A while back I was browsing at a favorite bookstore of mine called Common Good Books, which specializes in featuring local authors and "books with a cause." The Compassionate Carnivore is a book that caught my eye. I read and enjoyed it, and quite frankly am long overdue to write about it.
Unlike my cats, I actually call myself an omnivore (not a carnivore), but this does mean that I do eat meat. In the book the author says that she uses the carnivore term to be more pointed. Truth is, eating meat raises a lot of concerns on multiple levels (ethical, health and environmental just to start). Many of those issues I have strong feelings about and as someone who desires to having their feelings and actions align (some might call this a desire for integrity)... I feel it's an issue that should not be left alone and this book does a great job facilitating that conversation. The author says we need to pull our heads out of the ground. Being raised as an pretty average American diet eating meat was never a "decision" I questioned growing up. It was just "normal" and delicious. I understood it was a dead animal, but I didn't give much thought to how it got to my plate. I probably continued largely in this mode until a few years ago when I saw Food Inc., and I began to understand the woes of factory farming.
If you are not on board with the opposition to factory farming, allow me to hum a few bars on that tune. First of all, let's understand the practice. Factory Farming is what happens when animals are raised for meat production on a large scale manner. Animals are often confined, fed inappropriate diets and "live" short, disease ridden, terrible lives. If animal welfare alone doesn't inspire you, then consider the negative environmental impact. The toxins that are leeched into the ground and air are unsustainable when animals are housed that densely. Besides all that, the "cheap meat" factory farms produces unfairly compete with local family farms who treat animals more humanely.
Food Inc. was a great movie for raising awareness and I'm glad it exists, but I feel that it leaves the "what to do now" part a little short. What I often hear is that the only response to factory farming is sustaining a vegan diet and forgetting about the meat and dairy industry all together. While I truly support those who come to choose this lifestyle, I see it as a tall order, so much so that it might turn many off before they even start. Also, I don't agree that this is the only way to oppose factory farming and I want people to have many ways to get on board with this fight.
The Compassion Carnivore does a great job of outlining other options. You can limit the kinds of meat you eat to just those that are not factory farmed (such as elk). You can purchase directly from the farmer (so you know how the meat came to be), which I would like to get into, but it takes time that I've yet to spend.
The key thing that stuck out to me was this. Factory Farms exist because of our high demand for "cheap meat". I put the term "cheap meat" in quotes because the externalities created by this meat make it anything but. We demand cheap meat because of how much we consume so much. In the 1950's we consumed 138 pounds of meat per person per year, in the 1970's that number rose to 177 lbs, and in 2005 was at 200 lbs (Friend 44). To me, that is a shocking trend, that contributes greatly to our factory farm problem. Do we really need to be consuming that much meat? (answer is no)
So, my tiny little part will be to take at-least one day a week where I prepare and eat a meatless dinner (Sort of like meatless monday). I love fillet Mignon, hamburgers and so on... but I certainly don't need that all the time. I can easily choose to skip it sometimes.
I hope that this will also be yet another opportunity to be more creative in the kitchen and try new things, and yes, I'll be sure to keep you posted as interesting recipes come along.
