what Integrity means to me

Part of the reason I started blogging was to figure out what eating with integrity would mean to me.

At the time, I was tempted by veganism, but I wanted to play more with growing bacteria and molds. Even though bacteria and molds can be found in alcohol, tempeh and natto, bread, and other vegan goodies, I couldn't resist the idea of growing bacteria in cheese and yogurt. I didn’t want to give up expanding my repertoire of kitchen culture experiments, with an eye towards perhaps transferring those skills to vegan cultures.

And eating vegan doesn’t mean that the distributors of vegan food don’t also distribute meat. Take a look at your grocery store. Are you not voting with your dollars to support a store that makes meat consumption possible? Go backwards through the supply chain, and you will find blood on everyone’s hands. Just by bicycling and watching films, I have blood on my hands as rubber tires and film stock both use animal derivatives in their production. For a while, I was freegan, scavenging from rather than contributing to capitalist food production. But there are no simple answers there either.

Besides, vegan doesn’t automatically mean healthier. For example, fast food made from processed soy derivatives is still unhealthy!

The integrity I seek means eating for my optimal health AS WELL AS decreasing suffering for sentient beings everywhere.

In sum, I was unhappy following the label 'vegan' or 'freegan' or 'locavore' or what have you. In addition to realizing that no label was ideal, I also discovered that adhering to some label restricted my freedom to choose. That was not a freedom I wanted to give up, because I want to eat whatever makes me feel the most alive. I want to eat consciously every time I eat and not just depend on rules to which I submit.

Barry Schwartz talks about rules crippling wisdom in his talk at TED: ‘The real crisis? We stopped being wise’. Here, he abstracts to society at large my idea that labels like ‘vegan’ overrides thinking when eating.

What I took away from Schwartz: Anything we do with people requires wisdom. Practical wisdom is moral will + moral skill + improvisation depending on the situation. That means, to practice wisdom we must want to be moral, have the abilities to act morally, and respond to each situation as it demands. For this, we need time + permission + being mentored + space for experimentation, that is, the possibility of failure and learning from failures.

Current societies try to change behavior through rules and incentives, believing and acting as though more and better rules as well as more and better incentives will bring about better behavior. (This is the ultimate political question for me: how to non-coercively rearrange others’ desires) According to Schwartz, rules and incentives only lead to mediocrity, because we stop thinking about what is right. Rules atrophy moral skills; incentives destroy the desire to do the right thing.

Schwartz proposes that to become wise, we must celebrate moral exemplars and heroes. We must have examples on how to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Likewise, we inspire through being good examples. As teachers, we are always teaching because someone is always watching. Schwartz makes this sound like Big Brother, but I prefer to interpret it as that people reflect back to you what you give out. Someone is always learning from you through your actions. Just pay attention to what we do, how we do it, and in what organized structure we work to develop wisdom. We must practice wisdom to serve, not manipulate, others.

In the end, Schwartz is talking about virtue. I haven’t heard that word in public discourse in a very long time. These days I read a lot about happiness and people’s quest for happiness. Unfathomably even to myself, I find myself less and less concerned with happiness and thinking more and more about how to do right—how to live virtuously. And since living and eating are intertwined, living virtuously means eating with integrity.

Photo by Mr. Kris