So a friend asked me the other day how my commitment to eat less meat has been going. If you remember, several months ago the price of meat (especially beef) rose dramatically out here, due to the drought, and I decided to put the family on a pretty restrictive non-meat diet, eating more vegetarian and pescatarian foods most nights each week for dinner.
(And for me, this also translated to eating no meat at other meals as well. I eat almost all my breakfasts and lunches at home, since I work less than five minutes away from my job and can therefore "dine-in" almost all the time.)
The answer to how our new diet is going is this: It's been a pretty fabulous success. It's been far easier than I thought, and certainly has lifted a huge weight off the ol' checkbook to not be purchasing meat. As we all know, grass-fed, local-raised meat can be quite a bit more expensive than what you'd get at the local supermarket, but what you get at the local supermarket is a huge mystery as far as how the animals are treated, what they are fed, and what kind of conditions the meat is processed in. In my opinion, if you can afford to pass on supermarket meat, do so.
And of course our new diet is certainly rich in eggs, provided by our beautiful hens. Hard to pass those up, although I do toy sometimes with going completely vegetarian, as I was one for several years. But in addition to eggs, I'm just not sure I'm ready to give up salmon and other locally-caught seafood. So we're sticking with this present diet, at least for awhile.
I will say that I thought giving up eating my fellow mammals would be more difficult, but especially now that it's summer, there is such a wide variety of other foods available, it's easy -- provided you're just willing to look outside the meat/starch/vegetable triad so many of us grew up with on our dinner plates each night.
And I'd like to think we're living a little lighter on the land by not contributing to the cycle of uisng gallons and gallons of water in order to grow the tons of grain needed to feed the animals we're going to eat. But I don't live in a glass house on this, and I should be honest here: my own pets still eat commercial pet food, the chickens get layer feed in addition to kitchen scraps, and we do still drink milk and eat butter, so it's a small victory at best.
But a small change is still better than none at all, I figure. Small steps.
As you may have read in an earlier post here, we are attempting to eat more vegetarian these days, due to a drought in the western states. It's a known fact that harvesting food in the form of animals uses a lot more of the wet stuff than just dining on the grains and veggies the animals would otherwise be eating, so to that end I've ramped up the amount of vegetarian meals we'll be eating in the coming months.
The other night I made a delicious mushroom/grains casserole, using this:
You could probably use any grains combination, or just quinoa if you wish, but this recipe came from a vegan friend and this is how she made it.
To the grains I added a generous portion of sliced portabello and shitake mushrooms -- enough to give it a meaty texture and flavor, as only mushrooms can do (in the vegetable world, anyway). Plus a half a red onion, a couple of cloves of garlic and about a half-cup of balsamic vinegar. And salted to taste.
I first sauteed the garlic, onions and mushrooms in some olive oil. Then added it to the cooked grains. Then stuck it in a 350 degree oven for about a half-hour or so.
The result was heavenly, healthy, and will definitely go into rotation as part of our regular meal choices.
Over the years of making the transition from urban to rural living, I have experienced the death of a stereotype, sadly. It's the image I had of "country folk," being 100 percent comprised of simple, honest, optimistic people, living their lives close to the land and embracing their choices while respecting the choices of others.
Oh, that does happen sometimes, but its by no means something you can generalize about. But the following idioms are, I believe, present in almost every rural place you can find across our great nation.
(This is because, just like city life, there are hierarchies and cliques residing in the country.)
It goes something like this:
Large agricultural businesses often scoff at small farms, claiming they are either hobby farms or "communes run by hippies." (Are there even still people out there calling themselves hippies anymore, by the way?)
Small agricultural holdings, on the other hand, scoff at people choosing to be "yuppies" living "city life." Although there are always a lot of platitudes about how they totally respect other people's choices, their disdain seeps through their conversation, their writings, and their attitudes when they run into these urban folk. It's like they just can't quite believe people still choose to live and work in the city, and they treat those people like exotic zoo animals they don't quite understand. (Note: This is always worse if they themselves actually chose to leave city life at some point for rural living. Then the mock respect/curiosity/feigned ignorance gets plastered on so thick you could scrape it off with a knife).
People with no land are not immune to this either: People with no land at all, who shop at the local farmer's market sometimes scoff at the ignorant fools in the grocery store, buying mass produced crap by the cart-load...never mind the fact that it's all they may be able to afford.
The carnivores, who believe eating meat is practically a Biblical mandate talk about vegetarians the way white people used to talk about blacks and commies in the 1950's.....they're all simpletons who just don't get the natural and correct order of things.
Horse people are in their own world and there are cliques within cliques within cliques, drama, gossip and grand plot twists. Your horse clique is usually you and a couple of other couples who know how to keep horses. Your equine vet and farrier are in this clique too, although they are probably not aware of it. Everyone else with horses are dangerous idiots, all other vets are incompetent, and all other farriers do nothing but cause horses to founder and develop cracked hooves.
All that being said, you may ask why anyone would want to embrace rural life with all this mock elitism going on. Well, it's worth it because, at a certain age and maturity level, you see these opinions for the prejudices they are -- held only by some (unfortunately) very vocal minorities -- and just live your life, not worrying what other people think.
You survived high school. You can probably survive the country.
As any Californian can tell you, right now we are in the midst of an extreme and historic drought. We've had a few years that have been light on rain, and the last 12 months have been bone dry, with less than an inch of rain falling.
But in the midst of all this brown, I've had something of a green revelation: In drought conditions, eating a more vegetarian diet is a great thing to do. Raising plants uses less water than raising a large supply of animals, since animals require those same plants plus more water to drink, to keep their living spaces clean, etc.
My solution is not going to go completely vegetarian, but rather mostly vegetarian for the foreseeable future. We still plan on raising two hogs (split between another couple and ourselves) for our chest freezer this spring, but with the right kind of planning, that one hog could provide the bulk of our meat for an entire year, and since it's not factory-farmed or butchered, we can use water more wisely while raising them than you could on a larger scale. Our other source of animal protein will be our laying hens, since their water use is negligible, and they provide such a delicious product -- eggs!
And in the meantime, searching for that vegan chocolate mousse I made for our dinner party the other night has led me to several lovely vegan and vegetarian websites, chock full of yummy recipes, which has me excited to begin to eat more vegetarian meals. I think we could easily make do eating meat just once or twice a week, and there's no question that not only our bodies, but also our geographic region, would be the better for having a less water-intensive diet.
In the midst of drought, bring on the green, I say.
There's a discussion going on at another blog I follow about the ethics of posting a photo of an animal's hooves after it's been slaughtered, as part of a discussion on local meat. Eating meat is, of course, the larger issue, and what's causing the controversy. Being carnivore is something I still wrestle with. I went many years being a vegetarian, but have eventually come to the conclusion that the predator/prey cycle is so built into the planet and its own health, as well as the health of our bodies, that it is what is is.
If you look in the Book of Genesis, there are no references to slaughtering or eating of animals in the Garden of Eden. It states that Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the trees. I take this to mean that in Eden -- the idealistic world -- everything Man needed came from the fruits of the trees.
But as the saying goes, we live in a "fallen" world, and so the uncomfortable process of animal slaughter is part of our human history.
The fact is that if everyone ate vegan, the planet's ecosystem would be ruined due to over-tillage. Soy and grains are especially hard on soil and land. The best and most natural fertilizer for vegetarian crops is animal manure, which requires keeping animals in one place in order to take advantage of it. And if you keep animals, they are going to reproduce. Cows do not produce milk without giving birth first...chickens must reproduce in order to make more hens, and some roosters will be part of any clutch of chicks. So even if you only drink milk and eat eggs, you still are left with the issue of what to do with the superfluous male offspring -- the bull calf and the young rooster, as they will not produce neither eggs nor milk for you, and you don't need more than one of each on any rural block. Nature is overly repetitious with males, and at some point culling them seems an inevitability, in any community or on any farm.
Which brings me to the blog I was reading. "Today I get to watch a cow die," was stated in the post, and later on, there was a graphic image of severed cow's hooves posted. Was it too sensationalistic? I say yes. Some of what seems to be going on these days is that people are so excited to be pasturing and slaughtering their own livestock that they seem to actually believe the animal is OK with being a part of the whole, wonderful process. "I get to watch a cow die" sounded like, "I get to see Justin Beiber in concert." Whaaat? Why all the excitement and joy?
Make no mistake about it: When any mammal dies, that is not what it would choose, if it were given the choice. So when people make comments like, "I think Annie The Pig would be proud to see everyone enjoying her meat so much at our Harvest Party," that is complete and utter bullshit. Annie would have voted to not be killed, if given the choice, the same as you or I would. (And don't even get me started on why in the world we gave Annie a name in the first place, like she was a household pet.) Not that there's any kind of higher level thinking going on with the average farm animal, but there is the will and the desire to live, which is ingrained in every animal's brain stem, us included. Saying the animals is "proud" to be in your freezer is just more anthropomorphic nonsense from an already too-anthropomorphic generation.
If we are going to cull, butcher, slaughter animals (you pick the term) lets be honest about what it is. We're not "harvesting" them like we would a carrot or ear of corn. We're ending the life of something that has a brain, a heart, two eyes and likes to lay in the sun and enjoy its morning breakfast. Culling animals is, in my opinion, necessary to the balance of life of our planet. Slaughter is uncomfortable and sad. It's not a cause for cheering (unless you're currently starving) or overly sappy and sentimental calls of how "sacred" the whole thing is. It's bloody and its primitive. And it's magical thinking that the animal somehow understands this is all a part of life and is OK with being shot and having its throat slit to bleed it out.
It's part of living in a fallen world. No one loves a good pasture-raised steak more than me, but I don't fool myself for a minute that it came to be either willingly or painlessly on the part of the cow, once alive, and now dead and in my freezer.
