Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it.

Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian, and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life.

The pebble in my shoe as a vegan was there for many years, but I got used to it. That sense, so deep it was difficult to put a finger on, of never being satisfied... but I'll start elsewhere. 

It's worth talking about why I went vegan in the first place. Like most converts to veganism, I was an impressionable teenager (18) at the time. It was the BSE crisis, mad cow disease had the UK in its grip and on my TV were scenes of utter horror - staggering cows, hills of cattle being burned. I decided I wanted nothing to do with any of this, and went vegan right there; I was never vegetarian. Now, at this point it's worth saying, I do not and never will regret the impulse of kindness, of wanting to do what I can to keep from adding suffering to another's life - what I can see with hindsight however was that I made a shortsighted, simplistic decision without looking at the issue in depth.

I read some books on how to live vegan (since my grandmother assured me I was going to die) and ended up following the vegan ways of Drs Esselstyn, McDougall, et al: no processed foods, no added fats, basically a diet of vegetables, legumes and starches. Documentaries like Forks over Knives and books like The China Study told me this was the healthiest way to live, and since I was already vegan, confirmation bias meant I never bothered to check whether that was true. [Both have been thoroughly debunked]

Over time, veganism gained in popularity - when I first started, 'vegan speciality foods' could only be bought in special health food stores, and soya milk was a beige-watery bean juice! Not that I needed the special vegan foods anyway, since I was eating a whole-foods diet. But, more and more vegan foods appeared on shelves, along with much pro-vegan messaging in the media. I was no longer an outlier, I was now part of a movement that was becoming mainstream. Messages about veganism being best for the environment began to circulate, and again, I just believed them and didn't bother to dig deeper since I was already vegan. And again, it's simply not true.

I was convinced though. And so the pebble in the shoe that never shook out in the 20 years I followed this dogma, just remained: I never, ever felt satiated. Stuffed, yes; I could eat huge amounts, and people often commented on those. Of course, large amounts of vegetables without any fat or protein added do not have many calories, and I would often eat so much I could barely move and yet it never 'hit the spot'. It was like scratching my leg raw for an itch that was on my arm! I ate and ate, yet never got to a point of satisfaction. That is how I managed to be 20kg overweight on a diet like this: I filled myself up with so much food yet it never met my body's needs. I hated being fat; according to my diet dogma, I should be thin! Yet, there was nothing I could do: even weeks on 600-900 daily calories did not bring my weight down for any sustainable length of time. I was starving and fat at the same time. Great.

And yet this didn't make me question my veganism. 20 years of struggle and I didn't question it - so deeply convinced was I, so committed to never reading anything that went against my beliefs.

And then, we found that N (then 6) had to have six milk teeth taken out under full anaesthesia because they had rotted in her mouth. This was outrageous. We ate so healthily (as I thought), very rarely any sugar, no juices and certainly no sugary drinks ever! We religiously cleaned her teeth! How could this be? My 6-year-old was in pain and had to go through this operation and I was completely dumbfounded as to why. Teeth aren't meant to just... fail like this!

My wake up call

And then, when I shared about this and what we ate in a mother's Facebook group I was in, it was a simple comment: someone mentioned how 'cariogenic' oatmeal was. I was like, what? I never knew anything about this, can it be true? And that was the beginning of my paradigm shift. I had never considered my own terrible teeth as a cause for questioning my beliefs, but when I saw my little one suffer, that did it. That's when I finally began to look outside my echo chamber.

What I found shocked me - from the historic work of 1920's dentist Weston A. Price (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration) who visited then-still-untouched tribes all over the world and never found a single vegan tribe, but did find that as soon as 'civilised' foods were brought in, dental decay arrived with them; to the excellent 'Vegetarian Myth' by Lierre Keith, who was also a vegan of many years and laid out the compassionate case against living that way - I finally learned what I had simply refused to see previously. I learned how industrial agriculture is what devastates ecosystems; how regenerative agriculture restores them; and how the human body requires no carbohydrates (or plants!) to survive at all, but cannot do without essential (hencewhy they're called essential) nutrients from protein and fat - how we are meat eaters by nature, and while we can just about survive on plants for a time, we can't thrive on them.

This didn't raise an ethical dilemma about harming or killing animals, because I finally realised that many more animals are killed for vegan foods than for meat. As a meat eater, I will eat the equivalent of one cow over the course of six months or so; one life taken. If I could take no lives at all, that would be great, but if I want to stay alive then that's simply not an option. As a vegan the death toll is much higher - from animals driven off the land as monoculture crops are planted, to those killed when said mono crops are harvested (the final acre of harvesting is a bloodbath, as the combine harvester finally plows through the animals who have sought shelter in the very last part of the field: mice, baby deer, and many others). It is not possible to live without doing harm in some way, and environmentally, raising livestock on natural pastureland regenerates soil and diversity. I haven't abandoned my values in going for meat: I am living them out in an informed way now! Our meat, milk and eggs come from local farms with food miles below 50 and in supporting this kind of non-industrial animal husbandry, I'm putting my money towards regenerating the local soil rather than towards devastating far-away soils where soya and the like are being grown.

So... four years on, we continue to eat meat. It was a struggle at first, as the texture of meat is so different to anything the kids would have been accustomed to before, but we're slowly getting there and the kids are growing well. N's new teeth are strong. Both kids are healthy and only very rarely they will come down with light colds. I am grateful that I was so committed to breastfeeding them both (N to her 5th birthday, D until nearly 4 years old) - I think this prevented much possible damage I could have done in feeding them vegan diets. Still, of course, the mama guilt is strong for what I put them through... but I stand corrected, and am grateful that we are doing better now.