bearing blog

Meat, less. And more blegging.

Mark, getting more and more interested in sustainability, has been urging me to cut back on the animal protein in favor of vegetable protein.  I see his point -- sure, our family can afford to eat as much meat, fish, eggs, and cheese as we want, but six billion people can't eat like that.  We could make a few sacrifices without sacrificing our health and be part of the solution instead of part of the problem. 

I am the only trouble.  I'm the only person in the family with any sort of chronic health problem at all, and that problem is overweight.  Combine that with a family history of diabetes, and it's a high priority in meal-planning to make it easier for me to keep my weight down.  The easiest way for me is to stay fairly low-carb, and the way to do that is to get most protein from animal sources, since legumes and grains mostly pack a high starch load.  That's why in the last few years we've moved away from the vegetarian dishes that used to make up about a third to a half of the dinners I made, and towards meat-veg-veg plates with the occasional side of rice or potatoes or pasta. 

But the rest of the family doesn't seem to have that problem, so maybe we can cut back on animal protein as a whole family while still letting me follow what I've learned works for me.  When I make my meal plan this week, I'm going to try for combinations that use some meat and some vegetable protein, that I can serve to family members in different proportions.  Hannah helped me brainstorm some possibilities that will seem natural and not complicate things too much:

• Meat and bean enchiladas: make some very beany and some very meaty.
• Chicken picadillo enchiladas: make some very almondy and some very chickeny.
• Pan grilled salmon served over lentils, a very nice recipe I will share sometime.
• Mjadra, a middle eastern lentil-rice-onion dish, with grilled sausages on the side.
• Extra-beany minestrone soup with shredded cheese on top.
• Vegetable stirfry with a bit of meat stirfry on the side, served with high-protein quinoa instead of rice.
• Ma po tofu, a pork-and-bean-curd-and-green-pea dish.
• Bean soup with ham, the ham shredded separately and mixed back into the soup in varying proportions.
• My fast chili, made extra beany and with some of the browned meat kept back out; also, the kids and Mark can serve it over pasta, and I'll eat it neat.
• Now that there are some new higher-protein pastas, macaroni and cheese can be an excellent protein source; I can have it as a side dish with a serving of ham or tuna, the kids and Mark can have a little ham or tuna mixed in.
• Black bean tostadas -- always a favorite around here -- with chicken or beef as a topping.
• Serve high-protein edamame as a vegetable next to a smaller portion of meat -- that's tonight's plan (see below).
• Pitas stuffed with hummus, cucumbers, lettuce, tomatoes, and a bit of seasoned ground beef (all you need is oregano, onion, and salt -- a little yogurt-dill sauce and you're in business -- my family loves this meal and it goes together very fast).
• Stuffed peppers -- some with rice and hominy, others with mostly beef.
• Spaghetti and meatballs. I'll just eat the meatballs.
• A simple approach: Make a mess of vegan rice and beans in the beginning of the week, and serve it every day as a dish to stretch whatever else we're having. Recipes are earnestly requested (that's the blegging part); hit "comments."

I'll start tonight -- the plan is for grilled fish, edamame, a big salad, and some rice.  I'll try to make the rice more interesting, like fried rice or pilaf, to see if the family can be satisfied with only 2 oz of fish per person.  Since fresh wild-caught fish is freaking expensive (I decided never to buy frozen packaged fish again, it's so frequently yucky -- we're getting it from The Fancy Grocery Store fish counter or else from a can from now on), I'm thinking my cheapskate frugal husband won't mind.

More musings from The Omnivore's Dilemma: A food-group-based selection of questions at the grocery store.

General questions

Shall I move towards a greater variety of foods for improved nutrition, or greater restrictions on our food choices for improved ecological impact?

Shall I move towards fewer shopping trips to different places, or shall I move towards driving to more places (e.g. the grocery store, the co-op, the farmer's market, the dairy drop-off, the grass farm)?

[ADDED]  Shall I spend more time thinking and planning the family's dietary choices, or shall I use that time for other useful and pleasurable activities?

Fats and oils

Shall I use more locally produced fats in cooking, i.e., more lard from the farm I get most of my dairy from, and more butter from PastureLand Farms of southeastern Minnesota?  Or shall I use less animal-based fats, i.e. eat more long-distance imported olive, sesame, and coconut oils?   Or shall I cook with less oil?

Dark Green Vegetables

Shall I serve them more often in the summer, in season, or shall we eat them daily year-round? 

Shall I buy frozen turnip greens that were grown organically, or conventionally?  Or should I not buy frozen greens?

Shall I buy greens to be eaten raw, or (presumably hardier and more local) cooking greens?

Shall I stop buying conventionally grown broccoli, with its reputation for pesticide absorption?   Shall I, then, buy only organically grown broccoli, which means less fresh and more frozen?

Shall I use precious time gardening, not a hobby I enjoy for its own sake?

Protein

Shall I serve meat less often and high-carbohydrate protein meals like beans-and-rice more often?  Or should I favor the lower-carbohydrate diet that has been the easiest way for me to keep my own weight down (I'm the only person in the family with that particular health problem)? 

On Fridays, shall I serve more wild-caught fresh fish, which runs upwards of $20 per pound?  Or shall we choose mostly eggs, cheese, and legumes, or canned fish?   Shall I buy non-smoked canned tuna, or low-mercury tinned smoked kippers?

Shall I buy ordinary deli meats?  Or shall I let my children eat mainly peanut butter on their lunchtime sandwiches?  Or shall I buy expensive, humanely produced deli meat as a luxury that I serve far less often?

Shall I stick to our grass-fed beef and pork from the freezer or shall I buy the occasional kielbasa or bratwurst?  Shall I ration the bacon and sausage from our half-hog, or shall I buy it at the grocery store after we run out with months to go before we get another hog?   Or shall I make a trip to buy humanely raised bacon from the co-op?

Yellow Vegetables

Should I serve mostly sweet potatoes and squash in the winter, and carrots and yellow squash in the summer?  Or should I rotate them throughout the year?

Should I buy woody organic carrots, or pleasantly crunchy conventional carrots?  Or should I search far and wide for better organic carrots?

Fruits

Shall we eat mostly apples all winter long?  (What else would be local and seasonal?) Or not?  Shall we eat citrus fruit less often?   

Shall we buy frozen fruit?  Shall we buy imported fruit?   

Shall we do the research to find out whether the organic apples were sprayed and how much?   Shall we not bother and simply fill the fridge with fruit of all kinds, since the kids like it so much?

Starch

Shall we eat more of it, since it can give us the most nutritional calories (you know that's really kcal right?) per kJ of petrochemical energy expended?  Or shall we eat less of it, because it usually gives us far fewer vitamins and minerals per nutritional calorie than most fruits and vegetables do?   

Is it feasible we eat more locally-produced starch?  Here in Minnesota, what would that mean -- more potatoes in the winter and more sweet corn in the summer?  More wild rice, too, I suppose?  Is cultivated "wild rice" a good substitute?  Should we eat any long-distance starches at all?

Should we eat lots and lots of it in the form of wheat, since that packs the highest protein-and-fiber punch?  Or should we favor more variety?    

Sweet treats

Dark chocolate:  an unmitigated boon or a global-capitalist child-labor horror story?

"Rapadura" and other less-refined cane sugars:  a funny-tasting ripoff that's not significantly better than white cane or beet sugar?  (Cane's a monoculture too after all.)

Grade B Dark maple syrup and molasses:  worth the extra expense to substitute more often for white sugar, even where the distinctive flavor will be detectable?  Or should I just use less sweetener overall and suit the sweetener to the recipe?

More thoughts from Omnivore's Dilemma.

After I finished the book, I passed it on to Hannah, who had almost finished it by the time I arrived to spend Thursday at her house with Melissa and all ten of our respective children.  Believe it or not, Hannah and I had a moment to sit down with cups of tea in the comfy chairs in the sitting room and discuss the book.  Hannah commented that it had raised some issues regarding "industrial organic" that she had not really considered before.  "For example, I never thought about the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix like that before."

I knew what she meant.  There's a detailed description of the pre-washed bagged organic spring mix industry in the book.  It involves specially designed harvesting machines and rows of down-coat-clad workers washing leaves in big refrigerated warehouses, not to mention a fleet of (smoke-belching, I'm sure) semi trucks to deliver it all to the grocery store distribution centers so that you can pick it up from the organic section of your local Kroger or Cub Foods, or indeed, the local co-op.  Michael Pollan points out that the salad costs 57 times as much energy to produce as it supplies in food calories.  Surely that's one of the worst energy ratios one could possibly be eating. 

But is that really a fair point?

The lettuce discussion in Pollan's book is, to me, emblematic of the complicated nature of the "what to buy" decision, and I said so to Hannah.  After all, who eats lettuce for the calories it contains?  We eat different foods for different reasons, and it's probably not good for the average American to try to maximize the number of calories eaten per square inch of carbon footprint.  (I have a sneaking suspicion that if we were to try to do that in today's economic environment we'd still be eating mainly corn! )

Mark and I share the job of nutritional gatekeeper:  I write "apples" on the grocery lists, he's the one who chooses between conventionally grown Fuji apples for $1.99/lb and organic Braeburns for $3.59/lb.   Maybe we should switch to some organic produce, I suggested the other day.  Since I have no data regarding pesticide residue and health, I cited fertilizer runoff and other ecological-footprint issues.  He says, "Look, if you want to tread lighter on the planet, our first priority should be eating less meat."   But our meat is grass-fed!  "Doesn't matter." 

Yeah, meat is inefficient in terms of calories, I'll grant you that.   And yet... calories aren't all I am trying to get from meat.  Those calories come with different stuff when you eat them as meat than when you eat them as grain, or even grain 'n' beans.  Lots more protein and fat, for one thing.  And heme iron.  If the beef is grass-fed, even better -- the fatty acid profile is good for you.   The more we find out about fat, the more we realize that lipid chemistry is a lot more  complicated than "it's 9 calories per gram so don't eat too much."  Speaking of 9 calories per gram, our family cooks mostly with unrefined coconut oil now.   I live in Minnesota.  That's about as far from "eating local" as you can get.    

Back to the lettuce -- calories aren't the proper measure here.   Let's think about rational, appropriate substitutions.  Let's say it's summer, and I put "bag of lettuce" on the grocery list, and Mark comes home with local sweet corn instead.  "It's local!" I imagine him saying.  "And it costs less per pound!  And it looked better than the lettuce anyway!"  I am still going to be supremely annoyed because sweet corn is not a reasonable substitute for lettuce.  Not only is it unworkable in recipe substitution, it is nutritionally a starch, not a vegetable, and certainly not a leafy green vegetable.  It goes on a different section of the plate.  Nope.  Not going to fly.

On the other hand, if he comes home with a bunch of kale ("It's a heck of a lot cheaper than the bag salad"), I can work with that.  Lettuce is a green leafy vegetable.  Kale is a green leafy vegetable.   If it's young kale, I can make a salad out of it -- a different salad from the one I envisioned, but a salad nonetheless.  Even if it's older and I have to cook it, I might grumble a little bit about the extra work, but really I know that the time-saving nature of the bag salad is a luxury I don't really need, and it's not that big a deal to steam or saute the kale.  The main point is that the kale and the lettuce occupy the same niche in our family's diet.  I may not be able to substitute kale into a lettuce recipe (e.g. Caesar salad), but I can substitute a kale recipe for a lettuce recipe into most family meals.

As I thought about it, I realized that I mentally organize family nutrition into a "food group" model -- not the USDA food groups per se, but one of my own construction.  Foods come in categories like "starch," "protein," "deep green vegetable," "not-so-deep-green vegetable," "yellow vegetable," abd so on.  I can make substitutions within the categories but I don't want to change the categories for eco-purposes.  Even though I do care about global impact, I do not want to make decisions to minimize the single variable of petrochemical-energy-expended-per-calories-consumed.  My first duty is to feed my kids the nutrients that help them thrive, and to teach them to make food choices that help them thrive.   

I take into account food preferences, too.  Right now, for instance, Milo my 4yo is very happy to eat raw green beans.  I buy a lot of them and I put them on the table most nights for that reason and no other.  Last year it was so-called baby carrots.  I am aware that "baby" carrots are more energy-intensive to produce than non-baby organic carrots.  You know what?  The kids like them and eat more of them than regular raw carrots cut into sticks.  That means I buy them and put them on the dinner table.  Not every time; they need to learn to eat carrots served many different ways.  But I am happy to "indulge" the kids with baby carrots.  I want to encourage the habit of eating vegetables cheerfully.

Still, there are probably meaningful substitutions that can be made that do make a real difference.  It is hard to tease the meaningful ones apart from the non-meaningful ones.  Back to those apples.  What really is the difference between the $1.99 conventional apples and the $3.59 "organic" apples?  Is that difference worth the cost?   Does it matter what you would do with the extra money? I asked Hannah, "If your family chooses the costly organic apples instead of the cheap conventional apples, does that mean that your family eats fewer apples?"  She thought about it and answered, no, it means they'll have less money to spend on other things.  For our family, I suspect that the marginal cost of switching to organic produce would simply be to save that much less, for retirement, for our kids' college costs, etc. 

Does it matter?  It depends on the substitution.  I have no qualms at all about buying grass-fed beef  and humanely raised pork from a local farm, or the extra cost of the farm eggs and the raw, whole milk and the pastured chickens.   I am certain that the nutritional quality is better, and they taste better too, so the cost translates directly into a tastier and more satisfying meal.  But I'm not sure about the produce.    (In some cases I think we'd pay more to enjoy it less.  All the organic carrots I've ever bought have been decidedly woodier than the conventional ones.)  Maybe the first question is -- how much more expensive could it get? 

Moral expenditures.

Megan McArdle is writing about her decision to eat only humanely raised meat, on ethical grounds.    The comments on her posts are interesting.  Here's a selection of the relevant posts in chronological order:  1 2 3 4 5   

But it's not specifically humanely raised meat that interests me.  What she's writing about can be generalized to elective moral decisions of all types:  decisions to modify one's behavior in order to avoid remote co-operation with evil and to promote the good as we perceive it.  (Note I'm talking about remote, not direct, cooperation with evil -- the kind of choices that depend on our perception of a proportionate response.) 

First, does our behavior have to be logically consistent?  That is, let's say moral calculus A has logical consequence B.   If we change our behavior because we accept moral calculus A, are we hypocritical because we don't go farther and change our behavior further to accommodate B as well?    (In Megan's discussion, this type of question shows up as "Should vegetarians wear leather?")Second, does our choice to modify behavior in some ways and not in others imply a hierarchy of morality -- we "really care" about the things that we change our behavior for, and "don't really care" about the others?  If a person won't eat foie gras but doesn't bother boycotting Nestle products, does that mean he cares more about geese welfare than about worldwide breastfeeding?  Or does it simply mean that he enjoys chocolate milk more than he likes pate?   

Megan writes

Is it true that there is some implied censure in the decision not to eat meat, or not to eat factory-farmed meat? Well, given that I have concluded that refraining from the purchase factory farmed meat is the ethical thing to for me to do, then it is indeed logically implied that I also think it is the ethical thing for you to do.

However, polite society thrives on people with ethical differences agreeing to live and let live. I leave room for the possibility of errors in my own judgment, for differences in situations and priorities, and for the fact that no human relationship can survive a strict accounting of every value difference. I think it would be nice if everyone thought hard about how much moral weight to give to the suffering of animals, and gave up meat for a month or so in order to find out how hard it would be to live without it. (Answer: not nearly as hard as you think. I eat meat perhaps a few times a month, and honestly don't much miss it--and I like to eat.)

On the other hand, I also think it would be nice if everyone tried hard, every minute, to be as nice as possible to those around them; volunteered with homeless children in their spare time; and supported a robust free market regime. I don't live up to all of these ideals, however, and living in society means understanding that others make differing value judgments. I presume you know better than I do whether you are really doing your best to do what is right. I'm not going to lecture you on your moral obligations. In return, I would very much appreciate it if people would refrain from attempts to argue me out of doing what I believe is right because they would enjoy their own value judgments better if they had more company.

I wonder if most humans' moral effort -- what they would expend in behavioral changes in order to avoid remote cooperation with evil, or to promote good -- is a limited resource.   (Again, I'm not talking about avoiding direct evildoing or about meeting positive obligations.  I'm talking about the sorts of things we don't have to do but that we can choose to do.) Maybe a little bit analogous to  the money we donate to various charities.   

Our family gives away a certain fraction of our income each year as charitable donations.  Each year the church gets some; a certain pro-life charity gets some; the Catholic high school that gave Mark a scholarship gets some; a scholarship fund at the public university that gave both of us scholarships gets some; and other charities that catch our attention that year get the rest.  This year, for example, our local inner-city YMCA branch, where we have a family membership, had a capital campaign to update their facilities, which are woefully substandard.  This year we sent the largest proportion of our donations there.

If you asked me to name the number one most important evil to fight today, though, I wouldn't name substandard facilities at nonprofit community gymnasiums now, would I?  No, I'd say abortion -- what else could I say? So isn't it a bit hypocritical of us to give even one dime to the Y, or to the scholarship funds, when we could instead give more to fight the culture of death in its most horrible form?  We have limited resources but we can decide where to put them -- why aren't we sending all of them where they are needed most?

Maybe it is just hypocrisy.   

And yet we feel a certain specific obligation to the Y, to the schools, because we ourselves have received direct benefit from them.   This Y, not any other, is the Y in our neighborhood; and this year, not any other, is the year they're asking for extra money.  My children take swimming lessons there.  My neighbors' children receive child care and hot lunches there.   The neighborhood teenagers can use it as a safe after-school hangout.  As for the schools we mention, they provided scholarships to me and to my husband personally.   The personal connection gives us a certain personal obligation.  Subsidiarity in action:  going out from me are concentric circles of people and connections, and I have the most responsibility toward the individuals (and organizations) who fall within the nearer circles.   

At least that's one theory.  Hypocrisy is still a big possibility.   Anyway, what I'm getting at is that money is limited; and maybe moral effort is too; and so maybe we expend effort on causes that we feel we are  personally moved by, even personally called to work for, rather than on causes that we view intellectually as most important.   Still, there's a certain disconnect there, and I can't deny that it is troubling.

The answers here aren't clear, but then, nobody said either morality or economics was easy to map; and so why should the intersection be?

ADDED.  I'm not really happy about the structure of this blog post and would like to rewrite it, especially to give a little more emphasis to the unwiseness of judging each other's priorities based on what we do and don't boycott, on what we do and don't give to charity.    But I don't really have time to rewrite, and so it's going to have to stand for now.