Eating Low: A New Paradigm

It's easy to disassociate the meat that you cook with the living animal it came from. This happens to me, even though as a professional cook I prepare meat almost every day.

Someone once said to me that if you visit a slaughterhouse you'd never eat meat again. I've never visited a slaughterhouse but I did work for a short period with a butcher who was a veteran of such a place. He had spent five years on the  "killing floor" and it showed in his eyes. He'd relate horror stories in such a matter of fact way. He talked about petting the animals and looking in their eyes briefly to calm them before taking their life (a nervous or stressed animal supposedly yields tough meat). He drank whiskey after work. A lot.

I am not a vegetarian, but I do have a distinct memory of the first time that I was repulsed by meat. I was visiting in-laws at their 100-acre homestead in the rural Midwest. It was summer and oppressively hot, but the scenery was beautiful; cows and goats roamed freely on the land. I stood in the shade drinking a cold beer as the host shaped burgers in his hands and placed them on the grill. He handed one to me on a roll. It was rare and a little blood dripped out onto my hand as I bit in. It tasted good. Then, as if I were in a Stephen King movie, I noticed a group of cows about 20 feet away staring at me as I ate. Their big marble-like eyeballs looked directly at me. It was a little too close to the source; I felt sick to my stomach.

That said, I have to admit to being something of a hypocrite. Like many Americans, I am aware of the health and environmental benefits of a plant-based diet, yet I still eat meat; not much but some. Some of the meat I eat is a result of my profession -- as a cook I have to taste and season the foods that others order. But this is also a cop-out, since I eat meat mostly because I enjoy it.

Now chew on these statistics:

According to the USDA, total per capita meat consumption in the U.S. (red meat, poultry and fish) was 194 pounds in 2001, which is 16 pounds more than Americans consumed about 20 years ago. The types and amounts of food a person eats affect not only their own health, but also have direct implications to society as a whole. For every pound of beef produced cattle must consume over four pounds of grain. Frances Moore Lappé notes in her book,  "Diet For A Small Planet" that for every 8-ounce steak consumed there could be a roomful of people fed on grain. According to the British world hunger group VegFam, a 10-acre farm could support 60 people if they grew soybeans; 24 people if they grew wheat; 10 growing corn -- and only two if they used the land to raise cattle.

To take this in another direction, the sheer volume of food that is fed to these animals doesn't just get consumed, nature takes its course and it gets excreted too. And this is very bad for our environment, say People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA states that animals raised for food produce more than a billion tons of waste a year, and much of this waste ends up in rivers and streams. A runoff of animal waste, for example, contributed to a 7,000-square-mile  "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico; a dead zone can no longer support aquatic life.

Disease-infected meat seems to be a daily occurrence in the news, and we have known the health risks of a meat-based diet for years. So why then do we continue to eat so much meat? Because it's ingrained into our culture, and much of this meat consumption is a result of fast food.

Fast food meals are, of course, primarily meat-based ... or at least something that was once meat. This, in my opinion carries a double whammy, because not only has fast food changed the way our country eats it's also changed what our country grows and how it's grown. Besides, fast food is just plain bad for you on many levels.