meat is morrissey

[papergreen]

so you probably know that i've been a vegetarian since i was 18. in the past few months though, i've come to the conclusion that it's better for both me and the environment if i were to give up all the processed soy crapola i've been eating instead of meat and, once or twice a month, have a serving of really good, organic, ethically-raised-

Comments

[cosmopolitanblu]

congrats!

welcome to the dark side.

[robarchangel]

josie- glad you're feeling good about it!

i like the guidelline of listening to your nose: if the smell of cooking meat disgusts you, stay away. it sure disgusted me for years. but if it starts to smell real good, like it did a couple years back, then maybe it's time to try some again.

right on- welcome to the ranks of the ethical post-vegetarians!

[papergreen]

thanks! your advice was really valuable to me in making my decision!

[robarchangel]

awesome- you're welcome! glad to help.

[jdtnirvana]

I want to hear the better for the environment reasons of ethical meat>processed soy crappola. On the other part, man I don't think I've eaten better than this week. Lots of fruit salad and GOOD veggie meals... Yeasterday I had amazing homemade hummus w roasted red pepper. Yummm... Today I'm having pasta w roasted red pepper pesto (they sell half gallon bags FULL of fresh roasted red peppers for like $3! It's ridiculous! It's way cheaper to buy it roasted!)

[papergreen]

i should clarify that by "soy crapola", i don't mean tofu or tempeh or seitan (not that seitan is soy, but you know what i mean). i mean the fake bac'n and chik'n nuggets and riblets and any other processy factory crap with a cutesy name.

and you're the second person who's asked me for a more thorough explanation of that...so maybe if i get my act together i'll post one.

also, i have been LIVING off of homemade hummus since we borrowed (ahem, stole) our neighbor's food processor a couple months back.

[jdtnirvana]

nice! I kinda figured there was a distinction there, but I don't know much about the processing of tofu, etc. vs the processing of the cutesy named products. Love to hear it if you get around to it.

Oh man, that's great and then zucchini, eggplant, red pepper mixed in with tofu and spiced up like tacos is incredible. That was my lunch today. Hmmm, it makes me happy.

[jdtnirvana]

after checking out the sauerkraut, I did a lil research on what makes sauerkraut what it is and then came across this, which I found kind of amusing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4347443.stm

[missbettenoire]

it hurts my heart to think of tofu as "processed" (though i know that it is). at the very least, i totally reject soy products that are packaged as faux-meat. ugh.

but yeah, i was reading (very good, btw), and in it, Mark Caro talks about how, as far as trying to minimize one's support of cruelty in the animal farming industry goes, it's actually one's best bet to eat cow products. like, as opposed to the fake-ass "oh i don't eat red meat cuz i'm cool, but chicken and fish are ok" kind of mentality.

[robarchangel]

in terms of industrial food production, chickens certainly get the shorter end of the stick than beef cattle, who live on pasture for a couple years commonly, before they're grain fattened and finished for slaughter. and fish- dunno what to say about cruelty of production, but global fish stocks are being decimated (literally: reduced to 1/10 of their original population in many cases), and fish farms often get their feed stock from those depleted ocean ecologies, and so are barely better, and potentially worse since they concentrate waste so well.

anyway, yeah- beef is still tremendously wasteful in terms of water and land use, and the slaughterhouses are no cakewalk, but from a humane point of view, they're probably less awful than lots of other animal food.