#15 Give a Cow a Break.

But we’ll leave mealworms for another day.

According to The Guardian, more than half of all the CO2 released by growing food worldwide comes from beef production alone! The percentage for the American diet is even higher. Beef results in 4.3 times as much CO2 as chicken meat, about 13 times as much as egg production. Buffalo milk and goat meat come near the bottom.

There are three good reasons to reduce your meat consumption: climate, health (yours) and compassion (if you saw the conditions that most meat animals live in……….). In addition, one of the main reasons for clearing tropical forests is to graze cattle, or to grow soy for animal feed.

For all these reasons, my wife, Jean, and I have been trying to reduce our meat consumption for the last five years. We started out with the “meatless Monday” approach — one day a week with no meat. From there, I tried to move up to the “meat no more than once a day” plan. Since it is not atypical for an American to have meat with every meal, I found this surprisingly difficult. It takes a real shift in food shopping habits. Jean was initially not enthusiastic, but gradually we have arrived at a place where we’ve cut out about 90% of the beef from our diet, with chicken and pork down about 60%.

People’s attitudes towards switching away from animal meat seem to fall into four broad categories:

1. Never!

Self explanatory.

2. Maybe I’ll eat fake meat when it tastes just like real meat.

For this group, making the switch is tough, although time will probably conquer. The only product we’ve found in this category is Impossible Burger. It could fool a caveman, with fake blood and very good taste and texture. Beyond Burger is good too, but a picky caveman might notice.

3. It doesn’t need to be just like meat, but must give the kind of umami that meat provides.

Most products fall into this genre. You won’t find any fake blood here. I think the key to using these products is to feature them in dishes where meat would typically be in addition to other savory ingredients, not standing alone.

4. Who wants to even pretend to eat a dead animal?

These folks believe you should just buck up and eat plants, with maybe some eggs and dairy thrown in. There is a lot to recommend this approach, a certain intellectual honesty, for one. Countless studies have shown it’s cheaper and healthier to eat mainly unprocessed plant foods with a small number of ingredients. Jean recommends Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian as a good book to have on the kitchen shelf.

But wag a slice of bacon in front of me, and I’ll follow you anywhere. And it’s not really necessary to give up meat entirely. Just use it more responsibly!

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Anyone studying the aisles at their local grocery will have noticed an explosion of plant based meat substitutes in the last couple of years. There is now a bewildering array of products, and new ones arriving every day. Here are some animal substitutes we have found useful:

• Impossible Burger — the undisputed champion for burgers on the grill.

• Beyond Breakfast Sausage Patties — we still haven’t found link sausages that will pass muster, but these patties are good in a breakfast sandwich.

• Deliciou Plant Based Chicken — you can make a pretty good chicken burger with this stuff, or put it in wraps.

• Trader Joe’s Chorizo — good for chili or taco mix. Crumbly, but great flavor & texture.

• Quorn meatless fillets — not a very catchy name, but a good product for use in spaghetti sauce or stir fry.

• Field Roast dinner sausages — these are one of our daughter’s favorites.

• Oat Milk — creamy and slightly sweet. There are several brands, but I like Silk and Chobani. I have yet to find a recipe where it didn’t work just as well as cow’s milk.

Eating out

A restaurant meal can be a disappointment for a novitiate vegetarian. It’s a bad sign if the menu has only one or two vegetarian entrees amid a sea of meat. Clearly it’s not really their thing and they are just trying to cover all bases. Try a place that does exclusively, or at least mainly, vegetarian, and you’ll see how truly delicious a meatless meal can be.

For a comprehensive, but not too technical, article on the diet/climate equation check out this article in the NY Times: Eating Choices

Please Help

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Thanks for reading,

Doug Hylan , Brooklin, Maine

“Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is a story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequence. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story.” ― Paul Kingsnorth