The Dream - Why I am a Vegetarian

I used to eat a fair amount of fast food. I would eat at McDonald's at least once a week.

One night, about eight years ago Mitra, baby Darius and I had taken the evening ferry to Vancouver. On the ferry, I had eaten a particularly gross hamburger and later that night, I had "The Dream".

In my dream, I walked into a McDonalds. It was strangely quiet and I was the only customer. This made sense in the dream. I went up to the counter and ordered my usual: a Big Mac, a regular hamburger and a vanilla milkshake.

The server handed me my food. Instead of a usual bag, the server handed me a big black garbage bag (the kind that have a hint of green in the plastic, if you hold it up to the light). The garbage bag was rolled down.

I opened up the bag and looked inside. The bottom of the bag was filled with dirty sawdust - like sawdust that had been thrown on a shop floor to soak up spilt oil. The bag also contained old black dress shoes of many different sizes.

I remember thinking in the dream, "This is odd". Another voice said in my head, "This is always what you have been getting. You just never saw it this way."

I looked closer at the shoes and was struck in horror by the realization that the shoes were mismatched. Remember the image of those huge piles of shoes in Auschwitz? It was as if someone had taken a shovel full of shoes from this massive pile and put these mismatched shoes in my bag. I could feel this whole machine turning away and cranking out my meal.

I awoke in a sweat. I lay there in bed in the early morning and felt the impact of the dream wash over me.

I made many changes in how I eat as a result of that dream. The first change was to stop eating at McDonalds. After many years of eating regularly at McDonalds, I stopped the day after my dream and haven’t eaten there once in the eight years since this dream.

A few months later, I stopped drinking coffee. I was never a big coffee drinker, but I would consistently have a cup of coffee in the morning. I noticed that within a week of not drinking coffee, my stomach stopped hurting in the evening.

About six months later, I stopped eating refined sugar for about four years. I used to eat a lot of sweet food! It was really hard to not eat candy bars, white chocolate and the like, but I did for four years. After we sold the company, I started having some sugar again. Now I eat some refined sugar, but far less than I ever had in the past. I am much more balanced in my consumption of sugar.

Then about a year after I had The Dream, I stopped eating meat. It seemed to me that not eating meat just made sense. It is not that I have any issues with killing my food. I just didn't want to participate in the industrial production of meat anymore. It was like coming full circle back to the original moment of the dream.

I find it interesting that one short dream could change so much in my life. No other dream has had such an impact on my life.


Postscript 1 - Mitra’s Reaction

A funny story...

When I came home and told Mitra that I wasn't going to eat meat any more, she just laughed at me.

"What are you going to eat? All you eat is meat!"

She was right. My diet used to be very unbalanced (lots of meat and carbs, no fruit and veggies). Becoming a vegetarian has meant that I had to eat way more fruit and veggies. After six years of no meat, I have started eating a little meat in the past six months.

It seems to me that I had been so unbalanced in one direction that I needed to go far in the other direction for some time before I could find a healthy balance (lots of fruit and veggies with a little meat once in a while).


Postscript 2 - Keeping It Quiet

When I made the other changes to my diet, I never told anyone. I just wanted to keep them to myself. However, when I stopped eating meat I found it impossible to not mention.

The day after I made the decision, I was at lunch with a business friend. I ordered a veggie pizza and he asked me if I was vegetarian. A week or two later, I was traveling for business in the US. We stopped somewhere to eat dinner and every item on the menu involved meat (even the salads!).

I often attend business lunches and dinners. Every time I do this, I always have ask the server for a vegetarian meal. Not only does this announce to everyone at the table that I am vegetarian, but it invariably means that I am served at a different time than other folks at my table.

I tried being a closet vegetarian, but found it impossible.


Postscript 3 - Part of the Family Story

Darius refuses to ever eat at McDonalds. He happily eats meat, but is adamant that he will never eat at McDonalds because McDonalds is bad.

I once asked him why he has such strong feelings about McDonalds (especially because he has never eaten there). He told me all about my dream in McDonalds. It was an odd moment for me because I had never directly talked to him about my dream. However, he had overheard me tell the story enough times that he could recite it from memory. It was surprising.

I realized in that moment that the story of my dream had become part of the fabric of our family story. The kids know the story by heart and it informs how they live their lives.

"Seeing is Believing" Tour of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver

I had the opportunity to join a "Seeing is Believing" tour of the downtown East-side of Vancouver on June 30, 2009. “Seeing is Believing” tours started in England and have been very successful at providing a way for people to understand more about life in places like the downtown East-side.

As most folks know, I have previously participated in two street retreats (one in the DTES). I figured that this tour would provide a different view into a world I had briefly experienced previously. On the street retreat, we only used a few services (like for food) and the Seeing is Believing tour gave me the opportunity to learn more about services that I had not experienced.

We started off at the Potluck Café. This is a social enterprise. It is a business which makes meaning in the world through training staff, providing meals to those who need them as well as running a restaurant and providing catering to business functions.

At the restaurant, there was an overview of the tour, the Street to Home foundation and the Potluck Cafe. The information was very well put together and the presentation was very professional.

Next we went to RainCity Housing which provides long-term and transitional housing. We got an overview by the Executive Director. The comment he made that stuck out in my mind was when he said, "Initially we would try to tell people how best they should proceed in their lives. That didn't work. When we realized that each of the people we were working with were experts in their own lives, then we could be much more helpful. These people had survived through some horrible situations and the fact that they are alive is an accomplishment to be proud of. We needed to understand that they are the experts. We are the most helpful when we ask them what they would like to achieve next and work with them to that goal."

We then divided into two groups (depending on whether you had a "1" or a "2" on your name badge). My group went for a tour of the housing first. They showed us a room. It was reasonably clean and very small. There were hotplates in the room and a shared kitchen down the hall.

They explained that their policy was to allow most things to happen as long as it didn't bother other people and it wasn't selling drugs.

Then my group went to chat with some of the folks that were staying in the place. We divided into smaller groups and 3-5 people each chatted with one tenant. My group spoke with an aboriginal man. He had been placed in the foster care system when he was a baby and had spent his entire childhood in that system. He didn't like it. When he was 16, he committed some crime (he didn't say what) and he went to jail. He had just gotten out a few months ago.

He was about the same age as me and he had never been outside of a rigidly structured system (foster care and then prison). It was striking.

Next we went to Covenant House. They provide service to street youth including a drop in centre, addictions counseling and housing. The Executive Director was very eloquent in her comments. For her it all boiled down to providing three things: support, structure and love.

She talked about how important it was to have clear structure for these kids. She was also the only person who mentioned the importance of emotions (in particular, love) in providing services.

After her talk, we once again divided into two groups. My group stayed and broke into smaller groups to chat with folks who work at Covenant House. At our table was a woman who had been working there for several years. One thing that she said really struck me: Every single kid who she has worked with at Covenant House was abused before arriving, regardless of their gender. Sometimes the abuse is recent (for example, "you can have free rent if you…") and sometimes not, but all the kids have been abused.

Next my group went and chatted with some of the kids who had gone through Covenant House. There were four kids who were all on their early twenties. One had turned his life around and was now working at Starbucks. Another had fought with the structure of Covenant House and talked about realizing that the structure was there to help her.

Another kid talked about needing money and working as a stripper to earn cash. Now she was on a path that she preferred.

The one kid who stood out in my mind the most was the oldest one. She was in her mid-twenties. Her mother was a sex worker and she was raised in the foster care system. She said that she had been through twenty six different Elementary schools.

Twenty-six schools!

Assuming that the Elementary school system went to grade 7 when she was attending (unlike now, when it goes to grade 5), then she would have averaged about four different schools a year for seven years!

She was obviously a bright woman, but she talked about how she hadn't been able to learn anything because her schooling had been so broken up. If my memory is correct, she only learned to read after turning eighteen.

She talked about how hard it was to grow up with everyone around you thinking that you would grow up to work in the sex trade.

She talked about how the foster care system paid for her bills until she turned eighteen. She turned eighteen in the middle of the month and the system wouldn't even pay for her last two weeks of rent. She was out on the street. Luckily, several kids said that the folks at Covenant House were good people. She went there and they provide what she needed: support, structure and love. She learned the skills that she needed, finished school and now is hoping to go to university to study to be a teacher.

I was really touched by her story.

The next location was the Coast Mental Health Resource Centre. Once again we had the overview briefing by the ED. We then talked to some residents and finally went on a tour.

What struck me about this final stop was seeing this one guy who looked a lot like one of my friends from university. It wasn't my friend, but he looked so much like him. It reminded me of my connection to everyone there.

Afterwards, the tour group gathered to discuss the experience and provide feedback. A few people commented that they felt the tour had been somewhat sanitized. The organizers agreed with this point. They felt it would be too dangerous to bring such a large group (30
people) to some of the more dangerous locations. However they indicated that they would be happy to arrange a tour with a plain clothes police officer.

Two of us indicated our interest in participating. Subsequently, we arranged confirmed a date with the police officer for late August.

All in all, I am very glad that I had the opportunity to attend the Seeing is Believing tour. The tour validated a lot of impressions I had from my street retreat (such as the importance of emotional connection). It also helped me to learn new things (such as the role of the foster care system in homelessness).

I look forward to seeing where this knowledge will take me.