On Intuitive Eating | Pt. 2 - Respectfully Eat What You Like

I know it sounds bland and rather numb to say so but in a way it's perfectly true.

Ever since uncovering the best arguments by plant-based eaters I felt less and less of a need to eat animals and found I gravitated towards a more plant-based diet naturally and without any issues at all. Wasn't long ago when my supermarket shopping cart was exclusively filled with frozen pizzas and packages of peperoni sausage to tune them up and that has completely changed over the years to the point that I rarely ever eat packaged meats in any form these days. But that is the point: I don't until I really feel I want to.

There are days for example where I outright crave a can of tuna. Simple can of tuna. Industry grade. Now, great arguments have been made by vegans and vegetarians to never ever eat tuna because it allegedly accumulates many toxic chemicals and heavy metals over the span of its life. Tuna fishing is said to create all sorts of ecological problems like decimation of natural fish reservoirs as well as an increase in waste-overproduction, and some have made a good case that most tuna might actually be radioactive, citing the Fukushima incident and related ecological disasters like oil spills. Most of us would think: YUK!

But when I took the liberty of researching those things more deeply I found some rather interesting arguments countering those narratives, points that most vegans of strong conviction had never heard or mentioned before let alone most 'educated people' in our societies. So I had enough logical merit in being neutral over this from a health-related perspective and still wanted to enjoy my tuna now and then, much like some deer when the opportunity presented itself...

What ultimately helped me move away from eating meat regularly was the simple fact that it didn't taste good to me anymore.

I took the liberty of experiencing a piece of meat without the seasoning and without sauce of any kind, and I was rather shocked how little taste it actually had. It literally tasted like nothing. Had I always just dug the additional flavors to tasteless animal matter?

Lately I have found this experience to be increasing in frequency, even when I eat some allegedly high grade meat in a restaurant or the like - there is less and less point to have it be meat at all because it just doesn't tickle my taste buds. It's convenient but simply not so resonant as it used to be when I was younger.

It's not that the good moral arguments against eating animals didn't count for me, it's just that I never took them so overly serious - which probably had to do with my basic philosophy of what life on Earth is and how we are all faces of the same basic energy of the universe, temporarily swapping roles to experience... eating one another. Not to reduce it to that but in a way it seemed counterproductive to deny it and instead I chose to praise and thank the animal on my plate before eating it, while at the same time finding that I really really didn't need that much meat in my life any more because it just didn't taste like anything.

No point in killing an animal and seasoning it when I could just season a carot or an unhatched chicken, if seen from a purely pragmatic (non-moral) perspective.

Specificity-craze!

More and more I found that sometimes I simply feel like eating a specific thing. For instance there are days when I would do (almost) anything for an apple, or a bag of apples, and there are days when apples seem like the worst idea ever. And on those days they taste like the worst too, I've tried it.

Sometimes I get a pasta craze where I feel I "must" eat pasta for a week and then it subsides so heavily that you can chase me with it and I would rather not eat than eat one more dish of spaghetti. Same with french fries, rice, all sorts of veggies in general.

Same with deep-fried foods, same with fast food, same with salad week - I try to feel what I am craving and then go for it. and guess what - it works beautifully... until it doesn't and then I find out what I am feeling now.

I have since started to meet more "intuitive eaters" as I call them and we agree that this somehow is how we are supposed to live. The difference is we don't go around forcing other people to convert to our way of living and nutrition but rather: Are excited to stumble upon the specialties of any of the nutritional hardliner camps, who did their utmost to dream up amazing new or forgotten dishes in line with their nutritional strategy.

In a way intuitive eaters get to experience the best of all worlds why still being able to live our nutrtitional emphasis in line with our beliefs. I naturally find I rarely ever want to eat meat and when I do I never feel bad about it nor do I cry how evil it all is to kill animals, knowing full well how malignant the industry behind it has become.

At the same time I never want to fall into the materialist illusion that killing animals is bad and killing plants is totally fine. Plants live, they grow, they react and respond.

They react to their surroundings like an animal does only in a different way, a way that somehow implies killability to strong-willed vegans. I don't believe that at all.

Rather I do my best to always respect my food, to take a moment before eating it to be thankful, to close my eyes and send it my gratitude and to hold the strong faith that this food will be the best food for me currently, which is precisely the reason why I want to eat it now in the first place. Intuition calls for it so why argue with it.

I feel this intuitive and... respectful strategy of eating is reminiscent of animals in the forest rejecting certain kinds of human foods in experiments while always knowing what they can and will eat without anyone having to tell them or teach them. Some may call it instinct, others may say their parents have shown them but I find that if my intuition rejects food I really shouldn't be eating it.

And the more I go with this nutritional strategy the more I find that I already reject foods on a supermarket shelf long before I would ever have them on my plate. Foods that next week I may totally crave and ultimately want to grow myself in the future just to have their best version available when intuition calls for them.

Read up on other parts of this series:
#1 - A Short History Of Contemporary, Nutritional Confusion

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