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Musings
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Born again carnivores
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| by Heather Ramsay My vegetarian roommate was caught at the meat counter the other day drooling over the T-bone steaks. "Don’t worry no one’s a vegetarian anymore," her friend said with the conspiratorial wink of someone who also used to show up at potlucks with one of many variations on beans and rice. After a delicious mixed grill bar-b-que at a meat-eater’s house one night not long after, I saw the cover of Time Magazine and knew that we were all on to something. When an alternative lifestyle phenomenon hits the mainstream with a splashy cover story one can be fairly certain that a lot of people have probably moved on to something else. Even McDonalds offers veggie burgers and salads now. |
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| But they’re still missing the latest trend. What people want now are locally raised, organic, grass-fed, all-beef patties marinated overnight in a garlic, oregano and wine reduction. Call it slow food, the food artisan movement, or the organic revolution, but that’s what is turning people on these days - food raised well and prepared well by someone you can trust. Over the last 30 years, the trend toward vegetarianism has been building. More and more people have chosen to follow a non-meat diet for a variety of emotional, health and environmental reasons. When I became a vegetarian more than 12 years ago, it was like a new awakening. Having spent my childhood in Alberta eating blandly prepared hamburgers, pork chops and the like at every meal (my parents will be quick to remind me that I turned my nose up at all vegetables), moving into a dorm at university and living with vegetarians who knew how to cook was nothing less than enlightening. All of a sudden I was eating zucchini Parmesan, Indian dahls and butternut squash soup. For me, becoming vegetarian was part of a whole subculture that questioned the middle-class-white-picket-fence lifestyle I was brought up to expect. I learned about environmental impacts of the beef and pork industries. I decided that I couldn’t justify another creature dying for my meal, especially since I was unwilling to take responsibility for this death myself. Vegetables I could grow. Slaughter a cow? No way. The years went on and I read more and more about the meat industry in books like John Robbins' Diet for a New America and his May all Be Fed, which convinced me that eating meat from supermarket foam trays was truly evil. Not only is meat a waste of agricultural space - it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce a pound of feedlot beef, and only one pound of grain to produce one pound of bread — but because cows naturally forage on grasses, grain-fed cows need to be pumped with antibiotics in order to save them from disgusting diseases like feedlot bloat and acid stomach. Robbins is also a vegetarian for humanitarian reasons, believing that we could feed the world if so much land in places like Columbia, Guatemala and Brazil wasn’t wasted on cattle for export to the United States. With other issues like mad cow disease, excessive use of growth hormones to fatten a calf for market in 18 months instead of four years, waste management issues in slaughterhouses, inhumane poultry factory farms, hormone pumping fish farms and more, being a vegetarian was an easy path to walk. But then I moved north from the city. And people started offering me spaghetti and moose meat sauce, fresh caught fish, and slices of caribou roast. Wild meat didn’t seem to carry the same baggage as factory-farmed so I became as Time Magazine labels, a 'semi-vegetarian', someone who doesn’t usually eat meat but who doesn’t systematically avoid it. Or, as I called myself, an opportunitarian: someone who doesn’t actively seek meat but will eat it if it is offered. Then my boyfriend cleaned out the coop behind his house this spring and ordered 50 fluffy little chicks. I had a lot of thinking to do, over late summer omelets, before the beheading in the fall. Like what is a healthy human diet? And what about eating food appropriate to your locale? There are many different theories about human diet. Some experts suggest that the healthiest diet is our ancestral pre-agricultural diet, which consisted mainly of fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and nuts. This diet contained almost no starch or sugars and food was very minimally processed. When you consider that 40% of our adult population shows some allergic response to dairy and that wheat and corn allergies are also common, one begins to wonder how grain and dairy products have become such mainstays in our eating habits. Legumes, even though they are vegetarian staples, are also known for their ability to disturb our digestive tracts. According to some of the latest ideas about human nutrition, we can live without starch but some fats are essential to our diets. While you may cringe at the idea of fat filling your arteries and turning into cellulite on your thighs, in fact fat from animal and vegetable sources does not convert to fat in our bodies. Our bodies burn it off completely through very slow and efficient metabolism. The fat from grass-fed and wild animals contain Omega 3 fatty acids that actually help prevent heart disease and maintain healthy nervous systems. Starch, on the other hand, breaks down quickly and floods our bodies with calories that can’t be used fast enough and are therefore converted to body fat. The second question about locally appropriate food is easier to answer. If you look for food that is locally grown and available in this valley, you will find it difficult to sustain yourself on a fruitarian’s regimen (someone who only eats portions of a plant that are easily replaceable by the plant - that’s a lot of huckleberries.) In the Bulkley Valley, people raise grass-fed lambs and beef on land that is not particularly suited to growing grain. Look to the indigenous inhabitants and see that they have always fished in our abundant rivers. People gather berries and mushrooms from the forest and hunt seasonally for deer and moose. If you want to maintain control over your own food source you can sow a garden that will provide root crops (Mom, I like turnips now!) a stash of pole beans (blanched first, then frozen) and fresh basil leaves (make them into pesto!) to keep you in fresh local veg for the winter. If you don’t have time or space to grow your own, visit the farmer’s market all summer and stock up. Otherwise, everything you eat has to make an immense journey by airplane and/or truck to get to the grocer’s shelves and into your mouth. So, now I eat meat along with my stir-fried zucchini and kale. The old-school veggies are shocked. I just think of it as being on the leading edge of the trend to support local food artisans or farmers who are maintaining older, more traditional ways of producing food or raising livestock. Pasture-based animal husbandry is perfectly suited to small-scale family farms. And a sustainable farm design includes grazing sheep or goats to keep down noxious weeds. Chickens are also excellent at keeping slugs at bay. I am still disgusted by the corporate meat industry and the inhumane treatment of animals in factory farms, not to mention the high saturated fat content (Omega 6 instead of grass-fed’s Omega 3) in grain-fed meat. But I did get in there and pluck a number of chickens one fall day and ate roast bird that night. It felt good. Recently I phoned the guy who is raising the lamb that is going to last me all winter and we had an excellent conversation about our similar philosophies. He even invited me to visit his farm and meet my lamb. Now I've got my own gourmet recipe for marinating lamb chops overnight in mint and lemon balm, picked from my own garden. (Heather Ramsay is a Smithers writer.) RESOURCES: For more information about eating meat from foam trays: Diet for a New America, May all be Fed, The Food Revolution all by John Robbins. The Paleo Diet, Loren Cordain, Ph.D., (J.Wiley & Sons, January 2002). WEBSITES: www.foodfirst.com www.consciouschoice.com/food/ Articles about slow food, grass-fed meat, ancient diets and more. www.mercola.com/beef/main.htm LOCAL SOURCES: (listings from the recently produced Northern Root Local Food Directory) Andrew Yeker, Smithers, 847-2314. Beef. Bill Graham, Telkwa, 847-0144. Rare turkeys. Blake Trenerry, Kitsequecla Rd. Chickens and eggs. Brown Family Farm, Telkwa High Road, 847-3463. Beef, lamb, turkeys, eggs. Dieter and Loise Jacobs, Quick, 846-5210. Eggs. Foxhole Bakery, Telkwa, 846-5807. Bread, eggs. John and Carol Vincent, Quick, 846-5803. Dexter beef, lamb and eggs. Little Shepard Farm, Larry Wiwcharuck, Quick, 846-5015. Lamb and eggs. Robin Hawes, Telkwa, 846-5946. Chickens and eggs. The Sausage Factory, 1107 Main St, Smithers, 847-2861. Buffalo burgers etc. ORGANIZATIONS PROMOTING FOOD SECURITY: Northern Root, A Smithers-based, non-profit group that has a community garden, community kitchen and runs regular workshops on preserving and preparing storable cuisine. Tel: (250) 846 9470. The Ram’s Horn newsletter by Brewster & Cathleen Kneen. Tel: (250) 675-4866 or www.ramshorn.bc.ca |
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