We are all looking at the problem of food morality through the wrong lens.

We think “I need a moral framework on which to hang my hat and proudly proclaim myself this or that in order to feel like I am not a bad person.” Instead of clustering around a moral high ground, I would like to encourage us all to accept the fact that life feeds on life, and to examine the real and important differences between regenerative agriculture and the chemical and GMO-based agriculture that now dominates the landscape, with unclouded eyes. We need to begin the healing process on the land by adopting regenerative practices, cultivating the spirit of respect, by acknowledging the life energy that resides in everything that we eat.

We should respect the life energy (in breath, blood, sap, and cell) in everything that we consume, from the tree that we use for firewood to the petroleum that we use to fuel our car, both the accumulated energy of ancient sunlight captured by perennial plants.

We exploit life energy endlessly, day after day, in various and sundry ways, including driving our cars on tarred roads and turning on our plastic phones to surf the internet, all of which is powered by the dark black blood of dead trees, crushed under the weight of millennia only to power our new way of life.

Veganism is a laudable idea, but for some it provides a framework for moral superiority. Cultivating a savior complex is a natural result of following any ideological cause, and life is then seen through a frame that excludes anything that doesn’t fit into its limited ideology. And the reality is that we all consume life energy, endlessly, in order to live our daily lives.

The least harmful foods to eat come from perennial plants, and the animals that eat those perennial plants. The synergy of cows and grass can hardly be bested as an ideal system.

If the primary goal of veganism is to reduce suffering, then many of us are vegan, and a diet composed of primarily grass-fed beef and dairy, as well as free-range chicken eggs and perennial plant products, is the most vegan diet that I can think of. A diet based on grass that is never tilled, with no worm disturbed, no gopher sliced in half, allows nature to grow and flourish without our annual agricultural blades, machines, and chemicals.

We need to examine our relationship to land and the life energy it contains. In the early 1900s farmers knew that to keep the land in good tilth, which meant healthy and productive, they needed to let their fields go fallow. The idea that a piece of land is worthless if it is wild and free is prevalent in our society, and the idea that land should be allowed to go fallow is anathema.

In our modern society we feel that all things should at all times be as productive as possible. This exhausts us, the land, the wildlife, our seas, and our air.

But the funny part of the term fallow is that it doesn’t mean that land is actually resting, doing nothing. No, what it means is that the farmer is not coercing the land into productivity with a blade, engine, or chemical. When allowed to fall back into fallowness, the land itself bursts forth with wild life and energy beyond what is possible with an annual agriculture. The life stories of a million creatures play out and contribute to the regeneration of a piece of fallow land, a wild acre, a small part of planet Earth.

Much like that exhilaration that we feel when we quit that toxic job, so does the land, the wildlife, the sea, and our air feel when we stop exploiting the natural resources of the world for our endless hungers. In a fallow state we all begin to regenerate.