What are your feelings about eating meat?
Prompt from WordPress
With all the talk of how our food choices impact the climate, the primary discussion generally jumps to opting for a 100% plant based diet. In Northern temperate climates, these plant based diets are high in grains and pulses; grown as monocultures that decimate all life within the boundaries of the farm. They are deserts with only one plant growing at a time for ease of harvest. In these monocultures thousands to millions of insects, small mammals and birds are killed to grow, harvest and process the soy, corn, wheat and other lesser know grains to process into plant based foods, as well as for animal feed and biofuels. The argument is that arable land should be used for growing crops for humans. I have never seen anyone walk into a soy bean field and start happily picking and enjoying these beans as sustenance. Rarely if ever will you find hundreds of acres of winter squash, or okra, or eggplant. In the areas where tomatoes are grown this way they are grown for shipping, not for taste. They are picked green and hard for the long travel miles they must endure. A full plant based diet comes at a high energy cost. Starting with the end of the growth cycle the energy it takes to get a grain based product to market looks something like this….. energy for harvesting, transporting, processing (cleaning), transporting to factories to make the grains edible, processing to make the grains edible, packaging, transporting to warehouses, transporting to individual sales points, transporting once purchased….. and I know this is a simplified version. There are many more steps in the energy intensity wheel.
I have seen almost no discussion that speaks to opting for a locally based diet that has a focus on eating seasonally.
In much of the Northern hemisphere, eating a local seasonal diet means consuming meat products. The farther from the equator and the oceans you get, the harder it is to have fresh vegetables year round that are in season. In some areas of the globe human populations survived as carnivores, subsisting on fatty ocean mammals and native ruminants. Asking these populations to change their diets to one based on grains and plants is unethical, and yet, in this global world where we are all connected, we do ask these populations to submit to these diets. It never ends well.
Here in on the high prairie in Eastern Colorado there hasn’t been a fresh vegetable to be found grown locally in about a month. Sure, there are some farms that still have some late season produce in their high tunnels, but they are few and far between, and within the next few weeks they will be completely out of produce until May and then when production begins again there will be mostly greens and some herbs before the season really kicks in. All the farmers markets shut down in the first or second week of October. What is left is what we have grown and stored for winter use: all manner of long keeping squash, potatoes, onions, cabbage, and anything that could make it into a jar to be canned.
What is available to be purchased fresh during the late fall, winter, and early springs is meat. Beef abounds, with several producers within mere miles of my home. Lamb seems to be gaining popularity here and is more available than ever before. There is a chicken producer that also has turkeys about three miles from where I live, which if raising ones own is a barrier this is a viable option. We have a high goat population. Milk is also readily available from small dairies throughout my county, both from cows and goats. By default this also means that cheese, and butter and cream are also available.
There is no more local opportunity than right outside your own door with chickens, which in recent years have become the new fad pets. In well designed systems chickens can be supplemented very little with outside grains. They keep in the freezer once harvested very well and there is no need for feeding birds all winter unless you decide to keep a breeding flock or a few laying hens around. There are almost no food miles involved with chicken this way.
Consider your food miles. Meet the people who are growing the foods you consume. And if you live in a place like I do remember that meat, especially in winter, may be your best option for cutting out the transportation miles of the standard grain based 100% plant based diet. Oh, and one more thing… bananas aren’t local for most of us, consider an alternative.