I grew up drinking milk, eating meat, pretty much normal American diet. But my mom was a good cook, so all meals were made from scratch and she didn;t buy junk food for snacks.
For the past 10 years I've lived in the Caribbean. A place with a lot of Vegans and Vegetarians, particularly the Rastafarians. The isolation of where I live requiring meat products to be shipped in and my infatuation with Rasta has made me look at my diet very closely. High grocery prices I will admit have also played a role.
Over the past 10 years I have become healthier and much more selective of what I eat. I've always been big into spearfishing and fishing so for much of the past 10 years at least half my protein has been seafood based and harvested myself.
About this time last year, a friend told me about a book called "Clean" by Alejandro Junger. I won't go into to it too much but it was very inspirational and I went through the 21 day cleanse following his recommendations. He does advocate eating grass fed organic meat during the process which I did. After doing the 21 day cleanse, I felt so good I didn't want to go back to how I was eating before. Mind you, I went into it already eating healthy so many of the side effects I read about and was expecting, I did not experience. But I did experience wonderful positive effects from eliminating the acid and mucous forming foods.
That cleanse sharpened my microscope on what I eat. At the start of 2017, I decided I wanted to try cutting out all meat except seafood. I haven't been 100% true to this, but have done my best and only eaten meat in situations where there were no other options or I just wanted to have a taste. My main reason for wanting to try this is actually more ethical and this is the main point of my post.
Over the years, all the fish I have speared has given me somewhat of a guilty conscious. I can remember my first Mahi and the beautiful colors fading away as the life from the fish faded away. I can remember the giant Cubera Snapper that pulled off the spear before I could get him and how heart wrenching that was. I have felt pangs of remorse for every life I have taken. I don't feel that when I eat store bought fish or order seafood in a restaurant. I never felt that when I threw a nice steak on the grill. I think there is something wrong with that disconnection.
So my thing is, if I can't kill it myself or would be unwilling to kill it myself, I prefer not to eat it. As fruit lovers, everyone here should be able to understand this. That mango you picked off your own tree tastes way better than anything you could buy in the store and probably even better than a mango from your neighbor's tree.
People are so far removed from the food they eat. It goes into their mouths and straight to the digestive system without a second thought. If it tasted good, one might have a glancing thought about that. But not about where it came from, how many hands or machines touched it, how many chemicals fertilizers or hormones were added to it.
I have considered hunting. We have deer here and many of my old Florida buddies hunt so I could take a trip up and load up a cooler and bring it back down with me. I know that I will feel that same pang of guilt when I kill my first deer though. Just like that time I shot a bird with a pellet gun when I was about 12. I was crushed. So for now, I'll stick to fish.