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Making Conscience-Based Food Choices— By Kathleen Ellis At this stage, it is of paramount importance to refrain from any critical judgments. “What are you having today,” he scoffed. “Nuts and twigs?” I was sitting at my desk eating my bag lunch. My boss was passing by my cubicle to make some friendly conversation. It was a running gag around the office—he thought vegetarianism was for rabbits. “Actually it’s peanut butter and raspberry jelly on homemade bread.” My boss, a chronic hypertensive with more than one scary cardiac event in his medical dossier, softened his expression. He seemed kind of wistful for a moment. I like to think he was a little jealous. He looked at what I was eating. Admittedly, it wasn’t exactly homemade bread the old fashioned way; I had a bread machine at the time. But it was a hearty brown bread, sliced thick. The filling between the slices oozed out provocatively. “Okay,” he conceded. “That does sound good. Better than what I’m having—it’s another ‘BK’ day for me.” We’d had more earnest conversations about healthy eating. He seemed to agree that adding more plants to his diet would be better for him than cheeseburgers and diet Coke, but he couldn’t get over the idea that it would mean a life of all tofu, all the time. Plain tofu. He had painted himself into a conceptual corner that things were the way they were—and that it’d be impossible to make changes. Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide Eating is vital to life. Most of us do it several times per day, and the associated rituals and cultural connotations are vast and complex. Moreover, we are what we eat. The quality and types of food we take into our bodies are reflected in our physical and psychological wellbeing. On a larger scale, human agricultural, culinary and consumption practices greatly affect the earth’s ecosystem. This is a big responsibility! We have the desire to do what’s right and when we aren’t in accordance with those beliefs, cognitive dissonance causes stress. But it’s our reptilian brain, the limbic system, which nervously intercedes at the prospect of change. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken, we have enough problems as it is!” “You can’t save the world yourself, so don’t bother trying.” These impulses are only natural, but we sell ourselves short when we allow them to have the last word on any matter. Bad news fills our awareness every day. There are plenty of reasons to be worried about food choices: chemical pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, and genetically modified organisms entering the ecosystem; epidemic levels of obesity, heart disease, and cancer; food prices skyrocketing due to fuel shortages, and global warming. You probably already know that a plant based diet, sourced locally and grown with as few synthetic chemicals as possible, is best for you, and the planet. But how do we go about making changes? And what changes can we make? What’s the best we can really do? The good news is that the issue need not be hopelessly overwhelming. Human beings are both creatures of habit and creatures of conscience. Higher reasoning—the specialty of our frontal lobes—is the evolutionary achievement of homo sapiens. Many who wish to become more enlightened find that allowing their intuition, conscience and capacity for mental flexibility to assist them in decision making leads to a more fulfilling and less stressful life. Make Room with Mindfulness The key to peaceful, enlightened change is mindfulness. Take a moment to ask yourself the following questions: “How do I feel about the food choices I currently make?” “Do I make well-informed choices about my food sources and their implications?” “What social values are important to me? How can I express that through food choices?” “How do my eating habits affect my health? How do allergies or medical conditions affect my choices?” Depending on your outlook and level of anxiety about food, these may seem like terribly loaded questions. At this stage it is of paramount importance to refrain from any critical judgment about your answers; simply observe your internal responses. Ask these questions from a place of compassion and curiosity. Don’t worry about the consequences just yet, we’ll deal with them later. The answers may lead you to certain conclusions. These include considerations about possibly going organic, biodynamic, local, or free-range. You may wish to be more observant of your health goals, ethical values, your ethnic lineage, or of religious restrictions. You may also consider your social values—how do you feel about the corporatization of Big Agriculture? What about the cruelty associated with beef, poultry, seafood, egg and dairy production? You may want to reduce the amount of packaging that goes into the landfill. This is where it may begin to feel overwhelming, because this is where the conflicts appear. Try not to worry that your goals are impossible or that you can’t afford a new food relationship. Keep breathing and be patient with the process. It isn’t necessary to boil your conclusions down to totally concrete new rules for living and engrave them in stone. You can make your decisions on a meal-by-meal basis.
The Transitional Period The next step is to start transitioning. Start with small steps. For instance, if you’ve decided to go vegetarian, start by phasing out beef and pork for two weeks, then poultry for two weeks, then seafood. If you’ve decided to go raw, cut out the most addictive cooked or processed foods first—ones that contain caffeine, then sugar, then simple carbohydrates. If you’re simply trying to eat more natural foods, a good place to start is to eliminate all corn syrup. Making incremental changes in this way will give your system time to adjust, and it will also get you psychologically accustomed to your new patterns. As you proceed, the next logical steps will appear as you make time to contemplate them. Naturally, what you invite into your life is more important than what you cut out of it. So as you do this, start adding new and exciting things to your menu. Experiment with one new ingredient each week. If you’re getting the meat out of your diet, try adapting recipes you already know and love with commercially available meat substitutes. Next, try breaking out into new territory with some vegetarian cookbooks. If you’re switching to all whole or organic foods, find new ways to snack—nuts and fruit rather than packaged salty or sugary snacks. Sticking With It All of these changes will involve new behaviors beyond simply eating the food. You’ll get accustomed to reading food labels, new cooking techniques, asking servers about ingredients, and planning your day-to-day life so that you have delicious and nutritious food to eat when and where you need it. It takes, on average, eight weeks for your mind to adjust to the point where foods you no longer eat stop smelling or looking tempting. It takes far less time, though—more like two weeks—for your body to start feeling the positive effects of your improvements. As these changes set in, it will get a lot easier. Seek out restaurants that cater to people like you. When dining out, order items that match your ethos and study their flavors and ingredients. Don’t be too shy to ask the staff about how the dishes are prepared. Group activities with like-minded people are a great way to find support and get ideas. Any group of food aficionados out there has a web site, support groups, bulletin boards meet-ups, and luncheons. Use the resources in your local community, too; try hosting a potluck or dinner party. Finding like-minded people for support is instrumental in taking on a new dietary paradigm. A Few Miscellaneous Tips • Slip-ups aren’t the end of the world, and they certainly don’t mean your project is a failure. Take it one meal at a time. Every experience is a learning experience • If you’re struggling with one particular aspect of your new dietary ethic, get help! Ask for advice from Internet chat groups or locals who have been through the same thing. • The worst food cravings happen when you’re really hungry. If you start to crave a fast and easy meal from McD’s, have a simple snack—anything you can get your hands on—to ease your hunger, even if it doesn’t seem tempting to you in the heat of the moment. That will help tide you over until you’re in range of a healthier and ultimately far more satisfying meal. We live in a time and place of unprecedented abundance—both of food and the information about it. Cross-pollination between cultures has created terrific, exciting culinary possibilities—particularly in Chicago, but in the suburbs and rural areas as well. Your new conscience-based food choices may take you right out of the conventional grocery store and into new territory: ethnic groceries, farmers’ markets, and co-ops. Be brave and good luck!
Kathleen Ellis, RYT, is a writer and yoga instructor living in Chicago. She has a BA in Psychology. When pressed, she currently identifies herself as a “pesco-quesotarian.” Her web site is http://www.thleen.org.
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