I used to be a vegetarian. For 14 years, actually. It started around the time I learned to cook meat, which I still find slightly disgusting. I think it was meatloaf that set me back, something in my 12 year-old mind couldn’t quite take the look and feel of raw ground beef. So, I decided I wouldn’t eat it anymore. At the time, I didn’t know any vegetarians, and I got a fair amount of ribbing for it, which, in reality only made me feel more resolved. I learned a lot about the reasons why other people became vegetarians: the health reasons, the environmental reasons, the animal cruelty reasons. They all sounded good to me, and eventually became some of the reasons I shunned all meat from my diet for as long as I did.
Then I went to Africa, and lived in Niger for two years. To say that I was exposed to a different way of including meat in my diet would be an understatement. There, as I suppose was once the case here, meat is something savored on special occasions. It isn’t expected to be part of one’s daily diet, much less part of every meal. The animals live in harmony with the people, providing milk, labor, and sometimes income. When meat is eaten, it is with the knowledge that something has been sacrificed, and every part of the animal is consumed or used (and I mean every part). There is no factory-farming or meat-packing, no hormones or cages (though I did see a fair number of goats that seemed to subsist entirely on black, plastic bags). We were nervous about eating meat there for other reasons, images of fly-covered meat at the market danced in our heads. But something about the way meat was consumed there made it, well, more palatable to me.
So there was that, and the fact that we (Seth and I) were hungry and craving protein. So, towards the end of our time in Niger, I began to eat the occasional brochette. It took some time for my body and mind to adjust to the change, but eventually I eased back into my omnivorous ways. As my old friend David would say, “it’s a slippery slope to eating human babies”…but I digress.
When we came back to the U.S. I learned more about cooking meat and found that it is a surprisingly simple way to make a meal. Vegetarian recipes, what with all their cutting and spicing are a bit more challenging generally than grilling/broiling/sauteing up a hunk of meat. So I started cooking meat more and more. At a point recently, I realized that some form of meat (usually chicken breasts, ground turkey/chicken, or fish) are part of our dinners 5 or so nights a week. I rarely cook red meat, though an occasional burger, pork chop, or slice of bacon has been known to grace our table. This is not to say we don’t eat red meat, we do, just mostly when we’re out, so not as frequently.
Why, oh why am I writing all of this? As you know from a previous post (and countless other news stories), there is a shortage of rice and other global food staples. People have been going hungry all over the world and my diet has changed very little. What bothers me about this is that part of the reason folks are going hungry has to do with our (and other rich nations) meat consumption. I recently heard another show about this issue on NPR, and was left feeling like it is very unjust that I am feeling little to no repercussion for my compatriot’s over-consumption while those around the world are suffering severely as a result of it. The old vegetarian reasoning creeps back: the production of meat leads to increased greenhouse gas emissions, and the land that was once used to grow food for people is now used to grow feed for animals who will later become food (in some places). This is all very ‘Diet for a Small Planet’ stuff. Not new news, of course.
So, here’s the thing. The meat that we eat (with the exception of that in some restaurants) is faithfully more responsible, local, free-range, grass-fed, all those good things. So, in theory my actual meat is probably not eating feed grown in African fields that should be used to grow food for African people. Also, in theory, my meat does not quite contribute the same amount of greenhouse gas to our global climate crisis. Not that my animals don’t produce methane, but I’m not supporting the overproduction of animals through factory-farming, and I’m not eating meat that was shipped from another state – or country. But, I am, most certainly over-consuming meat by any historical standard. Yes, many argue, we were created omnivores; but I’m hazarding a guess that we were not intended to eat this much meat this often. And, meat, no matter how it’s raised does lead to less food production of other types and more pollution.
I really appreciated Kingsolver’s assessment of meat consumption in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Forgive the over-simplification, but essentially, all food production involves death of some kind, and eating local meat is probably better for the earth than eating foreign bananas (she said it much better). True. And still, I don’t think she was suggesting support for eating (local) meat every day, or even a few times a week. It is clear that our meat consumption is just another sign of the American tendency towards over-consumption in general.
So, we’re cutting down drastically; pulling out the old veggie cookbooks, enjoying the growing variety of fresh produce for summer, and figuring out how to make it less of a staple and more of a special occasion food.
