Meat: To Eat or Not To Eat?

I cook with meat. That’s perfectly obvious when you take a quick glance through the recipe archives on this site. You’ll also find recipes that use butter, lard, eggs, and animal products of all sorts.

But the main theme of this website is healthful, responsible cooking. I am deeply committed to food that promotes the health of my family and the health of our planet. Doesn’t that commitment demand a vegan or at least a vegetarian lifestyle?

Not at all.

While I know that the typical American consumes far too much beef, pork and poultry, and that our meat-producing industry is a significant contributor to greenhouse gasses, the destruction of rain forest and a host of other environmental ills, I do not agree that we need to stop eating animals all together. We simply need to eat less of them.

The all-or-nothing mentality assumes that if one isn’t completely vegan or at least vegetarian then one is forking up quarter pounders or rib-eyes once or twice every day. That is not the case.

In the 1928 presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover promised prosperty with the slogan “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.” That hope was rooted in the imge of the once-weekly Sunday chicken dinner shared by an extended family that included several children, grandparents and an odd aunt or uncle.

No one imagined in 1928 that every working family could have a bucket of chicken every evening, and certainly not half a chicken or more per person!

Most of us could easily cut our meat consumption by half and suffer no ill effects. To the contrary, the reduction of fat, calories and excess protein would do us a lot of good. Replacing much of that animal flesh with whole grains, vegetables and fruit would add interest and flavor to our daily meals. We would feel better, literally less weighted down, and we would be taking a big step toward returning balance to our planet.

To change the way we eat we need to learn different ways of cooking. More accurately, we need to remember different ways of preparing food, the way our grandmothers and great-grandmothers cooked when chickens didn’t come wrapped in plastic and juice didn’t arrive in tiny cartons. There is a wealth of knowledge in our traditional recipes, in our old dog-eared cookbooks, and in the cultural celebrations that are rooted in the yearly cycle of the seasons.

We already have all the information we need; we just need to find where it was buried beneath the piles of frozen dinners and stacks of processed snacks. We can learn to distinguish real food from imitation processed food products. And in the process of eating less meat we may discover we are enjoying it more.