Masson - The face on your plate: the truth about food

THE GOLD STANDARD IS GREEN

W HEN I WAS TEACHING S ANSKRIT AT THE U NIVERSITY of Toronto in the 1970s, I came across a phrase that stopped me dead: ashrayaparavrtti a sudden moment of life-changing insight. Paravrtti is like a somersault, and ashraya is ones home base, so it means letting go of everything you have always believed or understood for a leap into the unknown. The Christian equivalent is known as the Road to Damascus experience in which Saul (later St. Paul) underwent a conversion on his way to Damascus to slaughter Christians and instead became one.

Many people become vegan in just that way: a sudden moment, a blinding insight, a turning ones back on conventional wisdom, in this case, conventional diet. How did it happen for me? Well, I had the good fortune to grow up in a vegetarian family: my parents were disciples of a vegetarian guru, Paul Brunton. Even when I gave up the belief in the Hinduism and Buddhism that he taught, I still maintained my belief in the value of ahimsa, not doing harm, which included not doing harm through ones diet. Later, at Toronto, I had a negative epiphany: what was I doing teaching this language that had lost its magic for me? I entered psychoanalytic training. Alas, giving up Sanskrit somehow entailed giving up my vegetarian ways. One day, after becoming a Freudian psychoanalyst, I had another transformative moment: I was sitting at Freuds desk at Maresfield Gardens in London. I opened one of the drawers, and found a stash of letters, all of which dealt with the hidden reality of the sexual abuse of children. That was to become my concern (some would call it an obsession) over the next ten years. Only when I decided that I could no longer be a psychoanalyst in good conscience did I reconnect with my former vegetarian self: I started investigating the emotional lives of animals, and what I learned turned me back into a lifelong vegetarian.

During that time, I can remember hearing Csar Chvez say that if you want to lessen animal suffering, you would do better to eat meat and give up dairy and eggs. Again, one of those defining moments for me. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly challenged, but I also knew that I was not yet ready for such a challenge. I turned my back on that moment. Yet I understood even then that sooner or later I would have to face up to what I could no longer ignore.

That moment came for me when I began to visit dairy farms and hen-laying facilities and saw the misery and suffering that the animals endured just so that we could enjoy their milk and eggs. My denial was no longer possible, and I took the leap. I have asked some other vegans how it happened for them, and got some interesting answers. John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, told me: I remember one day in August of 2003 I made the decision to become (near) vegan and that once the decision was made I felt great emotional alignment within my heart. I knew this was the right thing for me to do and I also knew that I was making a decision that I would be committed to for the rest of my life. At last my beliefs and my ethics had come into alignment. Stanley Godlovitch, one of the people who began the back-to-vegetarianism movement in the 1970s (he and a friend first confronted Peter Singer, then a graduate student in philosophy at Oxford and now the best known animal rights author, about eating meat), told me recently that every vegetarian who drinks milk or eats eggs knows from scratch that theres something not quite right. But for him and his wife, the push came from our teenage son Daniel, who brought out the ancient Consistency Cannon over dinner and fired at will. I guess I must have been poised, ready, and that was it.