You know the saying: a prophet is never a prophet in his home country? Well, this couldn't be more true for me, at least in the way I eat. Though I grew up eating quite healthy, my choices of food now include things my grandma wouldn't recognize as food. But that's not necessarily bad in this case. Because the foods that comprise the majority of my meals were simply not available in Mexico when I was growing up. Things like tempeh, eggplant, miso, sprouts, tofu, and quinoa are not at all common in Mexican cuisine. So I'm not surprised when a relative comments that my dinners look like rabbit food. I take it as a compliment. I eat a wide variety of foods and I don't subscibe to isms, (vegetarianism, veganism, paleoist, etc) But my ethics do play a big part in the types of foods we consume. More on this later. First a bit of background.
My dad used to carry cows on his back. Dead cows. For a living. Do you know how heavy those suckers are? just google it for fun. Yes, he was quite the man. He did this for over 25 years until his back gave out. Some of my brothers followed in his footsteps and they built businesses around buying and selling cattle. They would go out to ranches and hand pick the best bulls (cows were typically reserved for milking), drive them to the slaughter house, and go around the city looking for buyers, typically mom and pop butcher shops.My grandparents owned livestock and they were cheese makers. On a typical visit to their home, my grandma would fry a whole pig or send one of the kids out to swing a chicken by the throat so we could have it for dinner. Graphic, I know. But the point I'm trying to make is that eating meat (a term I will loosely employ to refer to beef, chicken, and pork), was, quite natural, and a big part of my upbringing. I knew exactly where my food came from. I chased after it and often helped kill it. I know how to milk a cow, how to get the feathers off a freshly killed chicken, how to debone a hog. I have eaten just about every part of a cow, a pig, and a chicken, including an egg that never made it out the chicken I swung by the neck. Ok, you get my point. Eating animals has been and will probably continue to be quite natural for me. To an extent.
But the type of meat I ate and the meat found at the supermarket today are simply not the same. The meat I ate growing up came from cows that roamed free and lived pretty happy lives. Most of the meat that is consumed in the U.S. comes from CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations). These are nothing more than cow factories. Free roaming cows take up to 2 years to mature. CAFOs churn them out, fatten them, and get them to us, buyers, in about 6 months! Cows are fed grain (GMO corn and soy primarily), they are confined to very small areas, and they pretty much stand in their own shit. All. day. long.
There are just too many wrongs with these facilities. For starters, cows aren't biologically able to process grain very efficiently, so consuming it causes their bodies to produce (and release) a lot of methane. Methane as you might know is a greenhouse gas that is 300x more destructive than carbon dioxide (remember global warming?) Secondly, CAFOs are by inception large operations so the waste that is created is massive and not always handled Properly. Runoff stemming from these facilities carries tons of "nutrients" that are responsible for dead zones in the ocean (areas depleted of oxygen where fish can't live). As if that wasn't enough, meat from CAFOs is nutritionally deficient and more inflammatory than meat from free roaming cows. Cattle production at CAFOs is a resource intensive endeavor. I read somewhere that it takes somewhere around 30,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat. It makes sense when you think about all the resources necessary to grow the grain to feed the cows (land, water, fertilizers, etc). In short, as with most things, mass production of cows has rippling effects, often beyond our immediate understanding.
Knowledge is power! And we have power with our dollars. I know that I can buy 5lbs of meat for the price I pay for one pound of 100% grass fed beef. But I choose the latter. Which brings me to my second point. I (we) don't consume meat daily. We couldn't afford to. Not the kind of meat that is good for our bodies and won't devastate the planet. We consume a lot more plant protein (beans, lentils, fermented soy, nuts and seeds) and some dairy. This is why I got to eating the way I do. I have started to experiment with different foods to bring variety to our diet. With fresh produce the possibilities are endless. I have recently started fermenting vegetables, sprouting grains and seeds, culturing milk, and making kambucha. It makes me feel close to my food source. So in a way I'm going back to my roots. Or creating new ones :)
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