I ate a spoonful of my son's yogurt yesterday (partly testing behavior) and was instantly reminded that yes, I have lactose intolerance. Bad pain, that only subsided some hours later when I slept.
It's incredible to me that I ate mountains of cheese, I mean every day, all kinds of cheese, throughout my life. It was (is?) my favorite food! Before the holidays I was eating about a half pound of Stilton a day—you can take the boy out of England but...
Doesn't this just put more meat (oops) on the bones of the idea that not everything we do is for the sake of survival? We don't simply live to “live on.” There are inordinate desires and pleasures and gratifications that make no sense whatsoever. There is no logic to them. You just can't supply or discover a “logical infrastructure” of any kind at this deep level.
3 comments:
Simplistically, perhaps because cheese (curds with the whey removed), unlike yoghurt, contains small to trace amounts of lactose (milk sugar found in whey)?
Also, if you were to eat the yoghurt several days in a row, your digestive system would almost certainly adapt to produce the requisite enzymes.
But I take your point about "inordinate desires and pleasures and gratifications that make no sense whatsoever" - my own food poison is dark chocolate, which invariably gives me heart palpitations much less pleasant and much longer lasting than the fleeting experience of eating the chocolate. But then, as you well know, a little bit of poison, a soupçon of death, helps you live longer...dark green leafy vegetables perhaps being the prime example of this.
p.s. from personal experience, i wouldnt recommend veganism (as opposed to vegetarianism with modest eggs/cheese) long-term, nor i suspect would the Buddha (asceticism)
i get the point of this and even embrace it to a large degree, but at the same time theres many contexts in the world and many ways through (how accessible some of these things are to people, etc). i wouldnt want to reduce things to binge/purge or a death drive in all contexts. theres always exceptions. you can passively not eat cheese, chocolate, etc... and not think of it as optimizing survival, or trying to living to live on (for some people it is, sure). you may not just want it anymore.
aside from that: ive been vegan 17 years. no problems whatsoever. theres nothing wrong with it as long as you focus to eat nutritionally - like any diet. theres plenty of meat eaters and ovo/lacto/vegetarians that "eat worse" and develop their own problems. whatever works for them.
its also funny how the above comment basically plays into the original post creating a "logical infrastructure" to veganism... in that you are bound to fail - not survive. id rather see it as neither of those options.
Yes! Yes! Oh, yes!
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