meat – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

Catchups and closure (part 2)

– in which Dorn continues updating some previous posts.

EGETARIAN’S PROGRESS

In past posts, (Cold turkey, Herbivore log), I promised to report on my experiment to give up all cow meat until Thanksgiving. It’s not quite T-day yet, but I’m pretty confident that the experiment is a success. Even though I REALLY LIKE BEEF, stopping it didn’t produce any irresistible cravings, and I plan to continue excluding it from my diet indefinitely.

I’ve had two lapses. First was when I bought a box of beef broth for a soup I was making. Once I realized that beef broth is made from beef (duh), I still used it and ate the soup anyway.

The second was only today, after the entire draft of this post was written, when I had a pastrami sandwich with dill pickles and saurkraut. I thought pastrami was some pig product and had written a comment in my post about it, but I looked it up just to make sure. Drat! It’s made of beef brisket, so (a) that doubles the number of failures I have to report, and (b) I can’t eat the rest of the pastrami in the fridge!

I also had a near miss: before my video-capsule TV appearance (described here), I had to fast for 36 hours. When I was allowed to eat again after the procedure, I spent much of the long drive home anticipating a stop at the Sonic drive-through, which has GREAT burgers. Fortunately or unfortunately, before I got there I remembered that I had sworn off that sort of thing, and I diverted to a different fast food place to get different junk food.

My “meat tooth” is adequately satisfied by meaty things like portobello mushrooms, and even more so by chicken soup, bacon, eggs, turkey and fish. Recall, I didn’t swear off all meat, just cow. So I’m not really a vegetarian, but what am I, and what is my food regimen called? None of “cow-free”, “nonbeefetarian”, “anti-bovinotroph”, “extra-taurustrial” sound exactly right.

The closest real word I can find is “flexitarian”, meaning a vegetarian who occasionally eats meat. I’m a little put off by the “flexi” part of it, because I used to be a complete omnivore, and now I’ve added some rules and restrictions to my diet, so it seems like I have become more inflexible in my eating. But I suppose the word is just right when applied to a strict vegetarian who has eased off a bit.

“Flexitarian” was selected as the 2003 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society (https://www.americandialect.org/woty). The word is in impressive company, including 2017 Word of the Year “Fake news” and 2014’s “Black lives matter”. (It seems like life and language have gotten much tougher since 2003, haven’t they?).

These Words of the Year have retained their power, but others haven’t really lived up to their potential. One such is the verb “To be Plutoed”, which means to be demoted or devalued, with a connotation (to me at least, ’cause I like Pluto) that the demotion was ill-considered. It was the Word of the Year in 2006, but never really caught the public’s imagination, despite the fact that Astronomers continue to this day to argue about the wisdom of downgrading Pluto to dwarf planet status.

Googling “plutoed” yields almost no hits after 2007, and virtually none ever with the verb being used in its intended meaning (all are stories about its Word of the Year selection). The fact that language and society have moved on so easily after Pluto’s retirement from the Brotherhood of Planets leaves me inexpressibly sad. Speaking of which…

MY RETIREMENT (last updated here).

Things continue satisfactorily. I’m still doing a little bit of consulting work, and I recently signed up with a new government contractor. So far my biggest task there has been to go through orientation.

The orientation presentations—work ethics, sexual harassment, etc.—were pretty much the same as those I saw every year as a Fed, but it was encouraging to see something that I had never seen before in a sexual harassment Powerpoint: that intentionally failing to “pronoun” a coworker correctly can be considered a form of harassment.

I prefer to think that I’m finally seeing this because of a general increase in respect for all individuals’ workplace rights even when they don’t match conventional gender stereotypes, rather than because the orientation came from a private company that’s more woke than the Federal government. And maybe societal norms really are changing for the better: the use of singular “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun was the Word of the Year in 2015.

In general, retirement is still a pretty easy gig. There have been bumps, but mostly not caused by retirement, and in fact often made easier to navigate by being retired. But I can see looming the need to address the Bigger Questions—what am I here for? What should I be doing, in the broadest possible sense? These questions, of course, face us all at all stages of life, but they are good to re-address periodically, especially at times of transition. I’ll keep you posted, perhaps in a future post called something like “Be Who You Are”.

Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving,
Dorn
11/21/2019

Herbivore log

– In which Dorn records his switch to an extra-taurustrial diet.

ERBIVORE LOG.

Day 1 (Oct 1). Twenty-four hours into my eat-no-cow pledge (made here), still no irrational meat cravings, which I worried might happen. I tried to remember the rules of vegetarianism from 40 years ago. Is “protein complementarity” still a thing? (Google says no.) What’s good for protein? Beans, rice, hummus, uh, quinoa? What’s easy enough to make that I’ll actually do it?

And what about the beef already in the freezer—is it out of bounds? The environmental damage is already done. Still, best not to eat it if somebody else will, to keep to the spirit of the rule. If no one else will eat it (e.g., the chili), I probably should, so the cow’s (and the rainforest’s) sacrifice isn’t in vain.

What about other kinds of meats? The promise was only for cow meat (mainly ’cause we’re getting into chicken soup season). I nibbled some bacon from a recipe Kathleen was making. That’s allowed, right? A pig is not a cow. Pigs and chickens don’t burn down rainforests, they just pollute and kill the Chesapeake Bay. And I can’t be expected to solve both problems single-handedly!

Supper: red beans and rice.

Day 2 (Oct 2). Not craving meat yet, but thinking a lot about food. I realize I’m mentally approaching this like I approach being on a diet, which experience has shown does not work in the long run.

I need to develop a new mindset. I should be approaching this as a cooking challenge. I like cooking, and I like trying out new recipes. The days when I didn’t have enough time or energy after work to prepare anything complex are long gone. So the main reason I couldn’t sustain my youthful vegetarianism (or at least the main reason I admitted to myself) is also long gone. The biggest thing holding me back now is probably just inertia. The Post reported on squid salads and armenian chicken meatballs today—I gotta get me some recipes!

Supper: shrimp salad.

Day 3 (Oct 3). An article in the Washington Post today reported a drop in Amazon rainforest fires. My cow-free diet is working! More likely, the press attention of the fires that led to my diet is also working in more direct ways. Either way, good news.

Supper: macaroni & lentils.

Day 4 (Oct 4). It’s Friday, so my body is craving movie popcorn! I’m not ready for The Joker—the murderous white sociopath meme feels too close to home these days. And we already saw Ad Astra (spoiler alert: the Brad Pitt character talks about his feelings for three billion miles).

The Washington Post online had a timely article, “Impossible vs. Beyond: We tested cook-at-home versions to see who makes a better vegan burger”.

They felt that the Impossible Burger was the best of what they tested, and good enough to be more than just the “least bad” of the contestants. I’ll store that info, but right now I’m too busy experimenting with real food ingredients. I’ll turn to fake meats when I’m tired of plant-based plants.

Supper: chicken mushroom soup.

Day 5 (Oct 5). Today was my first real challenge. Cleaning out the freezer, we found a flank steak begging to be charred rare on the grill for breakfast, with sides of broccoli and jacket potatoes cooked just right. Man that looks good!

Stay strong, homie! I let my mind drift back to my college days, where I’d learned my iron discipline. Sunday night was always steak night, but what I liked best about it were the baked potatoes, covered with melted butter and sour cream. That’s roughing it. I concentrated on my baked potato, which was actually really good, though we didn’t have any sour cream. We’d baked it British style for about 3 hours to get that crispy outside and soft inside.

And maybe I cut up the broccoli on the cutting board. And maybe the broccoli touched a little of the flank steak juice there. By accident. But I held firm!

Supper: veggies, and mac & cheese.

Day 6 (Oct 6). This showed up in my Facebook feed today:

Man, that Zuckerberg knows your every thought, doesn’t he? Nothing else interesting meat-wise happened today.

Supper: salmon.

Day 7 (Oct 7). Weekly grocery shopping. Got some beef (for others), picked up some commercial veggie-burgers (but nothing that claimed to be imitation meat).

Nothing remarkable happened today, even by my low standards for what’s worth remarking on. Maybe this a-bovine thing has already settled into my new normal. This’ll be my last log entry until something interesting happens (if ever).

Supper: a Field-burger™.

Thanks for your patience. Next post, something interesting.
Dorn
10/8/2019

Cold turkey (mmm, turkey!)

– 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.

(Irrelevant side note: When I googled “how many burgers are in a cow?”, another hit also came up, the answer to “how many cows are in a burger?”. It varies with the processing methods used, but McDonalds says that each of its burgers could have the meat of maybe 100 different cows in it. [*]

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.

Satellite image of burning rainforest — Satellite image of South American rainforest fires

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.

(Irrelevant side note: The only other time I ever had to do this was when I tried to eat “Phoenix feet” I had ordered from the greasy-spoon Dim Sum restaurant on New Hampshire Avenue near where I used to work.)

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