Meat: My Heart, My Soul, and My Planet (Part Three)

The story so far:  I believe meat is a big part of a healthy diet. A grain and soy based diet is likely to lead to the "diseases of civilization" - heart disease and diabetes, among others. I have no doubts on the first point. However, current factory farming of meat is horrific and is an unethical treatment of our fellow creatures. I uneasily remain complicit in this. I try to make better choices, but often compromise.

Now, looking at the ecological consequences of eating meat, I find myself much less knowledgeable. My freshmen roommate at college was a vegetarian, inspired by Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet. I never read it, but got the gist: it takes energy to convert sun energy into plant energy and then into animal energy, and a lot is lost at every step. The planet cannot afford, on a global scale, the inefficiency of relying on animal protein to feed the world. I actually took enough advanced ecology classes later in college to work through the fairly complex math myself in a few specific cases.  Everyone agrees with the principle, that energy is lost in each stage, but the actual numbers remain subject to a great deal of dispute.

Mark Bittman, in his Food Matters, bases his advocacy for eating less meat on climate change. He asserts, with a series of top level statistics, that beef cattle are a huge source of green house gases and switching to three meatless meals a week is equivalent to more than taking an SUV off the road. I am skeptical of the statistics, but haven't worked through them myself, and he does have endnotes and a bibliography, but doesn't go through their derivation in the book itself. I haven't done any other outside reading on the topic. Here is my big difficulty with this:  Cows make methane gas? They fart a lot? Cows fed on grain fart more than cows fed on grass?  My understanding of greenhouse gases on a geological timescale for global climate change is this: it is the mining of fossil fuels that makes a permanent contribution to atmospheric CO2. Biofuels are good because its a closed cycle: grow the plants, pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, then burn the plants, releasing it again, but grow more plants, and net-net there is no atmospheric increase.  Wouldn't it be the same with cows? They eat grass and corn, which contains CO2, they themselves contain CO2, and it's a closed cycle, yes?  I guess there is the same possible criticism that corn-based ethanol and other biofuels face: there are fossil fuel inputs into the cycle, required for the raising of corn or cows, resulting in a net increase of CO2 over the whole lifecycle.  I just can't accept how the numbers work out without more reading. I'm willing to accept the premise (that our current meat production is a net contributer to greenhouse gases), just not the magnitude, without more study (that I may or may not get around to).

Mark Bittman also predicates his "eating as if food mattered" prescription on the total planetary resources required for meat versus plant energy.  Again, I accept the concept and have never grasped the numbers.

The problem I have is his prescription for eating is heavily dependent on grains to make up the calories.  He acknowledges the bad health aspects of sugars and simple starches, and focuses on grains and beans as the alternative to meat. This just does not work for me, at least not now.  

Michael Pollan's final answer on "what to eat" is much the same:  

Eat food. 

Not too much. 

Mostly plants.

I am totally on board with the general sentiment, but the "mostly plants" part for me cannot be grains and beans. It should be the kind of plants that look like plant parts:  leaves and stems and things that can be plucked, pulled and dug up. And its really hard to get enough calories, and the right nutrients, solely from those parts of plants. I remember the story that during World War II, in Norway, cabbages were grown in every available square foot of soil, served at every meal, and people were still starving to death because they could not take in enough calories. (Cabbages thrive in the short cold climate of Norway and were the most practical local food source, as all meat and fish and what limited grain they could grow were seized and sent to Germany). Back to the hunter-gatherer food sources for me: at least 60 percent animal-derived calories. But is this feasible on a global scale?

Mark Bittman asserts the humane standards are simply not scalable to replace meat in the quantities we currently enjoy.  Again, I haven't studied the issue but I suspect he is right. Factories are more efficient than handicraft markets, and it may well be we couldn't have grass fed beef and free range chickens on the scale we have cars churning out of Detroit.  There are, however, some big-ish corporations producing meat according to much more sound principals; Niman Ranch is one. 

So I worry at this, while continuing to live uneasily with choices I know are not pure. Instead, they are expedient, and serve me and and my family in the short term. I haven't delved deeply into the ethics and ecology, because I'm pretty sure where it would make me end up finally and I am not ready to go there. I struggle at every meal to add a plant-based component and decrease the meat and dairy.  But I know for my own heart health, and that of my family, it can't be white bread and white rice and pasta filling up the plate instead. I need dark green. because I won't do whole grain or soy. And that is more work, and can't supply all of what we need.

After I reach goal weight, I will experiment with more whole grains and legumes into the mix. Right now, I'd rather stay away from them almost completely. My family will resist the shift, and if I'm not going to eat them myself it is not worth the battle. So it's off to Whole Foods for me now, and maybe swinging past the farmer's market later to get some more happy meat.

(Note, I never before said or wrote "after I reach goal weight". That just came out. I'll need to think about that whole premise, that there is a goal and an after.)