I love bacon –seriously, I do a little celebration dance in the kitchen whenever my husband cooks it. I wrote a little song too: Bacon bacon such a treat, something super delicious to eat…But, it wasn’t always this way, in fact I was a moral vegetarian for more than 20 years. Squiggly line zoom-out…

I was about 10 years old, my  family was driving around Miami on a Saturday evening and, out of the blue, we saw a pig jump out of the back of a truck, get hit by a car and run into the bush aside the road. We, being good, caring people, stop the car, chase the pig down and put it in the back of my Dad’s fancy Cadillac. So now the real question…what do we do with a pig?

After finding the pig medical care, we brought him home and named him Traif. One day my brother decided to feed Traif bacon and, being the little piggy that he was, he ate it. I was appalled, I felt like I would never want Traif to be made into bacon and I extended that emotion to all other animals. I felt  disgust with my brother too — seriously, feeding a pig bacon, ugh!. I had already come to the conclusion that I was better than Seth in my extraordinary compassion, and here was another chance to prove it with my actions — I stopped eating meat that day and began 20 years of being a burden on all the humans who ever wanted to cook for and care for me, starting with my Mom and Dad. Over the years I layered more elaborate moral arguments onto my initial decision.  But at the heart of it, I was a little girl who saw something emotionally shocking and felt like I wanted to do something to help. Only later did I realize that I was mostly  just ‘helping’ myself…

Fast forward to a few years ago. Initially, it was my doctor’s suggestion I start eating meat to deal with some digestive and blood sugar issues I was having. I was so hesitant, I wanted to be a good person and good people are vegetarians. Right? But then again, I also wanted to be a healthy person and in my case, that may mean eating meat. I decided it was time to consider what wrong views may be underlying my diet:

1)   Being a vegetarian can’t make me a good person —  I realized, over time, being a vegetarian was part of a particular identity I had established for myself –“Alana the Good Person”. Even from the get-go, part of my decision to stop eating meat revolved around being better than my brother and being compassionate to animals. The longer I was a vegetarian the more I saw it as an identifying characteristic of myself and as evidence of myself as a good person (and a person who was better and morally superior to others).

As part of my broader practice I started confronting a number of the identities I have created for myself, including the “Alana as a Good Person” one and probing them as to their truth and desirability. So in this case some of the questions were: Is there such a thing as a 100% always good person? Is it an identity I can have? I realized that sometimes I do things I judge as good and other times as bad. So am I a Good Person if my actions are mixed? Moreover the same act that I may judge as good can be judged as bad by others. Also, its situational, sometimes something can be good and other times that same act can be bad.  

I contemplated a number of actions I had assigned as kind and compassionate, not eating meat was one of them.  So,  if not eating meat really is good can it balance out other bad things I do and make me net good as a person? I also thought about situations where eating meat could be good, or at least neutral –what if I was starving? What about not refusing something offered if I worry doing so might cause offense? What about honoring cultural or religious norms of places I visit?

I saw that there is actually no such thing as a good person or a good action all the time—I was striving to be something that doesn’t exist. I also realized that my actions to be a good person were mostly self-serving … Good Person Alana wanted approval from others, wanted to be loved, wanted to be treated with the same “kind compassion” I treated others, including animals, with. Good Person Alana was actually not all that altruistic.  In the process though I was ignoring that there could be actions and identities that are more or less appropriate at certain times. For me I found that sometimes eating meat could be desirable, like when it helps stabilize my blood sugar, or makes it easier on hosts cooking for me. Sometimes it may not be appropriate, like if I developed trouble digesting meat, or if I went to stay in home that had rules that everyone should cook vegetarian food in the kitchen.  Either way, by clearing-up the misconception that being a vegetarian makes me good (or even more profoundly that I can be an absolutely good person), I was able to open myself to making decisions on a case-by-case basis that frankly causes me much less suffering.

2)  The idea that not eating meat was allowing me to assert control over the welfare of animals and over my relationship with animals was completely false:    Even at first blush this is pretty ridiculous. After all, I wasn’t raiding factory farms and freeing the cows. I was just not eating what was already packaged in the store.  Still –in my mind I was super heroically transferring the virtue of my meat abstinence into the living condition of animals –impressively delusional no? I came to realize that this notion was hubris. As was the more subtle lurking idea –I knew what animals deserved and it was my role to somehow interrupt their fate, in whatever way I could, in order to control its outcome. Basically I came to see that this is a pretty deep misunderstanding of karma. In reality I have no idea what got animals, or anyone, into the situation they are in. To believe that blindly, and based on my own poorly informed judgments, I should (even if I could) intervene is ridiculous. I’m not saying its never appropriate to act or intervene –just that I was applying a blanket misunderstanding to create a blanket rule. Intervene, in one particular way, in all cases.

3)   That I could have my cake and eat it too.  I wanted to be a vegetarian even though it was creating health problems for me.  So on one hand, I wanted to be a vegetarian, on the other I wanted to feel good and be healthy. For me, at that time, the two were mutually exclusive and I was suffering for wanting both outcomes when only one seemed possible.   What finally  prompted me to start eating meat again was realizing that I was the one setting-up all the trouble, after all, I was the one creating rules (based on my own wrong views) for a diet that made me feel ill.