Abbie's Real Life Blog

Here’s a great article from the New York Times about our current consumption of meat and how it’s destroying the planet.  It’s not written by a vegetarian, the byline hastens to point out to everyone, and the article itself is not an indictment of carnivores in general, but it does make many good points that everyone should take to heart. 

“The world’s total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the last 20 years.) World meat consumption is expected to double again by 2050, which one expert, Henning Steinfeld of the United Nations, says is resulting in a “relentless growth in livestock production.”

I don’t want to be all vegetarian-activist about this stuff.  Even from the beginning of my time as a vegan, I didn’t evangelize too much because I know it puts everyone off.  But it drives me crazy when people act as though everyone in the whole world requires three daily servings of meat (including fish, which is just stupid when you consider the facts about mercury). 

Sure, some people like to eat meat.  I did.  As I’ve said before, I didn’t become a vegetarian because I hated meat.  That’s not true, and it doesn’t do justice to my abstinence.  I loved steak and hamburgers, bacon and bratwurst and salami.  I miss those flavors, because the veggie versions can’t reproduce them.  (They can come close, like with Tofurky bratwurst, but it’s still not the same.)  I used to grill out all the time.  But I gave up meat, ultimately, because my stomach does not handle meat well.  I discovered this after I went vegetarian for other reasons (namely, because I was grossed out by the book Fast Food Nation).

Tracy gave up meat when she was in her teens, but she never liked meat.  So it wasn’t a sacrifice the way it was for me.  It’s like my disinterest in alcohol.  I don’t drink alcohol because I don’t like alcohol.  You can call me a teetotaller, but really drinking just doesn’t interest me.  I don’t care about drinking.  I only care about knowing just enough about beer or wine to pick out a good one for parties or as host gifts, because I want to appear cosmopolitan and knowledgeable, even though my ideal drink at a party would be grape soda.  (Or punch!  The non-alcoholic kind with the ginger ale and sherbet?  Delicious.  I love punch.)

It’s not like I don’t have vices, obviously.  I don’t have a sweet tooth; every single one of my teeth is sweet.  All of them.  I love carbohydrates and sugar, and I eat too much of it.  It’s a constant struggle to ensure that my diet is varied, especially including enough vegetables.

Anyway, I can see why people like eating meat.  I do understand.  But after I read that book and gave up red meat for a few weeks, all of these health problems lessened dramatically.  It was stunning, really.  I went further and gave up poultry, and it was like flipping a light switch.  It was amazing.  It was a huge connection to see how my love of meat was so destructive.  And, months later, when I cheated once or twice, my stomach problems came back with a vengeance.  On the other hand, I have never had the ‘musical fruit’ reaction to beans or fresh vegetables, reactions that are supposedly the norm.  It is very clear that I am built to be a herbivore, no matter what my taste buds think.

So my point is that not everyone needs meat to survive, and, further, decreasing the amount of meat that you eat can make you healthier (if you replace the meat with more servings of vegetables, not sugar and carbohydrates) as well as help to improve the health of the planet, as the article says.

On a completely different note, here’s another interesting NYT article about Sears, and how people aren’t shopping there anymore.  Which is interesting to me, since I have shopped there more often in the past eighteen months than ever before.  They started carrying Land’s End clothes, and I have bought several pieces of outerwear there.  I also was totally impressed with their customer service: I bought a lawnmower online last year, and picked it up at the store.  Then a screw fell off (which was my fault- the lawnmower is a solid product and the best deal for the money) and I called them to order the part, and I didn’t even have to tell them what kind of lawnmower it was.  They used my phone number to access my account with the online store, so they knew which lawnmower it was and then just accessed a parts list for it.  Seriously, that was pretty amazing.  That kind of customer service should be commonplace in our world, and it just isn’t, is it?  A big company like Sears linking its online stores with parts lists for the products?  That’s just crazy amazing.