On Not Consuming Animals Or Viewing Them As Exploitable

Article Table of Contents

• the eating patterns before
• and I ‘went vegan’.
• Its about the animals, not health
• bio-chemistry of whatever that ‘keto’ thing is
• Ketosis has nothing to do with eating animal products or protein
• The pieces that shifted
• Coffee: heavy cream plant based alternative
• My other main meal was already ‘vegan’
• Interesting observations as the shift happened
• Baking without eggs & butter
• What about nutrients or amino acids or protein?
• sidebar on collagen/fascia
• Supplements
• Soy propaganda
• Intermittent fasting
• Food can be tasty or bland, easy or hard. Exploitation is optional.
• human animals deserve at least as much consideration as animal-animals
• exploitation of animals seems inevitable from people like this
• Additional Reading

This is such a draft, but I wanted to get it written so I could point to this big compendium of things related to “now I eat/consume plants and not animals”, or “i went vegan recently, here’s some observations”.

I ‘went vegan’ a few months ago, as of when I began drafting this document, collecting notes and thoughts. That was approximately May/June 2026. I wish I’d made the shift a decade earlier. I’ve got some thoughts, and in my standard write it now preference, I’m jotting thoughts as I go.

I’ve been one of todays 10,000 plenty of times over the last few months, and it’s nice to sometimes document the unfolding, breadcrumb style or whatever.

So, a few weeks ago June 2026, something shifted in my brain emotionally and intellectually about consuming animal products, and more things kept shifting since then.

the eating patterns before #

I grew up deep inside of the culture of carnism. Grew up in a house where the flesh of dead young animals was a part of every meal.

In 2017, i read the book Eating Animals, and stopped eating meat, almost, and almost all milk products. I still ate eggs (lots of eggs), heavy cream for coffee, sometimes used butter for baking, and various other “animal products”.

I have always liked to eat plants and have had a mushroom/broccoli/lots more veggies in my egg omelette most days. I didn’t like the thought of exploiting animals, and I had a story in my mind that eggs were essential in some way to my nutrition, even as I stopped eating meat.

the way some people feel about meat being an essential food component is probably how I felt about eggs being essential. I knew they were not technically essential, but my cooking and nutrition showed that in my actions, I found chicken periods essential to my food consumption.

I always had a sense of wanting to eat less of animals. some days I’d eat no eggs, but by spending money on eggs, I was obviously calling into existence the exploitation of those animals. If I’m paying for something, I’m supporting it.

I never liked that I was contributing to, calling into existence by spending money on, factory farming for cows to drink their milk, and factory farming for chickens and their periods, and the fish for their flesh. Even though I thought it was possible in theory to get milk relatively ethically from a theoretical farmed cow, and a theoretical farmed chicken, I knew that what I was getting was the standard factory farmed/CAFO(concentrated agricultural feeding operation) animal or ‘animal product’.

and then something changed.

a three-ingredient plant-based egg replacement/upgrade #

I remembered reading something that said, casually, off-hand, something about an ‘egg substitute’ that jumped out at me:

mix the following:

1. plant milk
2. plant yogurt
3. chickpea flour
4. nutritional yeast
5. spices

mix it up and swap it in for anything an egg is called for.

🤯

on my next grocery shopping trip i got some soy milk & soy yogurt & chickpea flour at the grocery store (and some nutritional yeast).

I tried it out, and it was perfect. Amazing. The taste, texture. After the very first ‘attempt’ at this new version of my standard, daily meal, I kept trying it again and again.

I noticed as each day passed and I had not taken another egg out of the pile of egg cartons in my fridge. Then the first grocery trip happened, and I noticed with satisfaction that I had no need in getting more eggs - I hadn’t eaten any more of the ones already in my fridge. The eggs continued to go untouched. I noticed that I liked not eating the animal products - I also began experimenting with alternatives to cow-based heavy cream for my coffee. Turns out there are many great options.

and I ‘went vegan’. #

I noticed, sorta watched it happen after-the-fact, as I eliminated animal products from my consumption, and then kept on going and now wish I’d arrived here a decade ago. I wish I’d not eaten those thousands of eggs, or drank those kilos of heavy cream, representing quite a lot of participation in the dairy and chicken industries. the “dairy industry” is really the beef industry, so even in eating a milk product, I was participating in the meat industry, of course.

And the exploitation of the mother’s capacity to reproduce, but then stealing away the kid (and executing it or growing it up into another cow to make more milk)

sidebar: due to a shitty situation with a past partner and a kid involved, I became aware of how miserable it is to feel like ones kid is being taken from you, and is being mistreated by the people who took it. I cried watching the videos of mother cows chasing after their kids, as the kids are being taken by the humans doing the exploiting.

male baby cows are usually killed shortly after they are born. baby cows that can reproduce are raped (artificially inseminated) as soon as they’re old enough to reproduce, and when they have a baby cow, it’s taken from them, and they have their milk taken from them until it eventually stops, then it all starts over again (rape, stealing the kid, then stealing the milk) and repeats until the milk stops permanently, at which point the mother cow is killed.

Its about the animals, not health #

I am no longer participating in animal exploitation for the animals. the thought crossed my mind where even if I had to feel marginally less healthy or found avoiding animal products to be inconvenient in any way, I didn’t care. An animal’s entire existance being torture and hell would never be fair, for a momentary taste of what? milk? butter? an egg?

the switch was very easy. I’ve added chickpeas/garbanzo beans to my diet, and the full lineup of soy products. (soy milk, soy yogurt, tofu, tempeh, soy-based “meat alternatives”). I love soy.

Soybean yogurt has the same grams of fat per serving as cow milk yogurt, but I don’t know that anyone has tried to make a yogurt out of any other bean. Cashews and almonds (both are high fat) also get turned into milks and yogurts. I’ve always loved cashews and almonds, so I’m happy to eat more of those kinds of things, in the form of soy milk, soy yogurt, tofu, and any other kind of plant yogurt/milk.

bio-chemistry of whatever that ‘keto’ thing is #

I’ve long been interested in whatever the heck is happening inside the body when this thing called ‘ketosis’ is happening. My lay understanding is:

‘ketosis’ is a name given to a process in the body where the liver ‘decides’ to manufacture a collection of molecules that function similarly enough to glucose. the liver puts those molecules into the bloodstream, and eventually mitocondria pick them up and metabolize them for ATP. There’s

I could write like two blog posts that fully encapsulates the several things I’ve picked up about the conditions that give rise to those molecules some people call ‘ketone bodies’, or the ways the body makes them and uses them.

The three molecules associated with ‘ketosis’ are acetoacetate (whatever that is), acetone (yeah, like in nail polish and spray paint and stuff), and something called ‘beta-hydroxybuturate’. ¹

These three molecules that can be measured, in three different ways, and I don’t know the relationship directly between all three. one is measured via blood serum testing, like blood glucose measured by diabetics, another is measured via urine sampling, and the last is measured via breath meter. this needs to be it’s own blog post. basically. all of them can range in levels of low to high, and one’s ‘level of ketosis’ is sorta inferred from that value.

Those ketone-body molecules are made from fat molecules, which then get used inside of mitochondria to make ATP, supposedly in very efficient ways (krebs cycle results in ~330 molecules of atp being created, instead of the normal 33?). Like, one sort of fuel that you would use in a stove vs a different one. A stove burner fuel vs a welding torch fuel, perhaps.

the ‘krebs cycle’ or ‘citric acid cycle’ wikipedia, ‘krebs cycle’ is a name for the cellular energy/cellular respiration cycle. A bunch of biochemistry that talks about how something like glucose turns into ‘energy’. supposedly one glucose molecule makes 33 ATP molecules, a ‘chain’ of a fat molecule can go through the cycle like 7 times, one molecule being spent per cycle, and thus makes like 330 ATP molecules? I think it’s interesting. youtube: ‘ATP Yield in Fatty Acid Oxidation’

Ketosis has nothing to do with eating animal products or protein #

Something I dislike in some keto spaces (like the keto subreddit) is the odd obsession with meat. (the vegan keto subreddit is relatively less busy) It sorta seems to self-describe as a ‘fat and protein heavy nutritional pattern’ but the animal protein piece doesn’t need to exist. If more protein (aka, some collection of amino acids) is wanted, augment with a scoop of plant protein, or tofu or lentils or any of the other dozens of sources of those amino acids.

But I never saw dead animals as a necessary part of ketosis. Partially because of my thinking, but also obviously informed by my many years of eating like this, and relatively fine health.

I’ve never had unwanted weight on my body, always been able to move around, climb, bike, walk, run around after a frisbee, etc.

Sooo I’ve been low carb, no-meat for a while now, and just flipped to vegan and low carb, and while the changes had nothing to do with how I thought my body would handle it, I now notice these dietary patterns feeling very nice inside my body.

My explorations of ketosis deserves it’s own post, I’ll write that soon. I’ve written about it before. Mostly inside of these two pieces on continuous glucose monitors: cgm part 1, cgm part 2.

The pieces that shifted #

I’d not watched intensely many factory farming documentaries before, maybe a part of me didn’t feel ready or willing to engage with the implications. I remember three things landing at the same time. Something about the ‘byproduct’ of factory farmed eggs, something about what happens to cows who can make milk.

Consider watching dominion if you are friendly to the idea of no longer exploiting animals.

for egg laying chickens, when the baby chickens are hatching, within hours of hatching, all non-future-egg-laying baby chickens are immediately ‘thrown away’ via being ground up or drowned in CO2 baths. (aka, the male chickens are tossed into a grinder, or put in racks and drowned in gasses). as a casual byproduct of hatching chickens, looking for chickens that can lay more eggs. Of course it is this way. Being a chicken capable of laying eggs ensures one lives a longer, and equally horrible life.

The other piece - cows, mother cows, have horrifying experiences repeatedly to be made to have babies, and then having those babies immediately taken from them. then the milk intended for that baby is taken, and a few horrible experiences continue until the animal is ‘worn out’ and killed at the same slaughterhouses that kill all the rest of the cows killed for meat consumption. More could be said about the thoughts flowing around my head. I watched some of the documentaries about animal exploitation, and noticed how freeing it was to easily drop all animal products from my life.

I’ve usually felt a bit grossed out by the thought of eating meat. Fish was exempted, but the primary animal meats, like cows, pigs, and chickens, don’t particularly appeal to me and its hard for me to even remember times that I did like meat. Obviously, to meat eaters, who like the taste of meat, they also find plants to be delicious, and if meat is embedded throughout plants, the taste profile can be delicious, but at that point I’m inclined to point out that some of/ much of what’s delicious there is the plants.

Coffee: heavy cream plant based alternative #

I drink coffee, and often would add a few grams of heavy cream, for taste.

I don’t vibe with that anymore.

I spent a while sampling alternatives, testing different things, I’ve so far settled on coconut cream. I pour a can of coconut cream into an ice cube tray, and add a small amount to my coffee. Coconut cream works better than coconut oil (tried that), and plant based creamers are either way too sweet, or taste like almonds (I like almonds, but not almond milk in my coffee), or are oat milk based.

update: coconut cream powerder is really good! it stirs into the coffee better. Also, any plant-based half-and-half. The one I’m currently using just mixes oat milk and coconut cream and it’s delicious, and it means I’m no longer directly exploiting the cow torture industry.

My other main meal was already ‘vegan’ #

My second most commonly consumed home-cooked meal is sorta like an indian dal, and I’ve made that without any animal products for many years now. Since the egg alternative ‘fixes’ my most commonly cooked meal, and my second most commonly eating meal was already free of animal products, and my coffee was free of animal products, I noticed I was feeling a growing sense of internal consistency towards animals. I don’t know which developed first, though.

over the next few weeks, I watched a few more of the standard ‘vegan documentaries’ and noticed even more of my distaste towards animal products/exploitation growing.

Interesting observations as the shift happened #

I noticed when I first decided to get rid of the eggs, after they’d been sitting untouched in my fridge for weeks. It felt odd and quite nice, the first few times I went grocery shopping and kept not purchasing eggs or any animal products. Especially because I was loving the taste of everything else I was eating.

So, I got rid of all the eggs but a few, in case I was going to bake a banana bread or something. (recipe calls for an egg, and I’m not so extreme that I wouldn’t use an egg while baking, right? right?).

Another few weeks later I tossed the rest of the eggs, and the butter. Now I would rather have a ‘deficient’ baked product, one that doesn’t rely on any form of animal product, than change my stance on exploitation because of a preference.

I don’t know why it took so long for me to make this shift, I’m 37, I wish I’d done this any time earlier than I did. I think i’m embarrassed that this thing was in such plain sight for so long, but I sorta hid behind not eating meat, even though everything else I ate contributed to the exact same systems in the exact same way as eating meat would have.

Baking without eggs & butter #

My main baked products are sourdough bread and banana bread. Sourdough is just flour & water, of course, but banana bread wants eggs and butter, and lots of other baked goods do too. I’ve already described my egg substitute, I use that in baking as well, but I’ve not yet ‘sorted’ a butter replacement in the same way. It’s experimental, and sometimes the resulting loafs have a bit different texture than a ‘standard’ banana bread. I have enjoyed every single one.

update: I’ve found a great substitute: if a recipe needs an egg & butter (lets say combined weight of butter/egg would be 130 grams) I take 130 grams of silken tofu, pulse it with an immersion blender, and then use it in the recipe. It works perfectly. I’ll throw a little coconut oil or peanut butter to up the fat content, too.

Changes in texture or whatever isn’t a big issue. Guess what? It’s going just fine. my first experiment was ‘vegan’ banana bread, and it was excellent. Even if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t be inclined to make it with butter or eggs.

I’d rather not associate with those industries, yeah? Paying someone to do all that to so many others?

What about nutrients or amino acids or protein? #

aka “but what about {some health concern}?”

The animals experience nothing but endless difficulty, misery, sadness, and torture. it seems odd to not only demand that for them but to then put the stressed, sad, dead animal into one’s mouth and eat it. And chicken periods. I did the math recently on how many chickens have I functionally forced into existence and continuous bad existence. yikes.

I’ve been “low-protein” for a decade and been just fine. I occasionally track my eating patterns out of curiosity and I have never eaten anywhere close to the amount of protein that some sources recommend.

and you are right to care about health. Lets talk about 🍄 mushrooms #

I have drafted a part 2 of this post, sorta an update from another year or so: On Foraging Mushrooms at Cheesman Park

I’ve long considered mushrooms to be a special part of my nutrition. I have eaten mushrooms with most meals for years, always getting a container of mushrooms from a grocery store, having mushrooms on hand for cooking. then I started foraging from a local park, in abundance.

Then I saw a cool documentary about mushrooms, and felt all the more fond of them. Then I read a paper about how the kind of mushroom I eat (agaricus bisporus, 70% of farmed mushrooms are agaricus bisporus) are a ‘complete protein’, which means that they have some certain molecules called ‘amino acids’, some of which animal bodies (or at least human animal bodies) cannot make from scratch, so they need to be obtained from outside sources.

I didn’t really know what ‘protein’ was, anyway. Supposedly ‘protein’ is a name for all of or any of like 21 amino acids. Glutamate, quite present in muscle, is a protein, ‘collagen’ is a collection of three molecules, all of them are considered ‘proteins’ . Anyway, here’s two relevant starting points for proteins and mushrooms:

1. Nutritional and amino acid content of stem and cap of Agaricus bisporus, Bulgaria (PDF)
2. Composition and Biological Properties of Agaricus bisporus Fruiting Bodies – a Review (PDF)

sidebar on collagen/fascia #

maybe two years ago I started paying attention to my own tendon health.

Barefoot sprints, isometric bar holds.

Worked great. I kept hearing about collagen supplementation and thought about it as far as skin goes, but not as far as tendon health and such. I never did/still don’t do any sort of collagen supplementation - my primary action is to give myself high quality stimulus, so the body adapts and remodels itself. Heavy isometric barbell holds or plyometric barbell holds, or single/double leg jumping, counts as the quality stimulus.

I can tell my joints and connective tissue is slowly getting stronger. I’m not rushing anything, supposedly it takes 6-9 months for the college to remodel itself, and I think I’ve got like three rounds of remodeling to do before I’m able to jump how I want. (I’m 1.5 rounds of remodeling in, I’m way stronger than I was two years ago, and I feel like I’m still in newbie gains territory)

amino acids support collagen production, too. supposedly, almost 20% of a human animal’s weight is collagen, in the form of fascia. Every muscle fiber is wrapped in fascia. It’s super interesting stuff, deserves its own blog post at some point. I got from the library Fascia - What is it and why it matters

Supplements #

Plant protein powder is as good as (or better) than animal protein powder. It also fully counts as a ‘collagen supplement’, because collagen is a protein, made out of amino acids. collagen is made up of three amino acids, so any pattern that includes complete proteins will have you/me covered on collagen. Or, again, one can get a plant protein powder. I use this stuff occasionally, and rarely eat more than a quarter serving at a time.

So, eat mushrooms, for protein, or any of th regular sources of protein like chickpeas, any soy product like tofu, tempeh, soy milk/yogurt, etc. And then augment with a plant protein powder if you think it necessary.

Vitamin D supplementation is reasonable. If you’re a person who deals with exercise at elevation, or regularly menstruates, maybe add an iron supplement like this.

cooking occasionally or making tea with an iron fish taking some vitamin d might be helpful for me too. I do these things but I did them before I stopped eating animal products, too.

Fermented foods could be considered supplements. Supposedly fermented food goes GREAT in the digestive tract (kimchi, kombucha, sourkraut, etc etc). Lots of the neurotransmitters that are used in the body are made as metabolic byproducts of gut bacteria eating fiber-rich foods. So, I consider fermented food to be essential. I eat kimchi nearly daily. I’ll eat it raw, or mix it into whatever meal I’m cooking.

if you have any slight health complaint, a reasonable first intervention might be eliminating meat and dairy from your consumption. Considering how sad and tortured the animals are, even if I think meat overall isn’t unhealthy for a human animal to eat, nor eggs, I’d say the byproduct of those particular animals is probably quite unhealthy.

I notice the propaganda of ‘eat meat to grow muscle’ is everywhere. I associate ‘growing muscle’ with sorta supremacist beauty ideals, so it’s never motivated me.

However, i’d not considered that the most muscle-bound, strong animals we can think of are entirely plant fed. So maybe if one really, really does want to grow huge muscles, they should eat more like the big strong animals? Gorillas, hippos? none of them eat meat like any american eats meat. Those animals eat meat like vegans eat meat. Yet are huge.

Soy propaganda #

I noticed that even though this year of 2026, I was still affected by what I’ll call “anti-soy propaganda.” (I grew up around people who made fun of people who didn’t eat meat, or who did eat soy, and while I recognize that nearly everything I heard growing up is bullshit, i’m still finding bits and pieces of it that I wasn’t yet conscious of)

For instance, I’d often-enough eat tofu at a restaurant, but I wasn’t cooking with it all the time. now I have sometimes a block a day, and cook with it all the time.

Soybean oil can be made not so different than peanut butter is made (grinding and squeezing) and olive oil is made (grinding and squeezing). Soy has all sorts of molecules in it. Plants make all sorts of molecules. Plants are so cool. I quite liked this books: The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. Go eat you some plants and get these cool molecules directly!

Soybeans turns into tofu, tempeh, soy milk, soy sauce, soy yogurt, soybean oil, miso, and more. No animal torture required. I noticed when I used to think poorly of it, because of the ‘estrogen’ thing. I’d not spent even 30 seconds looking it up more. my slight opposition (I was never opposed to tofu, I would always eat tofu at restaurants if a dish wanted a meat, but I didn’t make tofu a big part of my home cooking).

I’ve now fixed that, tofu and tempeh are in my home cooking all the time, as well as soy milk amd soy yogurt. and soybean oil, as a high-smoke-point cooking oil. I notice that I still view olive oil as top-tier fat, right next to coconut oil, I love to eat lots of both, and now make sparing use of soybean oil when I occasionally want to use a high-smoke-point oil.

Most global soy production goes to feed animals. Most global agriculture goes to feed animals. There’s ten times as many animals bread into existence, tortured, and murdered per year as there are people on the planet (ish). So by not eating animal products any more, there’s a big cloud of victims you’re no longer victimizing. lots of water consumption, too, is no longer happening on my/your request.

skipping the animals and eating soy directly is a big deal in terms of which industries participate and how.

I eventually watched documentaries #

after eliminating animal products from my consumption, I became willing to watch the ‘standard documentaries’ about animal exploitation. I hadn’t heard of some of these until recently, but I wonder if that was also me sorta trying to avoid them.

Dominion, 2018, available on youtube I’d never heard about it until I watched it, just a few days ago (june). I had to do it in small chunks. Sorta like what baby chicks get turned into if they will not grow up into egg laying hens.

I watched more documentaries, saved a handful into this playlist. Aside from Dominion there’s little emphasis on the factory farming side of it. It being in a playlist doesn’t mean I’m endorsing everything about it, but I found some parts of all of these videos motivating, interesting.

I like how it feels in my body #

I’ve generally had good, or good-enough health. And over the last two years, I’ve sorted out improvements in physical training (barefoot sprints, isometric holds) but this new eating paradigm is good as heck.

I feel more full after eating. Turns out the eggs were not doing it for me, but I didn’t know. I’m eating lots of chickpeas, I prefer those to beans. Satiation is high, I’m never hungry (that’s sorta more in the keto side of things vs ‘vegan’),

Ketosis, again #

I have a breath meter that detects acetone in the breath, which is a proxy for ketosis.

Low readings equate ‘early/mild ketosis’, mid-level readings are counted as ‘ketosis’, and ‘high’ readings are ‘deep ketosis’.

My default eating pattern has me always in mild or regular ketosis, 100% of the time, nearly. If I eat tons of rice and bread and sweets for two or three meals in a row, my ketosis readings will dip or go away all the way, but pop back quickly, as I resume my normal eating pattern.

If I do any sort of fasting, the ketosis readings get quite elevated, and I like it. This has been super interesting to me.

In the last year I made a tiny change to my food consumption pattern and as an experiment I turned up my fasting, just a bit, playing with occasional 1.5-2 days fasts, and… my body fat has gone even lower (unexpected, unplanned, and while I don’t mind it was never something I tried to achieve. I don’t care, but I notice) and muscles/connective tissue seem a bit more present.

No complaints. I feel strong, bouncy, overall. I play pickup ultimate frisbee at local parks, and have loved being able to run, cut, sprint, jump. I feel limber and quick-enough, playing frisbee, and it’s deeply enjoyable to experience.

But it’s interesting that I am in ketosis not all the time, but way more of the time than I ever thought I was , and I spend more time than I thought in medium and deep ketosis, too. I think it’s been nice.

if you bought meat the last time you went grocery shopping, or anything with dairy in it… #

next time you go grocery shopping, put anything in your basket but anything comprised of/containing animal products. Stock your fridge/freezer with tofu/tempeh, and swap tofu in anywhere you have a meal that wants an animal product.

If I was drinking milk/yogurt #

I’d stop buying milk and I’d get soy milk, soy yogurt or almond or cashew yogurt.

If I was eating cheese… #

I’ve never consumed much cheese, rarely purchased it, other than going out of my way sometimes to eat pizza with cheese (and plants) on it.

since the before times, I’ve had like one slice of vegan pizza and it was fine. if I’m not eating at home, I’m probably eating indian food. For a decade, indian food is my favorite kind of food to get, if I’m eating at a restaurant. much of the menu is entirely plants.

I’ve always eaten tons of veggies, and now chickpeas & tofu #

I love and have always loved veggies and mushrooms. I’ll eat every day some mix of cooked up broccoli, mushrooms, onions, carrots, brussel sprouts, asparagus, cauliflower, cabbage, garlic, ginger, tumeric, anything else from the produce section that looks appealing to me. I prefer sweet potatoes to regular potatoes, and I rarely eat fruit. any fermented food, I’m game for.

I’ve started regularly cooking a bag of chickpeas in the instant pot (dry beans, rinse, cook for 60 minutes at high pressure). I don’t always think to soak them overnight, but if I do then they go into the instant pot for just like 5 minutes. Chickpeas are amazing. My diet is now mostly mushrooms, veggies and chickpeas and tofu. Lots of olive oil, garlic, and spices. sourdough bread, often enough.

Intermittent fasting #

I often-enough do almost “1 day fasts”, any time I am eating about 1 meal a day, and often enough out of curiosity extend those to two-day fasts. I’ll barely experience discomfort besides sometimes noticing barely perceivable sensations of hunger, which usually pass as quickly as they arrive. I can easily ‘do without’ an ingredient in any particular situation, because it’s easy enough for me to do without food for a long time.

So finding alternatives to the last few animal products, and going without anywhere else I didn’t easily find animal products, was effortless.

plenty of people who fast, eat meat when they’re not fasting, yet it seems particularly easy to not eat animal products if one is also comfortable with any sort of fasting/intermittent fasting. I lean keto, low-everything-but-fat and like seeing the keto breath meter return a really high reading, sometimes.

There’s all sorts of literature (official and self-reported, for instance in books or the internet) about the several ways fasting sometimes feels nice. ²

electrolytes #

fasting is uncomfortable if one doesn’t have electrolytes. Sodium, potassium, magnesium. headaches and weakness can crop up if one’s deficient.

Since I’ve added sodium + potassium + sometimes magnesium I’ve not had any of those fatigue or headache type experiences. Sometimes I’ll throw a bit of coconut oil in a salty broth (sodium and potassium are both salts) and it’ll feel like a hearty meal, almost. Maybe the coconut oil makes it less of a fast, but I’ve always had bits in my coffee in the mornings anyway.

It technically contributes to the creation of ketone bodies within the liver, as coconut oil is like half-by-weight “medium-chain tryglicerydes”, which feeds nicely into the krebs cycle inside of mitochondria.

Also some ingested fats (like coconut oil) get a more-direct path to the liver and blood stream? via a lyphatic-system-based drain somewhere in the portal vein? between the stomach and the small intestine? (I need to expand this into a proper footnote, and look it up. Something about some sorts of fats don’t even go through the whole digestive tract, but get picked up very quickly and put to useful molecular work).

So, coconut oil feels like pure fuel, while the rest of the system gets to stay in a state of…. not digesting a meal. It’s nice to experiment with.

Oh and I’ll drink lots of coffee and tea, if I feel inclined, while fasting.

Plants are so cool #

It’s less about eating meat, now. I look at enslaved animals and feel sad for them, and don’t want any part of them to be inside of my body. And then I look at plants, I think of how cool they are, and I absolutely want to make sure I’m getting those things in my body.

For instance, mushrooms are cool, and great to eat. Plants overall do cool molecular synthesizing. Garlic as an example of an amazing-for-human-animals plant.

Fermented food is cool, too. Kimchi, kombucha, tempeh, Gochujang.

Food can be tasty or bland, easy or hard. Exploitation is optional. #

Sometimes people seem to use meat as the reason/excuse/opportunity to say the meal is good. It’s overall bland, perhaps, but since there is a dead animal on it, the whole thing is declared good.

I’d rather sort out how to make good food, without ‘relying’ on the meat. I’m also willing to eat bland/burnt/untasty food, but I rarely do (I did forget squash in the oven recently, burnt it pretty good, and still ate the least-burnt parts of it and liked it).

My spice game is good, and I view salt and MSG as a health food, so it’s always well seasoned. Lemon juice, spicy peppers, soy sauce, fresh green onions on top, etc. anything can be made delicious in several ways, I believe deliciousness correlates with health, in some ways, as a useful heuristic to guide people towards good stuff (garlic, olive oil, sourdough, tofu, well-seasoned and cooked veggies) and away from bad stuff (think of all the smells that induce a sense of anti-hunger. spoiled food, for instance, and many other things that smell bad are bad)

I like tasty food, I always make tasty meals for myself. I’ve only increased the quality of my cooking, as I’ve flipped to vegan eating.

I also don’t like prep or cleaning, so most meals require a single cutting board and a single cooking vessle, and usually a single burner, and minimal cleaning, but this is just my preferences. I aspire to someday like cooking more elaborate or complicated meals for myself or others.

oh and an instant pot! I will fill it with beans and potatoes and veggies and a can of coconut oil, then cook it up, add tons of spices and blend it with an immersion blender. It’s like 15 meals worth of food, in a single pot.

human animals deserve at least as much consideration as animal-animals #

I feel strongly about exploitation of animals, and am saddened to see the parallels between the worst ways humans treat animals, and the worst ways humans treat other humans.

I don’t know how to ‘talk nice’ about this all sometimes. I see the correlations between animal exploitation and human animal exploitation, and hate to see the settler-colonial system/participants that set up such systems of exploitations on so many lands.

A mountain of bison skulls represents honest efforts of the european-american colonizers to succeed in genociding the people that lived there. ³

exploiting animals for their literal flesh or reproductive outputs (chicken periods, breastmilk from cows) is trash, and exploiting animals for their labor is bullshit, too. Think about a horse made to drag a plow around, by an agriculturalist, or a horse made to carry a person. ⁴

I’ve long been uncomfortable with electric vehicles because electric batteries require cobalt. the cobalt market for many years was fed in large part by direct slave labor, and child labor. I did the math on how many pounds of cobalt was in a certain battery. (A fully electric car would have like 20 pounds of cobalt in it), and shuddered. I had/have a kid, I could imagine the three year old standing next to me having to live the life of a three year old in a cobalt mine, spending hours looking for grams of cobalt. or in the west bank or gaza, for that matter. Instead of searching through dirt for cobalt, the children in palestine look though mountains of rubble for bodies. I despise every person defending the existence of either flavor of exploitation.

exploitation of animals seems inevitable from people like this #

The issue isn’t ‘just’ a single slice of exploitation, though - it’s the willingness, the hunger, to exploit others. For instance, why not exploit a group just because of their thoughts and preferences?

how to hide an empire is about the empire of the greater united states, past and present, the jakarta method is about supremacists simply wanting to hear about bloodshed and death. blowback by chalmers johnson, was published juuuuust before the september of 2001 airplanes/buildings incidents. supremacists in the greater united states have been/are/will be fucking it all up for everyone.

I’m also vastly less confident in the anti-human-exploitation messages many people claim to hold, because if they’re willing to exploit animals for a momentary convenience, why would this person lift a finger to reduce the exploitation of human animals? The legacy of chattel slavery in the USA shows how some people will expend incredible effort to preserve exploitative dynamics. I participated in the enslavement of animals for most of the years of my life, unfortunately. Even the years I spent ‘not eating meat’, I was still paying money to get others to exploit, torture, assault, murder, and rape animals. my ethics maybe helped me feel better, but didn’t mean much to the animals enslaved on my behalf, for their entire existence. cows, egg-laying chickens.

my own parents are a distinctive example of exploitative ways of being, and of supremacy. ⁵

They would both prefer to assault children and torture children than do a smidge of inner work to address why they like bullying, assaulting, coercing children. 👎 evangelicals and evangelicalism. the biggest legacy of evangelicalism in the USA is chattel slavery. that’s the goodreads url, here’s some highlights I made in the book.

I think once I stopped eating meat, I certainly noticed not looking well on eating meat. It happened again. now I don’t like to see any animal product consumed. I wish grocery stores could drop the meat section and replace it with tofu, and get rid of all the dairy products and replace it with plant alternatives. I don’t like to see others consuming meat. I’m distancing myself from people that freely participate in such exploitation, in the same way I’ve distanced myself from people that assault children (evangelicals) and from anyone else who displays distasteful, anti-social behavior. Anyone who’s ever been in the american military, for instance, is either an active murderer, or is at least complicit in the abuse of empire. cops in the usa began as deputized slave patrollers. gross.

i’m disappointed to see the ongoing energies of animal exploitation, “the military”, the police, empire and colonialism, human animal exploitation, settler colonialism, american-style zoning, slavery, religion, and supremacy.⁶

I don’t want to be complicit in the abuse of animals. Now that I don’t eat animal products, I’m no longer complicit in that horror. I like this for me.

supremacy seems to still be partially running the world. The energy with which american supremacists created sundown towns all across the USA is the same energy israeli settlers/supremacists have when displacing/murdering palestinians. disgusting.

This book is excellent: Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism. Here’s an interactive map that shows the location of sundown towns across this disaster of a country: sundown towns map

I am angry.

Additional Reading #

• Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows
• Dominion (documentary)
• I’ve been saving some videos to this playlist around eating plants instead of exploiting animals.
• How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
• The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World
• Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.
• an interactive map that shows the location of sundown towns across this disaster of a country: sundown towns map

Footnotes #