|
I eat meat but I'm Greek and the food I was brought up on and eat still is about 80% plant-based (basically, it's naturally vegetarian or vegan [1] but we just call it ... food), not least because we cook with olive oil rather than butter or animal fats. So your description of your diet, "lots of lentils, soy, sweet potatoes, veggies" etc is pretty much a description of mine, minus the soy. Most of my diet is pasta, rice, potatoes (way too much starch) beans, lentils, and vegetables of all kinds, particularly peppers, aubergines, zucchini and tomatoes; and I eat lots of mushrooms (which are not traditional). I use up maybe 5 litres of olive oil every one month and a half or so (more in the summer, for salads). Greeks consider a navy bean soup with tomatoes, carrots and celery our "national dish". I eat lots of dairy, particularly yogurt, mainly from sheep and goats (when I'm in Greece where it's available) and cheese. I eat meat maybe once or twice a week and eggs about the same. Most of the meat I eat is from sheep and goats also (Greece doesn't grow much beef and about 80% of our dairy is made from sheep and goat's milk). I think all of what you say above is targeted to people who grew up and live in another part of the world than myself, a part of the world where the word for "meat" means "food" [2], where a "meal" is commonly understood to include meat, and where "meat" is commonly understood to mean "beef". I think this because I see in your comment (although this is in response to the OP) that you are talking about how soy is used to feed cows for beef. The inefficiency you point out, of "feed(ing) plants to animals" pertains to beef, not sheep, goat, or pig meat. The latter are meats of animals that eat plants (and, er, other things, when it comes to pigs [3]) that cannot be eaten by humans. For instance, the vast majority of sheep and goat's meat production in Greece is from animals that graze freely in the spring and summer and are fed hey in the winter. When grazing freely, their diet consists of wild grasses [4] that are inedible to humans. To be perfectly honest I don't know how sheep and goats are raised in other parts of the world, but my understanding is that they mostly graze freely also, although there are different races of sheep and goats in different countries, for example Greek ones are mostly raised for their milk and meat and not for their wool (which is not normally used). What I'm trying to say is that, personally, as a Greek person, I feel that you and others should learn to restrict the scope of your advise to "please be vegan", and generally of your advise to change dietary habbits to harm the environment less, to the people from those places in the world that are really causing the problem with industrial beef production and over-consumption. Your indiscriminate encouragement to "please be vegan" sounds to my Greek self as unfair and unnecessary, and ill-informed to boot. Think for a second please, how unfair it sounds to hear your plea to "go vegan" for the environment when I have eaten most of my life a diet that by all intents and purposes is "plant-based" (i.e. not exlusively, but predominantly made of plant matter) and where most of the meat comes from free-grazing animals and produces less than half of the greenhouse gas emissions of beef [5]. The environmental destruction that you are rightly concerned about is caused by the dietary excesses of others, but _I_ have to forego the little meat I eat to save the environment that those others are destroying with their overconsumption? Like I say, this is blatantly and infuriatingly unfair. _________________ [1] https://www.thenomadicvegan.com/the-nomadic-vegans-guide-to-... [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meat [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_toilet#/media/File:Green_g... [4] Happy to dig into my refs to list species - but Greece has an amazing biodiversity that includes a vast richess of different grasses, which in fact comes out in our sheep and goat's meat and dairy products. When I eat sheep's meat in the UK, where I stay most of the time, it feels to me bland and tasteless. And don't let me start on the dairy. [5] https://ourworldindata.org/carbon-footprint-food-methane |
