Sustainable Tongue

This is Charlie, from Sea Breeze Farm. They butchered a couple of cows last weekend and he was having a good time with the organ meats at the market on Sunday. I was looking on with a "boys will be boys" kind of attitude, but then it occurred to me to ask when was the last time they'd slaughtered a cow.

He thought about it for a moment, and said that they'd never done it before. He explained that grass fed cows have much longer life expectancies than cows on factory farms because they're much healthier. It doesn't make sense to kill them for their meat if they're still producing milk.

I saw a cow's tongue in a delicatessen when I was a kid. I was horrified. I think seeing this one up close helped me heal that experience. I touched it. It was scratchy, like a cat's tongue. Apparently that helps them get a better grip on the grass.

The Omnivore's Blind Spot

I just finished reading Francis Moore Lappe's Getting a Grip. It wasn't what I expected, from the glowing reviews I'd seen. ("She's done it again!")

The book's premise is that we can come to terms with our fears about the future by finding concrete entry points to start making changes. It wasn't that I disagreed with anything she said. I just craved some new insight, and I didn't find it here.

I'm a big fan of Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. I didn't even read it until a few years ago, but its central idea--that there is enough food to go around, we just feed too much of it to livestock--had long been familiar to me by the time I cracked the its cover, no doubt because the book had such a strong impact on my generation.

There was an editorial titled "Grains Gone Wild" in today's New York Times by the economist Paul Krugman. He explains the current global food shortages as being caused in part by the rising standard of living in China, which has enabled more people to eat more meat, as well as by the the widespread cultivation of corn for ethanol and the rising price of petroleum products because of the war in Iraq. At the end of the article he calls for increased food aid for poorer nations, as well as a rethinking of policies promoting the use of biofuels. Not a word about eating less meat.

I'm afraid that we have a huge collective blind spot when it comes to our consumption of meat, even though many of us intellectually understand the connection between meat-based diets and food scarcity. Sustainably raised meat is one solution, in fact, virtually every argument I've ever heard for switching to a vegtetarian diet is weaker when you're eating grass fed and sustainably raised animals rather than livestock from feedlots. But there just isn't enough grass or space on the planet for everyone to eat sustainable meat on the same scale that we've been eating industrial meat. At some point we're just going to have to face the fact that we need to eat less meat.

I'm not a vegetarian, although I don't eat a lot of meat. Francis Moore Lappe isn't a vegetarian either. In the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Diet for a Small Planet she explains that she eats small amounts of meat, as a flavoring or as a component in a larger dish. As she explains, this is how most people have eaten for most of our history.

My business makes only vegetarian food. For the past twelve years I've been selling vegetarian food at farmers' markets, listening to people's comments when they learn that my food has no meat. Seattle is a pretty enlightened city, but I still encounter ambivalence--and sometimes outright hostility--virtually every day. I tell people that you don't have to be vegetarian to eat vegetarian food, just like you don't have to be Thai to eat Thai food, but many folks just aren't convinced.

I do a lot of work with vegetarian organizations. I deeply admire the activists I know who dedicate their lives to getting people to stop eating meat, but I'm not sure that this all-or-nothing approach is the answer. Even the groups that treat vegetarianism as a process to be approached in stages still operate with the assumption that the ultimate goal is to get people to give up eating meat, rather than persuading them to eat less.

Meat is a special food. It always has been special for us, even before the emergence of our unique species, homo sapiens. We were scavengers of meat before we were hunters, taking the leavings from other predators who were more skilled or better adapted. But even to our early ancestors, meat was a windfall. It kept its special status, through the generations who learned to hunt, and later among those who first domesticated livestock. In many prehistoric societies, meat was sacred, and only eaten when it was sacrificed to the gods.

I suspect that the most effective way to reduce our collective consumption of meat is to somehow make it sacred again. Its rising cost lately certainly contributes to its longtime status as a special food, a symbol of living well. But that also makes it more desirable. I think our best hope is to somehow rotate that blind spot into our field of vision, to eat less meat as a choice, and also as a necessity, a way to improve our collective odds for surviving as a species.

Chunk o' Bacon

I grew up in Brooklyn. As a child, my brother thought that concrete was the natural state of things, and they trucked in soil when they wanted to plant something.

I thought about that when I saw this piece of meat at the Sea Breeze Farm booth yesterday. It took me a minute to realize that it was bacon: I'd never seen it unsliced before.

The world of food holds so many wonders.

The Wierdest Meat Recall Ever

Last month's meat recall had to have been the wierdest one ever. For one thing, most of the meat had already been eaten and, as far as we know, nobody got sick. The group that brought the offenses into the public eye wasn't even particularly concerned about food safety, their issue was animal welfare.

From a public health standpoint, the violation that occurred had to do with animals that became unable to walk in between the time they were checked by federal inspectors upon arriving at the slaughterhouse, and the time they were shoved and prodded onto the killing floor.

The CEO of Westland/Hallmark first insisted that none of the meat from the sick animals had made its way into the food supply, but finally admitted to a Senate subcommittee that some of it probably had.

Perhaps the wierdest thing is that, aside from animal rights activists, nobody seems particularly outraged or afraid. Maybe we've grown jaded. Or maybe there have been so many food safety scares related to meat that folks have either chosen to eat better meat or no meat at all, or just live with the risks.

Expensive Meat

These customers are lined up in front of the Sea Breeze Farm booth at the Ballard Farmers' Market, waiting for the day's sales to begin. The line is there every week, rain or shine, because Sea Breeze usually runs out of their most popular meat and dairy products early in the day. The customers line up and wait even though Sea Breeze's meats cost two or three times as much as the meat at the grocery store.

We've come a long way since the 1970's, when angry housewives picketed and boycotted supermarkets over the rising cost of meat. In response to these angry consumers, the USDA implemented a program of subsidizing farmers to grow corn and soy, much of which ends up as cattle feed. This has ensured that the price of meat has stayed relatively low and relatively stable. At the same time, many American households discovered that they didn't need to use meat in every meal, every day of the week.

When you compare meat and dairy prices at the farmers' market with meat and dairy prices at the grocery store, you'll find a much bigger difference than when you compare fruit and vegetable prices at the farmers' market with fruit and vegetable prices at the grocery store. That's because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than it does to grow fruit and vegetables.

Bizarre federal policies can bring down the price of meat and dairy at the supermarket, but cows aren't adapted to eating corn and soy. The animals who eat these foods are unhealthy, and their meat is inferior. Low meat prices can't fool these consumers, who line up and wait for Sea Breeze to start selling their meat and dairy, week after week, in every kind of weather.

Cheap Meat

This week we saw the biggest meat recall in history: 143 million pounds, most of it already eaten. Concerned pundits everywhere are calling for tighter regulation. That would certainly help, but legions of inspectors won't change the fact that you've got to resort to some pretty nasty practices if you're going to to mass produce meat and sell it cheaply.

There's something special about meat. The reasons that vegetarians and vegans cite for avoiding it have historically moved others to regard it as a high status food. Eating meat involves taking a life. It takes more resources to raise meat than to grow produce. Back in our hunter-gatherers days we had a fairly reliable supply of nuts and berries, but meat from a hunt was a windfall, and an occasion for feasting.

During the past few centuries industrial entrepreneurs have learned to mass produce meat. In order to do so they've had to displace self-sufficient farmers all over the world, clear the American plains of buffaloes, destroy millions of acres of rainforest, pollute our air and our ground water, inject animals with artificial hormones and antibiotics, and subject these creatures to horrific conditions. The quality of the meat has declined, as the animals are sick, stressed and poorly fed.

And yet some part of our brain continues to look at meat as a special food. That's only natural, considering the fact that we spent millions of years as a species enjoying it only rarely. Contemporary advertisers understand this, marketing meat as a treat or a reward, even though it's now available every day, for every meal.

But there's always a wake up call, like those millions of pounds of suspect meat that we heard about this week, much of which has already worked its way into the school lunch program.