I was playing around with Twitter this morning. I don’t follow many people and I don’t tweet much so even the people who might follow me don’t have anything to follow. I don’t know who to follow. Mostly I’m not interested in pithy quips from celebrities and I don’t have many friends who are into the whole twitter thing. So I tried to figure out what interests me. Now I’m following Alton Brown, Mario Batali, and Michael Simon. Don’t know where we’re going but I seem to be following. And isn’t that a strange idea? To “follow” people you don’t even know. Where?
Anyway, I have a point here somewhere.
Alton Brown was apparently in a twittery conversation with someone about foie gras, which I will say up front I have never tried because I hate liver. I have told certain chef friends I don’t eat it because of the horrible treatment the geese undergo in order to produce it, but seriously – liver? Eww. So Alton tweets “We make our cows stand knee-deep in crap, shove our chickens in cages smaller than cereal boxes, and you want to complain about foie gras?” Then, “And by the way…animals don’t have rights. We have the responsibility to care for them…all of them. Not just ducks and geese.”
I used to be a vegetarian. I chose not to eat meat because of corporate farming and the treatment of the animals and the planet. It’s a bad thing. I think most of us can agree with that, whether or not we choose to take action on it. I tried not to be preachy when I chose to eat vegetarian. I eat meat these days. That’s a choice, too. It’s hard not to eat meat. I had some ideas about healthy eating but you can be a vegetarian and eat crap just as easily as you can eat meat and eat crap. It’s all a matter of choice. As a person with diabetes, it’s pretty hard to not eat meat. Add to that some interesting digestive issues that preclude most fresh fruits and vegetables, beans, rice, and many whole grains and the vegetarian lifestyle becomes pretty hard to support.
That’s not, by the way, why I returned to eating meat. It was far less idealistic than that. When my dog, Fred, died I just stopped caring about all those damn chickens I wasn’t eating. Weird how the mind works but that was my tipping point.
So, I eat meat.
In an ideal world I would eat locally sourced, organic, free range, humanely slaughtered animals. I cannot afford that, however. So like most Americans, I eat meat from the grocery store which is often, if not always, from corporate farms with inhumane conditions and disturbingly scary slaughterhouses. I pretend that those conditions and slaughterhouses don’t exist. Meat comes neatly packaged and presumably clean from my local grocery. I hope that some of those sad and frightening things from the world of meat production have improved with our awareness but I am lying to myself if I think the meat I eat has come from kindly treated animals. This bothers me, but I still eat meat.
But, and here we approach my point, is vegetarianism that much better? Once again we are stuck with the impossible choice of finding locally sourced, organic, humanely produced food.
Yes. Humanely produced. Not only do corporate farms use a lot of scary chemicals and overwork the land, a lot of it is produced, picked, cleaned, and packaged by overworked, underpaid migrant or illegal workers. I worked with migrant farm workers in Wyoming and while they don’t get the publicity of cattle mistreated in slaughterhouses, little children are out there picking the sugar beets that eventually find their way into our sugar bowls. This is true around the country. Small, organic, family farms are not the norm in our grocery stores. And even some farmers market produce is not certain to be from these idyllic farms we imagine. In many places, you’ll find the same produce that is shipped to your grocery store. So, you need to know your local farmer as well as your local chicken rancher.
And to my mind, time, and wallet, that’s just not possible. It’s not that I disagree with the locavore pundits. I’d love to eat nothing but local, organic and humanely produced food. And I’m not even addressing the fact that if you truly eat local, you are going to have a very limited choice of produce since oranges just don’t grow in Minnesota or Iowa.
What are we supposed to do?
Adam Roberts from Amateur Gourmet wrote a piece about attitudes regarding our diet last fall (and he kindly sent me the link because I was damned if I could find it). He was writing more about the idea that we should make healthy choices all the time – also an unrealistic idea – but his article struck me because we have so many people not only telling us what is healthy but being so judgmental about food.
What’s so hypocritical about those who preach from on high is that so many of us food people eat food that’s just as fatty, just as caloric, just as unhealthy as the food that we’re urging the unwashed masses to stay away from. True, the fried chicken that we eat in Brooklyn may be locally sourced, it may be pasture-raised and fed a steady diet of organic grasses, but guess what? It’s still rolled in white flour and it’s still submerged in a bath of bubbling oil, just like the chicken at any fast food emporium.
…What is a necessity is that those of us who are privileged enough to know what’s good for us and who can afford to buy the food that’s good for us get off of our high horses. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that big ball of grass-fed beef sitting on that artisanal bun is still a hamburger. Let’s not kid ourselves.
Food and eating are so complicated. What is healthy? What is humane? What is good for the planet? What comforts you? Small wonder we’re all a bit crazy about what we eat.
do it now.
