So You Want to Grow Veggies Organically AND Be a Vegan?
Posted: April 22, 2012 Filed under: Gardening, Non-Toxic Choices 1 Comment
Photo from All About GardeningWhat do plants eat? They eat dead animals; that’s the problem. For me that was a horrifying realization. You want to be an organic gardener, of course, so you keep reading ‘Feed the soil, feed the soil, feed the soil…’
Alright. Well what does the soil want to eat? Well, it wants manure, and it wants urine, and it wants blood meal and bone meal. And I…could not face that. I wanted my garden to be pure and death-free. It didn’t matter what I wanted: plants wanted those things; they needed those things to grow…
So, I sort of played a moral hide-and-seek in my mind. I was left with this realization that I could eat an animal directly, or I could pass an animal through a plant and then eat it, but either way there were animals involved in this process. I could not remove animals from the equation.
I had to accept on some level that there was a cycle here, and it was very ancient, and ultimately very spiritual. It was really hard for me to accept the ‘death’ part of that equation. Years. It took me years to finally face it. But there wasn’t any way out of it if I was going to grow things.
Lierre Keith, on gardening as a vegan; October 8, 2009 on Underground Wellness Radio
Meal Delivery Service by Millie Barnes 
I think this is one of the most fascinating things about nature–that all life comes from death. Death is necessary. Death is natural. The cells of our body are constantly dying and being replaced. And from the perspective of the earth as a whole, each human being is just a cell that dies so another can replace it.
When I slaughtered chickens for the first time, I learned a lesson about my own mortality. Watching the chickens suffer and die, I became acutely aware that one day, perhaps not too far in the future, I would make the same passage. I just hope that my body will feed other organisms as that chicken fed me.
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