On relationality and diet

Let’s make a change from moaning about how demotivated winter makes me! How about we talk about food.

I have always been very food-motivated – before emigrating from America, my favourite holiday was Thanksgiving solely because of the food, and though I enjoyed the opportunity to make fancy food for British Christmas, it wasn’t until I became an observant Jew that I found the holiday replacement I craved. And let’s face it, Shabbat is such a fun holiday to observe when you love food, because it happens every single week!

Since moving to the seaside from a town that’s nowhere near the sea – come to think of it, this is the first time I’ve properly lived by the sea – my perspective on food has shifted dramatically in a relatively short space of time. When I moved here, I was in theory ostrovegan but in practice just vegan because you try getting decent shellfish when you’re nowhere near the ocean. I’d been vegan since 2013, nearly 8 years, and while my morality had mellowed since the first heady days, my perspective was entrenched.

Well, now I have 30 eggs in my fridge. Lol.

In all seriousness, being happy and near the ocean let me step back and re-evaluate my ethical stance, and I came to realise that I didn’t actually object to animal husbandry. What I truly objected to was the commodification and large-scale exploitation of animals in factory farms – not animals in the kinds of symbiotic relationships with human beings which we’ve nurtured for millennia.

In fact, I sometimes felt discomfort around some vegans’ absolutist stances, particularly regarding the food webs of indigenous cultures. Much as I would not, personally, wish to club a seal, who was I to tell an Inuk to desist from hunting one of the few food sources available to him in the Arctic? Would I even go so far as to accost a Maasai warrior for subsisting on cow’s blood, when cows have been culturally revered and reared for thousands of years?

My perspective shifted, to question what it was about the indigenous diet that appealed to me, and I came to the conclusion that what I actually sought was to encourage right relation with animals – healthy, symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationships that can be traced and accounted for.

With that in mind, I found a local honey supplier who spring harvests, and I found a nearby free-range smallholding which delivers 30(!) eggs per week (or, like, every other week, because I would really have to work to use 30 eggs in a week!). Seeing as I’m by the sea, I have my eye on sustainable fisheries that sell fish caught within 20 miles of my town…but we’re not quite there, yet.

Having said that, learning how to cook eggs again has been a journey in and of itself! So I’ll wait on the cod for now. I’m just happy to have articulated, to myself and now here, my desire for relationality and symbiosis with the animal world. Aligning myself with a more indigenous perspective on food has been immensely satisfying, and has helped grow my sense of place, of belonging somewhere.