthy, maybe even many decades or their whole life, but are their children and their children’s children and so on, completely healthy all on a vegetarian diet? I could not find much about multi-generational vegetarians except for this 2016 study from Cornell that found a 40% increase in colon cancer in multi-generational vegetarians due to a genetic variation from generational vegetarianism! https://www.rt.com/usa/337952-vegetarianism-cancer-study-cornell/
To make such a sudden and large dietary change from more than 3.6 million years of eating meat is not wise.
Daniel Vitalis was vegan for ten years, which is longer than most vegans make it, and has two podcasts about it, one explaining why he is not vegan anymore, and the second one answering people's feedback from the first episode and explaining his omnivore position. They include some of these points so I’d encourage you to listen if you are interested. I knew there were nutrients I was missing in a vegetarian diet and I tried to make up for it, but I wasn’t fully informed on the historical perspective and large scope of the issue.
3. The Psychology of Hunting & Eating Animals
When people would ask why I was a vegetarian I would give a vague answer because usually I didn't want to get into a debate or feel like I was being judged, and I didn’t want the other person to feel like I was judging them. It was not something I liked to openly discuss or bring up myself because I thought it was quite personal. So I would quickly mention all the top reasons, including animal rights, environment, health, etc. If they asked more I would share with them a line of thought that occurred to me early on and stuck with me the whole time I was vegetarian: if something else more powerful than humans wanted to eat us, thought we were really tasty, but they didn't have to kill and eat us, and could live fine without doing so, what would you want them to choose? Here is the question of animal rights, which also delves into my personal spiritual reasons for not wanting to eat animals, the more Buddhist perspective on the matter and non-violence. These factors were my core reasons for being vegetarian.
We view animals with such love and compassion, they are our pets, how could we ever hurt them? Every once in a while when an animal was going to be butchered at the farm I work at, there would be many school kids there who would be sad and didn’t want it to happen. I took this as a sign that pure human nature is compassion and non-violence towards animals. I thought that as children they were not yet conditioned by the world, their hearts not yet hardened. But what I didn’t realize was that they were conditioned in another way. They were conditioned by the media they consume in which animals are completely anthropomorphized characters with names, wearing clothes, talking, acting and living like humans everywhere around them in TV shows, movies, books, youtube videos, etc. Also they have had cute fluffy stuffed animals around them since they were born! This leads to a severely warped perception of animals starting in childhood and possibly lasting a lifetime. While at the same time the source of meat someone has been eating their whole life has been completely hidden away. Most children have never seen an animal be butchered before, meat is just food that comes from the grocery store. Until agriculture began and I am guessing probably up until the industrial revolution, children were routinely exposed to the butchering of animals, they grew up with it. Our modern day domestication has softened us all.
Humans have at least a 3.6 million year history as hunters and killers for food. It is more work to hunt than to gather berries, so why throughout history were our ancestors so persistent? I think the answer is two parts, that we evolved eating both plants and animals because there wasn’t enough of one to live on always so we need nutrients from both, and that hunting and killing for food is an innate part of human nature.
“In the same way that if a woman decides to not have a child or cannot have a child and goes her entire life not having kids, there is an aspect of womanness that she didn’t get to experience. She might make that decision as a conscious choice or circumstances or medical reasons may create that. But historically what we see is that woman rear children and that’s an important part of the development and unfolding of a woman’s life. Similarly hunting is something that every man physically capable of it throughout all of human history until very recently has done. Literally every single man, there would have had to be specific circumstances for you not to become a hunter. So I think it is the equivalent part of the journey, and when you think about the beautiful balance of this, woman create life and men take life away and that’s the polarity of our gender within our species and there is so much historical precedent of this. Part of the maturation of a man is dealing with the power of life and death and learning how to justly appropriate that, in other words killing. I think if a man choose not to hunt through his lifetime there is a critical piece of their maturation that will never come to fruition and I think that there’s a kind of boyishness that is difficult to do away with without taking up the mantle of manhood. When you start killing things and taking things apart, you can’t help seeing what’s inside you, because when you take apart a deer or a bear, or even a squirrel, what you are seeing inside is incredibly similar, same organs, same bones, same basic tissues and structures as in your own body and you can’t help but come to terms with mortality.” -Daniel Vitalis
Maybe it is because the pastime of hunting for food is removed from most people’s lives that today we see such aggressive behavior and conflict in every part of society, the global political landscape and everyday encounters. We have left behind this natural outlet for combativeness and healthy aggression and competition that brings nourishment and coming of age maturity. Hunting not only has been mostly abandoned but is now looked down upon by many. Not only that but fear of death and avoidance of thinking about death plagues humans today more than it ever has in history. People nowadays are so afraid to deal with death there are many people who eat meat but will refuse to confront where that comes from or ever take it into their own hands.
While I was a vegetarian I use to say if a person wants to eat meat they should have to kill an animal, or at least watch an animal being killed and butchered, in person. I still agree with that and plan to start hunting soon. Because in my opinion to avoid that for your whole life and yet continuing to eat meat is to not fully confront and acknowledge what your food is and that is complete cognitive dissonance and disrespectful to the animals you are eating.
In being a domesticated human, I was afraid of encountering death as well and I didn’t want to kill an animal so I didn’t eat them. I had developed an unrealistic amount of empathy for animals which ended up divorcing myself from my natural ecosystem. Instead of being a part of nature and being involved in the landscape, the food chain and mortality of living things, I was living outside of nature and overthinking things. Yes animals do feel pain and suffer but you cannot tell a lion not to kill animals, it is an obligate carnivore, it must eat meat. Humans are obligate omnivores, we must eat meat and plants, but we can make sure we treat animals as best we can with respect and gratitude.
I didn’t eat meat for seven years because at the core I didn’t understand how you could treat a being with respect and yet also end its life. I think it's important to let the animal live its natural life, either in the wild, or on a farm with so much space it practically is wild. But how do you “humanely” or “respectfully” slit an animal’s throat, or shoot it in the head, is that a contradictory statement? When a lion kills an antelope, is it being disrespectful? Is it being cruel? Are the Native Americans, the Inuits, the Hadza, the Maasai irreverent in their hunting? Are they any less spiritual than Eastern Indian and Tibetan Buddhists? Were indigenous hunter gatherer tribes around the world, going back 3.6 million years, inconsiderate or ungrateful towards animals? (Not including 19th/20th century market hunting - that is a separate issue). Animals and plants will continue to live and die around us no matter how far we falsely think we are able to remove ourselves from that reality. Switching from hunter gatherer to agricultural civilizations just 12,000 years ago, we think nature is outside, and that it is separate from us. We forget, or try to deny that we are apes, we are animals and have a place deeply rooted inside of nature.
https://www.evanbrand.com/blog/217-daniel-vitalis-rewilding-cognitive-shifts-modern-hunter-gatherer
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Going Forward
Being vegetarian helped shape my life in major ways and brought several amazing people and experiences into my life. It brought new friends and connections into my life, as well as helped me personally to establish my own ethics and morality. It was also an avenue that helped me discover yoga, spirituality and meditation. I am also grateful for all the great vegetarian food I ate and all the questionable food I avoided! However the greatest impact for me has been discovering the world of natural health which I continue to be fascinated and obsessed with now more than ever. I am immensely grateful that being vegetarian was part of my journey. I am also grateful I continue to have an open mind and do not become rigid with any dogmas, -isms or self-identifying labels.
In a hunter gatherer approach to living, or neo-aboriginal as some call the modern version of it today, many of the values I had as a vegetarian, animal rights, environmentalism, and health still remain true. I still do not want to have factory farmed meat, and if that was the only option I would have remained a vegetarian. I think plant agriculture and animal agriculture are both to blame for many issues, even organic farms, though they are a step in the right direction. Since agriculture and civilization started 12,000 years ago, desertification has happened around the world in times when there were no chemical fertilizers or global warming. Overexploitation and soil exhaustion can happen even with organic farming. If the top causes of sickness and death in the US are issues that do not affect hunter gatherers, I want to move towards that lifestyle. Not to mention hunter gatherers are egalitarian, or equalitarian which reveals to us our real human nature and not this extreme inequality we have today which began as a result of agriculture surpluses and the power that can yield.
Ideally I would like to hunt, trap and fish all of my own meat, but I have a lot to learn. So for now I want to try to hunt what I can and source as much as possible from local hunters or small local farms that do things the right way. It has been fun being reintroduced to the world of meat and fish, trying things I haven’t had in several years. So far the best thing I have had was smoked oysters in olive oil. I ate a double bacon cheeseburger the other day and it was a spiritual experience haha.
I have acquired my hunting license recently and plan on starting with small animals, squirrels and rabbits for food and going from there. I think there is a huge misconception of hunting nowadays, with many people viewing hunters as assholes or rednecks who don’t care about the environment and enjoy killing animals for no reason. Foraging is gaining in popularity now, but hunting, a clear equivalent of foraging, is now taboo. Not only is hunted meat the cleanest source of meat you can find and better than organic pasture farmed, but the act of hunting helps control animal populations that no longer have natural predators like wolves or mountain lions. Hunting is extremely regulated, the government employs biologists to keep an eye on animal populations and hunting limits are set accordingly to keep populations in sustainable numbers. Not to mention the sale of hunting licenses, tags, and stamps is the primary source of funding for most state wildlife conservation efforts. If you feel like you have strong disagreements with hunting, as I did when I was a vegetarian, I would encourage you to listen to Daniel Vitalis’ take on the matter. On his podcast he has some episodes about hunting in which he presents his unique perspective on hunting and common criticisms. Previously I was judging hunting without knowing enough about it, and he has a very deep understanding and articulately explains the nuances of this lost way of life.
Thank you for reading this long post, this is a controversial topic nowadays so I thought it was important to share. I am open to feedback on this and would like to know what your thoughts are. And if anyone wants to go hunting or fishing, or just eat double bacon cheeseburgers, let me know! :)