Meat Monologues Part 3: Hug a Vegetable

Lest it come across like I am vegan-bashing today, let me just get this part out. I'm an omnivore. I still eat meat. I'm going to have hot dogs in an hour, actually. I have cut back on my meat intake. Are vegans and vegetarians greener eaters than I? Yes, of course. Over and above, no question. I fully freely admit that. (I would question some of your items for their packaging, but that something else for another time.) I give it up to them. And generally my posts are not aimed at vegans because they are already doing good stuff for the species. If I lash out sometimes, it's against the militant ones, not the ones I personally know and like lots. And in these recent posts, I was just getting stuff out of my head that had been rumbling around in there.

But I do have one question that whispers when I look at vegan food. What's UP with all the imitation food??? Fake meat, fake bacon, fake cheese, fake burgers... if I didn't know better, I'd say you were envious of "our" food. Your magazine industry recently took a hit for using real meat products in their photos, to look all appetizing etc. The vegan I most respect is a raw food vegan, John McCabe. He has written several books on the topic (http://www.amazon.com/John-McCabe/e/B001K81LGI/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1306797776&sr=8-1), and they are good. He doesn't go for all that fake, processed, maybe-I'm-meat stuff. He goes for real actual food. If I did it, I think I would do it like that.

Why you gotta copy our stuff? Do you miss it that much? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery... nuh-uh. If you don't want to eat bacon, why you gotta eat something that tries to taste like bacon? If you don't wanna eat cow, why you try so hard to make it seem like cow? Chicken? Whatever? If you are so into non-meat, why not just eat what isn't meat or near-meat or wannabe-meat?

I understand John. I don't understand the other part. He's the greenest eater I know, with the other raw food vegans. Will I do it? I don't know. Not now and not in the foreseeable future. But is that the way I would do it? I think so. If I'm gonna not eat meat, I'm not going to tease myself with not-meat-but-sure-trying-to-be processed FOODSTUFFS. I would be a consumer of fruits and vegetables and grains and nuts and whatever wasn't meat or anything like meat.

Just sayin'. Just another one of those things that makes me wonder. Now, where's that BBQ?

Meat Monologues Part 1: Zuckerberg Method

Vegan Monologues was already taken. I'm not talking about meat here. I'm talking about vegans, and I'll probably get some flak. Oh well.

So the news that shook up the food world this past week was that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, revealed that "he is currently only eating meat from animals he has personally killed himself." To that, I say, good for him. That takes some huevos. Vegans, however, are horrified. How can he??? That's BARBARIC!!! How is it different from eating an animal someone else killed? Well, let's see, shall we? For one, he is living an understanding of where his food comes from and is appreciating it more, and is cutting back, and is living much more sustainably. I wish we could all live in such a way that we got rid of factory farming and were much more in touch with our food. (Oh yeah - we could, if we weren't hell-bent on such needless useless rampant over-population. Oops, separate post. I digress.)  It's funny to me how an admitted omnivore makes a mooooove (SORRY! I really couldn't resist. I did try.) towards healthier, more sustainable, more of a vegetarian-based diet, and all the vegans can do is be all horrified and condemn him instead of applauding him.


I'm not saying I will never be a vegan or a vegetarian. I have cut back on the meat, but I have yet to even think about wanting to give it up. I try to be responsible about where it came from. Mr. Z doesn't eat meat in restaurants, just vegetarian foods. Why can't this be a good thing? How about we moooove (didn't even try this time) some of that ire and outrage back to Go-Daddy founder what's-his-name, for needlessly killing elephants? (I could look up his name, but I refuse to give him that much thought. Please look it up. THAT'S bad.) Here, we have someone trying to raise his own awareness, and we have to turn it into a bad thing. OK, not "we"... "they". Yes, I will put up that wall right here. 


Aw hell, I just think it's funny they are lamenting this ON Facebook. Now That's irony. Thoughts?

2) Twice the Plastic for Twice the Freshness... and Garbage

Remember when buying lunch meat meant going to the butcher counter, pointing to your slab o' meat of choice, and receiving a package neatly wrapped in butcher paper? And you made sure to eat it before it had a chance to go bad, because otherwise that was a waste of money. And even when it might have started to go a little south, no worries, just fry it up! Not so now. We don't have time for those kinds of shenanigans. Nope... we need our lunch meats in pre-packaged plastic containers and if we don't eat it in time, just throw it away.

What price do we pay for convenience? In my weekly coupon search, I noticed Hillshire Farms is touting that their lunch meat is "Sealed Twice for Fresh Taste." Well, that sounds great, right? I have to wonder how many people buy that product and actually re-use the container. Those actually ARE containers that can be re-used many times. That would at least be something positive. I'm not sure that happens much, though. But on top of that, the product is sealed in an inner pouch. There's nothing to do with that except throw it away. There's not a lot of meat in these packages. How much are we buying in new containers and sealed pouches? Again, we wouldn't want it going bad before we had a chance to eat it all. And sealing it so much is actually a way to trick people into thinking it doesn't have all the crap in it that it really has. "Hmm, look at all that sealing, must mean it is so fresh and wonderful that it has to be extra-protected. It MUST be good for us!"

Uh-uh. Now, I'm not advocating to not eat meat. I still eat it. I'm just saying watch the packaging. If you can avoid products like this (and you can), then you should. We don't need to put all this extra plastic into the world. Send a message to these companies that we neither expect nor want this kind of excess garbage in the environment. It's staggering to think of how many of these are sold in just one day... let's make it a little bit less.

Oh, and go visit your butchers' counter. There's pretty good stuff there, and they might be lonely. Who knows? You might actually have a real conversation. I know. It's scary. Try it anyway.