My Vegetarian Hypocrisy Revealed

“So,” my son said, with a snarky tone, “you eat eggs but not chickens. What’s the difference?” Fueled by a glass of wine, I gave a smart-ass response that made little sense. One of my daughters-in-law mounted a more intelligent defense on my behalf, but the encounter left me feeling conflicted and a bit ashamed.

Let me see if I can do better. “Why eggs but not chickens?”

1. Egg production stresses the environment less. One hen makes lots of eggs. One fryer makes …one fryer. Who knows if that’s true, but it feels right. Oh, and I like eggs.
2. I’m not a vegan. I like eggs.

The truth: There is little moral or environmental justification for eating eggs and avoiding eating chickens. Veganism without question has the lowest environmental footprint. It is even the “in” diet these days. Bill Clinton converted. Venus Williams is giving it a try. Mark Bittman, who can teach you how to cook and eat everything, advocates a vegan lifestyle “until dinner” in his New York Times column. All of them revolutionized their diet when their impaired health didn’t respond to traditional American interventions like drugs, a low fat diet, or exercise.

After watching “Forks Over Knives,” I started exploring a plant-based diet more seriously. Many sources pointed to evidence that a well-planned, mostly home-cooked, vegan diet provides optimum health. Yes, we are physically suited to an omnivorous diet. Psychologically, most humans are capable of killing animals to eat. But we humans also possess intellectual and spiritual capabilities. These help us formulate personal values to constrain our physical and psychological urges.

Here are three of mine:

I value the earth’s health because a sick planet dooms my grandchildren. Unfettered exploitation of resources is suicidal and stupid. I’m neither.

I value my health because I dread suffering pain and disability on my way to my grave. Heart disease, diabetes and cancer all bring suffering. They are all strongly linked to diet.

I value humane treatment of those less powerful than me. Videos like this from PETA, make it impossible for me to ignore the lives of the animals whose bodies occupy the center of most American’s plates.

If I’d asked my son last night to justify eating meat, he would have said that he likes meat and does his part to support sustainable farming. He buys organic, pastured, local, and (maybe) humanely raised meat. Like most modern, conscientious omnivores, when he eats at home he focuses on animal husbandry rather than environmental burden or nutritional research. And when eating out, no questions asked. For now.

But I’m prone to ethical shapeshifting too. By eating eggs, however they’re raised, I promote the untimely and unpleasant death of a hen. I can’t hide from that. And after watching a video clip of dairy practices recently, I’m more uncomfortable than ever with eating cheese. I adore cheese. It’s one of my core protein sources. But each time I pick up a block of cheese, it gets harder to ignore the life of the cow who produced it or its contribution to my bad cholesterol.

We are all living an elaborately constructed “middle way.” Some of us lie closer to the vegan endpoint …my ideal. Conscientious omnivores emphasize sustainable livestock practices and organic meat as the goal. We all want health -- for ourselves, for the planet -- and we each strive to get there without compromising our most deeply held values or the quality of our lives.

No, I’m not “all in.” My son’s right. I’m a hypocrite. Processed food, eggs, dairy, sugar …I eat them all, and my health and well-being reflect that. I eat junk when I’m stressed. I trade off healthful food for speed and ease. I’ve become adept at elegant rationalizations for my behavior. But my consciousness is rising again and with that, my guilt. I struggle. That’s why I can’t give my son a very satisfying answer to his question. I know he was baiting me. He disapproves of my lifestyle. I’m a pain in the ass to feed at family gatherings. He wants me to stop my craziness and make everyone’s life easier. So he points out my hypocrisy in hopes that I’ll eat …a nice chicken pot pie. Instead, he makes me think harder, and I creep ever closer to my ideal. I hope he’ll edge closer to his too.

To the Healthy Turkey Burger!

Many thanks to those who work so diligently to offer us an alternative to beef burgers:

You thought I might have gotten some sense didn’t you? Nah ….thanks to Facebook/Food Inc for this link. And to Mercy for Animals for their courage in exposing this.

Many of you who view this or read further will labor to convince yourself that this is the exception. (Full disclosure: I couldn't watch the whole thing.) If you are young enough, you think that turkey is an everyday food. When I was a kid, turkeys were local, maybe even “heritage,” though we didn’t think in those terms. It was just “turkey”. Butterball got into the act in the mid-late ‘50s. Their primary feature? Juicy. Nice and juicy.

They got that way by injecting stuff like fat, water, salt and chemicals (mono-and diglycerides, sodium phosphate, annatto color and artificial flavor) to turn what was often a dry, tough fowl into something resembling succulent. OK, maybe not succulent, but reasonably tasty. Round about the 80s turkey started to appear in grocery stores all carved up into breast “cutlets,” or ground up, just like chuck, and pristinely wrapped in plastic. White meat. Low fat. Healthy. I bought it. Any discerning consumer, striving for health bought it. After all, it wasn’t red meat. Readily finding turkey without the hours-long hassle of cooking the whole freakin’ bird, now that was a miracle.

Those healthful turkeys, whole, cut-up, ground, frozen, “fresh”, are dominated by factory farms under the auspices of Butterball, who sold over a billion pounds of the stuff last year. But health is about more than the color of the muscle you eat. True health includes the workers as well as the environment. Certainly, the practices in the above video can’t possibly lead to “health”.

What happens next? If this plays out like other factory farming revelations, nothing of consequence will come of it. It’s a rough economy. Someone will be sure to equate reforms with jeopardizing jobs. Sanctioning Butterball will hurt “job creators” and we know we can’t allow that to happen.

At the least, conscious consumers will vote with their forks, forgoing food that makes a mockery of life, regardless of how low on the food chain it resides.

I’ll stick with plants.

Just Put Down Your Fork! Obesity and the Health Care Debate

I like Bill Maher. I do. He supports PETA. He encourages vegetarian diets. He's rich. OK, so the last one is no reason to like him, but it's important to this post.

Recently on "Real Time", he got into a rant with Arianna Huffington about the role of personal responsibility in fueling health care costs. I'm sympathetic to the argument. It goes something like this: Obesity is creating an alarming rise in health care costs. Where there is obesity, there is diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease among others. We can lower health care costs by lowering our forks, giving up junk food, and using some old-fashioned will power to control our eating. The underlying premise is that obesity is primarily the result of overeating. As a health care practitioner, I like the simple elegance of that solution. A lot.

But there's more here than meets the eye. Really.

We're flooded with obesity statistics every day, usually accompanied by photos of fat people with their eyes conveniently covered by black bars. Or we get only their backsides. But if you want to see how large we're all getting, you don't need the media to tell you. Stroll through your workplace, the mall, your local grocery store. Look around at your fellow movie-goers. We are surrounded by fat people. What's worse, we don't even know who is fat any more. May I direct you to Match.com? Check out people's descriptions of their body type. Pay special attention to those who self-identify as "about average" or a "few extra pounds". Now look at the pictures. Often they are substantially overweight ("average") or morbidly obese ("a few extra pounds"). Uhhh, I thought average meant that they were not fat, not "toned", not "thin" ...just kinda in the middle, you know? Average. Then again, recall your stroll through your familiar haunts. What do most people look like? Yup. Big. Bigger than they used to be. Obesity is the new "average".

I'm biased. A "weight-ist", if you will. You probably are too, but won't own up to it. I absorbed a distaste for overweight people from my mother who had strong opinions about such things. I'm in my 60s. I remember when significantly overweight people stuck out in a crowd. The Conventional Wisdom of the time was that "those people" had no self-control. They were the poster children for the Deadly Sin of Gluttony. We felt little guilt for deriding them.

More than 50 years later, the belief still sticks: you're fat because you can't control yourself. Like every belief, this one is partly true. I overeat. Sometimes, I'm compelled ...like many people, I can slip into "emotional/stress eating". But is the secret to conquering obesity just exercising more willpower? Getting a grip? Perhaps, for some of us. But I don't think an epidemic emerged from a sudden inability to put down our forks. Especially among the poor, minorities, and the middle class.

Which leads me to three broader food-related issues that undermine our health and cost us money: 1) the poor quality of our food supply, 2) the near absence of people's ability to cook from scratch, and 3) the unavailability in most families (especially elderly and one-person families) of someone who has the time and/or energy to make a fresh, healthy meal. If we can't address these three, complex systemic issues we won't get very far trying to impose incentives for "healthy behavior" or for providing more efficient care to large numbers of people who have chronic conditions.

"Food, Inc.", a documentary on how our food is raised, concocted and engineered, is currently playing in our area. Go see it. It presents a visually compelling link between our consumption of food-like substances and the cost and quality of our health. I came to tears watching a lower middle class working Hispanic family shop for food. Two bottles of soda were cheaper that a bunch of broccoli. They had two children to fill up and with the cost of the father's medications, not enough money to buy the food that would avert further deterioration. One young daughter was perilously close to a diabetes diagnosis. The mother knew what she should be eating, but she couldn't afford it. They all worked 16 hour days, with no time or energy left for cooking at the end of the day. Three out of four of them were overweight or obese. This is not their fault. They want to do the right thing. The system conspires against them.

If you think this is a problem of poverty alone, you're wrong. While obesity declines as income and education climb, it remains higher than we can afford. And all those lovely kitchens in McMansions, are for show, not daily use. Those families eat out. A large proportion of adults my age are on multiple medications for high blood pressure, high cholesterol and depression (which is linked to poor cardiac health). Most of these illnesses are partially fueled by the hidden, unhealthy ingredients in food, the things we didn't eat 50+ years ago because they didn't exist. As an example, this week a study was released that revealed that the average American woman eats 22 teaspoons of sugar a day, almost all of it "hidden". Her healthy limit should be, at most, 6 teaspoons -- half that if she is sedentary. Flavored fat-free yogurt, a common health and weight loss food, contains the entire sugar budget for the day. Yogurt, for crying out loud.

So as you ponder your position on the health care reform debate, perhaps you need to challenge your biases. That's hard. For me, for you, for Bill Maher, who unlike most of us can afford to play the food game by "New Rules". But think about that Hispanic family, your co-workers, maybe your own family members ...and how difficult it is for all of them to buy, prepare or eat a high quality diet. Think about the cost of our heralded cheap food. Face the dirty secret that the decline in food costs almost directly mirrors the increase in health care costs. Then ask yourself who's to blame. Not so simple, is it?

The Big Bugs Among Us

Yeah, I know, I've been silent a long time. But I'm gearing up again for a spurt of activity. Sooo much data is released every day that deeply worries me. I can't ignore it while I go about my mundane chores.

This blog is dedicated to health, broadly interpreted. I'm a health care professional. Since childhood I've been deeply influenced by the health care culture. Over the last year, I've switched to a primarily vegetarian diet which has had a profound impact on my health, my understanding of nutrition, and my opinion of American eaters and the dominant food culture. So I've become increasingly sensitive to emerging information on how our contaminated, processed, nutritionally vacant food chain compromises our health. I have grandchildren. And I'm scared shitless over the impact our food sources have on their long-term health.

A top story on MSNBC right now, just fueled my fear.

The story recounts investigative reporting from Prevention magazine: Concerns Growing Over Superbugs in Our Food. Bottom line: a growing proportion of the animal protein in our country is causing outbreaks of MRSA (an antibiotic resistant bacteria) and/or seeding our bodies for future eruptions of the disease. The incidence of workers in factory farms and processing plants with this illness in also increasing. And most worrisome, MRSA is recurrent -- once you get it, you are likely to have repeated outbreaks, each one more resistant to treatment than the last. MRSA can be lethal. It is unwise to dismiss it as 'just a skin infection'.

The story offers a list of ways to protect yourself. One of them is switching to organic meat. However, in my view, that's just trying to soothe meat-eaters into thinking that organic means "safe". But, if that organic meat is finished in a CAFO or processed in plants where contaminated meat was processed, or if it is butchered by workers who've been infected at other plants, then the organic label is less protection than people imagine. Regulation won't protect you: no one regulates the exposure to MRSA promulgated by the food industry.

The meaningful switch is another one suggested by the list: avoid or minimize your exposure by using non-animal sources of protein as much as possible. All the meat eaters I know will be jumping onto their soap boxes, throwing verbal epithets at me, and extolling the virtues of meat, insisting that they will eat what they damn well please, thank you very much. I support free will, OK? But informed eaters can't continue to ignore the increasing flood of information on the risks of eating 'food' supplied by the American industrial food complex -- and that includes the organic and natural food industry, which is increasingly being industrialized, with unanticipated consequences.

We need to eat lower on the food chain, period. We need to attempt to verify our food sources whenever possible, be deeply skeptical of food in restaurants, and take seriously the impact of food on health. The risk is highest for children. At the least, we need to feed our children differently than we eat. We must be vigilant about their exposure to contaminants, possible allergens in processed foods, and minimize their consumption of food that is low in nutrient value. Allergies are increasing in children and I have no doubt whatsoever that this is directly related to the amount of processed food they eat. If you wait for studies to identify the risks, it will be too late for your children. No one wants to fund those studies or take on the food industry, whose campaign contributions have bought them protection from deep scrutiny.

Read the article online. Consider the benefits of a conservative approach to your food choices. Your children will one day thank you!

Pigs and MRSA

Nicholas Kristof has a column today on the spread of MRSA (a potentially lethal, drug resistant bacterial infection) among people who live or work around factory-farmed pigs. This is yet another example of how our food chain has run amok. As Kristof notes, we've done a good job in the U.S. of providing cheap food. But the pricetag is far bigger than the one presented at the checkout. Increasingly, we're uncovering "farming" practices that put our health at risk -- animal waste that permeates and contaminates aquifers, overuse of antibiotics which manifests as drug resistance in humans, "meat" that has an entirely different nutritional profile than the meat eaten by our grandparents and great-grandparents -- the list of evolving hazards is long, and growing longer.

Most people I talk to about these issues are in deep denial about the quality of their food. If it's cheap and shrink-wrapped, then it's fine by them. As a group, Americans seem hell-bent on defending to the death their need to eat food that kills them and despoils the planet.

Hopefully, information like the kind in Kristof's article, information that has only recently been published in the mainstream press, will begin to challenge people's assumptions about the desirability of the foods they eat. We need to wake up and break the back of the factory farming industry in this country if we're going to significantly improve the environment and our personal health. A real test of our resolve to bring change, is soon to come: the Obama administration's new budget is attempting to reduce or eliminate subsidies for large agribusiness. This move is absolutely essential to fostering the resurgence of family farming; illuminating the true cost of the mass-produced food, especially meat, that we eat; managing our federal deficit, and addressing climate change. But be prepared. If you want a healthier food supply, you're going to have to fight for it ...and pay dearly.

Purpose Past 60 -- Food and Our Future

OK, so I'm nearing my 61st birthday. I'm alternately somber and excited as I creep ever closer to the milestone of sixty-five. How did I get here? How much time is left? And maybe more importantly, how do I continue to pursue a life of passion and purpose?

Sometimes I wish I could free myself of that last question. Seriously. I contemplate just "being", the Zen master approach to life. But that really isn't me and though I respect and admire that approach to life, it just doesn't fit my energy and personality. I am a passionate person. I must have a purpose that extends beyond my own pedestrian interests. The work I do now, certainly contributes to both individuals and a community. I'm using many of my talents. It taps into some things near and dear to me -- sustaining health, aging with dignity, providing leadership and mentoring others. But in truth, I'm weary of the constraints I work within and I don't get any chance at all to promote, proselytize, or propel others to a deeper understanding of critical policy issues.

So I'm searching. The day will come, God willing, when I can leave my current venue and take on something new. What might that be? I've been reading two books by Dawna Markova -- Wide Open and I Will Not Die an Unlived Life -- as I sort my way to the next phase that awaits me. Digging deep, it is getting clearer what pulls me -- food activism. Food is essential to life. And in the United States, food policy directly influences the potential for improving both individual and planetary health. If we can successfully change the food system, we can alter the eating choices available to the community and to those close to me. Dedicated activists, community organizers and entrepreneurs around the country are demonstrating every day that there is another way to grow and eat food that results in greater pride and prosperity for the growers, better nutrition for the eaters, richer land, and more vibrant communities.


But is that happening here? In the Kansas City Metro Area? Yes, it is. Good old Google helped me find a not-for-profit that is doing amazing work. They've been at this for a couple of years. I'm astounded and encouraged by what they've already accomplished. Who are they?
The Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture. Their mission: "Promoting small-scale, community-based, entrepreneurial farming in the Kansas City metropolitan area". Here is their latest newletter, which leads with a story about the Urban Farms Tour 2009, to be held in June. The information in this thing is so intriguing! I had no idea this was happening in my own back yard. I'm not yet sure how my sense of purpose and my talents fit into their work. But my heart swells just to know there are people in my community who are working toward developing small, local, sustainable food systems in urban areas.

I'm sending them a check. And I'm going to subscribe to their newsletter. I'll definitely attend some upcoming events and I know my family will be interested as well. As a group, we are all searching for a possible business to develop, green initiatives to promote, and a path to a more sustainable lifestyle. We need to connect to this broader community. My mind and heart are engaged. Let's see what comes next.

The Path Away from an Omnivorous Lifestyle

Evidence continues to accumulate that eating substantial amounts of meat is detrimental to health, the environment, and possibly to global social stability, as valuable land and water resources are rapidly depleted to support vast numbers of animals.

Last year, after deciding to limit my meat-eating, I began to shift to a primarily plant-based diet. After joining Weight Watchers to get off some pesky pounds, I discovered that filling up with fruits, vegetables and legumes left me less hungry, a lovely benefit! I lost a substantial amount of weight, and so far (fingers crossed!), I’m maintaining my weight even as I experiment with adding more whole grains and complex carbohydrates to my diet. I believe that limiting animal protein has been instrumental in my success and overall physical well-being. Mark Bittman, celebrity foodie, shares my experience (see his new book, Food Matters).

As my diet continues to evolve, I find myself in early 2009, rarely eating meat and seafood. I don’t miss it, which is somewhat surprising. I’ve always enjoyed meat and poultry and never intended to stop eating it entirely. But over time, the desire to eat meat has dwindled. As a consequence, I’ve had to learn new ways to cook, which has led to discovering wonderful foods and recipes that I never would have tried before. I’ve expanded my horizons and added much more diversity to my eating experiences. Certainly America’s increasing ethnic diversity has made the shift easier. More food cultures are available to us all now — Mediterranean, East Indian, Asian, African — many of which have strong vegetarian traditions. I’ve learned to appreciate simple foods, fragrant spices, and new cooking techniques. In many ways, eating mostly plants challenges one’s creativity and educates the palate.

Not unexpectedly, people have noticed the change. I’m the only one in my social network who eats this way so I tend to stand out. For some, I’m a pain in the neck as I sort through what is available to eat from a table laden with the Standard American Diet (SAD) — which is dominated by factory farmed meat, highly processed/refined carbohydrates, and high fat, salty, and sugary “foods” (and “sad” it is, for it is the root cause of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and immune disorders). But for more open-minded folks, I’ve been a curiosity, a source of education as they tasted my weird food and discovered some things they didn’t know they’d like. As I’ve answered questions about why I eat this way, a few have made small changes of their own.

But among those closest to me, there has been abundant criticism, teasing, and sometimes outright hostility regarding my choices. I work hard not to pound my family and friends over their choice to still eat meat. They know that I wish they’d eat less meat for the sake of the planet’s future and their children’s health. They think that if the meat is humanely raised, then they have done enough, for they’ve posed the problem as an animal rights issue. They cannot yet see that it is impossible to feed the world on humanely raised, grass fed, pastured animals. There isn’t enough space to do it. Period. We have to significantly limit our intake, regardless of the meat’s origins. In their children’s lifetimes, if not in their own, meat will become a very costly commodity, much as it was when my grandparents were young.

My friends and family are socially conscious, intelligent, caring people. They have progressive values and try their best to live by them. Yet eating as much meat as they please is a line they’ve drawn in the sand, a way to demonstrate to me and themselves, that they are free and relatively affluent Americans. They are very in-your-face about it too. They take every opportunity to remind me how much pig they eat and take great pride in updating me on how much their children enjoy meat. Their mantra is “I love meat, I’m going to eat as much as I want, and no one is going to get me to change that” (a long mantra, I know).

I’m mystified about the aggressiveness of many meat-eaters. What about having a “near vegetarian” in their midst triggers their need to extol the virtues of a meat-based diet? What logic might persuade them to be open to changing their habits? I recognize that a diet that is 80% plant based isn’t for everyone. Mark Bittman offers a compromise by eating “vegan until dinner”, when he then eats anything he wants. His impetus was both his health (his doctor wanted him to become a vegan!) and his increasing awareness of the environmental burden of his lifestyle. By making his changes, he dramatically improved his health while significantly reducing his reliance on meat, seafood and dairy. It hasn’t been very hard for him either. While I wish he would save meat for a couple of days a week, his solution is certainly more progressive and responsible than the lifestyle of the majority of Americans.

Perhaps one day, those of us who are forgoing meat, will not be perceived as a threat or an anomaly. But whatever a person's reasons for avoiding or minimizing meat, today I’m making a free and conscious choice, trying to bring my values and lifestyle into greater alignment. The time may come when devoted meat-eaters will be forced into change by economic and environmental circumstances. I don’t look forward to the uproar that will ensue!

Looking to Iowa

I remember driving through Iowa in mid-summer about a year ago. My son lives in Minnesota so I rush through Iowa farmland annually on the route to Minneapolis. But the last time I drove along I-35 North, I'd just finished Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. What passes for American "farmland" looked very different after that drive. I realized that the farms of my Wisconsin childhood were nowhere to be seen. While there were vast fields of corn and some other green crop (was it soybeans? Who knows what that looks like in the ground?), there was no real sign of life. No livestock. No trees, or chickens, or vegetables. Just acres and acres of a single crop. Monotony, endless monotony.

I'd read in Pollan's book that if you closed the borders of Iowa, some of the richest farmland in the world (at least theoretically), the people there couldn't feed themselves. Why? Because their crops are all grown to feed cattle, pigs and chickens, not people. There is no crop diversity, no traditional permaculture that can actually sustain the nutritional needs of a population. When you read that, you suspect that Pollan is exaggerating to make a point. Then you take a cold hard look at Iowa, and realize it must be true.

But while Iowa has come to exemplify all that is wrong with our food system, it might also be starting to offer hope for the emergence of a new era in farming. Recent statistics from the 2007 Census of Agriculture revealed that Iowa gained 4000 new farms since 2002 ("Good News From Iowa", New York Times). More fascinating, these farms are smaller (many only 9 acres), grow diverse crops, and are run by much younger farmers, many of whom are women. Their target market is local populations, not large food processors. Better yet, nationwide, there have been 300,000 new farms established in that same period.

I live in another state with rich farmland, and I'm hoping that this is a trend, along with family kitchen gardens, that takes root and flourishes. We desperately need to source as much of our food as possible, close to home. One day, maybe my children and grandchildren will be able to experience the richness of local farms as an integral part of their suburban life.

If We Are What We Eat, God Help Us -- UPDATE

The USDA announced a recall today of 143 million pounds of beef, the largest recall in the history of the country. Westland/Hallmark Meat Co was the subject of the recall. This is the company that was a subject of investigation by the Humane Society of the US, who had been secretly video taping abuses there.

Sometimes, the right things are done, and this is one of them. I have been haunted so much by that video, which is posted on this blog, that I've had a hard time eating meat, any meat. I suspect that there are many more abuses in this business, most of them invisible to us. When your meat comes all wrapped in plastic, it's easy to forget that it once had a life and often, a terrible one with a gruesome end.

I commend the courage of the people with HSUS for undertaking this investigation and explosing what is really going on in the world of cheap meat.

If We Are What We Eat, God Help Us

WARNING: this video is not for the faint of heart. It isn't bloody. It attacks your heart and soul. From: http://www.humanesociety.org/. By way of Ruhlman and Chris Cosentino.

Beef. It's what's for lunch. Your kid's lunch. And if you think this isn't making its way into your daily MacD or other cheap meat, you're deluding yourself.

I'm not one of those folks who objects, on principle, to killing things for food. Human beings are omnivores, though we have historically found it difficult to be gluttons about it since meat was hard to find (when we hunted) and expensive to raise. Interestingly, our populations were also smaller as a result. We couldn't grow larger than the natural habitat could support. I know, a lot of us starved, or died of disease ...but some days I wonder if our intelligence at manipulating the food chain hasn't just postponed the inevitable. Given the environmental pressures and our now-ingrained meat gluttony, somewhere along the line we are going to pay a huge, if not catastrophic price.

But I digress. I've been posting lately about the need to pull back on our consumption of meat protein -- smaller servings, fewer meals centered around meat. Now I'm discovering another reason for examining our meat consumption: to have more impact over how animals are treated as they approach their deaths. We have the most control over what we buy for home cooking. So I suppose that's a start -- cook more at home with meat that you can determine has been raised and slaughtered with a focus on health and humane practices. There are several sources for meat in our area. Here's one family farm that provides a CSA as well as other types of meat purchasing (not organic or totally pasture raised). Here's another CSA that serves many local restaurants; it includes many purveyors with whom you might already be familiar. They provide locally grown and raised organic food for 50 weeks a year (they also have smaller subscriptions). Contact information for a number of locally grown/raised food is on the KC Food Circle web site.

None of these farmers states whether or not they support humane slaughter but I suspect they will respond if locavores start asking.

Clear-Cutting With a Knife and Fork

Worried about climate change? The vanishing rainforest? Are you unwittingly part of the problem?

Consider this: 2700 square miles of rainforest were lost between August and December of 2007, the months when rain usually prohibits clear-cutting. The Brazilian government is so concerned, they declared a state of emergency.

Activists have pulled out their pens and keyboards trying to mobilize citizens to care. Maybe they need to take away everyone's steak knives instead. Why? Because the cleared land in Brazil is used almost exclusively to grow soybeans and graze cattle. Brazil, second only to the U.S. in soybean exports, is a major source of soy used to fatten cattle for consumption by the wealthier among us (and in America, with its beef addiction, that's most of us, regardless of income). By exporting our eating habits, we've contributed to more than just worldwide obesity.

In an article in the New York Times, Mark Bittman, the cookbook author, lays out the cost of our fixation on meat -- beef, chicken, pork -- as the center of the American diet. Bittman recently published a huge tome on vegetarian cooking. Not a vegetarian himself, he has come to realize that if he continues his large consumption of meat protein, he will accelerate global warming more than through almost any other single individual act. As Bittman notes:

"Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation."

So, before you rush out to buy that hybrid car, maybe you should make an effort to reduce your consumption of meat. I didn't say 'eliminate'. Americans aren't going to stop eating meat protein any time soon. But today we each eat 50 pounds more meat each year -- 200 pounds -- than people ate 100 years ago. Currently the 'average' person eats about 3 oz of animal protein a day, excluding eggs and dairy. Personally, everyone I know, who can afford to eat meat, is eating much, much more than that. If we each made a commitment to cut our daily consumption of animal protein in half we'd make significant inroads in improving personal health, the environment and, not insignificantly, in reducing the fossil fuel demands that keep the cycle going.

This isn't easy. I'm retooling my own dietary habits aiming for a goal of eating meat only a couple of days a week. Once you start this, the first thing you notice is that you've been eating a hell of a lot more meat than you thought you were. Once you examine what's on your plate, you realize how much animal protein is central to a meal. If you don't have any, you think you are deprived, or that you haven't had a ''full meal". Next, it hits you that you are clueless about how to meal plan and cook differently. Everything changes: your pantry, the contents of your freezer, your shopping habits. This is a really hard shift, no question about it. But the argument for changing my lifestyle has become too compelling to ignore.

I'm slogging along, doing my best to embrace a new way of eating, increasingly conscious of how my food choices impact the planet and my grandchildren's future. Check out the evidence yourself. That $25,000 hybrid may be too much for your budget today, but you can change the way you eat right now. Think about it.