On our last weekend in the United States this summer, Martin and I met up with my family in a small, rural town to say our goodbyes. Main Street and about three other streets were paved. The rest of the town was gravel road. Fields of crops and grazing cattle dotted the landscape between the enormous mountains hugging the valley where the little town sat.
We went to the local cafe for lunch. They sold local ice cream (by local, I mean made within a 150 mile radius). So surely their hamburger patties would come from local meat. We asked our waiter. He was a Polish college student; he’d seen all the cattle just a mile from the cafe, too. ”Where else would the beef come from?” he asked. That’s what we wondered.
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Today’s American meat industry scares me to death. The hamburgers at that little cafe weren’t from local beef. They were from an enormous food distributor who purchases meat from all over the United States and all over the world. That meat gets blended together, pressed into patties, and shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to restaurants and grocery stores. The more Martin and I read about it, the more we want to keep being vegetarians. The more we hear about meat recalls and contaminations, the more tofu we reach for. I don’t want to tell you why I think you should all be vegetarians. Our diets and food choices are decisions we all have to make on our own. At the same time, I’ve gotten countless questions about why our household is vegetarian and what it means to us.
So here you go – in honor of Blog Action Day’s stance against climate change – our reason for being vegetarian.
It’s all about the environment.
I grew up fishing and hunting. I also grew up with cattle grazing everywhere we went. That’s the great thing about living in “rural” America, out in the Rocky Mountains. It never occurred to me that animals could live any other way than how I saw them on a regular basis.
Fast forward to my junior year of college. I had just transferred schools to a small school in Virginia and was sitting down with my cafeteria tray for lunch. (That picture is of my dorm.) I’d been eating less and less meat – partly to challenge myself and partly because it was supposed to be healthier. When I bit into my hamburger, it tasted a little strange. It was supposed to be beef, of course. But that’s not what it tasted like.
“Do these burgers taste funny to you?” I asked my friends.
“No,” they mumbed back with full mouths.
I was already the country girl of the group of Southern and East Coast girls, and I knew they’d think I was crazy. I took another bite, thought about how my hamburger tasted, and chose my next words carefully. ”This hamburger doesn’t taste like beef. I mean…” I sipped whatever I was drinking that day. ”It sort of tastes like deer.”
I don’t have to tell you what happened next. They thought I wasn’t just crazy. I was insane. Who knows what deer meat tastes like?
I never finished that hamburger. It made me so scared. What was I eating? That was the day I seriously began questioning commercial meat products. And slowly, I became vegetarian. At first vegetarianism consisted of frozen veggie burgers and processed vegetarian substitutes. I grew up eating meat, and I didn’t know how to replace it yet. I kept practicing over the stove, and now I can’t even imagine wanting to reach for a vegetarian hotdog. (Here’s a link to our list of favorite vegetarian cookbooks.)
I was dating Martin at the time when I discovered my “deer” burger. He only ate ethically raised meat for a while, then he switched, too. Now we try to cut out a lot of dairy products and only buy local or organic if we can. We loved reading about how a vegetarian driving a Hummer actually is better for the environment than a meat eater who bikes everywhere.
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Figuring out what you stand for doesn’t happen over night. Each person is unique, and your perspective changes with experience.
For example, sometimes we’ll make a rare exception and eat meat. If my grandma tries to make a vegetarian meal and uses chicken broth, not realizing it is animal-based broth, I won’t throw up my arms and get upset. I don’t even point it out to her because I know she’s trying to accommodate us. And when my six-year-old cousin catches a fish from the same lake where I used to fish at his age, we’ll probably eat some. (That’s me fishing in the picture below – I was so little!)
I absolutely do not believe in wasting food. Refusing food because it has an animal product (such as on a commercial flight where we always ask for vegan food) doesn’t make sense to me personally. I’m not going to send my pizza back to be thrown away because they accidentally sprinkled chicken on it when we requested vegetarian; I can pick it off. Someone in the group will probably eat my share. But if we refused to accept that pizza, the food goes in the garbage. Waste is even worse for the environment.
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According to a 2006 United Nations initiative, our livestock industry is one of the top two or three largest contributors to environmental degradation worldwide.
Animals raised for consumption are not treated well. I know there are exceptions, but they’re so very few. Many chickens often spend their entire lives in cages no bigger than a piece of paper. They never even get to experience the feeling of stretching out their wings. Turkeys have been so modified to fill our Thanksgiving tables that they can’t reproduce by themselves. Humans have to do it for them. And one pound of beef – which probably is factory-farm meat – requires 2,400 gallons of water and seven pounds of grain to produce. Imagine how many people could be fed with that much grain and how that water could be used or untouched.
My favorite scout camp was located downstream of a cattle ranch. The water was too dangerous for us to drink or do our dishes. We had to haul drinking water 30 miles from town to feed the camp. But we were lucky. Some communities near animal production facilities like this one reported in the NY Times have polluted water, air so rancid people develop lung problems… It just goes on and on.
I’m going to step off that soapbox though. If you’re trying to figure out where you want to stand on the environment or our food culture, I would with trumpets blaring suggest the following three books. We’re read dozens of books on the topic. These three have touched our lives. They have changed us.
- Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat
- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
- The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Please note that these three books are linked to our affiliate partnership with Amazon. If you are interested in purchasing these books, please consider going through these links to help us out. Our English book budget and access have seriously shrunk in Germany.
If you have an opinion about food and the environment or a book or article that has really changed the way you look at these things, please share. We already have a little list of new vegetables to try at the grocery store over the next few weeks thanks to your suggestions.
