Excerpt: Introduction Excerpt: Body Freedom Excerpt: Vegan Diet Excerpt: Hippie Counterculture |
 Excerpts: Vegan Diet Vegan Diet: a whole-foods, plant-based diet excluding all flesh and animal byproducts. Chosen for spiritual, compassionate, ecological, and/or health reasons. Mom, a typical gullible housewife, was lured by the siren song of animal products and so-called convenience foods then flooding food markets. She'd grown up semi-vegetarian, but had acquiesced to dad's preferred diet, which reflected the mainstream dietary wisdom: eating dead animals was important for healthy, strong bodies. She duly served various poor creature's select remains and generous glasses of bovine fluid every day. Our freezer section was crammed with parts of unfortunate animals: We were always ready to have a cow. 
She bought canned fruits, vegetables and meats by the ton, along with box mixes that you "just add water!" to. An over-trusting soul, she believed splashy ads' claims of providing wholesome nutrition, when in fact we were scarfing the skeletal remains of the original food stuff after the living enzymes had all been sucked out and the residue "fortified" with synthetic vitamins (a fraction as effective, if at all). Why would they do that? For the sake of long shelf life. Multinational corporations were out trying to corner the food market and it was impossible without first desiccating the food. Why'd we go along with such madness? Hey, it saved time in the kitchen, and our wise government gave its blessing.Canned goods by the hundred vied for space on our groaning pantry shelves. I'd absently stare at them, their jumble of colorful labels conjuring abstract images in my mind, feeding my imagination if not my body. We gobbled bleached spongy white bread by the cart full - all but void of nutrition but a great substitute for modeling clay. If it was the staff of life, it was a balsa wood stage prop for a children's church play. We stocked packaged snack foods so embalmed with unpronounceable preservatives their useful shelf life still hasn't expired. 
Fried strips of pig muscle marbled with fat and chicken embryos constituted part of a good nutritious breakfast. I didn't know what was good for me if I didn't eat my fried chicken livers or braised cow's tongue, dad said. Sandwiches featuring ground-up, seared cattle muscle were the all-American snack. (I don't mean to gross you out here, but, crazy as it sounds, this is actually what we ate.) If we are what we eat, it's a wonder we didn't grow hooves and sprout fins and feathers. As I mentioned, people rejecting such bloody fare for exclusively non-animal food sources were looked on with more than faint suspicion. |
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