Nice to meat you

It's always interesting to me to think about my seemingly endless desire to find labels for myself. I guess it just makes things so much simpler when talking to people. "I'm a grad student", "I'm liberal", "I'm a math person", "I'm apparently a lazy horse who wants to just follow the butt of the horse in front of me".

I don't know why I feel such a need to fit into a specific box.

This has become particularly problematic recently in regards to my eating. I was a vegetarian for a few years. Not because PETA convinced me, not because I am against the killing and eating of animals, not because I don't like the taste of meat, not because I am a pot smoking hippie.

I became vegetarian because I don't like the way the meat and fishing industries work in this country. I don't like the way cattle, chickens, and pigs are raised on feed lots and I don't like the way the fishing industry depletes the world's oceans of entire populations of fish. If you want the nitty gritty, I'd suggest watching Food Inc. but for now I'll give a few of the gruesome details of the chicken industry.

Chicken are now genetically engineered to have larger breasts because Americans like white meat better than dark meat. This means that most chickens marketed by companies like Perdue and Tyson can't even walk. They can take a few steps and then have to plop down because their chests are so big. Maybe we can engineer them some better sports bras. The birds also don't generally see the daylight. Perdue and Tyson now force their farmers to build chicken houses without windows and with no spare room. The chickens can't walk anyways, why would they need more space right? This is all before the birds even get to the factory.

So I could maybe even get over all this. I mean, a chicken is just an animal right? I should be more concerned with feeding people and providing jobs for the struggling economy. Well, it turns out Perdue and Tyson don't treat people so well either. They have unofficial agreements with government agencies to employ illegal immigrants from Latin America at wages below the Federal minimum wage. They allow border patrol raids every few weeks that send a handful of workers back across the border, who are then quickly replaced with more helpless and underpaid workers. Not exactly what I'd call humanitarian.

This kind of behavior from the meat industry led me to choose to be vegetarian during the last few years of college, as I had no other viable options for eating meat.

But like I said, I don't mind eating meat. I actually love it. I just don't want to put a Tyson or Perdue chicken breast in my system.

Our family is lucky enough to have some land in northern Colorado, enough to raise some cattle on. My aunt and uncle have raised cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys of their own over the last five or ten years. They are animals that I seen raised, killed and processed. It is amazing how much better grass fed beef tastes and how much more healthy and yellow a real egg yolk looks.

So I'm not a vegetarian. Definitely not when I spent a whole day last fall helping to carve up the carcasses of three year old dairy steer, eat steak, bacon, and burgers from Tim and Lee's stock.

But it's not easy to describe myself to people when they ask if I'm still a vegetarian. I always try and explain why I try to eat the way I do, but sometimes it just doesn't come out right.

I think I may have found the word though, a box to constrain myself.

Awaritarian.

I am making a conscious effort to be aware of where my food came from. Not a carnivore, not a vegetarian, not even a pescetarian, but an awaritarian.

On ravens' wings

From Robert Service's Call of the Wild:

...
Have you swept the visioned valley
with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence?
Then for God’s sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.
...

This post isn't really about food, but it's about the reason I'm telling this story.

Whenever I leave Moab, I can't help but wonder why the hell I'm leaving. I've had the fortune of visiting Moab twice in the past two weeks. Last weekend I went with my sister and high school friends for a weekend camping trip, and the week before I spent five days canoeing on the Green River with family and friends.

Canoe trips are one of the weeks I look forward to the entire year. The day after I get home from the trip might be the worst day of the year. It is a week of spectacular views, ultimate relaxation, and a reminder of my place in this world.



This is seriously what it's like for five days.

On the river, watching a raven soar along the canyon walls in Still Water Canyon, I can't help but feel small and insignificant. I can't help but think "No matter what we do, this world will be ok. The beauty will survive, whatever we throw at it. Someday we will all be gone, and this place will still be here, still be beautiful, still be alive."

It is the most humbling week of my year to float through the time of millions of years. Hiking over fossils frozen in the Honaker Trail from when an ocean covered present day Utah forces me to think about the epochs that have passed, and those that will, with indifference to my existence. It reminds me that my wants and desires are fleeting, that I am a part of something larger.

And yet. I am still a part of this world. I still have a role to play. I am still connected.

I am connected to the cryptobiotic soil that holds the desert soil against the powers of erosion that be. I am connected to the lizards that scamper along the layers of rock. I am connected to the ravens that soar along the cliffs, teaching their young to fly. I am connected to the water, always flowing towards the dam, patiently moving each grain of sand from one sand bar to the next, ever carving the canyon a few centimeters deeper.

Somehow, I can feel that my life is connected to the desert's. I can feel the life in me revive during the rain. I can feel the struggle against the heat during the middle of the day. I can feel weight of the wind and water, pushing me on, inevitably, down river.

Somewhere throughout my years I have lost something in the jungle of concrete, the constant buzzing of electric outlets, and the stress of a schedule. And each year I return to the vast desert and string my soul to the flow of the river, the red of the cliff walls, the grit of the sand, the call of the Canyon Wren, and the wings of the ravens.

My challenge now is to bring that lesson home and live with it throughout the year.