I'm going to start a vegetarian rock band called The New Malthusians, we are going to play the same three songs over and over. Obviously, in not a vegetarian but it's been a cool week in vegetables. First, I scored a few pounds of shishito peppers which I grilled with a little olive oil and salt. I also roasted a head of califlower and made a batch of hummus, it was a feast. It was cool to score those shishitos, I can almost never find them but after that luck, it turns out it's garlic scape season. I bought pounds of em. There are few seasonal things I like better than garlic scapes. I made and froze a bunch of scape pesto and grillee the rest of them with cous cous and a pork loin. Lovely grub... Shishitos and Scapes, fuck yea!
You'll sell out every show you play in Portland.I'm going to start a vegetarian rock band called The New Malthusians, we are going to play the same three songs over and over.
Vegetarians have this nasty habit of going "you know that thing that you do? That isn't fundamental to your being? That you don't think about much? Have you thought about it lately? Oh, you have? Well guess what you're impossibly guilty and all your behavior has to change at once as penance for everything you ever did no there's no way out I've been waiting for YEARS to unload this unholy fury on you because I've been telling you so since Clinton was president that everything you do is going to bring about the immediate downfall of mankind unless you absolutely utterly one hundred percent recant everything you've ever said and change every aspect of your lifestyle and there is no way out there is no moderation there is no possibility of staggering things out or delaying other things or attempting to do a little bit and yes we can talk briefly about institutional problems no we can't psych this is entirely about your own personal behavior and your behavior alone but not mine not me I'm righteous you're the bad one you're the evil one do you give up do you give up do you give up do you do you do you do you do you" And I'm gonna eat another fuckin' burger just to spite the little bitch. 'cuz you know what? Uncle Sam buys me $38 billion dollars worth of burgers every year and Mr. Foer just sorta goes You know what? I'm game. But so long as American tax dollars go to producing beef, chicken, pork, cheese and corn, American food is going to be made of beef, chicken, pork, cheese and corn.If for a single year the government removed its $38-billion-plus in props and bailouts, and required meat and dairy corporations to play by normal capitalist rules, it would destroy them forever. The industry could not survive in the free market.
Doesn’t have to be an absolutist thing. If you’re eating less meat than 2019 nil or 2018 nil, you should feel good about yourself. After my wife went pescatarian a few months ago, I’ve been drowning in meat. All kinds. I try to absolve her of any guilt, so that she doesn’t buy as much for me, but it’s only recently been getting better. Being forced into eating the meat before it spoils has been terrible, but at least sometimes I’ve weightlifted. :/ I would be OK with a sharp reduction in meat production. Eventually. Might sniffle into my pillow for a bit, but it’s for mama earth. Worth it.
I've lost 15lbs since the last week of December, when my religious conversion happened, which puts me at 174. It's the lightest I've been in at least 6 years, but I don't own a scale so I don't track that closely. Eating vegan hasn't affected my lifting at all. I would say if anything I feel better, since I'm taking a lot of stress off my knees and heart. I'm old now, so I'm not going to compare myself to what I was like when I was 23 and lifting 5 days/week, but for my current situation (2 little kids, 37 yrs old), I'm feeling like a million bucks. (FWIW my wife always yells at me when I say I've lost 15 lbs in 4+ months by just going vegan. She's like, "IT'S NOT THE VEGANISM, YOU DON'T GO TO THE COFFEE SHOP TO EAT A 600 CAL MUFFIN FOR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY LIKE YOU USED TO, MORON!!!!" But then I'm like, "yOu DoN't GO to ThE cOfFEe ShOp...," and the argument continues.)
I’m vegetarian (gotta have that disclaimer right???) and the end of Meat is nowhere near here. Smithfield has annual revenue of $14 billion, with a B. Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Field Roast, and Daiya combine for.......less than $1 billion, with a B. It’s an emerging (developing?) market, absolutely. Oh and Tyson? $40 billion in annual revenue. We are not-anywhere-fucking-near the end of meat.
I'd give Foer a break. No matter whether you agree or disagree with his POV, he definitely didn't pick the title. Some editor did to try to make it sound more controversial (i.e. clickbaitey) and stir up conversations like ours. I'm all for anyone eating meat who wants to eat meat, but like with the oil industry, I just wish its end user cost was more reflective of its true cost. A $1 cheeseburger just shouldn't be a thing (and yet I subsisted on them and $5 pizzas in grad school, so who am I to talk). I'm well read enough on the politics of the food industry to not expect that anytime soon, but political winds shift very quickly sometimes. Remember when no one in the US had really thought about gay marriage as a thing (except for activists on either side), but then Karl Rove had the genius idea to make it the linchpin of W's reelection, which didn't look great in early 2004? It worked in the short term, because they got all these stupid amendments on state ballots, which really brought out the Bible thumpers and W narrowly won reelection. Guess what happened next? It sort of became a rallying cry, and then Joe No-liberal-bona-fides Biden went on TV and said that it was the policy of the administration to support gay marriage (much to the surprise of Obama, whose views were still "evolving"), and a decade after W's big play legal gay marriage was the law of the land. I don't know how old you are but that was unthinkable in the 90s. I went to a high school that had 2400 students and there were like 2 openly gay people. (And both were tormented by their peers. One died of a drug overdose a few years after graduation, and the other went on to be a successful lawyer, so not a great success ratio.) Not exactly saying that there's an analogy here, but I'm just trying to use a recent example of something that went from nothing to inevitable in the space of 10 years. Of course lots of other examples exist, and in retrospect things that seem unlikely often look inevitable or even obvious after the fact. I don't think meat will ever be illegal (and I don't think that would be good policy anyway), but I also think that our current policy choices are on a trajectory that is bound to break at some point.
I think if meat was a lot more expensive you'd have cuisine treating it the way much of the rest of the world treats it: a small part of a varied diet. I think you'd also see quality go up. It used to be this way: a steak was a luxury because it was expensive, and people ate it when they were feeling boss because it was fucking delicious. At this point I often grind steak up into hamburger because it's only marginally more expensive than hamburger and because I know that it's only one animal's worth of contamination. You don't even have to go back very far to see old Julia Child and Jaques Pepin cooking shows treating a piece of chicken or beef or pork with some reverence and arraying other ingredients around it. Now? Now we've got chicken fries. The protein has become so commoditized that we separate it entirely from the animal, render it into glue, add binders to it, extrude it, batter dip it and deep fry it to sell it hot at a price point commensurate with fucking potatoes. I am not a vegetarian. But I have a pretty strong conviction that if the externalities of industrial meat production were removed, the meat consumption in the western hemisphere would return to semi-sane levels... and if the externalities of meat production were properly taxed we'd see a renaissance of vegetarian options.
I haven't had them, but I did have, on a dare one time, a KFC Double Down, which is a bacon, cheese, and mayonnaise sandwich for which the bread has been replaced by two pieces of fried chicken. It is not as scientifically dubious as chicken fries, but every bit as offensive to humanity.
It might have been In Search Of, it might have been Burke's Connections. They were standing in the desert somewhere showing erosion control. When all you have is oil, they said, you use oil for a lot of things you wouldn't normally. Like erosion control. Dig it out of the ground and charge the Infidel $40 a barrel for it... or spray it on the dunes to keep them from moving. That, to me, is American cuisine. The Iranians (or Saudis, can't remember) would probably have killed for dandelions and the ability to keep them alive. But they had oil and nothing but oil so they kept the dust down by hosing it with crude. The British have us beat, I guess, but they're a country that told their proletariat to eat nothing but potatoes. The Double Down is an Irish Potato Famine of protein subsidy.
My path doesn't cross fast food very often. The kid's grampa likes to go to McDonald's so she'll go there with him (or did "before the sickness" as she puts it) and there's a Wendy's on the way home that has gotten maybe 3 orders out of us in 5 years. But if there were a Burger King in my sphere of influence, I probably would have also expected chicken strip in fry aspect ratio, and then I would have kicked myself for not recognizing it as a bizarre funnel cake mutation.