Green Lenses: to meat or not to meat

Dilemma # 2: Bessie? Broccoli? Or a little bit of both?

I am a vegetarian. It's OK, give me funny looks, tell me that you could never do it, be astonished. The thing is, even though I'm fine with being veggie, sometimes I don't really feel like I have to be, and sometimes I actually kind of wish I wasn't.

I'm not a vegetarian because I think it's morally wrong to eat animals. I'm a vegetarian because I don't feel that I can call myself "green" as a meat eater. These days, most of the meat that you can get your hands on is a product of the second greatest greenhouse gas emitting industry (next to electricity production) according to Mark Bittman (video below). Bryan Walsh writes in TIME magazine's global warming survival guide that,"The international meat industry generates roughly 18% of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions—even more than transportation—according to a report last year from the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization."

If I could get meat from a local farmer who I knew and trusted (unfortunately college dorm life doesn't award me this luxury) I would probably eat meat once in a while. At the very least I would eat chicken. Just as I don't want to give up my carbon-vices (traveling for instance) I don't think that people need to give up meat completely. The problem is that most people - as in most Americans - don't eat meat in moderation, and the meat that most Americans do it is raised on factory farms. According to Mark Bittman in a January article for the New York Times, "Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average ... if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius."

The average American doesn't need to - and probably wouldn't even if we wanted him/her to - go through a radical sustainable transformation, for example by going cold turkey on meat consumption. All we need is for everyone to down shift a little. I for example, am not a vegan. I haven't made it to that extreme yet. But I've cut down my dairy and egg consumption, and I feel good about it. (Besides, soy milk is yummy.)

With the green movement in popular culture, could moderate vegetarianism, a low-meat omnivorous diet, become part of the mainstream?
Locavore was the 2007 word of the year for the New Oxford American Dictionary. According to an MSNBC article back in the archaic year of 2004, the vegetarian food market was just beginning to take root (yes - pun intended) doubling in sales from 1998 to 2004. But this was mostly for health reasons, not because Americans were becoming more eco-conscious. If meat prices were to rise high above those of grain, I wonder if factory farm meat would go the way of the SUV.

Until then, I'll be munching on tofu, thank you very much.

The following speech by Mark Bittman is a little long (20 min) but if you have some time and you want to learn more about the necessity of reducing meat consumption - for the sake of our health and that of the planet - watch it.