I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. … I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat. (Source)
Could this be true? Has the arch carnivore of the Western media – the man who notoriously ate the the still-beating heart of a cobra on television – finally turned the corner?
Let’s be clear about one thing: Bourdain’s concern isn’t to alleviate the suffering of any species apart from human beings. In his limited personal quest to raise the quality of human life, he does, however, care about the food we eat, and this raises a valuable point: even for a person with such narrow concerns, it makes sense to pursue a diet in which animal flesh is eaten only on the condition that its quality is high. And if that means eating less animal flesh, this is a price he’s prepared to pay.
One of the purposes of Lowmeat.org is to publicise common ground. The strapline here is, For you, for livestock, for the planet.
The great thing about a low meat diet is that even if you only pursue it for the sake of one member of that triumvirate, the evidence suggests you’ll benefit the others as well. That, at the risk of sounding corny, is a win-win situation! So thank you, Anthony, for caring about our diets – and for writing about them – whatever you may think about the rest.
…or at least, a less meaty festive season and new year than your last one.
But what can you cook to replace some or all of the turkey, goose, pigs in blankets
, or other traditional festive dishes you might usually eat? Well, you could spend a while searching your cookbooks and the Web for suggestions – and doubtless you’d find some good ones – or you could give yourself a head start by jumping straight to the recipes linked from this article by Adharanand Finn.
There, moderation isn’t so difficult after all. Happy holidays, folks!
The leg bone
Is connected to the foot bone,
Is connected to the Export Processing Zones,
And it’s nothing we condone…
But everybody owns
A pair of those shoes.
Million Dead, Holloway Prison Blues
For the ethical consumer, shoes pose a problem. If one wants to buy shoes not made mostly of synthetics, one has two broad options: canvas shoes or leather ones. Canvas shoes are fine for some circumstances, but not for all. read more…
With flights frequently cheaper than train tickets and the usage of oil-based products and fossil fuel energy still almost impossible to avoid, it’s easy to feel like saving the planet is an uphill struggle. What you may not know is that if you’re a carnivore, you can make a dramatic reduction in your environmental impact by simply choosing to reduce the amount of red meat in your diet. read more…
A 2003 epidemiological study – Does low meat consumption increase life expectancy in humans? – concluded that “data from adults in North America and Europe raise the possibility that a lifestyle pattern that includes a very low meat intake is associated with greater longevity.”
Have a recipe that calls for meat or fish stock? Try substituting half of the animal stock with stock made from yeast extract. Concentrated yeast extract from brands like Marmite can be used in place of stock cubes. Use about a teaspoon of Marmite per stock cube. So to make a recipe calling for, say, two beef stock cubes, try just using one beef stock cube and replacing the other with a generous teaspoon of Marmite. You’ll still get almost all the meaty flavour you’re after.