Lo que ocurre en la vida de una persona que va convertiendose a hippie

Good morning,

I'll continue now from my last post:

I'm not sure if anyone got it, but what I wrote last time was almost completely plagiarized from Hunter S. Thompson's opening to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". The only original thing was the content, not the style. As for the accuracy of it, I think (not very sure - can't remember a good deal of it) it was pretty accurate. Except for the nitrous. The total damages for the day are as follows:
- I ended up twisting my ankle (probably) dancing around stupidly to Disney songs.
- I drank only about 1/2 of a bottle of whiskey but smoked 2 bowls with 2 others.
- I drunk-text-messaged this chick I'm stuck on (actually this isn't a damage seeing as we're going out now but it usually would be. Drunk dialing is bad, mmmkay?).
- I don't remember how I got back from Middlesex Fells Reservation.
- I got bruised and cut from rock climbing
It was all worth it, I think.

Other occurrences in my life:

I am now vegan. Yes, this means I no longer eat meat, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, milk, butter, etc. I've been doing this for perhaps three weeks now. At first I had many slip ups and ate things which I didn't know contained the foods I've made forbidden (i.e. corn muffins for breakfast) but for the last week I haven't made any mistakes. I even survived Easter brunch with my conservative family.

You may be wondering why exactly I came to choose this lifestyle. Well, to begin, I like to think that I've already given myself time to consider many important issues and develop a stance for myself. While I have a strong opinion on many things, vegetarianism/veganism was not one of the things that I had thought out. However, after meeting several vegans at school and reading several environmentally oriented books, I began to question my choice of diets. Eventually, I came to the conclusion to become vegan for about 60% environmental sustainability reasons, 35% ethical reasons, and 5% health reasons. I'll outline my thought process on each for those who, like myself, were uneducated on the topics.

Environmental:

• The meat based diet that most citizens of the United States have is not sustainable.
• We cycle 80% of our corn, 95% of our oats, 90% of our protein, 99% of our carbohydrates, and 100% of our dietary fiber through livestock
• In the end, eating meat wastes a significant amount of calories (or energy) absorbed by plants from the sun
• 60,000,000 people starve to death each year
• 60,000,000 people could be fed each year if Americans reduced their meat intake by 10%
• 16lbs of grain and soybeans are needed to produce 1lb of feedlot beef
• 5lbs of protein are fed to chickens to produce 1lb of protein as chicken flesh
• Number of pure vegetarians who can be fed on the amount of land needed to feed 1 person consuming meat-based diet: 20

These are just some of the statistics which got me thinking about veganism. They can be found in full at: http://www.ams.ubc.ca/student_life/resource_groups/sec/resources-facts.htm
This website compiled the statics from John Robbins' (former heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune who gave it all away because his father's company was unethical and a problem to American health) book Diet for a New America.

Ethical:
You've all seen or at least heard of the PETA advertisements. While these did not play a very heavy role in my decision, I do understand and support their message. I believe you all have read the book Into the Wild about a young man named Chris McCandless who gave away $24,000, abandoned his family, hitchhiked across the country, did odd jobs, and eventually died in the Alaska wilderness. The book had a passage which affected me deeply detailing Chris' response to killing a moose. In short, he was unable to sufficiently preserve the animal's meat and it rotted. After this incident, he was unable to kill for a while and underwent emotional turmoil. If I had to hunt for my own dinner, I suspect that I would feel the same way. I can no longer blindly eat another living being without thinking because I feel that all life has value and animals should be eaten if and only if there is no alternative. Luckily, we live in a society which has an abundant number of dietary choices. Furthermore, I believe, as PETA does, that livestock in the United States are treated unethically and are usually tortured before their deaths.

As for the topic of eating dairy or eggs, I was able to sufficiently defend myself from my family's questions using a mix of ethical and environmental arguments. First, my brother, among others, argued that cows, for example, need to be milked and that it is natural and healthy for humans to drink cow's milk. I would like to point out that cows are force bred in our country to fulfill the demand for milk. They are then force fed corn, grains, and oats (which happens to NOT be their natural diet) in order to produce milk in a factory like setting. How is this natural? If we were doing cows a favor, then we would not encourage their population to explode the way it has in our country. Furthermore, we would not shoot them up growth hormones to produce more milk (Monsanto comes to mind... http://youtube.com/watch?v=fzu9M6dUCac) and antibiotics to fight the myriad of diseases cows pick up in such an industrial setting. Also, we drink milk from cows and think it's natural but, who would drink milk from apes or other creatures? Cow's milk is produced by cows for calves with 4 stomachs so that calves can grow to ~300lbs in one year. I use this argument against eating eggs too.

Health:
Anyone else remember studying trichinosis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichinosis) in Mr. Dupre's biology class? Yeah, imagine a foot long worm burrowing through your flesh. Also, meat and dairy contains an enormous amount of hazardous fat which is linked to heart disease. As for my protein and B12 vitamin intake, I eat fortified cereal, hummus / chickpeas, and drink fortified soy milk daily. I have several friends who've been vegan for years, including one who I rock climb with, that have had no dietary deficiencies.

There seems to be a reason why other countries, most notably eastern countries as well as European countries, have a much healthier populace even though they don't consume vast amounts of meat products. In America, we look at our meat as the main part of a meal and are disappointed to be lacking it in every meal. This is so, so wrong.

And that's about all I gotta say about that.

Next time on Chris' blog post, the ethics of gardening and why humans are weeds.

Chris