21
votes
No Meat Required - Alicia Kennedy’s new book explores the tensions and triumphs of leaving meat behind
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- How the radical history of plant-based eating illuminates our future
- Authors
- Julieta Cardenas
- Published
- Aug 17 2023
- Word count
- 2136 words
Really fascinating read and I enjoyed how the author is approaching plant-based diets from a capitalistic criticism. While meat based alternatives are a great option for diversifying your diet, I think too many people just assume they are healthy because they're meatless or ignore the industrial scale needed to make those products.
I'm not sure if many people realize that factory farming practices are very much bolstered by Animal and Dairy Science/Poultry Science Departments at Agricultural Universities and Colleges. Much of research done in those departments are funded by grants from the USDA backed by industry giants like Tyson. I was a student worker in one of the departments and saw some disturbing things that certainly have shaped my view on Poultry. If research shows that laying hens have a circadian rhythm with egg production, Tyson is going to fund research to min/max that as much as possible.
Lab grown meat and meat alternatives are most likely enduring a similar approach in Food Science Departments across the world. Not all the research is in the name of saving the world, but from capitalistic desire to maximize ROI as much as possible.
Instead I wish there was research to look into why some people are so vegetable adverse, especially in populations that really enjoy meat above all else. The author touches on this a bit that plant based dishes need to taste good and I can't help but wonder if past experiences with badly made vegetable sides is affecting views. The number of people I have met who say I can't stand greens or I hate vegetables is appalling; did they grow up with unsalted boiled broccoli and did that affect their view?
I think an interesting thing to ask people is why they think that they need meat to be happy. There are many possible answers and it's important to realize that most of those answers are going to be completely valid. Food is more than sustenance. It has social and emotional weight. There's going to be people who make meatballs to remind themselves about their grandmother, and there are going to be people who eat at steakhouses to celebrate good times with their friends. It's been said here on Tildes by many people at this point, but it's more productive to encourage people to make better choices than it is to make them feel miserable for doing what they thought was the right thing.
It is also important to consider economic factors. Chickens, for example, are a great investment for a lot of people. They are resilient, eat anything, with a good ratio of feed per amount of protein. Even more so if you eat their eggs. Raising a few pigs is
a great way to keep the family well fed during the winter. And some meats can be incredibly cheap. The choice for veganism is a privilege of few, many will just eat whatever's in their reach.
That might be true if you're impoverished in a Third World nation - one dollar a day type living - but that is not the audience for this book or this website. There is no animal that will give as many calories, as it takes for it to grow, and sustainable animal husbandry combined with all the processing and storage steps involved is very labor-intensive.
But that’s only if you raise and slaughter the animals for yourself. If you don’t, then it’s going to be much more expensive than plants.
(edited to fix some terrible autocorrect grammatical errors)
Does that mean I am not the audience for this website? :(
Chicken are low maintenance and often a great deal.
I mean I never raised chicken myself but that is a very present reality for me!
Pigs are not common, but I've known people that raised goats or even guinea pig for consumption.
And you don't need to be that poor for it to make sense. 1 USD is way too little. Even if you're employed, depending on the prices, it can make sense to raise your own protein.
My father used to raise cattle but he sold it instead.
It's about time you got the hint. 😉
Livestock is very expensive, comparitively. Chickens are the least expensive of the bunch at the time of purchase but require much more over the course of their lives. They need shelter, water, food, and sometimes medical care. On the other hand, beans just need dirt and water. Maybe fertilizer. Heck, beans are so common and easy to grow the word is colloquially used to mean "insignificant" (i.e. "That ain't worth beans!").
If you just think about the big picture, animals eat plants to grow. Sure, some animals can eat food that we can't, but most animals get food grown on farms anyways, so why not just skip the middleman?
Our egg-laying chickens are much easier, on a day to day basis, then our garden ever was or will be. They can take care of themselves for the most part if necessary. We have multiple 5 gallon waterers and feeders that we could only fill up once a week or less if desired.
Not everyone has great soil to grow stuff in (hello central FL) so there can be soil to purchase/mend/keep mended. Making a 4' x 6' raised wicking bed isn't cheap but raised beds made out of 5 gal buckets can be cheap (just like chicken coops can be really expensive to super cheap). The garden needs weeding and pest control (from chemicals to dusts to manually killing grashoppers/catepillars) on top of fighting things like fungus, leaf rot and other diseases. Nematodes, squirrels, racoons, birds, deer and any number of things will try to eat your garden. Too much sun, not enough sun, too hot, etc etc etc.
I'm not saying that chickens are perfect but to say that a garden "just needs dirt and water" isn't very truthful.
That's fair. And it should be noted that being a subsistance farmer changes the equation quite a bit.
But my point earlier is that we are not subsistance farmers. We are privileged to be in so-called "advanced" societies where you don't have to grow your own food, But beyond that it is not an economic privilege to have a diet free of animal products. Within the context of society, being able to grow your own food at all could be considered a privilege since it means you own land.
I think you're placing too much importance on things that are not always present.
If you have a house (or a shack) with access to an external area (even if it's a communal area), a makeshift chicken coop is cheap to make. You can also raise them free, to some extent. This is not an industrial operation. They eat worms from the soil, scraps of your own food, and whatever they find on the ground. They are largely unattended. If a chicken dies, she probably hatched enough eggs to compensate by that time. You keep a single rooster to mate with them all -- maybe you take greater care of him since there's only one. You don't have a veterinarian, you don't buy fertilizer, and there is no expensive specialized care. An appointment with a veterinarian could easily cost more than the value of a few chickens. The breed is usually adapted to your region, soil, and climate. When a chicken is fat enough, you kill them. That is not your main source of sustenance, it's just a nice-to-have. A way for your family to eat protein once a week. Maybe sell some eggs. That's about it.
I never said that it was difficult to raise them, only that it's more of an investment and when considering them as a food source it doesn't make as much sense as plants.
I was curious so I actually looked up how much it costs to raise chickens, and came across this simplified writeup: https://www.thehenhousecollection.com/blog/cost-to-raise-chickens/
Let's ignore the figure that says it's going to cost nearly $70 a month since they even point out that that's an overshoot figure, and use their $10 a month figure, even though they don't have any reasoning behind it. Pinto beans can be bought dry for less than $1 per pound. Each of those beans will sprout into a new plant, and there's probably something like 50 beans in a pound. Alternatively, you could just eat the beans. 10 pounds of dry beans cooks up to roughly 60-70 cups of cooked beans, and that's far more than I can eat in a week.
This website is based in the US, and, therefore, any estimates will take into account climate, customs, breeds, prices, housing, conditions, and overall needs of people in the US. I don't expect any of this to make any sense for places like India, China, Thailand, or Brazil.
For instance, if it's literally never cold, you don't need to insulate your chicken.
People in slums don't have external areas whatsoever, the chickens just roam freely and come around when it's feeding time. It's really low maintenance.
I don't see how that's relevant. Everything I've been talking about has been with the US in mind, since that's where I live.
But if we're talking about the US in particular, growing livestock is extremely uncommon and only 55% of people do any sort of gardening whatsoever, so the vast majority of people will be buying the food they consume from some sort of market, and it's fairly rare for meat to be less expensive than plants.
I thought it was already clear I was speaking about a context other than the US. So yes, nothing I'm talking about here is relevant to the US.
Ah, no, it wasn't clear to me.
I can't speak to the entirety of the world and I don't really want to dig into researching foreign markets and societies, but I really find it hard to see a world where vegetarianism or veganism is an economic privilege. We have records of meat-free diets going back to circa 3500 BCE in Egypt, and I'd like to think that most of the world is slightly better off over the course of the last five millennia.
I think it wasn't fair to say that the developing world is not the audience for this website. As far as I am aware, Tildes.net seeks to be inclusive of people who are interested in joining and abide by the rules of the site.
I didn’t mean that they were excluded, merely that they are not present. At least not present in a way that they are well known.
I think people get hung up on food because it's one of the first experiences you have of not having control. Like, babies are not in control all the time, but for most of that stuff you want to be taken care of. But wanting to eat certain things but being told you have to eat other things for your own good is a pretty universal experience at one point or another as a time when you want control but an authority overrides you.
And when you grow up, that's a base level way to assert your independence. There's still nutrition to consider and consequences to your diet, but at the end of the day it's on you to get food for yourself, so you can pick whatever you want.
Agreed, I also enjoyed the angle of the interview.
That said, in relation to your last paragraph, one part stood out to me:
I wonder how true that is, especially since the answer came from the question "Why has it been so hard to make a dent in US meat consumption"?
If someone grew up in an environment of meat eating (or, by contrast few vegetables), how inclined are they really to change the foods that are familiar and comforting to them? Do politics or other identities influence this?
Out of curiosity, I found a review on "Early Influences on the Development of Food Preferences" (note: I'm not an expert on this topic, so am not particularly able to contribute to the info provided in the review). The review points out some things:
It's long, and brings up other topics (e.g., unlearning behaviours, repeated exposure to foods, preferences changes in adulthood, and the biology of the gustatory/olfactory systems), but the points above I thought most related to your question.
Another paper I found used a qualitative interviews of various American ethnic groups on their perceived barriers to eating the recommended Fruits and Veg (link). I didn't read the full text (link is to the full text, free, though), but the abstract points out:
*Cost
*Perceived lack of time
*Early home food environment
*Limited access
*Different foods vs. home country [I paraphrased this bullet]
I've run out of time to look more into social influences, these alone at least seem to support your idea that having fewer (good) experiences in childhood is related.
These are pretty huge points for many people.
To way over-simplify and using a probably very flawed comparison:
A frozen hamburger patty (like a "bubba burger") is way easier for people to get, store and cook then, say a bag of green peppers.
-They already know what dish they can put the hb patty in.
-The hb patty is generally more palatable than different vegetables (Do you know more ppl who dislike burgers than, say, green peppers or onions or beans or...?)
-Food deserts are a very real thing where finding they can find that bubba burger but not a bag of frozen vegetables
-A single hb patty is often cheaper than a bag of vegetables in food deserts (it doesn't matter what is more economical by the pound. They can eat the hb patty by itself if need be but buying that bag of vegetables means buying other stuff to go with it)
And those are just off the top of my head from visiting a friend who lived in a food desert. (Solving food deserts is something beyond the scope of meat vs meatless, however.)
In our house we generally go through phases where we significantly cut back on our meat consumption.
We started by introducing the kids to recipes like unstuffed eggrolls, stir fry with with "non-traditional" vegetables, different styles of chili, etc. Over time we have included less and less meat into said dishes. We'll also include/sub cauliflower rice into dishes and they love it.
Currently, we are fortunate to be able to afford "fresh" produce but the prices keep going up while the quality seems to be poor.
Kennedy’s new book — No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating — gives a historical overview of the diverse movements that have decided to leave meat off the plate, and critiques our industrialized food system.
What stood out to me what this:
This article suggests that plant-based foods/companies can easily fall into the same capitalist/industrial model of Big Meat. I've assumed that the 1:1 replacement would be "enough" in both climate and animal rights issues of meat production. Despite those being the two main factors creating the pivot toward plant-based, there are still issues worthy of attention related to modern food production, other than meat. I appreciated the author's approach of criticizing the current state of industrialized agricultural economy and using the growth of plant-based foods/eating habits as a opportunity to focus on food justice and agroecology as a whole.
I strongly agree with a lot of these ideas. More than anything I find fake meat products to be something of a false messiah. My doctor once described them as transitional foods, and that's a pretty good way to think of them. But the problem with being transitional is that it also helps you transition the other way around; if you're eating a simulacra of beef, what's stopping you from just eating the (much less expensive and better tasting) beef in the first place? I know many more people who are eating them as a replacement who have not switched to a vegitarian/vegan lifestyle than people who have ate them and made that transition. Lab-grown meat is likely to have the exact same problems as simulated meat products do now and then several other problems we don't even know about yet.
I find that most meat eaters operate under assumptions about meat that are not necessarily true. For instance, most people don't actually care much for the actual taste of lean meat; the flavors they want are largely from the animal's fat, and those flavors are actually fairly achievable with plant fats. Even with the flavor from those fats, meat is fairly bland without seasoning, and those seasonings all come from plants or minerals. Heck, if you look at what those artificial meat products are made of, it's all plants and seasonings, so if one thinks those taste OK, then you shouldn't have too much difficulty applying that knowledge to cooking your own plants. One of the oldest recipes for a chicken replacement is just a wheat dough that has had the starches washed off and is cooked with the same seasonings you'd make a roast chicken with.
I also really resonate with the idea of strengthening regional food sources. Having access to fresh fruits and vegetables is life-altering. The difference between a store-bought mandarin orange or head of corn and the exact same thing, recently harvested, is dramatic. They are so much more sweet and flavorful. People are inundated with messages about how fresh food is at any given place, but most Americans raised in cities simply don't know what they've been missing out on.
Eating well - eating food that is delicious, healthy, and sustainable - is something that is so easy to do. Or at least it should be. But we live in a world where people are being inundated with messages that obscure what "eating well" actually means. People all think they're eating well, but health statistics tell us otherwise. The public has had the wool pulled over their eyes, and it's long past the time we pull that wool away.
Have you ever questioned how it could possibly be that some protein isolated from grasses and legumes is more expensive than meat, which has a far more intensive supply chain?
It's expensive because the methodology is patented and the prices are inflated.
Right now there is exactly one brand of artificial meat product made with something that is not a plant or mineral, and that is Impossible Foods. They make leghemoglobin by taking soy plant roots and fermenting them with a genetically altered yeast. So the production of it is essentially no more difficult than the production of sauerkraut or beer.
That leghemoglobin is also an incredibly tiny portion of the products made with it. There is more added sugar than there is leghemoglobin, which is in itself less than 1% of it's total weight.
Impossible Foods is basically the poster child for what the author in this interview is talking about.