This, I Believe: Why I am a Vegan.

I have gradually come to firmly believe that the “why” is often more important than the “what” or “how”. Whether in business or personal matters, I try to make it a point of living my life with real intent. It is no accident that I chose to both eat a strictly vegan diet and run my bicycle touring company as a vegan one – something that is hardly good for one’s bottom line given that the majority of our potential clients aren’t vegan!

Reading “A Language Older than Words” (Derrick Jensen) forced me to really evaluate and confront my own views on why I choose to eat strictly vegan and mostly organic. I firmy believe in treading as lightly as possible on the earth.

The reality is that death is as much part of life as life is part of death. What is true and real is that everything in life is very cyclical, a circle where death gives way to life and life gives way to death as part of the Universal of life. To say that eating vegan minimizes death is simply a false argument — but it is very true that eating vegan does minimize unnecessary suffering.

I am vegan because I choose to live lightly upon the Earth and one of the most responsible, most significant things I can do on my own level (next to choosing not to have kids) to minimize my impact. From a sustainability perspective, a local, organic, healthy, vegan diet is without a doubt the most sustainable diet.

Eating meat causes unnecessary, untold suffering, much of that unnecessary suffering caused not by the meat eating itself, but the evil (and I do not use that word lightly) factory farming system we’ve come to depend upon which distances us from the source of our food, and the process of taking life, required to source that food.

The reality is that eating is inherently requiring taking life of some other source of life, whether plan or animal. But I still need not cause unnecessary suffering in order to meet my basic needs.

The simple reality is I choose to live consciously. I choose to eat consciously — and doing so begins with being very conscious of the source of my food. I do not want to eat I would not feel comfortable killing myself, and I am not comfortable killing anything that has a face and more important that which has the full capacity and awareness of truly feeling pain.

My committment is simple — I will not eat anything the life of which I am not comfortable with taking — that, which will suffer in the process of me doing so. It is really that simple. I do not want my life to cause unnecessary suffering — and eating meat is simply unnecessary. Same goes for dairy — never mind how unhealthy it is.

I don’t wish to “use” living beings. I want to have a relationship with the world around me. I want to know where my food comes from, and I want to know that in the creation of that food suffering was minimized. An apple will not suffer by being pulled from the tree, but a chicken will definitely feel it’s throat being cut.