Another great post from dear pal Barbara Hirsch – check out the chart below on what it takes to grow your fave meat source… Looks like we need to eat a LOT more venison – which is also lean/low in fat and better for your heart… and veggie burgers have turned gourmet…
Ecofacts V.12 n.9 Eating Meat-like?
How about the Meatless Mondays campaign becoming Meatful Mondays? Really now, eat meat for 15 other meals per week and skip it on Mondays? Big help. Although you can find diets and actual people encouraging heavy duty meat eating, there are so many studies, and large and significant ones, that indicate that high meat diets are simply not healthy. They can lead to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and processed meats, even more so. And then for those who care, (e.g. those reading this) there is absolutely no question that high meat diets are bad for the planet. The meat we eat consumes huge amounts of acreage (often forest cleared), grains, fertilizers, water, fossil fuels, such that the planet could feed hundreds of millions more people if we ate much less, and/or fewer ecosystems damaged.
Righteous vegans or vegetarians aside, we could just could go with moderation, habits/ attitudes going from eating meat every day, to making it more of a treat or a side dish. I am not a vegetarian, I enjoy and even crave animal flesh occasionally, and then because I live in a place that allows this, try to find the well sourced clean bred and killed stuff and then…treat myself to it. As you’ll see below, venison – a deer who has actually lived a life – is a great choice in many ways, except most of us must buy our meat pre-slaughtered, and that packaged stuff is so much more appealing than the creature lying there dying!
Meat is animal flesh, not just that of the revered cow. (Revered American style, that is.)
These days, lots of good burger places are offering grass fed beef and/or alternatives that taste good and are far more satisfying than the old bland, pasty veggie burgers were. This new veggie burger seems to come close to meat. For that primal lust – it even bleeds! ; }
Heme is the key ingredient, the protein that makes our blood red and also exists in plants, from whence it comes to make a meatier veggie burger.
And then who knows? Soon we may be eating “cultured meat”, grown in a lab.
From Maya Lin’s Whatismissing.org
Barbara Hirsch, eco-nut
Santa Barbara, California
“Unless someone like you cares a whole lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
The Lorax, by Dr. Seuss
Chez Froggie 
