Making Friends With Salad

The Globe and Mail featured a headline today that read, "Care about the environment? Eat less meat" - something that I've been turning over and over in my head for a long time now, moreso within the last year. I don't eat a lot of meat on a regular basis anyway; I used to cook a lot for an ex-boyfriend and it actually got to a point where he complained that I was feeding him too much salad and not enough meat. I hardly ever cook with it and I find that I only eat it when I dine out or am at home where my family doesn't recognize vegetarianism as an actual way of life. Remember My Big Fat Greek Wedding?
"Ian is a vegetarian. He doesn't eat meat."
"He no eat meat?"
"Yes, he doesn't eat meat."
"It's okay, I'll cook lamb."

Yeah, my mum's like that. So it's been hard for me to actually become vegetarian - I suggested it at home once and my mother immediately told me that my babies wouldn't be healthy if I were to stop eating meat, and by goodness, she will not have her daughter raising unhealthy babies (and I was definitely sixteen or seventeen at this point). I tried to explain what I had learned in school, that science says animals are pumped full of hormones and that these extra chemicals are actually bad for the human body, but my mother wouldn't have it. I didn't even bother with the humanity says explanation.

When I was in India, I learned a lot about living a peaceful, non-violent lifestyle. About treating everything with respect, including our food. Kitchens were considered sacred places that could not be contaminated; the people in the ashrams often blessed and purified their food before they ate it; and besides, who gave humans the right to kill other living creatures for their own appetites' sake?

I'm not an animal lover, nor am I an animal-welfare/rights activist by any means, but I really don't like factory farming and the intensely cruel, inhumane conditions in which animals are raised. I do generally avoid conflict and am a pro-peace type of gal, so naturally, a non-violent lifestlye (which includes the way food is brought to my table) appeals to me. It's not quite like that Simpson's episode where I go to a petting zoo and see a cute lamb who pops into my head during dinner and laments the fact that they thought I loved them, loovvved them. But I do admit to thinking about the animal from which my cut of meat was taken sometimes and it does make me feel a little ill, if not a lot guilty.

I don't exactly plan on becoming vegetarian and cutting meat out entirely, I just want to cut down. Besides, if I were to really think about the conditions in which my food was grown, harvested and sold, I couldn't just become vegetarian, I'd have to go full-out vegan at the very least. If I cut out meat for the reason that I'm against factory-farming, then I'd naturally have to get rid of anything that is produced in factory-farm conditions, and this includes pretty much all animal products. Goodbye butter and cheese and yogurt and ice-cream? So, okay, maybe I can deal with an animal-products-free diet, but fruits and vegetables are constantly grown with fertilizers, pesticides and other chemicals that are considered toxic to not only the human body, but the environment as a whole.

So how do I reconcile a non-violent, non-cruel, very humane, animal-free diet with the fact that my tomatoes and oranges were probably picked by an illegal Mexican immigrant who works on a farm for something a little more than slaves' wages? How can I eat bananas from South America that are sprayed with pesticides that cause the male farmhands to be infertile? So I'll buy organic, try not to eat anything with an ingredients list more than two lines long on the packaging (seriously, what is all that crap doing in my food?), and one day I'm going to have my own garden where I'll grow as much of my food as possible. Again with The Simpsons reference: maybe one day I'll become one of those level-five vegans who don't eat anything that casts a shadow.

My life has decidedly taken an environmental focus; my roommate has greatly influenced and encouraged my interests in science, geography, the world; I went to the Career Fair looking only to speak with environmental agencies and employers; we recycle and compost at our apartment like it's our job; I took an environmental economics course in Spain and now I'm auditing an environmental studies course on water. So it seems natural that I'd make the move towards a more earth-friendly way of life. In addition to all my other reasons, I've learned that it takes less energy, fewer resources to produce non-meat foods than it does meat. I'm all for saving a little, conserving a little, and using a little less. We're starting to make our own hummus, join vegetarian associations, and explore other alternatives like oragnic quinoa. And heck, if the head of the IPCC, "the top man at the world's most important agency dealing with climate change (the planet's biggest problem)" is telling all of us to cut down on our meat consumption just a little bit, that it'll actually help with energy reduction and controlling climate change, I think I should listen, even if I didn't already have a long list of my own reasons.

Now who wants to come over for salad and gazpacho?
12:59 pm