This is something I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time. I have a deep, visceral connection to eating meat, something that is a product of the specific trials I’ve been through. A big struggle of mine throughout the past decade has been coming to terms with my need for meat – in other words, with the primacy of flesh, mine and other. It’s a hard topic to write about because people have very strong opinions about eating meat. I hope in this essay to shed light on my personal politics of and theology around flesh as food.
In 2013, I was gluten-free and vegan and mostly ate lentils and other legumes with a lot of nutritional yeast. My digestion was getting worse daily (because, as I know now, nutritional yeast feeds gut candidiasis or yeast overgrowth), so clearly this wasn’t working. I started to swing into a manic episode and sought treatment with pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticals weren’t working either. Quite suddenly, one day I started intensely craving chicken. I felt so hungry that it was as if I was starving, even though I was eating. I tried to fight my cravings for a while, but eventually I caved in and realized I needed some meat to begin to stabilize, physically and mentally. I started eating two chicken breasts for lunch and two steaks for dinner – despite fighting the urge the whole time. I didn’t know how to cook meat, so sometimes I would bite into my chicken and it would be raw on the inside. I gagged often while shoving the food down my throat. I was caught in a battle of being repulsed by the thing I knew I needed to start feeling better. I truly had no choice; at this point I could not live without these massive quantities of meat. I did not understand why this was happening, and neither did my doctors – they labeled it as OCD, and did not listen to my insistence that this was a physiological need that I was attempting to satisfy. The battle for/against meat lasted two years, as I was going through treatment for bipolar disorder. I hated myself, felt disgusted with my body for needing to eat another’s flesh. The adjacency to aliveness was terrifying to me, yet I continued to force it down daily.
As I came to accept my mental illness and disability, I came to accept my peculiar need for meat. And over time, as I continued my treatment for bipolar, the need for meat subsided greatly, although remaining to this day. I realize now what scared me so much about meat was the immediacy of its connection to death and mortality. Animal life and death are much more pronounced and easily observed than plant life and death. I had to face death. I had to face the fact that as human animals, just like every other living thing on this earth, we cause harm, and we are harmed in return. And we live off the dead, only to become food for the insects and mycelium when our time comes – and the cycle continues. I could not escape that truth, not through strict veganism nor through spiritual bypassing. The truth of mortality sat right in front of me on my plate of chicken.
I think it’s important for our healing to build a spiritual connection to our food. To truly be aware of what we are eating. That means that we notice when food has been processed beyond recognizability, when meat has come from an industrial slaughterhouse, when vegetables are monocrops and GMOs, sprayed with pesticides. Outside of a Western framework for food, in which we are divorced from the processes that lead us eating our meal, many people still have a deep connection to the sacred sacrifice of our food, whether it’s a vegetable or an animal. It’s in all of our ancestries, too. All of our ancestors had, and many still-living people have, hunter-gatherer societies. Ideally we would be connected to the source from the moment an animal is hunted until it becomes our food. Maybe some of us can hunt or fish or can learn how, and have the experience of nourishing oneself as an active agent within this cycle of which I speak. This is a goal of mine. However, since realistically, most of us don’t have access to these sources, we must do the work to acknowledge and connect to the source of our food in other ways. If we must eat non-organic GMO plants, or factory-farmed animals, we can still pay our respects to our food as we prepare it and eat it. We can say prayers. We can apologize for the being’s pain. Remember its once-aliveness. We can cook a little bit extra of our ancestor’s favorite food and leave it on our altar for them. We can build relationships with the local butcher, and maybe even volunteer at local farms.
I am of the belief that all is animate, even that which is dead. Everything contains Spirit. I had an extreme experience that led to my connecting to the Spirit of food and the cycle of death sustaining life and vice versa, by necessity, yet it has taught me a valuable lesson in not taking anything we eat for granted. It has also instilled in me the importance of harm-reduction in nutrition, because at the time when I was eating meat for three meals a day, I could only do my best to be ethical about my choices, which was less than desired. I want to work with people who have uncommon food needs and work around barriers to eat as healthfully, balanced, and mindfully as possible with the resources we have available.
Eat. Enjoy your food. And acknowledge your role in the continuous cycle of life and death on this planet.
originally published 2022.
hearthsoma 
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