Eating Animals

When I tell people that I'm interested in sustainable food and environmental issues, a lot of them just assume right away that it means I'm a vegetarian or vegan. No.

This is why.

Healthy Diet

I know a First Gulf War vet, let's call him S, who came back with a lot of health problems and is vegan because it keeps them under control. He tried going vegetarian during a bad spell, found that he felt better. He started a vegan diet just to try what his roommates were eating, felt even better. At this point several years on, the smell of cooking meat makes him nauseated.

And I tried going vegetarian for a couple years. The blood sugar spikes and crashes, transient aches and pains, and especially the migraines, all cleared up significantly when a nutritionist had me go off of gluten (the protein in wheat and some other grains) and soy. Gluten and soy just make me sick, first to my stomach, then everywhere else. And if I don't start my day off with a high protein meal, meat or eggs a must, I'm a zombie who can barely keep my eyes open.

S and I will never share much more than a salad in common at a meal, but we enjoyed each other's company nonetheless. Perfect illustrations of comedian Lewis Black's comment, loosely paraphrased, that 'the diet that's good for you will kill the person sitting next to you.'

The success of every crazy diet fad for a certain segment of the population should be proof enough that we all have our own, perhaps odd, diet that feels best for us. We don't come with an owner's manual, so a nutrient-balanced diet that makes us feel good and energetic can take a long time to figure out. I'm always glad for people who've found one that suits them, I know how hard it is.

I'd extend that same courtesy to my dinner. Cows are healthiest eating a variety of pasture grasses and hay, chickens are best off when their seed is amended by getting to eat weeds and chase bugs, and while pigs can eat anything, they also need pasture to be their fittest. Also, it makes them tastier and more nutritious.

Environment

Some raise the concern that eating meat is bad for the environment. It depends.

Without getting into the details, what's bad for the environment is raising animals on factory feedlots where they're fed a lot of grain and other food they haven't evolved to tolerate well or in quantity. Or concentrating their manure in pits that have to handle quantities of waste put out by small cities. What's bad for the environment is separating animals from the grasslands they're supposed to maintain, and grassland does need animals.

Whether it's cows, elephants, bison or antelope, grass requires regular destruction of its top leaves to promote root growth. It requires grazers to chomp down trees and shrubs so it won't be overshaded, and it further requires their waste to fertilize the soil.

That last is key because it's critical to plant ecosystems to have animal manure as a soil component. It's also critical to the health of soil organisms, and a thriving diversity of soil organisms, including many insect species, is required for maximum plant health and diversity. There are no fully vegetarian ecosystems and this is because flowering plants (from which we get the majority of our food) evolved with and alongside animals.

The only way to avoid animal inputs to a farm ecosystem and have it still be functional is to add synthetic inputs derived from mined minerals or fossil fuels. The latter, as I hope would be obvious, is absolutely not sustainable, which is to say that it can't go on indefinitely.

To raise all livestock on appropriate habitat might cut down some on the numbers of animals. Though small livestock, like chickens and rabbits, be comfortably raised in cities where a lot of land is now lost to agriculture, so there are other ways to juggle production needs. Further, there's a lot of land that could be greatly improved by managed grazing of livestock, such that the soil could take more carbon out of the atmosphere.

Yes, you read that right. Proper animal management would help our little excess carbon dioxide problem. The difference between animals raised in confined animal feeding operations and those raised in grassland goes beyond the nutrition profile of their meat to their impact on the planet.

That's why I get meat, dairy and eggs, whenever possible, from range fed animals and I do most of my eating at home where I can control that. I see this as perfectly compatible with my interest in the health of the environment.

Animal Treatment

The sustainable food and animal rights movements are often at odds with each other over the question of raising livestock, for what are probably obvious reasons. A sustainable food perspective holds integrated agricultural ecosystems, or agroecosystems, made up of a mix of plants and animals to be the most environmentally appropriate way to both grow food and protect biodiversity.

I regard this as ecologically sound and in keeping with the current state of life sciences knowledge.

As far as the conditions they're raised in, there are a host of reasons why maintaining farm animals in clean and comfortable (for their species) circumstances is best for animals, humans, and the planet. I'm also glad that well-designed smallholder farming and pasture raising techniques can encourage a greater diversity of livestock to be raised. They can even make the farm ecosystem hospitable to wildlife, from beneficial insects to migrating birds, promoting greater wild biodiversity. Because we do use about half of our land, more in some places, to grow food, it's gratifying to know that agroecosystems can be made to mimic the vibrancy of a natural ecosystem, including plant-animal partnerships and a healthy nutrient cycle.

I believe it best respects all the planet's animals not to treat farms as what some have described as "ecological sacrifice zones", nor to use artificial inputs of fossil fuel fertilizer and synthetic pest control, and a good way to ensure those aims is to include animals in the food production loop.

I think this approach to raising livestock on mainly sunlight and grass (which you could think of as spiky, green, super-concentrated sunlight) will further be important going forward as the costs of fossil fuel inputs for grain feed inevitably trek up again. It will start making more sense for animals to live off nearby land, a task for which heirloom breeds of animals are often better suited than those raised on factory farms. In the aftermath of our impending food and climate crises, everyone's great-great-grandparents who raised meat that could be fed off their own farm are going to come off looking pretty sensible.

Yes, this is a fundamentally humanist and human-centric perspective. I'm unlikely to change my mind on its merits, nor do I expect to change anyone else's mind that's already made up in opposition.

To Sum Up

As a classmate once said, when we were talking about a stew I'd made, “I love to eat the little lambs.” Mmm, lamb.

So in honor of good meat, well raised, this is my favorite easy recipe for a spaghetti sauce that'll taste like you've spent all day preparing it. Apologies in advance for not having exact measures, I only measure while baking.

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground meat (my favorites are lamb or bison)
About 2 cups of sherry (best for lamb, cuts down the gamy flavor) or red wine (good for bison)
1-2 large red onions, chopped finely
10-15 pitted kalamata olives
8-15 mushrooms, chopped finely
1 jar organic spaghetti sauce*
1-3 midsize tomatoes, chopped roughly
Sprinkle to taste of each: chili powder, cumin, cayenne pepper, basil, oregano, crushed garlic, sea salt
Grapeseed or other cooking oil

Chop up the onion(s). Take about half the onion pieces and put them in a pan with a very small amount of oil, cook to near translucence. Add the lamb, stirring regularly to break it up.** Take the other half of the onion pieces and add them to the pot you'll be making the sauce in, along with your herbs and spices, add enough oil to keep everything from burning. Saute until the onions are translucent.

Chop the mushrooms, add them to the onions and herbs along with the sherry. When the mushrooms start getting softer, add the strained lamb and onions, as well as the tomatoes. Heat for about five minutes, stirring all the time. The alcohol should be fully cooked out of the sherry by now.

Add the spaghetti sauce. Heat through. Serve with a pasta of your choice. I often enjoy this recipe with brown rice elbow noodles. The Tinkyada brand makes a gluten-free noodle whose consistency is so nice that I don't miss wheat pasta at all.

* You can also use plain canned tomato paste or sauce, and spice it up more. You could even start with a much larger quantity of raw tomatoes and make your own. But this is supposed to be the easy version.

** You'll probably notice a lot of fat coming off the lamb, I've never found lean ground lamb. Bison meat is so lean you can cook it in the main pot at the add-wine-or-sherry stage and not have to drain it, but lamb needs to be drained or it'll add a lot of gamy fat to your sauce. It's usually sufficient to take a slotted spatula or spoon and lift the meat and onion out of the frying pan when you're finished. If you then let the remaining fat cool in the pan, it'll solidify at room temperature; this should be scraped into the trash unless you want the mother of all sink clogs.

(Photo credit: nagillum on Flickr.)