Eating Less Meat: It’s surprisingly easy to do.

Vegetables are delicious.  I bet it was the meat and dessert industry that started spreading the meme that kids had to eat their vegetables if they wanted dessert, as though it were a chore to eat vegetables.  And then kids started to believe it. 

After reading James McWilliams analysis of the rift between animal rights advocates and sustainable farming advocates on the subject of synthetic meat at the Atlantic, I thought I might write a bit of an update to the post I wrote way back in December about roughly the same subject. 

I concluded that post by confessing that I ate all the usual meats without much in the way of guilty feelings.  Since then I’ve pretty drastically reduced my meat intake.  My decision to change my diet was not based on animals’ capacity to think or suffer but because a little over two months ago a few friends of mine and I were discussing the carbon costs of our diets.  Heh… Just writing that makes me feel like such a caricature of a liberal yuppie.

But anyway, my friend was pointing to some research he had read about that suggested, persuasively to him, that given the carbon costs of industrial meat production, going vegetarian was one of the most effective ways for an individual to reduce his carbon footprint.  I don’t mean to evaluate that argument here, but you can read about it at New Scientist. 

Now, my friend is not a vegetarian, so it’s not like he was judging the rest of us, but partly because by this point in the evening we were already several beers in, I decided to call him on his mild hypocrisy.  I told him that if he went vegetarian, I would too, thus doubling the environmental impact of his dietary decision.

We made a few concessions on the spot to make the challenge realistic and decided it would last only 6 months (actually until November 5th, because it’s so easy to remember).  We were permitted fish for two meals a week, some other meat for one meal a week, but beef only once a month because it’s apparently the worst, environmentally speaking.  Other than that we would abide by a strict vegetarian (though not vegan…eggs and dairy are allowed) diet.

Since then, 2 months in, I’ve got to tell you, it has been surprisingly easy and I feel really healthy and good about it.  Here are some ways that my eating habits have changed (or not):

• I order vegetarian meals in restaurants (easy)
• I don’t eat fast food (a little tough at first, but there’s no way I’m wasting a precious beef credit on a Big Mac, now it’s easy)
• I never realized how many hoagies I ate.  On average, I probably ate between 2 and 3 hoagies a week before.  Now I eat more peanut butter sandwiches, potato chips and fruit.  (moderately hard)
• I eat tofu sometimes, like in a delicious stir-fry (easy)
• I’ve been a recipe experimenter for a long time now, and if anything, contrary to what you might think considering that a vegetarian diet only reduces the number of ingredients I have to work with, my diet has grown more interesting, because instead of getting stuck in the old beefporkchickenpastabeefporkchickenfish rut, I’m trying all sorts of new recipes.  (fun and easy)
• I’ve experienced no loss of energy; if anything, I feel less sluggish than I used to
• I save money, especially on lunches, which I can then spend on expensive steaks once a month

So anyway, so far so good.  There’ve been only four or five minor slip-ups so far between my friend and I, and already I think we’re having a positive impact on the environment.  Just kidding, but seriously, significantly reducing the amount of meat I eat has been surprisingly easy for me and it’s delicious. 

There’s still four months ago, but I have a feeling that the eating habits I’m developing now will extend beyond Guy Fawkes’ day.

BONUS: Make this.  It’s easy, customizable, and you will like it.

The Dystopian Future of the Past is Now!

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time. (Times Online, 9/29/09)

Some Dutch scientists backed by a sausage manufacturer have grown "a soggy form of pork" in a petri dish.  Where to begin?

Leaving aside a mostly silly dislike I have for the Netherlands (Rembrandt and Van Gogh...Awesome; pirate capital of consumption and Infernal setting of Camus' The Fall...not awesome), I think this begins with Chicken Little.

In 1952, Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth wrote The Space Merchants, a novel I've been meaning to re-read.  It's sort of a satire of consumer-advertising culture, prescient in lots of ways, that follows Mitchell Courtenay, a future-day Don Draper, as he descends from the halls of Madison Avenue power to the dystopian subterranea of "Luna City" or something like that.  Anyway, the thing I remember most about the novel is when Mitch is escorted deep beneath a food-processing plant by a worker who is secretly also a member of the conservationist, dissident underground:

I asked about the apparently immense weight of the ceiling.  "Concrete and lead.  It shields cosmic rays.  Sometimes a Gallina goes cancer."  He spat.  "No good to eat for people.  You got to burn it all if you don't catch it real fast and--" He swung his glittering slicer in a screaming arc to show me what he meant by "catch."

He swung open a door.  "This is her nest," he said proudly.  I looked and gulped.

The "Gallina" (AKA Chicken Little) is a 100-ton mound of growing flesh, fed from nutrient tubes and pruned by Mexicans with light sabers for general consumption by the people of the moon.

Now Space Merchants is undoubtedly a more sophisticated satire than I recall, but I remember being repulsed by the very idea of Chicken Little when I was younger.  Some kind of blob of meat, fed with tubes and and prone to cancer?  So unnatural and alien, thought I.  But, to quote Augustine, such a fool I then was.

According to a PETA rep quoted in the article, "if meat is no longer a piece of a dead animal, there's no ethical objection."  So for someone who likes the taste of meat but draws some sort of line between animative and vegatative souls, this laboratory pork potentially solves a lot of problems.

But in fact, I'm not entirely sure what line or lines I draw.  I eat most of the usual meats, generally without compunction.  (Although I have been staying away from shrimp for the last several months, purportedly in support of mangrove swamps, but also because my brother once referred to them as the cockroaches of the sea, which maybe means that my ethics are always really aesthetic judgments in disguise).  Occasionally I try to determine a line.  Would I eat a dolphin?  Blue whale?  Elephant? Monkey? Mountain gorilla?  What if s/he knows sign language?  What about a friend of mine who died in an accident?  If something wanted to eat me after I died, I don't think I would mind.  Either that or worms anyway.  Is there a cognitive/non-cognitive line I would draw if I could decide what cognition was?  

It's probably true that the more like a human being an organism is, the more distasteful would be the idea of me eating it, which isn't to say that there's anything natural about this distaste, but I wonder if whatever explains that distaste might also explain the uncanny valley?  On the other hand, I also don't want to eat a bowl of spiders.