Why I'm (Still) Vegetarian
We continue this week with our 2025 "Dharma Life Reset" with more exploration of food and eating as practice. Last week at Satsang I did something I find myself doing regularly: mentioning my practice of eating/being vegetarian almost bashfully, promising that I wasn't going to try to convert anyone. Why do I do this!? I felt disingenuous as I was saying it. And anyway, I'm evangelical about most aspects of the Dharma, why not this?
I think I do this partly because vegetarianism isn't a Buddhist doctrine or instruction, either for monastics or laypeople, in the early tradition I draw inspiration and lineage from. Vegetarian eating for laypeople very much makes sense within an early Buddhist ethos, and is developed vigorously in later Mahāyāna, but it's not actually an instruction in the discourses. But more directly my hesitation is because food choice is so socially contentious in my progressive community, and I'm afraid of alienating people around this thing folks take so personally. Such intense views and strong emotion are expressed around food choices that they indicate identities, politics, and social location. Diet has become a social identity—we see this in vegetarian and later vegan politics, and we see it in what I read as the reactionary politics of Paleo meat celebration. But of course deconstructing identity is like our whole jam, right?
So tonight I'll try to give a clear doctrine-based reason why I'm still eating vegetarian even though most of my friends don't anymore (and in a few cases have tried to convince me to do otherwise). And we'll take apart some of the politics around food choice and why it might be both good practice to challenge the views we have about food choice and also make choices that are as coherent as possible within our faith, ethics, and practice.
