Meat Has Feet

Just a quick heads up on a nice piece in the NYTimes' Week in Review by Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, entitled "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler." As you might guess it focuses on the current state of meat production and consumption in America and in doing so raises a number of issues that we are concerned about here at WHRI. Here are a couple of quotes of note:

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States. . . .

Another suggestion is a return to grazing beef, a very real alternative as long as you accept the psychologically difficult and politically unpopular notion of eating less of it. That’s because grazing could never produce as many cattle as feedlots do. . . .

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”

One of the ideas that we seek to both practice and preach around here is the global reality that meat is a luxury in most cases and that when it is eaten it should most often be a side dish - a tough concept for most of us Americans to come to grips with. For that reason meat doesn't make many appearances at our community lunches and when it does it is meat that we have raised, butchered and cooked ourselves. It is also one of the things that we emphasize in the meal preparation portion of our LOTOS program. The concept that animals have intrinsic worth totally disconnected from the utilitarian value that we place on them is one that we think visitors to the farm should wrestle with and in this case quite literally. If they want to eat meat with their LOTOS meal then they have to decide as a group to do so and as as group they have to go through the process of catching (usually a chicken), killing, butchering and cooking the animal. Groups always point to this process as being one of the most powerful of their experiences because it impacts them on so many levels: the reality that every time they choose to eat meat it involves both an animal losing its life and a person bearing the burden of taking that life; the recognition that in most of the world people are much more intimately connected to their food and where it comes from; and for many the ethical struggle of realizing that if it were incumbent upon me to kill all the meat I think I need to eat then I probably couldn't do it and therefore should I be eating so much meat - all of which are good, hard things to work through.

Anywho, give the article a read and then if it makes you depressed at the current state of affairs come visit our animals here at the farm and see what a contrast there is in local food production. Oh yeah, and for those meat eaters amongst us who are looking for a little more conscience in their burger or steak keep checking the blog and website to see when we'll have our own grass-fed beef for sale in the next month or so!


Also worth a look:
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.
The Meatrix - can not be explained, must be experienced.