apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I read Jonathan Safron Foer's article on CNN.com last week and had that exact same conversation with my husband. We've been talking about retiring our steak knives for a while and the article finally pushed us over the edge.

By the way, a quibble with the excerpt from Foer's book I just read on the Atlantic's food blog. Foer says that while Indians revere the cow, some eat dogs (along with saying that French revere the dog, but some eat horses).

I just wanted to point out that the Indians who revere cows (some Hindus) do NOT eat dogs! They may eat chicken and fish, and even pork and lamb in some cases, but I have never heard of dogs being eaten in India, or seen dog-meat sold there. It is common in part of Southeast Asia and China, I believe.

I do agree with Foer's point, though, which is to question why people think it is OK to eat some animals, but horrible to eat others.

I don't plan to change my omnivorous habits -- but i do try only to buy farm raised animal meat. If everyone in the US ate as little meat as we did (me and my lover) there would be virtually no cattle business. I eat steak/beef maybe once every two months. Chicken alot. Fish alot. But would rather see changes to the system than people not eating meat.

Niman has a recent NYtimes op-ed talking about how it might be greener to eat local-sustainably produced/processed meat than to eat soy grown in clear-cut rainforests.

So I think for you and your bf it would be best to decide whether you are vegetarian for animal rights reasons or for environmental reasons. Then, act accordingly.

I'll remain an omnivore as long as I am a conscientious one. I'll continue to make choices that make the most natural sense. And I agree that it is kind of ridiculous to look down on other cultures for eating what our culture would consider to be taboo. Would I like to eat horse? No. But if eating horse is part of another culture's diet then as long as that horse lived a happy life and was humanely harvested then it's hard to argue with that. I wonder how many horses are destroyed in this country and incinerated because they are deemed useless?

I'm with pugluv. I don't eat meat that often, but when I do it's local farm raised (as are most of my groceries). I got these four canine teeth for a reason ;)

Also, the meat that I do eat probably has less of an environmental impact than vegetarians/vegans buying foods off-season, foods imported from over seas and south america, or genetically modified corn and soy.

I was under the impression that a lot of the rainforest clear-cutting was for animal agriculture. I'm sure it's both to a degree.

I'm a strict vegan for animal rights reasons, health reasons, AND environmental reasons. I buy products and produce that produced as close to me as possible. But I do believe a vegan diet it the best for environmental reasons none-the-less.

I remember seeing an article some time ago that indicated that an omnivorous diet can sometimes be more environmentally sensible than a totally veg one. It depends on the fertility of the land. (i.e., in dry areas or poor soils, to grow a crop you'd have to fertilize and irrigate, but without changing the land at all you could raise cattle on the existing grasses/scrub). I'll see if I can find it.

But agree with previous posters who said that's a different issue from the eating-things-with-faces issue.

My husband and I haven't had meat for a month for the "faces" reason...(I actually imposed it unilaterally, but he said he hadn't noticed till I pointed it out last week)...but I haven't totally crossed over in my mind. I think I align most closely with pugluv and can be ethically okay with that. It's not a compromise, but a position.

Here it is. It looks like it was about efficient use of "land area" rather than about environmental impact generally.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071008130203.htm

My husband and I are both vegetarian (as is his whole immediate family) for health, environmental and animal rights reasons.

My parents are omnivores, no matter how much I try to convert them, but they have their own reasons too. My Mom is a biologist, and over the years she has helped so many animals in so many ways - from raising orphaned baby animals, to adopting stray animals and finding them new homes (and keeping a few as family pets! Our house was always a bit of a zoo), to working on biology research which helped shed new scientific light on her subjects of study. She believes that continuing to help animals with her own two hands, is personally a more important contribution to her, than not eating some abstract cow that will just be eaten by someone else anyway.

That's just her perspective - and I respect her point of view. :)

Another 'conscientious' omnivore here (thanks, art, for the word). I don't eat much meat (and my husband is a recent convert to grain based sausages!), but what we do eat we try to make sure it was sustainably and humanely raised, preferably local. We've got a lot of local choice around here, beef, chicken, pork, mutton (and lamb), and goat; all at one farmers market. But meat will continue to be a small part of our diet; a 'condiment' as the saying goes.

mniche, some of the clearcutting is for soy production. GreenPeace is involved in a Soy Moritorium that is supposed to be slowing the rate of cutting for soy, putting cattle back as the prime deforestation 'crop' in the Amazon. So it really all comes down to 'know what you eat'.

I guess I consider myself a conscientious omnivore. I'm not going to give up eating bacon because someone on another continent would consider my puppy a meal. (Okay, I don't have a puppy.)

http://blogs.seattleweekly.com/voracious/2009/11/on_jonathan_safran_foers_modes.php#more

I became vegetarian about 4 years ago and have been veganish for the past year. I will occasionally eat dairy or eggs if they are ingredients due to other food allergies. I never liked meat, so that was an easy choice to make. I am not a big dairy or egg eater, but I cut back even further when I learned about the animal cruelty involved in both operations. The human cruelty, environmental impact, and health effects are also important to me.

I also belong to a CSA and shop at farmers' markets for produce and try to purchase food with minimal packaging and buy ingredients rather than processed food.

I was a vegan for a year, then a vegetarian for two more. I began eating meat again because I had become severely anaemic. It ended up being related to an autoimmune thyroid problem.

Since that time, I've done a lot of nutritional research, and I am convinced that eating animals is necessary for health for some people. There are several vitamins, such as A, D, and K, that are poorly absorbed in their vegetable forms, and I realize now that I was eating absolutely no saturated fat, which I thought was a good thing, but turned out to be a bad decision for my endocrine system. It's also easy to eat too few minerals on a vegetarian diet. Selenium deficiency in particular appears to be linked to autoimmune thyroiditis. I was an absolutely meticulous vegetarian-- I balanced the amino acids in various plant foods, ate fermented soy products and supplemented B12, etc., but the entire time I was a vegetarian, I got persistently weaker. I'm now in pretty bad health.

For the record, corn-fed animal meat, indoor-raised animals, and farmed fish are all seriously less nutritious than their grass-fed, outdoor-raised, wild-caught counterparts. If I were ever going to become a vegetarian again, I would make sure to eat sea vegetables every day for their mineral content, limit soy foods, and eat absolutely no soy protein isolates (they are "goitrogenic," meaning they cause the thyroid gland to become inflamed and enlarged). I would eat cheese from grass-fed cows and eggs from outdoor-raised chickens, and use butter instead of margarine. Obviously, plenty of health experts have evaluated vegan and vegetarian diets and found them acceptable, but others have not. I would be very careful before making that step.

Funny to see a post that encourages this debate on Re-Nest, and a thread that was "edited" over on the Kitchn for the same debate in the same time period.

juice--

I love the distinction you made on the over-arching reasoning. Too often, it's all one big lump of an argument, which is really misleading.