My first exposure to vegetarian eating came from being raised in Millerite Christian traditions. In particular, it was from early years spent in the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) schools my mother put me in. SDAs stress that one should treat one’s body as a temple of God.
My mother had been raised in a related tradition known as the Church of God, Seventh-Day, which was markedly more conservative owing to their rejection of women leadership (whereas SDAs looked to their woman prophet, Ellen G. White, for inspiration). In my mother’s tradition, Kosher-like rules were kept to,
such as refraint from eating bleeding or pink meat, refraint from eating pork and shellfish, and other such dietary constraints (though we did regularly combine our meats and milks!). So I was raised with dietary restrictions from the very beginning.
But when I went to SDA school the school lunches were vegetarian and many of my friends were vegetarians. When I would spend the day or overnight at their homes, I would eat their food, which included things such as vegetarian hotdogs and ham, as well as the famed SDA “haystacks,” and I enjoyed them quite a bit!
I absolutely loved animals, being an avid reader of Zoobooks, and it had always bothered me that I was eating animals. My father told me that if I ate like a vegetarian I would not grow up to be big and strong like Uncle Fritz, the lumberjack, but knowing that vegetarianism was a viable diet, and that my friend Chris, who was always just a step ahead of me athletically, was a vegetarian, had always left me curious. I had, after all, always cared deeply for animals. But my father was not supportive and I did not have a say in what was stocked in the kitchen at this time.
As I got older, however, around my teen years, I got interested in music. In particular, political punk rock bands became my fancy, such as Pennywise, Propagandhi, The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Refused, Strike Anywhere, Crass, Aus Rotten, and the list goes on. After reading more into some of their
ideas, I started taking toward an anarchist worldview, and especially a mutualist one, that of someone who believes in cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual aid. This is something that would solidify later and then stick with me to the present moment.
I stopped being so superstitious, and asked my mother to put me in public school, but some of the lessons and values from my time around SDAs stuck with me and even contributed to my new secular development. I ended up dropping out of public highschool to pursue my own self-education, a pursuit of
which I am very proud and for which I am a very accomplished autodidact.
Mutualist thinking is based upon rejection of domination in favor of mutuality, cooperation, and reciprocity. Some take this anarchic sentiment further than the bounds of human society, and apply it to animals or ecology more generally. In particular, the anarchist band Propagandhi stressed the values of veganism,
and this, along with what I was reading, had started to appeal to me, and to remind me of my exposure to...
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Feel free to respectfully comment, whether in favor or against. But be prepared to defend your view!
Read More!
You can find more like this on my real blog, Ambiarchy Blog, where I cover topics such as:
- Pantheism: The Belief that Nature is God
- Mutualism: The Belief in Anarchy and Cooperation
- Antapodism: The Belief in Friendship Between Humanity and Nature
... as well as other topics related to natural philosophy, natural theology, science, and history, including but not limited to:
- Witnessing Shell Theory: An Alternative Natural Cosmology
- Henogenic Volution Out-of-Everywhere: An Alternative Approach to Evolution
- Ambiarchy: An Alternative to Neo-Anarchism
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