I’ve been thinking a lot food recently. OK, I’ve been reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma, which hasn’t helped, but my ruminations do predate picking up the book.
Let’s go back a bit.
I haven’t eaten red meat–or any kind of mammal–since I was 21. (That’d be 17 years for those of you counting along at home.) And I didn’t eat a lot of meat in the three years before that either, so it’s getting close to half my life I haven’t eaten mammals. I don’t eat much poultry either, and when I do buy chicken or turkey, I try to make sure it’s organic, which means not just the diet but also the living conditions under which the animals are kept.
Why? To be blunt, because I think that the food industry in the US is highly unethical and immoral. Feed lots disturb me terribly, as does the idea of cutting off the beak of a chicken and sticking it in a tiny cage for the entirety of it’s life.
But before you get your panties in a bunch thinking I care more about animals than I do humans, I am even more horrified by the working conditions of humans in slaughter houses, and the way farmers are corralled into a lose-lose situation, and the way workers at most fast food restaurants are treated. In fact I have hardly set foot in a fast food restaurant after my own food service experiences and reading Fast Food Nation, and tend to eat at restaurants that are local, or else chains that have a reputation for treating their employees well, and providing them with benefits. (If you’re not sure about a restaurant’s reputation, look for a place where the waitresses have been there for years. Employees won’t stick around for long at a place that treats them like crap.)
So, long story short, I don’t eat mammals, and I don’t patronize restaurants that treat their employees badly.
So I do try to consider the whole picture when I made these decisions about what I would and would not eat. And as Michael and I slowly make more money, I try to make more and more food choices that are organic and/or fair trade. Often I fail in this, but it seems to me my only choice is to try. And of course it’s even hard to make these choices with my grandmother living and eating with us, because her diet is restricted by her health problems and her medications (she’s on coumadin, has dairy problems, and has high blood pressure; each has it’s own dietary restrictions.) But it’s still worth the effort, because things that are important are rarely easy.
But things have in fact become easier in recent years, as organic products have expanded from co-ops to regular grocery stores. There are three grocery stores within a few miles of my house that have relatively large organic sections. And one sells a variety of organic meats and poultry in addition to the veggies and dairy etc.
Which leads me to my current quandary.
Quiet obviously, ethical food is important to me. So would it not behoove me to start eating organic and ethically raised meat, so that I can support the farmers who put in the extra work and effort to raise their animals in a more healthy and moral manner?
To further complicate matters, the reason it was easy for me to stop eating meat, is because I never cared one way or the other for it. Excluding family get togethers, and some restaurants in the early 90s, it’s never been a problem for me, and, excluding going to the Jewish Deli in Baltimore near where my grandmother lived and getting fresh corned beef (oh, I do miss Attmans; turkey pastrami just isn’t the same), I haven’t missed eating meat in the slightest.
So would a change in my diet be worth it? I simply can’t decide.
