Sun, and a Question

Fi-nal-ly we had a sunny weekend. There was only one day of full-on sun two weeks ago (which I got to take advantage of, so no complaints there) but the last few weeks have been either rainy or snowy. Snowy is prettier, but it’s also kind of a pain when you can’t walk anywhere. I brought my ancient pair of cross country classic skis back from work, the kind with the scales on the bottom, so I can use them like snow shoes when we get dumped on.

But today and yesterday were wonderful. Okay, yesterday I wanted to ski (back country ski) and the best orientation was north, so very little sun. It was worth it for a nice descent. We went to a summit that’s only about a fifteen minute drive from my house. We left at 8h15 and were home by 12h30. I fell asleep in the sun on my couch, before getting up and….taking a nap in my bed.

Today we went for sun and did some cross country skiing. I have new-to-me skating skis to try out, and they are…meh. They’re a great brand and have been well kept up, but the edges are a bit screwed and if there’s a sideways tilt to the track I tend to slide off. I really wanted to get second hand skis, though, since so many people think they are going to ski and then don’t, or do and stop after a while. I got new shoes because shoes are weird to get second hand.

But here’s my question, with some back story. Last week I met with some acquaintances for dinner, and one of the women is vegan. She came up with two things that were, say, not the information that I have. I said that I eat salmon once a week, partly for Omega-3’s and partly for B12. There are three things that vegans need to pay attention to (and me as a mostly vegetarian): protein, iron and B12. Protein is super easy to find substitutes, iron a bit harder, and B12 is very difficult to replace with vegan options. Most people end up choosing to get an injection. There are pills but most are in gelatin and if they are “natural” pills, the gelatin is often from a meat based source, so no good for a strict vegan.

She said there is no B12 in salmon. I didn’t remember my research well enough to argue (I’d picked salmon as a least-bad option, so I’d looked it up at some point), and it wasn’t the place or time anyway. She also said that farmers are now giving B12 to their animals because they don’t graze enough to get it naturally.

I knew that the second one was one hundred per cent wrong, mostly because my sister raises cows now and my son-in-law (no one is married so that connection is not quite correct, but close enough) lives on his father’s farm. They are not feeding B12 to their cows, goats or chickens. Maybe everyone else in the world is feeding this mysterious supplement, but my partner, an agronomist by training, has never heard of that either. There are vitamin supplements in feeds, but where I live, they don’t have feed lots. That’s a US and South America thing. (If she’d added, “in winter” that would have made sense, and might even be correct. Animals don’t graze much in the snow. Most are fed grains in addition to hay in winter, and these grains might have supplements in them much in the same way some humans take supplements in winter.)

For her first argument, there’s more B12 in cow liver, but fish is a good substitute, and salmon is a pretty good option among fish. It’s also a pretty good source of iron. I don’t eat very much meat. I do a bit of salmon and some eggs from time to time and hope it’s enough.

The problem is not that she was wrong, but that it made me so angry after the fact. I suddenly started thinking of her as one of those anti-vax-Bill-Gates-is-trying-to-inject-us-with-nanoprobes people. Anti-science nutcakes who think all science and medicine is bad until they break their leg and want nice, allopathic treatments with painkillers and the works. They think that we’re being tracked and monitored “by them” but can’t put down their cell phones or quit social media which are actually tracking and monitoring us. She may not be that way, but I’m beginning to hate alternative-facts people. And here we are, a vegan and a mostly vegetarian, and I can’t stand her almost-what-I-think-but-just-far-enough-off ideas.

I was just surprised at how angry I was and I wondered why. My question is why do I get so angry about alternative fact sorts of people? What has made me become so intolerant?

Maybe part of this is that in the past, the kooks were more obvious. They read Weekly World News, thought they’d been abducted by aliens and had conversations with their own, personal angel. They were different in some physical way: cheap bad clothes, body odor, old eyeglass frames, hair in some place where it is not often seen. They ranted on street corners and you dropped a coin in their box when you passed by. (What ever happened to the good old days when a cult was a cult, and not a legitimate part of a political party?) Today they are hidden among us, look perfectly normal until they spew out some story about meeting the devil on a crossroads, with tabloid like details about what she was wearing, the Devil Wears Prada being taken literally because of course the title is was perfectly serious account of meeting the devil.

I need to work on myself and not take it so personally. I need to be kind and listen even to kooky things, because if I can’t then the kooks are going to grind themselves down into the ground and will never be unrooted. It’s hard, though, because I have to make a stand somewhere. If you just accept everything with kindness, you have to accept when the knife finds its place between your ribs to puncture your heart.

These were my reflections as I enjoyed the sun this weekend. Peace, love and Foro.