For the love of vegetables and all things good

“A vegetarian resturant. Everything on the menu is meat free, using tofu and various other tricks, they have faked all the main chinese favourite dishes.” - Photo courtesy of Mr Wabu on Flickr

After experimenting with living a vegetarian lifestyle for the past two weeks, after a lifetime of eating meat, I’ve decided that I am going to stick with this decision in the long run. Who knows, further down the road, I may decide to go vegan, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

For the time being however, I feel really good about this decision. Aside from the numerous health & wellness factors that come with going vegetarian, I’m also learning more and more about global food production within the context of declining natural resources and the accelerating growth of the human population in the world today. For some reason, this lifestyle choice makes a lot of sense to me. As someone who is also interested in transformative social change, especially through social entrepreneurship, going this route allows me to ‘walk the walk’ so to speak. As an individual, I know that making these small changes in my own personal life may not have much of an effect on the world today. However, as a collective (and I know that practising a vegetarian/vegan lifestyle seems to be a growing movement), it does make a difference.

One of the motivators behind this lifestyle change has to do with an online course that I am taking this semester, called The Global Conversation, run out of Magee College at the University of Ulster in Derry by Dr. James Skelly. This course is taught online and run in partnership with many academic institutions around the world, including ISES in Hungary. The main purpose of the course focuses on making the connections to the seemingly intractable and globally complex problems that we are facing in the world today, and exploring solutions and ways of thinking that will help us overcome these challenges in the years to come.

Chicken and Antibiotic Resistance

As an example, I was placed in an online discussion group where we had to make the connection between chickens and antibiotic resistance in humans, a topic that I did not know anything about. After doing some research on the topic, I was even more convinced that cutting chicken and meat out of my diet was the right choice to make for myself. This article from the Miller McCune website discussing chicken and anti-biotic resistance, did it for me. In case you’re wondering, the connection between chickens and antibiotic resistance lies in the fact that chickens are born, raised and slaughtered en masse in chicken farms around the world, as a primary source of food for human consumption. These chicken farms are not necessarily the most sanitary of places, as chickens are raised on top of their excrement and in very cramped quarters, with these factories teeming with parasites and bacteria that thrive on chicken excrement. To help these chickens cope with infections, drugs are mixed in with their supply feed and water. Antibiotics are also injected into chicken eggs to suppress disease and infections among the poultry (these antibiotics are also used on cattle and pork farms as well). Along with the suppression of diseases, these antibiotics also help the chickens grow faster, which means more birds sent to the slaughter house and therefore driving the farm/company’s bottom line, profit.

The problem for us humans lies in the use (or rather, the mis-use) of these antibiotics as growth promoters on farm animals. The continued use of antibiotics such as ceftiofur (a third generation cephalosporins antibiotic) and fluoroquinolone on poultry has led to a dramatic increase in the resistance of cephalosporins and fluoroquinolone antibiotics among people in North America, Europe and Asia. From the article linked above, these very same antibiotics are important to us because they have the ability to knock out a wide range of hard-to-treat human ailments such as urinary tract infection and pneumonia. If we are growing increasingly resistant to antibiotic drug treatment because of the food we eat (i.e. poultry that has been injected with these same antibiotics to prevent/suppress disease, promote/increase growth in the animals), this poses a huge public health risk for us all.

And this is just one of many examples that I could give you on some of the lessons that I am learning about (the horrors of) food production around the world.

At the end of the day however, I have never felt better in my life due in large part to this new diet, as well as this ‘new’ life that I am living in Hungary, that I would never have even thought possible three months ago when I was still in Kitchener-Waterloo deciding whether or not taking the risk of leaving everything behind was worth it.

It certainly has been worth it, in more ways than one. I now have a whole world of vegetarian recipes and cooking to explore.