As a vegan athlete, I get asked where I get my protein from all the time. I have to say, finding sustainable, plant-based protein sources has caused me to reflect a lot lately.
As a Nietzschean kind of person, I regard myself as a self-experimenter in the first place. Over the past 14 years, I’ve tried at least 5 different approaches to food.
My Dietary Evolution from 17 to 31
From omnivorous eater, I turned pescatarian at 17, meaning that I was on a 80%-lacto-ovo-vegeterian diet, allowing myself to consume around 20% of my food from fish and seafood more broadly. At that time, my workout routine consisted of: swimming 3 times a week, occasional running, occasional basketball with my friends, drama class and musical choreography once or twice a week, occasional crunches, push-ups and lateral leg raises in my bedroom. As my workouts became more resistance-oriented – which happened about 3 years later – I felt the need to increase my protein consumption. Between the age of 20 and 27, I turned into one of the major causes of the threatening fish extinction which the world is going through these days. My diet mostly consisted of canned tuna, fresh or canned mackerel and sardines, smoked salmon, eggs, yoghurt, cottage cheese and quark, oats, vegetables, fruits and rice cakes. I didn’t like that kind of approach, which made feel so guilty everyday. However, people kept telling me that “animal protein was the best source ever”, and I would “deplete my body”, if I stopped eating fish, dairy and eggs.
But that is not all. During those years, I decided to try various popular diets, to lose fat without giving up my performance. So I tried the 40-30-30 diet for a few years, then the Atkins diet, then I nearly starved myself and brought a lot of undesired medical conditions into my body, which I’m not very proud of and I’m not going to tell you about here.
In 2014, I randomly came across the bodies of amazing bikini competitors and bodybuilders online, who also happened to be vegan. How was that even possible? That seemed to be the answer to all of my ethical dilemmas at the time. I immediately did a lot of research and went vegan cold turkey. But because I can’t help being extreme, not only did I turn vegan out of the blue, I even signed up for a 3-day-raw-vegan detox plan online, which got me totally spellbound. I saw amazing effects on my body as soon as I started that program, and I was so happy, that I decided to stay on a mostly raw vegan diet for good. As I had moved to the UK only one year before, I didn’t have any good training equipment to work out, nor could I afford joining a gym. My workouts were still consistent, but they consisted of: bellydance, yoga, running and bodyweight HIIT-exercises. I shortly realised that a raw vegan diet couldn’t really sustain the intensity of my workout routine, but my obstinacy, as always, took over, until I finally could afford a gym membership and started lifting heavy. At the point, my diet had to undergo some significant changes, the pivotal one being getting back to a high-protein diet.
As I ignored the existence of high and low FODMAP foods, at that time, I was confusing some IBS symptoms with soy-intolerance, trying to not eat too much tofu or tempeh (was the latter even a food?). Also, there was this popular controversy about the possibility of soy being harmful to female hormones, which was scaring me a lot. I suddenly had no choice but to increase my consumption of legumes, mushrooms, and protein-packed vegetables such as broccoli, which in turn aggravated my IBS. Only in Summer 2018 did I finally come across the benefits of a low FODMAP diet, and found a good balance in my diet. I also did some extra research about soy phytoestrogens, and found out that their being harmful is not proven enough (this is an interesting up-to-date article on the issue). However, I still feel ethically guilty…
How Many Lives Does It Take To Meet Your Daily Protein Intake on a Plant-Based Diet?
If you’re omnivorous and base your daily meals on grass-fed beef, lamb and chicken, then you’re probably killing less animals than me, the plant-based insect murderer in disguise. Let’s leave the CO2 issue off this topic, as I’d like to solely focus on the actual amount of lives involved in soy production vs animal production.
Technically, when you eat a steak, you don’t eat the whole cow, calf or ox. In theory, one single life could feed you for one week, if not for longer (assuming you’re eating livers, kidneys, heart, brain, etc., and making bone broth on top of it). In a very hypothetical, ideal reality, when your meat is grass-fed, the animal – coming from a small, family-run farm – has been circulating freely and enjoyed its life till its very last seconds. No extra water has been needed to feed it, and no weird antibiotics. In this hypothetical world, when you eat a steak or a burger, only one life has been sacrificed for your meal, and that life will suffice for one week, or more. You might counter-argue by saying that that cow might have killed some insects or stepped on other smaller creatures along the way, but that would have occurred anyway, whether you would have eaten that animal or not – therefore, you’re not really responsible for their lives. You’re still responsible for you’re animal’s life only.
Let’s break down the process of soy production instead. Besides the deforestation and other environmental issues, which soy is seriously responsible for (to have an idea, see what WWF thinks about it), soy cultivation kills a lot of small animals (from insects to tiny rodents) because of the tractors used to plough and harvest. I’m aware that the main cause of deforestation is soy’s being used to feed animals – which wouldn’t happen, if nobody ate those animals in the first place. However, if everyone was vegan and on a high-protein diet, soy cultivation would increase even more, causing the second issue (i.e. the death of small animals) to grow accordingly (here’s an old, yet still insightful article by The Guardian on the issue; another, more recent post from Munchies on the debate is this one).
So, to put it in numbers, for every single soy bean you harvest, hundreds of insects have to die. Yo don’t need me to tell you you can’t make a block of tofu out of one soy bean…
Moreover, the same discourse applies to quinoa, buckwheat, lentils and avocados, popular “cruelty-free” superfoods, staples in many vegan kitchens. It seems like the most ethical choice to be vegan would be to thrive on a self-grown or locally-sourced fruit-based diet (I’m including nuts and seeds, as long as you’re able to grow them by yourself or find sustainable ones). Many people succeed on such a diet, even athletes and bodybuilders. Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. I tried many times, and I need my tofu and tempeh to fully recover in between workouts. Not to mention that, as an IBS-sufferer, my fruit choice would be quite restrictive…
Why Am I still Vegan, Then?
This is the question I’ve been asking myself a lot in recent times, especially since I’m married to a mindful omnivorous eater, who buys only locally-sourced-grass-fed beef, a lot of entrails (to not let any animal die in vain) and uses chicken carcasses to make his own bone broth every week. Is his approach more ethical than mine? Most definitely.
However, there is no scientific way to really address my dilemma, it’s just a matter of rather personal choices. In other words, it’s all about “compassion”. A few philosophers reflected upon animals’ suffering on the one hand, and the impossibility to stop that suffering in order to survive on the other hand (the most popular one being Arthur Schopenhauer, who drew many of his ideas on his knowledge of Hinduism and Buddhism, and who influenced later vegetarian thinkers). There is no escape: if you want to survive, one or more lives will have to be sacrificed. However, facing the suffering in your plate on a daily basis is not for everyone.
I just couldn’t take the idea of having a cow killed just to satisfy my selfish desire of eating – I know it’s my need to survive, but that’s how I can help regarding it, as “a selfish desire of eating”. Such a “selfish desire of eating” drives my choices everyday, leading me to consume lives, whether I want it or not. But there are different grades of murder, I believe, and eating a dead animal, absorbing the energy of a suffering-dead animal, has a more immediate impact on my ethical response, than eating some tofu or tempeh which accidentally caused the death of insects and small rodents. To u
se another popular word, it’s all about karma: meat is pure suffering, it brings the animal’s suffering into my plate and transmits it to me; tofu brings a lot of suffering too, but doesn’t expose me to the extreme, sudden death of what’s in my plate, and doesn’t really transmit such suffering to me directly.
Life is made of choices, and if I were to choose between having
an animal killed and eating it, or having a few lives died in the process of
creating something which doesn’t force me to eat a dead animal, well, call me a hypocrite, but I’ll go for the latter option.
But this is my very own personal perspective, which I’ll never impose on anyone else than myself.