A few weeks ago I participated in the slaughtering and butchering of quite a few organic pasture-raised chickens. The idea was to get closer to my food. I figure if I eat chicken, I ought to have the experience of preparing them from the beginning. This isn’t a new or novel idea, it seems to be one that’s stems from a large food movement of people trying to reclaim agency over their food and have a stronger connection to its source.

Slaughtering and butchering a bunch of chickens no doubt got me thinking about meat consumption and it’s implications on our environments, psyches, and health. I was a vegetarian for about 3 years in college. While working on a farm one summer after college, I grew to understand animal’s role in healthy sustainable farming (and that eating dairy and eggs involves me in the meat world indirectly) and perhaps because of all of the hard work, I found myself craving meat. I decided that my body needed it, and started eating meat again, but in a very reserved way, maybe once or twice a week at most, doing my best to make sure when I do eat meat it’s from a good source (it’s easier to afford more expensive meat because of the infrequency with which I eat it).

When I started acupuncture school, I was confronted by new attitudes about meat once again. In general, the Chinese diet would encourage a semi-vegetarian diet. Meat in traditional Chinese cooking was used more like a spice, in very small amounts, to add a bit of flavor and nutritional value, and even then somewhat infrequently.

Certain pattern imbalances, most noticeably “Blood Deficiency,” strongly encourage the consumption of meat (especially red meat) to help “build blood.” Blood in Chinese medicine, in some way correlates, but does not refer to the Western Biomedical substance of blood. Blood deficiency can be (but is not always) the root the cause of a number of symptoms, from insomnia and anxiety, to dry skin and hair, itchy dry eyes, poor night vision, dizziness, and constipation. Things like poor diet, overwork (physical or psychological) and poor digestion can lead to blood deficiency. I noticed that many people exhibited symptoms of blood deficiency (myself included, often attributed to a history of vegeterianism and/or overwork) and were encouraged to eat red meat to help build blood, but this challenged other values I have, and led me to explore other options (vegetables and herbs – basically red foods are good for blood: beets, tomatoes, goji berries, and dark leafy greens – chlorophyll is the blood of plants ), and try to understand this whole issue much more.

I also just started reading “The China Study” which is a book about diet and how eating a vegetable based diet greatly decreases our risks for many diseases, from cancer to heart disease. It’s very interesting and very well researched and I highly recommend it.

Then of course there’s the cultural issues surrounding the meat and when it’s eaten and how much (what’s Thanksgiving like without a turkey?).

In Chinese Medicine there’s a saying “Food is medicine and Medicine is food.” Many of our culture’s diseases come from improper diet, and strangely enough the “Standard American Diet” (SAD) is very similar to the Chinese medicine list of “What not to eat.” But it’s a complicated issue, and it’s challenging to figure out how to walk the line of sharing information about food and health, encouraging people to make changes, and making people feel bad for eating the way they do.

Unlike the chickens in my freezer, this is an issue I’m still dissecting, still working my way through.

A short video for a non-binary solution: “Weekday Vegetarian”