– In which Dorn battles with his inner carnivore.
unday dinner last week was a grilled ribeye steak, cooked just right—starting to char on the outside, still pink and dripping on the inside. It was SO GOOD. It’s really a psychological superfood, like chocolate! It is for me anyway.
The great thing about steak, or meat in general, is you don’t have to work at it to come out with a delicious meal. It’s tasty seared, sauted, spitted, stewed, fried, roasted or even raw. And when it’s cooked up right, it’s just out of this world!
Back when Kathleen and I were first married, long before you were born, I was a vegetarian for a while. I’d learned a little about ecosystem dynamics in college, including the rule of 10s: 100 lbs of grass = 10 lbs of herbivore (cow) = 1 pound of carnivore (me). Even back in the seventies, it was simple math that the more population we had, the less sustainable was the idea of eating meat.
My vege-plan soon collapsed—I found it was just too hard making tasty nutritious meatless meals, and meat was so easy. When a cow or pig seemed almost designed do the work of turning vegetables into a delicious meal for me, why should I slave away at trying to make a meal out of soybeans and lentils? I shouldn’t! So I’ve been living off the metabolic labors of other animals pretty much all of my adult life.
Every now and then I get a twinge of guilt. The latest one was triggered by a joke/rant by Bill Maher, who noted that the Amazon rainforest was being burned down by cattle ranchers to make room for hamburgers. My first thought was how awful it was that they would destroy the rainforest. My second was how awful it was anyone would support cattle ranchers doing that, by buying their meat. But surely that’s not me! I don’t eat so much meat that my habits would have any effect on South American cattle economics or rainforest survivability! Do I?
I checked it out. From quora.com, I found that a steer might yield the equivalent of 1800 hamburgers.
If I eat 360 burgers a year—I don’t (I don’t think!), but it keeps the math simple—that amounts to about 20% of a cow’s meat. Each cow needs about 35 acres of grassland[*], so my appetite for meat needs about 7 acres of grassland to satisfy.
Every acre of the Amazon rainforest can absorb about 1.3 tons of CO2 annually[*], so if the grassland used to raise my hamburgers was created by destroying rainforest, it resulted in about 10 extra tons of CO2 a year in the atmosphere.
This is twice the carbon footprint I produced by commuting to work[*], which was already high because I chose to live 75 miles south of my job (though I mitigated my choice by telecommuting and using public transportation).
I told myself that I had to commute because I had to work, but I can’t claim that I have to eat meat! I’m pretty much an omnivore, and I pretty much like everything I eat.
Ironically, almost the only thing in my entire 65 years that tasted so bad to me that I had to take it out of my mouth rather than swallow it, was one of the early commercial plant-based meat substitutes (a vegetarian hot dog) that came on the market maybe 40 years ago, and that I tried out of curiosity.
But nowadays, with plant-based “Beyond beef” and “Impossible burgers”, I don’t even have to give up the taste of meat. I’ve tried the impossible burger at restaurants, and it really tastes like meat. Although it didn’t really taste like good meat. I got it at a restaurant that was known for its hamburgers, but this one tasted more like meat loaf. Passable meat loaf, to be sure, but it wasn’t a match for a greasy, umamic, carcinogenic, char-broiled burger!
Even so, the bottom line is that it is harder and harder for me to excuse my failure to do my part for the planet by giving up, or at least cutting back on, the meat in my diet. It’s not even a sacrifice, not really, just an inconvenience that comes with any lifestyle change.
I’ve heard that if you want to successfully change the way you eat, you must set yourself simple absolute rules and follow them absolutely. “No more french fries, ever” might be a successful rule, but “No fries except on special occasions”, or “Always leave about half the fries on the plate” are almost certain recipes for backsliding into old habits.
But I’m not ready to say “No more meat!”, that’s too absolute. I can’t think of any clever argument to justify this reluctance, I just don’t want to give up this guilty pleasure completely.
So here’s what I’ve decided to do:
No more cow meat until Thanksgiving. Then I’ll take stock (ha ha, stock, get it?), see how I’m doing, and decide where to go next. Plus to make cheating less attractive, I’ll report how I did in a post so everyone will know my lapses, or lack thereof.
Thanksgiving is about two months away, so by my crude calculations this commitment will reduce my carbon footprint by about ⅙ of ten tons, or 1.7 tons of carbon dioxide. We’ll see.
This was a difficult post to write. I first decided I should do something about my environmentally irresponsible carnivorous ways, and then I decided that I might be able to write a good blog post about it. But then (over a bowl of chili con carne) I weakened, and thought maybe I wasn’t ready to make such a big lifestyle change. Maybe I better forget the whole thing, even though I already had an outline of the post in my head.
I reached my lowest point when I thought, maybe I could not drop the meat from my diet at all, and just write about my internal struggles with the concept of going meatless. I could score some karmic points by just thinking through the process honestly, and not making excuses when I failed to muster the strength to change. I pretty much had no shame by then.
But as I wrote, I was forced to think through the implications of my diet, and my reasons for not wanting to do the right thing. The implications were undeniable (even if the math was sloppy), and my reasons were indefensible. So by the time I was done, I decided I would do my best to conquer my weaker, hungrier self.
The writing was a good experience for me. So far at this blogging business, I’ve been writing about something I had done, but this time, it felt like instead I was doing something I had written about. It made the experience more powerful for me, and I think it—and the promised followup post—might increase my chances of being able to make a permanent change for the better.
Thanks as always for listening. If my posts are getting too self-absorbed or navel-gazey for you, please let me know in a comment.
Dorn
9/30/2019