How Eating Salmon Changed My Perspective

“Growth: What A Dead Salmon Taught Me About Life”

This blog reflects on how it felt eating salmon after abstaining from meat for a few years…

My quest to understand the relationship between food and it’s effect on my body/mind has led me to experiment often. I continuously add and subtract foods keeping track of how my energy and mood changes. Over the years I knocked out one at a time dairy, grain and meat from my diet (dairy was added back). To understand more clearly how dairy, grain or meat effects me I would eat that type of food for a while and wait to see what happens.

My state of existence improved a little bit without diary. I will blog in more details about how diary such as milk effects my energy levels. The effects dairy has on my body and energy are very clear and noticeable.

My health and well being dramatically improved in the absence of wheat, barley and oat grains. I suppose it makes sense in retrospect since I am known to be allergic to grass pollen.

Meat? Still trying to make sense of the state of my life without it. My life is better but the results are not as clear to quantify physically as the absence of diary and grain is. Living without meat seems to change my psychology, my way of thinking, my perspective instead of my mood and energy level. Perhaps the change to my body is too subtle for me to perceive at the moment. I feel cleaner but I can’t tell if that’s my mind or body talking. But then, there really is no separation between body and mind anyways!

I grew up eating meat daily like most Americans. Then I spent five years eating sausage and chicken daily for lunch and dinner. So going without meat for the last two years has been strange to me as far as meals and daily life goes. Odd, but it’s starting to finally feel normal and right.

So far this year I ate some raw salmon in sushi a few times in May and in September raw Ahi (tuna) and prime rib. The cooked steak was boring and dull which surprised me as I have always enjoyed steak in the years before. The ahi ahi was fantastic. It was a small amount, too, which helped me not feel weighted down. I really enjoyed it. Perhaps I’ll try it again some other year to see if my feelings and perspective has changed. But for all time my favorite meat is salmon. The last time I had cooked salmon was in December and November 2008 at a restaurant with my family and it was tasty as usual. (I ate meat possibly six times in 2008)

Curious as to how my favorite meat would taste, two weeks ago I bought two pounds of farmed salmon for four bucks as an experiment. I cooked it up till it was soft, pink, warm and covered in white, thick oil. I ate a half a pound each night. Not much happened physiologically but it sure felt weird eating it. It did not taste the way I remembered. It didn’t have much flavor. Maybe it was old. The cooked salmon was dull so I added seasoning to it which helped.

So here I am with half a pound of cooked salmon in a plate on my lap. While eating the cooked salmon I wasn’t repulsed but it sure felt strange and sad. It felt like a trade. His life for my life. Those thoughts lead me to a feeling of material satisfaction like I get when I buy new, expensive clothes. After the meal I had a sense that I won, that I persisted my own bodies existence through a victory of sorts. This was clearly an ego-based thought rather than a Oneness feeling. It was an usual intrusion into my mind. In the end I felt cut-off emotional from the fish and even myself. Near the end of the meal I felt that the fish was separate and different from me. Only the feelings of bodily satisfaction and triumph remained. These feelings are all non-substantive, vague and intangible but are real in my mind.

Because I dominated the fish my status level increased. I, my ego, became cruelly empowered by eating the submissive, dead meat. I sat back with my arms up wearing a sly grin of entitlement on my face. I felt dominate, authoritative, and confident for the next several hours. Eating the soft flesh triggered my pleasure and reward circuits. In turn, the pleasure from eating meat raised my perceived status and thus self esteem.

We all want to feel better. Increasing status level feels good. This experiment and experience helped me understand how eating meat rubbed my ego and increased my status level. By raising myself at the sake of another is a primal method of growth that creates only conflict and destruction, growth for the winners and loss from the losers. For one must fall for another to rise. The are always losers in the status game. In my case that night it was the salmon.

There is an alternative to this vicious cycle that does not involve harming others. The answer is to challenge yourself. Leave family, friends, work colleagues, children and animals out of your competition war to increase your status. Instead, compare yourself to yourself. Do not rise by stepping on another. Do not grow strong through the death of another. Grow strong by challenging yourself. Increase your status by doing what you do better. Decrease your death and loss quota.

Rethink growth. If an animal is equal to one unit of energy and you wish to increase your energy level by one unit to feel good, then killing and eating the animal is a transfer of energy with none gained or lost overall. It’s just of shift or displacement of energy. Increasing your social rank by pushing another down, belittling them or beating them in a game also just shifts already present energy with nothing gained or lost in the big picture.

Taking from one to grow another does not help overall growth, it just spreads and shifts energy around. For energy I mean anything really – life, food, money, etc. That which allows us to grow is not based from a finite resource that can only be shifted from the have-nots to the haves. Growth relies on creativity of which there is an endless supply of. Viewing resources as limited causes competition. This is the cause of war and pain. Ingenuity frees us from the constraints of materialism. However, for true growth to occur the bar must be raised for all without a loss somewhere else. In this way all of us grow without some heads breathing and others underwater. And only when we all grow together, as one, can we move forward in peace.

Life is sacred, not a commodity.

Reduce your daily, weekly and yearly death quota by engaging in a passive lifestyle that yields the lowest possible deaths. Then you will shift your life/death balance and start giving rather than taking from the pool of life. This will result in a shift in your mindset towards Love and Oneness.

If you would like to learn more about this topic read about Jain vegetariansim [wikipedia] and Jainism, non-violence [wikipedia].