The Diet Push

I am lucky to spend my time away from the farm in a canoe.  It's my hobby, and it's my sport.  I have a mix of friends from the farm, and my paddling friends.  Needless to say, it's a pretty diverse group, and it's part of what I enjoy.  I love to be at the farm and I enjoy my friends here, but when I leave it's nice to be around a completely different group.

The hardest part of being a farmer in a group of endurance athletes, is that we tend to be on the opposite sides of the food spectrum. People who work out more than an hour a day, everyday, tend to see themselves as more health conscious than the average person.  They take pride in having discipline and self-control.  They see diet and exercise as being complimentary.  Paddlers don't work out to stay thin, they workout to be healthy.  For some, this means being either gluten-free, dairy-free, paleo, vegetarian, or even vegan.  As you can imagine, sometimes things get uncomfortable.

Often with friends who are living what I consider to be extreme lifestyles, they love to tell you about it.  Why it is better, why it works for them, or apologetically, if they could get meat from our farm, from good people like us, then maybe they would change their ways.  It's usually someone you see as a friend, someone who is comfortable enough with you to tell you about their habits.  It usually isn't meant to be preachy, but most of the time it comes off as such, or at least leaves me feeling inferior.

At the same time, I recognize being part of this group allows me the opportunity to talk to people who have a lot of questions about food.  I have had some really good conversations about food production, and learned some different perspectives.  Hopefully, I have positively affected someone's attitude towards food as well.  What I don't want to be is overbearing, and make people feel the way I sometimes feel when I talk to people with different life views.  No one should have to feel inferior due to choices he or she willingly made. Most people don't try to make bad ones.

Probably the biggest take-away I have from these experiences is realizing that people honestly want to do the best they can, and that deserves respect.  Their are definitely people out there who actively want to hurt the farming community, but most people are either uninformed, misinformed, or are caught up in a type of peer pressure.  If you know any vegans, or least all the ones that I know, they tend to flaunt their diets, posting pictures of food, touting the benefits of their lifestyle, pointing out the flaws in every else's ways.  We shouldn't be that judgmental.  I have the choice to eat a certain way, and I need to give people their choice, even if I don't agree with it.  I care deeply about farming, and I support it vocally, but I have to understand that my opinion is just that; people have the right to choose.