One thing you’ll quickly notice about this blog is the lack of meat…while I’m not a vegetarian, my partner is, and so we tend not to have meat in the house. To be honest, at first I missed meat and ate it whenever it was on offer, but after a while I realised that I just didn’t mind not having it, and now I’m pretty happy to go without for weeks (or months) at a time.
Part of my reason for avoiding meat is that approximately 90% of energy is lost when you go up a trophic level in the food chain – so, for every given acre and a half of farmland, either one person can be fed on beef, or ten people can be fed on corn. From a purely sustainable perspective, if the planet has too many people to feed and not enough land, this seems like a pretty straight-forward solution.
Taking it a step further and going vegan, of course, is another question altogether. Lucy is always threatening me to go vegan at some point, but I just don’t see us getting enough protein and omega fatty acids that way. Not yet. We do try to eat vegan at least once a week, but I don’t think I could cope without milk or eggs! Plus, one of the fringe benefits of not eating meat is how much it trims your grocery budget, and while vegan lifestyles are even cheaper than lacto-ovo vegetarian ones, that’s only if you don’t cave and buy vegan margarine, rice/almond milk, vegan mayonnaise, and other expensive replacements.
That said, there are times when nothing but a hamburger will satisfy you, and I’m a firm believer in giving your body what it is asking you for! So, all things in moderation on this blog – I won’t guarantee there will be no posts about meat, but I also won’t be spending much time talking about the differences in cooking time for lamb and mutton.
The way I see it, if you eat a mostly plant-based diet, which is better for your health and the planet, then a little bit of organic, free-range meat now and then, is just fine.
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