Conscious Choice: Beyond Tofu: A Vegan Lifestyle

November 1998

Beyond Tofu: A Vegan Lifestyle

by Ana Arias Terry

One of my brothers thinks chickens exist solely to be eaten by humans. No ethical or philosophical argument seems to convince him that a chicken — or cow, pig, fish, or any other animal deemed a potential tasty meal by a human — has an inherent right to live. If the living conditions for these factory animals are horrendous, it’s too bad, he’d say. But that’s the way it goes when you’re at the bottom of the food chain.

As a passionate vegan, it’s a little hard for me to swallow my brother’s zest for meat; it obscures his vision of the numerous negative ramifications that his dietary and lifestyle choices convey.

After a series of highly intense debates that threatened to sever our relationship, we called a truce. He disagrees with my environmental and ethical reasons for becoming vegan four years ago, but respects them. I am bewildered by his lack of compassion for animals he deems inferior to humans, but I still love him. I hold out hope that I can offer him the right piece of literature to help him see the connections between our food and lifestyle choices and the use or misuse of the Earth’s finite resources.

A vegan lifestyle goes beyond eating tofu instead of meat. It’s about a life-changing commitment that chants in your heart and gets renewed daily.

What Vegans Put in Their Mouths
Vegans (VEE-guns) eats no animal products or byproducts, so they don’t consume meat, poultry, eggs, seafood, dairy products, or honey (some vegans don’t have an issue with honey). Because their diet consists of vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and seeds, it’s generally high in fiber content and moderate in fat.

As a vegan, you quickly learn to read food labels routinely, query educational vegetarian organizations such as The Vegetarian Resource Group about vegan ingredients, and sometimes go right to the manufacturer.

Once you learn to identify the numerous non-vegan items that can be found in some food items, planning a healthy vegan diet is no different than planning any other diet, say a lacto-ovo (one that allows consumption of dairy and eggs) or non-vegetarian diet. If planned poorly, any diet can be unhealthful. But with a vegan diet, you’re certainly starting from a much healthier place than with a meat-based one.

A perpetual myth that makes the rounds says that a vegan diet doesn’t provide sufficient protein, iron, and calcium for healthy living. Not so, says Ginny Messina, an internationally recognized registered dietician with an advanced degree in public health. Messina is a consultant on vegetarian nutrition projects, editor of a monthly newsletter on vegetarian diets published by Loma Linda University, author of vegetarian nutrition textbooks for health professionals and consumers, and Internet editor for Vegetarian Nutrition: An International Journal, published by MCB University Press.

According to Messina, protein is virtually a non-issue for vegans. The majority of plant foods, including soy products, beans, nuts, grain, seeds, and vegetables, offer protein. If individuals consume sufficient calories and make reasonably varied food selections, it’s close to impossible to have a protein deficiency. People on intensely low-calorie diets or young kids with very picky appetites, however, do need to ensure that they consume more frequently foods very rich in protein content, such as soy products and additional legumes.

Messina adds that as far as iron goes, the majority of the population find it surprising that vegan diets are higher in iron than lacto-ovo or meat-based diets. "Although iron derived from plant foods is absorbed less well than iron from meat, vegans should take measures to boost their iron absorption," says Messina. "The best way to do this is to include a good source of vitamin C at every meal since this greatly enhances iron absorption from plant foods — although not from animal foods."

Calcium is a mineral that vegans need to monitor and consume more carefully, Messina continues. She contends that while older studies demonstrated that vegan women had very low calcium levels, this trend could be changing thanks to numerous high-quality vegan foods that are fortified with calcium today. Some of these include fortified rice or soy milk, fortified breakfast cereals, fortified orange juice, leafy green veggies, and even some beans and nuts. Incidentally, Messina suggests that for vegans who like to boost their calcium intake with supplements, they should reserve these for between meals as opposed to with meals because calcium inhibits the absorption of iron.

But isn’t a vegan diet boring? Au contraire, ma soeur. Some of us vegans would argue that a vegan diet is actually more varied than when we ate differently. While we do indeed wipe out entire food categories from our culinary repertoire, most vegans seem to more than make up for that by exploring the whole scale of vegan food, says Messina. The spectrum covers a wide selection of breads and pastas, grain, bean dishes, and a significant range of nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruits, and soy products. "Vegans are very likely to explore international cuisines so that items that are staples in many vegan diets are actually foods that many Americans don’t eat."

Virtually anyone who’s a vegetarian has been asked by meat eaters ad nauseam why it’s okay to eat plants and not animals, and how do we know vegetables don’t feel pain when we pull them out of the ground. If you’re vegan, the two-part question always has an extra edge. Messina answers this question easily and fluently.

"I think most of us perceive a difference between plants and animals. Animals have a central nervous system, and we know they feel physical and emotional reactions like fear. I can’t prove to anyone that plants don’t feel pain, but I know animals do. We absolutely need plant food to survive. It’s essential in the human diet, and it’s clear that the greater the ratio of plant to animal food in the diet, the better our health and chance of survival. I think most would agree that it’s a reasonable decision to eat the foods that are necessary for our survival."

Erik Marcus, President of the Vegan Foundation and author of an excellent, recently published book entitled Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, holds a similar view to Messina’s. "It’s fairly obvious that animals are capable of demonstrating pain and fear," he says. Marcus offers an engaging philosophical argument to further illustrate his point. "Let’s say that plants are as capable of suffering as animals. It can take around ten pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef. So if you ate a couple of pounds of grain rather than a pound of beef, you would have saved wheat the supposed agony of producing eight pounds of grain. And that’s not even counting the quite visible agony you’ve saved the cow."

Recently someone asked me why plant life such as fruit is treated differently than chicken eggs when they’re seed for life just like the fruit. Messina summed up the answer more succinctly than the tome I was preparing. "Vegans avoid eggs because egg production is notoriously cruel. It isn’t so much the fact that an egg is a seed for life as it is that chickens suffer greatly on egg farms."

Of Passion, Compassion, & Sterotypes
People choose veganism for a broad range of reasons, including, yes, ethical reasons, but also environmental and health concerns. And while many select this diet for ethical issues and as such are activists on behalf of animals, few are militant, according to Messina. Many are relatively mainstream folks who are also raising kids, attempting to balance family and work, paying mortgages, and engaging in community activites. They simply adhere to a set of concerns about the place and treatment of animals in a human-centered society; the huge amounts of water, land, and fuel used up to produce grain to feed farm animals; the pollution generated by animal excrement and waste products by the dairy industry; the loss of biodiversity suffered in the name of ranching; and the health consequences of a meat-based diet.

These are strong arguments that fuel the passion of many vegans and which extend beyond what we put in our mouths. They affect what we wear, what health and beauty products we buy, what household cleaning supplies we seek, what forms of education, entertainment, and sports we choose, what stores we patronize, what charities we support, and even where, when, and how we tread.

But even within this movement, the degree of vegan commitment varies. Some don’t extend their veganism beyond their food choices. Others make occasional exceptions for the byproduct use of dairy or eggs. Some may not think twice about using refined sugar, which is bleached with charcoal filters that use animal bones. Others may wear wool, but not leather. Some will never again purchase soap or lotions that contain animal byproducts or that were tested on animals but will use their remaining supply of Gillette razors from eons ago. Yet others immediately rid their households of any item that’s not vegan.

Passion for compassion and the environmental well-being of this planet does not equate to a militant disposition. In the words of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, "until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace." And Alice Walker reminds us that "the animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for whites, or women for men."

Vegans err just as much as the rest of the population. It’s just that we’ve allowed ourselves to seek out, read, learn, and digest the gruesome realities of the behind-the-scenes details of the meat and dairy industry and of the impact our life choices make on the sustainability of a finite planet.

When I first started reading Diet for a New America by John Robbins, the Baskin-Robbins heir-to-be who decided his conscience wouldn’t let him pursue the family living, I had no clue it would change my life forever. But one painful and often highly-disturbing fact at a time brought me out of my plush state of ignorance. I found myself no longer able to support a system of abuse and misuse just to satisfy a craving or whimsical fancy for a product. You’d be amazed how easily knowledge will help you say no to things that may look appealing on the surface.

Despite my passion on this subject, I do believe diet is a highly personal decision that no other soul but yourself can make on your behalf. I applaud the efforts of anybody who even in the smallest way attempts to lower her consumption of and reliance on animal products. It’s not vegans that I admire, but the person who takes that first bold step to gently remove her blinders and educate herself in spite of the heartache.

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