Lighter Footstep: The Easy Way to Give Up Meat
Editor's Note: This Week, Chris Baskind from Lighter Footstep explores going vegetarian and its impact upon the environment. You can check out the original post here.
Want to help the environment? Consider cutting back on the amount of meat you consume — or go vegetarian altogether.
It's not just a question of animal ethics. Meat production is humankind's least-efficient means of feeding itself. For every pound of meat that goes to the plate, it took sixteen pounds of grain and soybean feed to put it there. On top of this, each calorie of meat protein requires approximately 78 calories of fossil fuels to produce. And at a time where 4,000 children die each day from the lack of safe water, livestock production — including feeds — accounts for about half the fresh water used in industrialized nations.
In short: an affluent, meat-rich diet consumes up to three times more resources than one based on vegetables.
Pretty gloomy statistics. There's really no argument with the idea that a well-constructed vegetarian diet is better for our bodies and the environment. Of course, it's easier said than done. Meat-eating is synonymous with health and prosperity in much of the West. Attend a business dinner, and you can be assured the main course is meat. It's tough to find vegetarian food when you're eating out. Going veggie is a significant commitment.
The good news is this: every vegetarian meal makes a difference. Maybe you're ready to swear-off barbeque forever. Choosing a day or two a week to eat vegetarian is a great start, and allows you to sample the variety and satisfaction of veggie cooking on your own timetable.
It's National Vegetarian Week. Through this weekend, all over the world, vegetarian groups and restaurants are staging events showing off healthy, green cooking. Even if you can't find something close to you, it's a great time to explore the possibilities of veggie cuisine.
Want to give it a shot? Here are some ideas to get you going:
Start small
Pick one day out of the week to be your "veggie day" and stick with it. If you're planning to do an all-vegetarian day, rather than a single meal, the weekend is a good place to start: you'll have more control over your schedule. Some families start by dedicating a single sit-down meal — Friday dinner, for instance — to veggie fare. Whatever works best with your busy schedule.
By essentially making an appointment with vegetarianism, you're confronting the big stumbling block for new Veggies — planning. Like any new habit, practice makes perfect. Knowing you need a meal plan (or three) a week in advance allows you to browse for recipes well in advance. More importantly, it allows you to shop. Having your veggie foods at hand following a long day at work will make it less likely that you'll be ordering out for pepperoni pizza at the last minute.
Once you have your day, resolve to maintain it at least three months. In 90 days, you'll see just how easy things were once you got organized.
Convenience is your friend
Let's face it: frozen foods are generally not as environmentally friendly as eating fresh and local. It takes a lot of energy to keep frozen foods cold from factory to freezer, but there's no denying their convenience.
Almost all grocery stores have a frozen vegetarian food section these days. Annie's Naturals, Boca Burger, Eden Foods, Fantastic Foods, Gardenburger, Morningstar, and dozens of others sell an incredible range of veggie, organic, and vegan entrŽes — all ready for quick preparation on your range or in the microwave.
Load up, particularly as you're just getting started on a three-meal veggie routine. There's no quicker way to kill a new vegetarian habit than dreading getting into the kitchen. Make a few meals easy, and spend your time elsewhere.
Get the tools of the trade
Vegetarian cooking can be more labor-intensive than just tossing a steak on the grill. Like Asian cuisine, there's a fair amount of cutting, slicing, and dicing involved.
Which isn't a bad thing. There's nothing more natural than preparing food, and once you have the right tools, you'll probably find it a great way to relax and unwind. So make sure your kitchen is equipped for veggie cooking.
A high-carbon or stainless steel Chinese cleaver is probably the most versatile food preparation implement on the planet. You can do practically anything with it, from delicate cutting to smashing garlic cloves with its flat side. You'll want a few decent fruit and vegetable knives in several sizes and plenty of bowls to hold chopped-up veggies while you're cooking.
A blender and a food processor are veggie essentials, particularly as you move into more complicated recipes. A lot of vegetarians have a heavy wooden cutting board or block fora working surface. You'll eventually want a rice cooker: they're convenient and energy-efficient. A spay bottle with a 50/50 mix of water and white vinegar is helpful for cleaning veggies, too.
Study up
Going veggie isn't just leaving out the meat. You'll need some balance in your diet — and variety. Like any new practice, you'll do better with vegetarian cooking if you seek out some instruction.
Here's an excuse to prowl your local new or used bookstore. Vegetarian cookbooks are hot. You'll find everything from books which help you replicate traditional recipes –veggie style — to ethnic cooking, to the uncharted waters of the truly avant-garde.
And then there's Google. Pop in the search query "vegetarian cooking" and you'll see there are thousands of free resources at your disposal. A few which really stick out: Vegweb's impressive archive of veggie and vegan recipes; VegCooking, with it's magazine-style survey of all things veggie, and the offbeat PostPunkKitchen, a fully vegan site with a lot of attitude and style.
Try some vegetarian restaurants
It's homework! The quickest way to get a feel for the broad variety of vegetarian possibilities out there — and get a sense of what you might like to try cooking at home — is to hit a few restaurants which specialize in veggie cuisine.
Vegetarianism isn't just hot — it's haute. So you'll find everything from funky little bistros with a hippie vibe to high-concept, high-end restaurants with prices to match. Your local whole foods or health store probably has a deli, also.
Make the rounds and try different things on the menus. It won't be long before you develop favorites. Take the ideas you pick up and try them in your own kitchen.
That grilled veggie wrap with hummus? You're going to like it. Really.
Chris Baskind: Lighter Footstep
Tags: environment, Food, Home and Garden, lighter footstep, organic, vegetarian
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May 30th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
There are a lot of animals raised for slaughter that eat foodstuffs people can’t or won’t eat. Sometimes, meat is a legitimate way to take a large quantity of low-grade or indigestible food and turn it into something edible. Humans can, for example, digest ruminants but not the cellulose the ruminants eat.
Granted, feeding wheat to cows or corn to chickens may waste a reasonable food to produce the meat, but feeding straw to cows is a time-tested way for humans to eat straw.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Great article! I found that once I committed to going vegetarian, I got way more interested in cooking and had more fun preparing food. I have never been healthier or happier either, and consider my decision to go vegetarian (and later vegan) the best choice I’ve ever made.
My advice is to research vegetarian nutrition (you really don’t need as much protein as you think - most people get way too much) and watch out for nutrients such as iron and B12 that can be a little more difficult to get on a plant-based diet. It’s also fun to experiment with different cooking styles and ethnic food (thai and indian foods are my favorites, and a lot of traditional recipes are vegetarian). Exploring new spices and ingredients has been a fun part of the veg journey for me.
Some of my favorite cookbooks:
Anything by Sarah Kramer, especially “La Dolce Vegan”
RAW (The Uncook Book) by Juliano
The Moosewood Cookbook (there are several, they’re all good!)
There are several great web sites out there for vegetarian info and recipes. Some of my favorites:
http://www.GoVeg.com
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/
http://www.happycow.net/ (great resource for finding veg-friendly restaurants)
Going veg is easier than ever with so many options out there, I can usually find at least one thing on any restaurant menu that I can eat, and there are all-vegetarian restaurants popping up all over. It’s an investment in your health, the environment, and the welfare of animals. Happy eating!
~Megan Prusynski
my site | volksvegan adventures | unplug
May 30th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
My sister is a vegetarian and sent this article to me. Thanks for all the great information! She really wants to try becoming a vegetarian so she also requested a free Vegetarian Starter Guide for me from the website http://www.TryVeg.com It’s been really helpful, too. I think being vegetarian will be a lot easier than i thought. There really are way more options out there than i realized. And after learning about how eating meat harms animals, the planet, and my health, my appetite is turning more and more green.
thanks again!
May 31st, 2007 at 2:27 am
True, just make sure you’re ordering the range-fed beef, eggs, etc. However, I’m guessing the majority of animals-raised-for-food are not range fed, or else range-fed meat (which is clearly less resource-intensive) would be cheaper than stockyard, force-fed-god-knows-what meat. (Why is that????)
May 31st, 2007 at 5:25 am
How refreshing to read a blog about our impact on the environment that actually recommends going vegetarian. People seem to be genuinely afraid of making such a suggestion, but I find that people will surprise you. They can take it. It’s amazing how much we tend to underestimate each other. Anyway….
To expand on the other comments’ suggestions for resources, I highly recommend Compassionate Cooks, an organization right in Oakland, CA, which teaches vegetarian cooking classes. I’ve been to several, and they’re really fantastic. The website is http://www.compassionatecooks.com.
Also, their podcast (it’s in iTunes - called Vegetarian Food for Thought, but it’s also accessible from their website: http://www.compassionatecooks.com) is amazing. Without wanting to sound too dramatic, it has literally changed my life. The host takes a much more compassionate though still very consistently ethical approach to vegetarianism and covers everything you could possible imagine, particularly all the social aspects of this lifestyle. She provides the most pragmatic suggestions for answering the typical questions and offers the most inspiring and insightful thoughts. Anyway, I can’t say enough good things about it. You’ll see (hear?) what I mean if you check it out!
Good luck to you! The 70 comments on iTunes should be convincing enough.
Thanks again. Great article!
May 31st, 2007 at 6:41 am
It’s a nice thought that there would be more food available for human consumption if only we would give up meat. The truth of the matter however is more like Crosius pointed out. That is that people are not capable of eating what cows eat. They are either fed low quality byproducts of grain production for people or are grazed on poor quality land that is incapable of
grain / vegetable farming. A farmer using prime grain land for grazing would not be a farmer for very long before the bank owned their land. People should leave the city occasionally so they can see the truth. There are known health advantages to going vegetarian but ethics is simply not an advantage unless it makes you feel better that you did not harm an animal in order to feed yourself. These last points are why I am a vegan. I also feel better by not misleading people.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I disagree that there are no ethics involved in vegetarianism unless your reasons are based in animal rights. The amount of resources that go into animal agriculture is massive, the amount of pollution that comes from industrial animal agriculture is massive, and the externalities from the production of cheap, industrial meat are something that we all subsidize. There is little voluntary transparency in the industry. For me, there are absolutely ethics involved in eating meat–I don’t want my diet, hence dollars, to support such an irresponsible, unsustainable industry.
As a sidenote, I’m a born-and-raised Iowa girl who has spent a lot of time around agriculture. It’s a part of life there. But just the stench from a hog confinement is enough to rethink bacon.
June 1st, 2007 at 4:16 am
For as long as people have been eating cows, they have performed the function of turning cellulose indigestible to us into digestible meat. And then we started feeding cows with #2 corn instead of grazing them as nature intended, which upsets the pH balance in their rumen, necessitating the use of antibiotics to cut down on ulcers and other nasty side effects that result. Cows weren't made to eat corn, and just because we can produce a lot of corn with a lot ofpetrolium-based fertilizers doesn't mean we should.
The industrial food system is broken, despite being optmized for maximum production over the last few decades.
Do some research.
David
June 1st, 2007 at 5:06 am
There simply isn’t enough information presented in this article to back up the author’s stats about commercial meat production. Given that his point and the entire article is based on those stats, it seems at best a major oversight, and at worst an overbiased viewpoint.
Can the author please clarify the source of the stats, and specify exactly which commercial meat production methods they apply to?
For example, is the commercial production of organic beef better or worse than non-organic? What about other meat products, such as pork or lamb? What about international differences in meat production - are different countries using different methods with varying efficiencies? And what about the varying carbon footprints of vegetables we see in the supermarkets - locally grown veg may have a higher carbon cost due to heated greenhouses than the same veg imported from a warmer country. Could some meat products have lower carbon costs than some vegetable products?
I feel that the author has glazed over the carbon cost of meat with far too broad a brush for his opinion to carry any weight.
By the way - I’m a vegetarian, and have been for over 15 years
June 1st, 2007 at 2:00 pm
These are agricultural FACTS posted on http://www.animalag.org, published by the United Soybean Board:
- Cattle spend 12-18 months on range or pasture land and an additional 3-6 months in a feedlot where they are fed high protein grain-based diets and gain 2-4 pounds a day.
- U.S. pork consumed 265 million bushels of soybeans in 2004.
- Animal agriculture consumed more than 23 million tons of soybean meal in 2004.
Once you know the facts it’s hard to justify eating meat. The only reason to continue eating meat is because it tastes good. The reasons not to eat meat seem to be endless.