V to the Vth Degree

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• What a nice little veggo love-in this is!

  I'm a meat eater with no real knowledge of where my food comes from or what experience the animals have had before I chew...that makes me common in my culture but an uncommon Velominatus it seems.

  Yesterday at the supermarket there was no chicken breast and I was able to choose from a wide selection of other meats including kangaroo and camel. My choice was based on fat content, taste and price. In the end I found some packets of 'organic' chicken but I have no way of knowing what that actually amounts to. It tasted like chicken. Maybe that's ethically vacuous but I've grown to be cynical enough not to think that 'people power' can take on the government - big business alliance and make any difference to the bottom line...I feel totally disempowered because I basicaly am. There, I said it.

  I'm suprised as fuck by Tjallingii's diet. Not that he's veggo but that he doesn't really eat protein. How doesn't he waste to nothing? Clearly I'm no dietician. Maybe I should try it out - I'm pretty much plateaued on cutting weight and riding speed.

  I'm not trying to be the smart arse here. I'm firmly in the 'respect choices' camp. Just trying to contribute balance...

• @Harminator

  I'm not trying to be the smart arse here. I'm firmly in the 'respect choices' camp. Just trying to contribute balance...

  One way to experience "balance" is to cook and eat the meat of an animal that you shot and watched die, and that you cut into pieces with blood up to your elbows and carried out of the hills on your back and spent two nights butchering and packaging for storage so you could eat it over the next few months. It gets personal that way, and personally I think that's a good way to experience some of the real costs of eating animal protein. In my experience, when you feel the costs, you feel the value.

  But--in the interest of balance--I will not imagine that the tofu/tempeh I put in my stir-fry a couple of times a week is cost-free. I've lived where soy is grown, and it's not a pretty sight at all.  A monocrop from asphalt to asphalt, nothing left for wildlife, even the birds deprived of a living. That sucks, too.

  But, shit, I love cycling again. Even today in repulsive weather, I felt good on my bike, even while bitching to myself about the rain and road grime like a little pain in my own ass.  Vive la Vie.

• @Harminator

  "Yesterday at the supermarket there was no chicken breast and I was able to choose from a wide selection of other meats including kangaroo and camel. My choice was based on fat content, taste and price. In the end I found some packets of 'organic' chicken but I have no way of knowing what that actually amounts to. It tasted like chicken. Maybe that's ethically vacuous but I've grown to be cynical enough not to think that 'people power' can take on the government - big business alliance and make any difference to the bottom line...I feel totally disempowered because I basicaly am. There, I said it."

  you have the answer right there, your power lies in your purchasing, because that's what makes a difference to the bottom line. The best vote you have is your currency, that's what counts so if you want to make a difference "show me the money"

• As the son of an Australian farm boy and a German village girl, a plate of food without meat wasn't a meal when I was growing up.  I changed a few things a couple of years ago -- meat maybe once or twice a week, more fish, cutting out added sugar, fast food, cow's milk and plain wheat, less alcohol, then more veggies, especially the green leafy kind, seeds and nuts, pulses, beans and complex grains -- and noticed big changes to my energy levels, strength, resistance to illness, digestion, appetite and weight stability.

  Cycling is what I love to do on roads; off-road, I'm more like to be running, and being involved in that scene has exposed me to people like Scott Jurek, whose book Eat & Run is a really interesting look at elite endurance performance on a vegan diet.  I think there are lots of things for an omnivore to take from this, and there's no reason things like quinoa, lentils and tempeh shouldn't be part of a meat-eaters regular diet.

  I'm a bit resistant to the tendency of athletes to refer to food as 'fuel', however if it gets people thinking about the quality of energy they're putting into their systems and the effect it has on output, it might be a good thing.

• In a past life I did some work on behalf of lobby groups, specifically chicken producers and farmers. While I have a lot of respect and time for most farmers, the things the lobbyists wanted to be allowed to do would make Marcus choke on his pet donkey. Free range is a perfectly meaningless term in Aus, unlike NZ; with poultry there is no discernible difference in taste, which I suspect means birds sold as free range can be pumped full of the same hormones and antibiotics as caged animals. Stocking rates for birds are astronomically high, while still being allowed to be called free range; currently it basically moves the same number of birds outside as are allowed in a high density cage barn: If you have 20,000 birds in cages and a door to a 1 acre enclosed space, they're free range. The RSPCA sticker is the best one to look out for, because their criteria are based on animal husbandry rather than stocking rates. They will label barn raised eggs, so long as the birds are not debeaked, stocked below a level that leads to aggression problems and are in good condition. Funnily enough I've never seen an RSPCA sticker among the 12 or 13  labels on egg packets round here, and as such have a massive distrust of how the eggs are labelled and produced.

  Beef doesn't seem nearly as bad although a lot of it seems to be finished on feedlots where the food is heavy in hormones and other fun stuff to make them put on weight as quickly as possible. The big problem is that the animals are moved twice, often huge distances. Before they're moved they are kept off food and water for 12 hours so they dont' shit and piss all over the truck, and stand around in it for hours, and some of the trips to the feedlots are pretty long. Then they are moved from feedlot to Abattoir, when they need to go through the same procedure which stresses the animals again. We don't buy ANY meat from the supermarket ever, largely because of the industrial processes that lead up to the product getting on the shelf. We are lucky enough to live in Australia's "bush capital" so we have good butchers and produce easily accessible, but eating at restaurants is a bit dicey, as again there's no reliable way here of checking on the quality of the product or how it was raised.

• @DerHoggz

  @brett

  Don't you rock fi'zi:k shoes? Poor baby 'roos. (emoticon goes here)

  Fuck no Roo's awesome. Its the most viable animal on this continent in terms of converting what grows here (two thirds of fuck all) to protein. The local government culls the roos regularly as well, (that's a separate argument but it stops them starving to death over winter, they're inside the city limits and can't range as widely as they should)) so if they end up on feet that's awesome. Good use for it I reckon.

• @brett Nice article. Do you eat fish and sea food, I can't remember from talking to you about it at the Keepers Tour.

  I'm a confirmed meat eater although I do find that I tend to eat much less of it and be much more selective about it's quality and sourcing when I'm really focussed on my fitness and weight.

  Have you read Team on the Run by John Deering? It talks a bit about riding a Grand Tour on veggie power and it's an interesting read in the same vein as Wide Eyed and Legless.

  @piwakawaka I'm not convinced that the likes of us have any true purchasing power. As long as there are huge numbers of poorly educated stupid people who either don't care or understand what they're eating, voting with your currency amounts to pissing into the wind.

  @PeakInTwoYears I like the idea of my kids understanding where their food comes from and I should probably do more to educate them in that sense - no one else is likely to. They get the whole meat comes from animals that have been killed part (I've got a few friends who shoot and the kids are quite unperturbed when a pheasant or duck is shot, plucked, cooked and served up to them) but I'm not sure they get the lower end of the market other than being told that I won't ever take them to KFC.

• @Chris

  Slap yourself, Marx brothers style... If he eats fish and seafood he's not a vegetarian.

  You sound like a French waiter.

  "Je suis vegetarien" usually provokes a confused look followed by the suggestion (or assumption) that you  eat chicken, and when it is "non" to le poulet then they move along to fish.

  Funnily enough they don't think of omelette as vegetarian, or any of the naturally vegetarian dishes that most cuisines have. Because 'normal' people eat that too.

  Even in the middle east where we have all that lovely mezze to choose from - tabouleh, felafal, houmos, halloumi, vine leaves etc etc etc they still look a bit puzzled if you start talking about veggetarian options.

• @ChrisO "Je suis vegetarian" "Ah, qui, would you like ze chicken?" is probably better than being offered a vegetarian sausage, most of which are about as offensive as alcohol free beer.

  I've met a few people who claim to be vegetarian but really just draw the line at red meat/poultry based on the ethics of meat production as opposed to the organic/free range nature of fish. Anyway, I was leading into asking Brett if he takes the time to enquire whether his beer is vegetarian.

• I think the underlying theme isn't so much vegan as much as it is discipline and sacrifice in pursuit of living the V. Just got back from training camp in Wisconsin where we climbed 8000 meters over six days. It was pretty freaking inspiring to be with 10 other guys who rolled out each morning to push themselves and each other. In terms of lifestyle, its a unique common ground that we share in our commitment to our craft.

  That said, nutrition plays a huge role. Attending training camps tends to hit the reset button on my eating habits - especially after a long-ass winter followed by cold and wet spring riding. If low fat proteins, whole foods and minding the intake of high fructose corn syrup help take the weight off - so be it. I know how much better I'll climb five pounds from now. For me its about bringing as much focus and discipline as I can manage [in spite of my many mid-age bad habits] to become a stronger cyclist. Whatever the pain or sacrifice...it's worth it.