going vegan

   For a long time now, Alex has kept her ear to the rantings on the internet about the quality of our food. Before I knew her, she had tried dieting, fasting and purging to help improve her life with apparently satisfactory results since she was successful in attracting me as a mate. Now that she's succeeded, she's still not satisfied. Now, it seems, she wants to keep her mate in tip-top shape for ever and ever. That's very flattering, but the trouble is, I have to change my habits, which I fear may change what she saw in me in the first place. I'm worried because I might become a little grumpy and her grand plan could backfire.
   Today for lunch, I put a cover over my lentil salad saving it for later. At supper time, we were served garden snails to top our whole grain spaghetti. I'm not sure this is pure 'vegan,' but it may be an abstract contribution to the success of our vegetable garden which will one day contribute to our "vegetable-based, whole foods" diet. In a previous post I have already mentioned bird seed as an important contribution to our youthful complexions. Every morning we get a heap of ground up flax seed on top of our soy-milk muesli. One thing is certain: I remain a lean, mean, fighting machine.
    It's easy to say it all started with a movie called "Forks over Knives," but that's not really true. The movie is just the latest in a long string of reinforcements to the conclusion that what the grocery stores are selling isn't that good for us. Prior to watching the movie, Alex read a book called Fats That Heal, Fats that Kill. The book drags everyone through a first year study of biochemistry, before concluding that veggies are good and meat is bad. And flax seed meal is really good. Full of fresh omega-3s. Now we are moving on to the the writing of Colin Campbell, first his distillation of data in the China Study, and then on to Whole which I have a feeling will promise me an old age of worn out teeth.
    Parallel to this, I accidentally discovered the TED talk by an outrageous English thinker, Aubrey DeGray. His fast-paced argument proposes that my children may be faced with the prospect of immortality and that we need to get our "shit together." I've long wondered that the whole Darwinian thing of adaptation through natural selection is hopelessly old fashioned in the face of modern medicine, birth control, genetics technology, and wealth distribution. After all, we haven't been naturally selecting our food stocks for quite a while. George Bush and the Catholic Church may have interfered with embryonic stem cell research but the delay was brief. In Japan they have figured out you don't need embryonic cells, in fact, you don't need stem cells at all to clone to your heart's content. According to Nina Tandon, replacement body parts built from your own data is only 10 years away. It's nice to know that I no longer need to consider evolutionary improvements to myself, I feel pretty happy with myself as I am. Or do I?
    There is this other podcast (BBC's radio discussion 10 Billion) that's troubling me. Stephen Emmott writes that the global catastrophe is just around the corner. We don't have enough water and we have demonstrated that we have no intention of dealing with it. Apparently it takes four litres of water to produce one to drink, and 100 to produce one cup of coffee. With a growing population and shrinking ability to produce food, due to climate change, we're all going to die. But wait a minute, if we start living forever and stop having babies, maybe we can hold out till .... we're imortal!