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ARTICLES INVENTIVENESS FOR A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE Author John McCabe on how to be part of the solution. I’d just finished reading John McCabe’s book, Sunfood Living, and it read like such a labour of love I decided to talk to its author. John lives in California and it’s the day after Thanksgiving when I get him on the phone. He tells me he spent it picnicking in the park with 400 other vegans. Sun shining, no turkeys dying – what a beautiful dream. So we end up speaking for half an hour and I go away and transcribe it all. But I’m bothered by something about the interview. The next day there’s a long email from John, going into much more depth than could ever be achieved in a short phone conversation. And I realise it’s my questions that were bothering me, leading him down negative paths that aren’t in his nature. John McCabe sees goodness and hope all around him. He supplies answers where I was offering complaints. So we’ve printed his story instead of the interview. We hope it inspires and encourages readers to make important changes in their lives. Over to John. – Sienna Blake, editor FOR SOME REASON I was terrible at learning how to read as a child and I was considered to be a stupid kid. When I was about 13 and I finally figured out how to read, I began to read encyclopaedias and every newspaper I could find. Maybe that reading experience formed my brain into writing the way I do with a zillion topics always under consideration. I grew up in Iowa in the Midwest, the youngest of six brothers and two sisters. While my mother didn’t seem to care about a lot of things, she did care about the environment and had an awareness of the impact humans were having on the planet. By the 1960s she was recycling everything, including newspapers, cans and so forth. She put food scraps in a compost pile that I used in my garden. I heard her say how the fields and meadows she knew as a child had been destroyed by the creation of roads, stores, office buildings, factories and houses. I had my own understanding of this at a young age when the local hill where we went sled riding in the snow was taken over by a company that put a fence around it and put up a big pole topped by an advertising billboard. It ruined the hillside meadow and turned it into a cement- and gravel-covered mess where trash collected. I grew up in one of those disastrous households where it is a good thing to stay outside as much as possible. Alcoholism, money problems and mental illness saturated the house. The only touch, and many of the words spoken in the house, had to do with anger, frustration, regret and other unpleasantness. Understandably, I didn’t like being there. The goal of every day was to avoid being assaulted. That said, I don’t want to place blame. I consider forgiveness to be an essential nutrient for our spirit and health. I hung out with the neighbourhood kids playing baseball and other games, or by myself climbing trees, bike riding, swimming in a nearby river and interacting with the local wild environment. I kept a vegetable garden in the backyard. I also liked to sketch and would often make drawings of the plants, insects, birds and bugs. I started sleeping outside in the summer because I felt comfortable there and I liked to look at the stars. Sometimes I would sleep on the grass or up in a nearby tree fort, but if it was raining there was an abandoned car or the porch, or a neighbour’s porch, to sleep on. In the daytime I knew where the wild fruit trees grew in the nearby field and woods, and what time of the summer and early fall each tree would be filled with ripe fruit. My favourites were apples, cherries, pears and plums. I knew where there were wild strawberries, boysenberries, mulberries, blackberries and grapes. There were also wild tomato plants and squash. All of that, as well as the food that I grew in my own vegetable garden starting when I was very young, was what I spent a lot of the summer eating. In the warmer months various people would camp in the nearby woods. Sometimes it would be railroad hobos and alcoholics who stayed beneath the bridge. Sometimes there would be young men on their way to Canada to escape the Vietnam draft. Maybe some of the people were running from the law, or from other life situations. In the summer of 1969 there were hippies camping out for weeks on their way to Woodstock. They came back through on their way home, bringing more hippies with them. These are the people I hung out with as a small child. These were my friends. I was a local tour guide showing them where to find the wild fruits, berries and vegetables. As I grew up, I became aware that when I was eating lots of raw fruit and vegetables in the summer I felt amazing. But in the winter when I went back to eating cooked food and not much fresh food I wouldn’t feel as good, my skin and hair changed and I would get sick. I was more into food than other kids. By the time I was seven I could make dinner for a family of 10. By doing this I became aware of the ingredients of foods. When I was 10 I was walking home from school in early spring. The snow was melting and there was ice along the kerb and in the street and I was stomping on it. Suddenly I realised that the water was turning pink and as I walked along it got more and more pink. Then I saw a little stream of red coming down a driveway and I saw blood coming from a deer hanging from a backyard tree. The head was almost hanging off the body. It was the first time I had seen something that gory, and I realised where meat really came from. After that my concern about food ingredients became more pronounced. I didn’t want to eat meat any more. I became aware of what was in hot dogs and processed “lunch meats”. I knew at a young age that all of the leftover salvageable pieces of the slaughtered animals were being thrown into big vats and ground up into what would become “hot dogs” and “deli slices”. I saw how meats were happily advertised on TV and on the radio and in the newspapers, and I saw it as a big lie. Every once in a while I would eat some meat, but it always felt wrong. The longer I stayed away from it the more it seemed to be a strange thing. Sometimes I ate fish and chicken. One of my friends tried to get me into fishing, which I did a few times in the local river and in a pond on a friend’s farm. I was pretty much disgusted by it all. During the times when I made food for the family, which I usually did when the depression being experienced in the house was at its peak, I would make a separate batch of food for myself without meat. Interestingly, nobody in that house ever said anything negative about me abstaining from meat. When my mother made pasta sauce she also made some without meat. She eventually became a vegetarian, as have some other people in the family. Sometimes I would go to the grocery store and read the ingredient labels of the various foods on the shelves. As I mentioned, I didn’t read very well when I was young, but I understood recipe books because they were mostly lists of common ingredients in different combinations. I wanted to learn how to make things from scratch. I came up with my own recipes. Whatever I made, including the mistakes, would get consumed by my brothers and sisters. They seemed capable of eating anything and everything in the kitchen. I was in a family where there simply was no money to be had. I began working at an early age, which I liked. I cut lawns, dug and planted gardens, raked leaves, shovelled snow and had a paper route. For a little while I worked at a meat and egg stand at a Saturday farmers’ market. I couldn’t stand the smell of the meat, and I never liked eggs. The whole experience of working there seemed surreal. Then I worked at a fast food restaurant. A few times I ate that food, but it seemed like a foreign substance, and not like food. To put it mildly, my stomach didn’t like that stuff. Then I worked in factories to save up the money to move away so I could go to school and start living the life I wanted. Off and on I would go back to eating only raw fruits and vegetables. I had no idea that other people were doing this raw food thing, or that there was even a name for it. It wasn’t until I met David Wolfe 10 years ago that I became aware that there was a whole movement happening with raw foodists. I had already become vegan. That meeting triggered me to dive into raw food culture. Read the rest of this story in the March-May issue of Vegan Voice, due out in the last week of February and available in selected outlets and by subscription. |
TO THE MAX Our popular columnist finally gets his head on the website. |
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Humans wiped out? It can't come fast enough for our columnist.
You might think I’m a DVD addict but it’s
a label I must endure for this column. This from a film called 50
Pills: There’s a new movie out called Saints and Angels (this from www.flickdirect.com): “The film is a compelling fictional account of an Animal Liberation cell that has been organised for one evening in order to free animals from the daily tortures of experimentation and other forms of cruelty. Actual interviews and animal liberation footage make this a great introduction to the ALF and the entire movement in general. “Labelled as the ‘#1 domestic terrorist threat’ by the FBI – and freedom fighters by the animal rights community – the Animal Liberation Front’s aim is to free as many animals as possible from places of abuse. Animal rights activist and filmmaker M. Scott Cardinal takes a look at the methods used by a clandestine ALF cell in the USA to carry out anonymous raids on university laboratories, factory farms and puppy mills in order to place animals in safe homes where they can live free from suffering. “‘I wanted to make a film that showed animal rights activists as the non-violent action heroes that they truly are,’ said Cardinal, the film’s producer, director and editor. ‘Just because they wear army fatigues and ski masks doesn't mean they’re not the good guys.’” A gem from Radio Iowa: Iowa Farm Bureau president Craig Lang blasted animal rights advocates in his opening remarks before the organisation’s county delegates. Lang claims groups like the US Humane Society tout an agenda to the public that they are simply trying to protect animals. “But the truth of it is, they have another agenda,” Lang says, “and sometimes that agenda is hidden. It might be vegetarianism or total elimination of livestock and agriculture, that’s what scares us the most.” Lang says that modern agriculture cares for animals and protects the environment. “We utilise new technology from research facilities at public institutions which captures those things that threaten the water and soil,” Lang says. “We balance the nutrients from the livestock industry today in a way that is positive for the return of more crops that create renewable energy and higher quality food products for people around the world. That’s the facts of modern agriculture.” So there, you silly, misguided vegans. Propping them up: The US has formerly notified the World Trade Organisation in Geneva that it paid an average of $US16 billion a year in subsidies to its farmers between 2002 and 2005, peaking at just under $US19 billion last year. The horror that is foie gras: “We used to serve it, but now it’s too controversial.” So says one Montreal restaurant owner, while Canada’s second-largest foie gras producer insists the 80,000 to 100,000 ducks he raises each year to make the stuff are not abused, despite a damning new video made by an animal rights advocate posing as an employee. “I find those images offensive,” he said about the video showing ducks on his farm being beaten and tortured. A lonely baboon in a private zoo has adopted a chicken he saved from certain death, and the two are now great friends. The chicken was meant as food for other animals in the zoo in Lithuania, but she escaped and was sheltered by Mitis, a six-year-old baboon. Mitis plays with the chicken, cleans her feathers, sleeps with her and takes care of her as if she was his own baby. I picked up an American hitchhiker the other day and we bonded over a Velvet Underground CD and some chat about organic food. He said he’d been sitting outside a Lismore health food store when three very chubby girls walked by. One said, “Ooh, let’s go in there – their pies are really good.” One of her friends quickly said, “No – organic food sucks.” This he related in an American drawl, which somehow added to its rich vein of postmodernism. Quotes of the quarter: Heard on commercial evening news in October, after the shooting of six people in the American town of Crandon: “Crandon is usually known for hunting, logging and fishing, but tonight it’s in the news for all the wrong reasons.” From Jenny O’Dea, associate professor of nutrition and health education, University of Sydney: “Fatness is here to stay. I don’t think we’re going to slim down. But children need to be fit, not smoke, and within cultural restraints do more activity. We’ll have a healthier, albeit bigger population.”. TO
THE MAX appears in every issue of Vegan
Voice, available in selected outlets and by subscription.
This
extract is from our December 2007–February 2008 issue. |