food: meat and potatoes
The first ten years of our marriage we lived pretty much on beans and rice, cheap ground beef, and pasta -- emphasis on the beans, rice, and pasta. For some years were were effectively vegetarian. They weren't bad years, but they were lean years -- appropriately enough, maybe, for people in graduate school and just starting a family.
In any case, we have no regrets, and we mention it only as it pertains to our attitude toward diet.
Today, our meals revolve around meat and potatoes, dairy products and eggs, with greens and vegetables as secondary foods. A typical dinner at our house is meat and potatoes, one or two veg, and bread and butter. Oh, and dairy products are ever-present: milk to drink, butter, sour cream, cheese, and so on.
Again, no regrets.
One often hears (from people whose expertise is exactly what, I don't know) that Americans 'eat too much meat'. I'm not sure what they mean by the statement, or what they think they mean.
One might truthfully say that the standard American diet gives too much financial support to a toxic centralized industrialized food-animal production industry. The vast majority of the meat, milk, and dairy consumed in the U.S. contributes to our national ill-health and our ecological fragility. This fact is demonstrable.
But not all meat (dairy, eggs) are created equal.
On the small, grass-powered farm, grass grows (and grows, and grows) just for the expense of management (mostly time). Cows graze grass for free, and turn it into milk (daily) and meat (the ultimate harvest), plus manure (to fertilize the grass so it can grow some more), also for free. Pigs and chickens turn farm wastes (surplus dairy, butchering offal, forage, and garden wastes) into pork, chicken, and eggs -- again, at no cost.
Get that: Sunlight makes grass. Grass feeds cows. Cows make milk, meat, and manure. People get fed, gardens and pastures get fed, pigs and chickens get fed. Free of charge. And so the world turns.
So when we eat meat and dairy and eggs pretty much every meal, every day, we are eating sunlight in about as direct a line as human beings can. And there is no waste; there are no pollutants.
Eat fresh; eat whole; eat local. Insist on seeing how your food is grown. Don't let Bill Gates, the United Nations, or the USDA dictate what you're going to eat. Don't let ignorant people order your diets based on false assumptions.
Not all food is created equal.