The great meat debate

Eating meat (or not as the case may be) is a massive topic right now. It’s also one that I’ve had my personal battles with for many different reasons. It’s a battle that I am still having and I guess, others are too.

When I was around 14 I decided to go vegetarian. I am guessing it was a time when a lot of people started to think about it, but back in the late ’80s being veggie was not as easy as it is today. There just simply wasn’t the choice that there is right now. To be vegan was even more difficult! I went veggie because I love animals. That was the main driver and is still part of the reason why I am in conflict with myself right now.

Back then, there were news reports coming out of a disturbing disease in cattle. BSE, or Bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Cows were seen not able to stand, behaving oddly or just generally not being able to move around properly. Even now I remember the scenes on the news. I still feel incredibly emotional thinking about it. The worse was yet to come. There was talk that the disease was crossing over into humans.  CJD, or Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, in humans showed similar symptoms and attacked prions in the brain the same as BSE. Cue more footage on the TV, but this time it was burning corpses of cows. Any herd found with BSE, rightly, had to be destroyed. I cannot tell you how many tears I shed over the years because of that footage.

I stayed veggie for a long time, well over 20 years, but was never really 100% in terms of my own health. It took a lot of time to realise that the issues I experienced, were most likely linked to the lack of meat in my diet. This is where the battle lines were drawn. Not only am I an animal lover, but I also see myself as Buddhist. This means that I am conscious of doing no harm. So much so that I will not kill spiders, flies or anything! My eating meat totally conflicts with that belief. These days another expression has been added to the equation. Climate change.

We all know now that the way we are living is no longer sustainable. Our farming practices are changing at a rapid rate as we are trying to feed more and more people a never-ending supply of food on demand. I have great issue with this. After the war, you’d be lucky to see a banana in the shops. These days you can get all manner of exotic fruit and veg any time of the year. The air miles involved for out of season fruit and vegetables alone are ridiculous – that’s before we even get to the meat in our diets! I know this has to stop, but my love of mango on a summer day is as conflicting as eating meat.

This is why my battle has become much harder to fight. My heart is telling me that I do not want to eat meat, that I also don’t want to have tomatoes that have come from a place I’ve never been too. However, my head and to some extent, my purse, are telling me otherwise. I feel like I cannot win. I have to find a compromise. At the moment, that is trying to reduce consumption of our of season produce and meat. However, that just doesn’t bring me to a state of nirvana.

I genuinely do not know what the answer is. I am trying to be more sustainable in other areas of my life. I am a beauty junky so I am trying to cut down on the number of products I buy. Especially the ones in single-use plastic. I am also trying to be more conscious of how I travel and what clothes I purchase. Whilst this does give me some sense of making things better, I always come back to the meat eating. I cannot escape the guilt that I feel for my body not being happy about me being meat-free.

Perhaps the answer lies in the Buddhist books I read? There is much talk of balance. For me, that may have to mean that I eat some meat, but balance this with more sustainable choices in the rest of my life. Of course, the bad karma I have cause will come and bite me on the bum. But if I come back as a dairy cow, who is loved by her farmer – is that such a bad thing?