Honest Meat

Getting to Win-Win-Win

What happens when over 98% of the population does not farm or do farm labor but yet are completely dependent for their survival on the less than 2% of the population that does?  The first words that pop into my head are riskiness and dependency (& ignorance).  When a global economic system is shaken to the core, I wonder what the reverberations will be.  I hear about and see more and more people, at least in my little corner of the world, trying to plant and grow more of their own food.  That seems to be an excellent strategy to minimize risk and dependency, while increasing the pleasures of the palate with fresh-off-the-plant produce.  Other strategies people are using are supporting their locals farmers through a purchase of their seasonal bounty, usually in the form of a CSA.  While the harvest is never guaranteed, few farms will short their customers produce even when they do have crop losses.  So, shy of the farmer going out of business mid-season or a severe natural catastrophe, CSA customers will receive their share of the bounty.  The shareholders reduce their risk of not having access to good food and the farmer reduced her risk of not having a place to sell that food.  Other folks use barter, trade, and work-exchange to secure their food.  But what about folks that don't live near farmers, don't have time to trade, or enough money to exchange.  How do they ensure a steady supply of fresh, pure, healthy foods?

The Meat We Eat: Part Three

My partner and I used to be vegetarians, coincidentally for the same exact amount of time- 12 years.  I began my vegetarianism as a college freshman working in the dining hall of my dormitory, horrified by the ingredients in the chicken nuggets and other 'meat-like' processed foods they offered there.  It didn't help that I was putting on the dreaded 'freshman 15' so I thought cutting meat out of my diet would help for weight control (little did I know that my fake meat and carb-loading ways would actually fatten my up quicker!).  I was getting into the whole hysteria over the destruction of the Amazon, which was being fueled by expanding cattle and soybean production around Brazil.  At the time, I did not even enter my mind that there might be grassfed cattle operations within the same county as my university that were struggling to find buyers of their meat.  I thought, meat was meat was meat and there were no choices, at least at the grocery stores I knew of.

I don't know what drew my partner to vegetarianism in the first place, but he too thought he would avoid meat to improve his health.  However, with his limited cooking skills, he didn't exactly fill the meat void with steamed kale and lentil stew.  He ate more starches, empty carbs, and found his energy lagging throughout the day.  At the time he was even an ultramarathoner, fueling his body with weird energy elixers and gels to keep his body moving.  He now thinks he would have performed even better and won more races had he been gnoshing ham and cheese sandwiches or beef jerky for his 6-8 hour runs.

When we started raising our own animals and killing our own animals, we felt like we could participate in eating them again.  We have a reverence for our animals that people who pick up their identity-less 'meat' products at the grocery store or fast food restaurant will never know.  So what about the morality of killing animals?  Again, I turn to the next installment of The River Cottage Meat Book and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's thoughtful words: