vegetarian

Barbie and I don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, I’m biodegradable and she’s not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson’s been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she’s only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?

But while eternal tweener Lisa’s the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it’s Bart who’s got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature’s fevered brow: don’t have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.

Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I’m not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than hummers.

Activist/author Anna Lappé’s been looking up at the sky, too, but while I’ve been running around squawking that it’s falling, her brand new campaign Take A Bite Out Of Climate Change looks up and sees a sunny solution--a plant-based food chain founded on the ultimate renewable energy source, solar power.

Lappé’s upcoming book, Eat the Sky: Food, Farming, and the Climate Crisis, will no doubt help spread the word about the wonders of foods grown through the natural miracle of photosynthesis instead of that man-made marvel, synthetic fertilizers, and the power of a naturally biodiverse, balanced ecosystem to protect plants from pests and disease instead of pouring on toxic pesticides.

But in the meantime, she’s put together a wonderful, non-wonky website that lays out for the layperson why switching to a diet dominated by locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables is one of the single most significant things you can do to curb your carbon footprint.

This is a huge public service and a tremendous boon to me, personally, because my endless chanting of the “eat-less-meat” mantra elicits plenty of puzzled looks from folks who can’t grasp the notion that a veggie-centric diet does more to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions than driving a hybrid car. I have been trying to get this message out for a while, now (which, in the interests of full disclosure, may be why Lappé put me on Take A Bite’s advisory council,) but now I can just say, “Go to takeabite.cc and see for yourself!”

Lappé is on a mission to liberate us from a food chain that relies on a systemic abuse of land, animals and people. Industrial agriculture is essentially a failed coup on Mother Earth, a tragically arrogant attempt to overrule the laws of nature, and now it’s coming back to bite us on our ever-expanding asses. It’s fouled our air, water and soil, spoiled our health and worsened global warming.

But Take A Bite’s raison d’etre is not to bum you out about the ecological disaster we call Agribiz; its purpose is to provide you with all the information and resources you need to lighten up your carbon footprint in the most delightful and delicious way. So thanks to Anna and her crew for stepping up to the solar-powered plate. Now even us Henny Pennys can look up and say, here comes the sun!

Advocates for healthy, ethical eating have a pretty tough row to hoe this time of year. It starts at Thanksgiving, with a flurry of Butterballs, and builds up to a Christmas crescendo of heavy cream, butter, eggs, and pretty much every kind of animal fat known to mankind. Vegetarians have to content themselves with cheese and crackers, while vegans crunch away on the crudités, in solidarity with the bunnies they’d never dream of broiling.

So, as a little gift to our meat-and-dairy-defying friends, I thought it would be nice to find a recipe for a festive and flavorful not-eggnog that’s easy to make and so good that even we non-vegans can enjoy it. If you’ve ever tried Vitasoy’s “Holly Nog,” you’ll know that it’s possible to make a decent ‘nog with soymilk, but homemade is always best. After a bit of googling I came up with a recipe from Vegetarian Times that’s been around for years and is apparently the gold standard for vegan eggnog—I made a batch and was pleased by its eggnogginess. And that was without the rum!

VEGAN EGGNOG (from Vegetarian Times)

2 12-oz. packages silken tofu
16 oz. vanilla soymilk or rice milk
1 Tbs. plus 1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 cup sugar (I substituted agave syrup, which worked fine)
2 Tbs. brown sugar
1/4 tsp. ground turmeric
1/2 to 1 cup rum or brandy (optional)
Nutmeg

In blender or food processor, combine all ingredients except nutmeg; blend thoroughly. Serve well-chilled and dusted with nutmeg. Makes 8 servings.

“You don’t win friends with salad,” according to Homer Simpson. Or lovers, if an article in Thursday’s New York Times is to be believed.

Ordering a salad on a date might make you seem “vapid and uninteresting,” one woman told reporter Allen Salkin. Choosing a steak or burger, apparently, suggests that you’re a fascinating woman of substance, and conveys the message that you’re “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” the woman added. Not like all those phony fancypants foaming-at-the-mouth vegetarians, I guess.

The New York Times has cleverly decided to play both sides of the carnivore/herbivore culture war, tossing this bouquet to beef eaters just two weeks after giving the cow huggers a big bear hug on the cover of the Dining Out section. This article, by contrast, ran on the front page of the Styles section, whose stock in trade is thin, shallow articles about thin, shallow people. Alas, Salkin knows just how to get my free-range, grass-fed goat.

The eye-catching title—“Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye”—was guaranteed to please the stock brokers who love livestock and the well-shod fillies who vie to be their brood mares. And equally sure to rile up the vegan/feminist/environmentalist crowd, whose huffing and puffing no doubt helped propel this weightless piece of fluff right to the top of the New York Times’ “most-e-mailed” list where it sits as I write this.

I just couldn’t sit here and let vegetables be vilified like that, for one thing. What was more annoying about this article? The weird, retrograde mindset of the women who order plates to please their dates? The hatchet job on herbivores? The slander of salads? The notion that flaunting a flank steak makes you a maverick?

Look, I’m a meat-eater, myself, and though I do my best to steer clear of factory farmed steers, I’m not a purist. I had a non-grass-fed burger at the Teamsters cookout last week at Yearly Kos (OK, full disclosure, I ate a hotdog, too—and so did Marion Nestle, who practices what she preaches—moderation!) But I’d rather be a conscientious carnivore and get my burgers and dogs from Hawthorne Valley and Fleisher’s, who offer organic, humanely raised meats.

Salkin serves up beef as a badge of honor, but stewing in those steak juices is a growing stigma attached to consuming factory farmed meat, because (a) it’s loaded with heart-hazardous saturated fats (grass-fed meats, by contrast, contain good fats), and (b) our meat-centric diet is chewing up the planet, spewing greenhouse gases, ravaging rain forests, and miring us in manure lagoons.

So, go ahead and order that sexy, Diet-for-a-Small-Minded Planet steak or burger, but don’t miss the big picture, which is not so hot. If you want to have your steak and eat it, too, the grass-fed beef is greener. Is humane meat an oxymoron? I’m not sure, but it’s surely the lesser of two evils. As the herbivores at Herbivore say, Eat Like You Give a Damn. Of course, they also say there’s no such thing as humane meat. Lead us not into tempeh-tation!

(Last weekend the Humane Society sponsored a conference in DC called Taking Action for Animals, so we sent L.C., the Liberally cow, to find out what her human allies are up to these days. L.C. gingerly tapped out the following dispatch on an iPhone, that ingenious device so user-friendly that even a fictitious bovine mascot can write long e-mails on it:)

Dear Matt & Kat,

I am still trying to digest everything that I saw and heard at this awesome conference—as you know, we ruminants tend to, well, ruminate. It was such a thrill to be surrounded by so many two-footed herbivores fighting on behalf of my fellow farm animals. And the food! I never knew tempeh could be so tasty. How come you guys can’t make it like that?

The folks who organized this conference bent over backwards to curb its carbon hoofprint. They provided pitchers of tap water and drinking glasses instead of bottled water, and served delicious vegan meals buffet style with real plates, silverware and cloth napkins instead of doling out the usual doleful fare in disposable containers and plastic utensils. Swanky and sustainable!

I’m delighted to report that there’s an alliance brewing between the animal rights activists, the environmentalists, and the nutritionists--everyone was talking about how industrial agriculture is such a huge contributor to global warming and the obesity epidemic. Michael Jacobson, the founder and executive director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, gave a talk entitled “Eating Green—for Ourselves, the Planet and Animals,” in which he said, “We’re all making progress working in our respective spheres; we could make much faster progress working together.”

And Representative Chris Shays (R-Conn.) noted, “Global warming isn’t the only inconvenient truth we need to confront.” He was talking about the fact that the world is consuming more meat than ever at a time when the single best thing people could do to help themselves, the planet, and critters like me would be to switch to a plant-based diet.

Now, I know you guys think it’s a step in the right direction just getting us cows back on a plant-based diet, eating the grass our digestive tracts were designed for instead of corn, corn, and more corn (btw, why is everybody so perplexed about the obesity epidemic? Big Ag switched us to grain in the first place ‘cause it fattens you up faster. People keep pumping kids full of corn-based by-products and cooping them up indoors; why not just keep ‘em in a feedlot?)

You “ethicureans” are so convinced that going grass-fed is a big improvement over the factory farms, and if I were an actual cow as opposed to a made-up mascot, I would so definitely prefer to be pasture-raised. Because what goes on inside those CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) makes Abu Ghraib look like a picnic. The factory farms cram us into tiny, squalid spaces that leave us so constricted we can barely breathe—not that you’d really want to, anyway, with all the foul odors emanating from the manure and urine we stand around in all day. It’s enough to make you sick, and it does; that’s why they have to use so many antibiotics to combat all the diseases we get. They use growth hormones, too, to make us grow bigger, faster.

They dock the pigs’ tails, sear off the cows’ horns, and hack off the chickens’ beaks--and all without any anesthetic, too. OK, so we can’t speak, but we can feel, you know? This kind of stuff is torture, pure and simple. We are living, breathing, SENTIENT beings, but industrial agriculture treats us like commodities to be manipulated for maximum efficiency, so all these barbaric practices are just business as usual (most of this stuff is illegal in Europe, btw.)

At least the grass farmers let their pigs, cows and chickens frolic and forage outside, and do the stuff we like to do, like roll around on the ground and chew the cud with our buds. But there was a faction of passionate vegans at this conference for whom, to quote Herbivore, the hipster purveyor of pro-vegan merchandise, “There is no such thing as humane meat.” And that’s why it got kinda ugly during the Q & A following a panel of grass-fed farmers, including Nicolette Hahn Niman of Niman Ranch fame.

Nicolette had shown some almost preposterously pastoral photos of contented cows grazing on Niman Ranch’s gorgeous ocean front ranch in Northern California. Looked like a nice slice of La Dolce Vita most livestock would die to have, even if it meant ultimately getting slaughtered, however “humanely.” But when Jenny Brown from the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary stepped up to the mic to ask a question, she expressed her outrage that the Humane Society had even invited folks like Nicolette to participate in an animal rights conference:

Ouch. You can see how the Humane Society could get gored on the horns of this dilemma. I mean, no matter how nice the livestock lifestyle at Niman Ranch, at the end of the day the cows are still gonna get slaughtered. And savored.

But roughly 97% of Americans are meat eaters, and even if half of them went vegetarian, you’d still be left with a whole lotta meat eaters. Given the atrocities the CAFOs commit on a daily basis, the Humane Society’s support for humanely raised meats seems to offer the best hope for encouraging more Americans to boycott the factory farms.

As Kim Severson noted in the New York Times last week, animal rights activists “have learned that with less stridency comes more respect and influence in food politics. So they no longer concentrate their energy on burning effigies of Colonel Sanders and stealing chickens. They don’t demonize meat — with the exception of foie gras and veal — or the people who produce it. Instead, they use softer rhetoric, focusing on a campaign even committed carnivores can get behind: better conditions for farm animals.”

The Humane Society’s approach revolves around the 3 R’s: “refinement of farming techniques, reducing meat consumption and replacement of animal products.” Severson points out that this tactic is paying off, with lots of legislative successes on behalf of farm animals in recent months and a growing awareness and acceptance of the animal rights movement in mainstream culture.

How factory farms ever came to be the norm is beyond me. I may be just a cartoon cow, but there’s nothing comical about the way the CAFOS abuse farm animals. And as the New York Times reported yesterday, the biotech industry’s busy tweaking our genes to create all kinds of genetically altered animals that supposedly solve all kinds of problems, like pigs who produce less-polluting poop, or faster growing piglets.

I may be an uddered luddite, but I wish people would stop tinkering with us and treating us like widgets. As Gandhi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” On that scale, you guys have a long way to go.