Toward Ecosophy

My wife Sara, who used to work in institutional food service, still keeps track of issues in the industry from time to time.  That's the only reason I happen to know that tomorrow is supposed to be National Vegan Day, and that all the usual suspects are banging all the usual drums, trying to tell people what to eat, as though it was any business of theirs. As acting Grand Panjandrum of the New Independent Order of Anti-Poke-Noses, it seems to me that a statement is in order. 

What you eat is your own business. 

Yes, I know that there's an endless line of pompous busybodies who all want to tell you that you shouldn't eat this or that or the other thing. Some of them are paid for by corporate interests who want to sell you products, but most of them are simply prime specimens of that common subset of people who try to distract attention from their own failures as human beings by bossing other people around. Diet, of course, is only one of a multitude of fields where said pompous busybodies gather in bleating herds, but the United States has long been the happy hunting ground of the food crank and the yelling over nutrition is louder than the equivalent noise in many other fields. 

Now I have no objection to food cranks who come up with quirky diets that work for them, and publicize those with might and main. Human beings differ in their nutritional needs, and a diet that would be wholly unsatisfactory to me might be perfect for you; therefore let a thousand saucepans sizzle, and all that. Where it crosses the line is when food cranks go around trying to shove their diet on everyone else with the kind of cheap rhetoric and shrill indignation you'd expect from a street-corner evangelist. I'm sorry to say that the vegan movement is embarrassingly prone to that sort of behavior -- though I'm glad to say I know quite a few vegans who aren't like that at all. 

In the name and under the auspices of the New Independent Order of Anti-Poke-Noses, therefore, I'd like to proclaim tomorrow, March 20th, as National Eat What You Want Day. If you're one of my readers who enjoys a vegan diet, hey, dig into that tofurkey; if you eat meat, do so and enjoy it; if you follow some other diet, however normal or unusual or astonishingly weird -- why, it's up to you. 

And if you're one of the people who think it's your job to go around telling other people what to do, I'd like to suggest that you sit down and spend a good long while thinking about just why it is that you think this is your job, and please don't be content with the cheap moral indignation and all the other self-serving habits people use to justify that sort of rudeness to themselves. I doubt you'll enjoy the experience, but growing up has its uncomfortable moments, you know.