Vice, vice, baby

[digitaldiscipline]

So, for those of you not in the habit of listening to Morning Edition, this week, they've been doing a series on beef production and consumption.

As your occasionally-stereotypical NPR listener, I am not immune to what's ha-ha-only-seriously referred to as "liberal guilt." So I had a small pang of it when I realized that what's currently considered a healthy week's worth of red meat consumption is, to me, "Tuesday's dinner.[1]"

You've seen the hamburger recipe I use; eight oversize burgers out of four pounds of grassland beef. Am I putting myself at risk? Maybe. Am I consuming an outsize portion of resources? Quite possibly. Am I going to change my ways? Hard to say, mostly because I'm not sure if I can locally-source comparable chicken (no idea where my local butcher gets theirs; finding farmer's market eggs seems like something I should probably investigate), and, to be honest, I'd make a lousy vegetarian.

[1] Okay, technically, I had steamed cauliflower, a dill pickle, and a four-egg Nomlette for dinner on this most recent Tuesday.

Comments

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

Am I consuming an outsize portion of resources? Quite possibly. Am I going to change my ways?

I know how I feel when I eat a plant-based diet, and I know what that did to my health. FUCK. THAT. I'll not decrease my meat consumption by my own choice. I already know I'm a bad liberal, =D so this is just one more drop in that bucket.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Admittedly, the closest I've come to attempting to be a vegetarian was going on a one-week fast, where all I consumed was water with lemon juice and a few apples. Even my shake-based shenanigans aren't veg-friendly, since, you know, whey protein.

[clevermanka.livejournal.com]

I was a vegetarian for seven years and I'm 99.9% sure that heavy exposure to soy was a major factor in tipping me over into my autoimmune disease. I'll never have any way to prove it, but my gut (ha) tells me so.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

This year, I've more or less given up dairy (still have the occasional bit of half & half in my coffee or a small bit of cheese) and have tried to cut as far down as I can on gluten sources (due to hindsight, I am wondering if some of my childhood dermatological & "being small and scrawny in general" issues may have been attributable to gluten sensitivity). I can't say I've noticed a lot of difference over my improved baseline of "drink less booze and eat less processed (and less-processed) crap."

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

True, but I tend to completely forget to eat meat unless you remind me, so between us we make two average liberals.

I should probably be slightly less facile: If you eat that much meat to feel full without consuming crap carbs, you could try stretching it with quinoa (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/27/meatloaf-with-quinoa_n_1057077.html) or something. (Bonus: quinoa is high-protein, for a grain, and gluten-free.) If you eat that much meat to keep up with your body's/lifestyle's demands for protein, you'd have to extensively rework your eating habits to cut down on your meat intake without running a protein deficiency. In the one case, you're eating meat to avoid carbs and the things that make you feel sick; in the other, you specifically need meat to keep up your other choices that lower your cholesterol and maintain your health. In neither case is it as simple as "You bad, blind overconsumer! Think of the starving children in Reductionist Example Area of the Year!"

Saying you're not doing as much as you can imagine doing is not the same as saying you aren't doing as much as you can manage to do. That the problem persists, and you can imagine doing more, does not make the persistence of the problem your personal responsibility to a degree that should outweigh personal health considerations.

It's a tricky little trap for the conscience, akin to the time a friend told me that if I really cared about the environment, I'd quit smoking. Never mind my CFLs, my switched power strips, my insistence on hauling trash to the recycling center; none of that mattered if he could point to one thing I wasn't doing, and thereby call me a hypocrite. Was he doing even as much as I was? No, but that wasn't the point; it was my hypocrisy we were discussing, not his. Would I do more for the environment if I installed solar panels and low-consumption appliances, washed all clothes and dishes by hand in rainwater, and routed the greywater out to a vegetable garden? Sure. Was any of that remotely within my reach, as a low-income apartment-dweller, without sweeping life changes and a giant windfall to pay for it all? Nnnnnope. But that wasn't the point; I was doing a thing that would be easy for a non/never-smoker to change if he were me. As long as he could point to something I wasn't doing that he thought was within my reach, anything I did do was thereby moot.

Granted, his concern was actually for my health, and he felt justified in enlisting any form of guilt he could think of because nicodemon! Anything is justified! Shame that smoker for her own good! But the strategy is the same. Fighting local consumption norms is hard, and the effort and expense usually increase with each step. It's easy for someone else to point to a step you haven't taken and claim its existence means you aren't doing enough, without knowing how much that step might cost you. Sometimes that's done to spur you to take a step the speaker has already decided was worthwhile to them, and it's less expensive to spread that word than to take their own next step.

Yes, sometimes saying "But I'm much better than the average! The majority of people are so much worse!" sounds self-congratulatory and derailing, and "I've earned this one peccadillo / I just can't afford to take this any further / it's too big a change to do the next thing" sounds like a cop-out. It's easy to get caught up in the idea that since you can't control others' behavior, it doesn't matter how much difference ten people adopting your current habits would make as long as you can think of one more thing to do better yourself. But the corollary is that you aren't responsible for ten other people's behavior, either. You're under no obligation to make your own health worse by eating less meat just because ten other people are eating more than is necessary (or healthy) for them. That's not a cop-out; that's personal responsibility.

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

I was vegetarian for somewhere between two and three years, against my doctor's advice and the arguments I myself had made for two decades to fend off pushy vegetarian friends. I felt great, but it wasn't good for me.

Turns out, it wasn't actually meat that caused most of the feeling bad after eating it. It was the crap in the meat. etcet pointed me at a source of grass-fed, no-hormones, no-antibiotics (I'm allergic to penicillin) beef, and suddenly eating meat didn't upset me at all -- even ethically, since yay free-range. Yeah, I miss the lightning-fast digestion and flat abdomen. I'm still getting over the protein deficiency and wildly variable blood sugar, though, so there's that.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Since you're intimately familiar with my own constellation of "Yeah, but"s when it comes to "I don't care how much relative ass I kick, I can and should still kick more," it should hardly be surprising that I would consider my failure to inspire ten other people to be a little bit better by following my example as a let-down. *laugh*

[cassandrasimplx.livejournal.com]

Derogatory-ungendered-epithet, please.

You know perfectly well that your best tool for whipping others into shape isn't just being imitatably awesome; if you want to feel responsible for improving their habits, you also have to show them how their own behavior holds them back from being as awesome as you, or they'll just keep sitting around stuffing their faces with Burgerdonald's crap wishing they "had it in them" like you. Motivation is potential energy, not the same as momentum. They have to break their own inertia first. People are used to the idea of "earning" empty calories with cardio -- I can totally justify a half-dozen donuts if I make myself walk to the bakery for them -- so make them earn their cheeseburgers, too. "You gonna do anything with that protein, kid? That's what I thought. Drop and give me twenty!"

*dusts hands* Any other complex issues of conscience I can oversimplify into absurdity?

[ivy]

I will note that I was (have been?) mostly or entirely vegetarian for ~20 years, and when I had to pick up stupid diet to address my blood sugar issues, I *had* to go back to eating more meat. I was really unthrilled about it, but I've been healthier since with more stable blood sugar. Who knows if that's due to eating more meat, giving up most refined grains, or what... but it works.

I would still prefer to be vegetarian if I could make it work, but I don't think anyone should have to compromise their health for it, including me.

[ivy]

Yeah, when you make several changes at once it's hard to tell which of them is responsible for the effects. Science! But a lot of reality is like that.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

well, the changes were not all simultaneous, except for the dairy/gluten thing. the booze thing was about about two years ago, and i've backslid somewhat on that (i even, gasp, had a beer on friday... and confirmed that i still loathe guinness), and the avoidance of processed stuff was even earlier. i suspect i'd have to get a lot more diligent about something like paleo or your diet of evil restrictocity or something than i'm really willing to be in order to experiment more seriously, and, frankly, that sounds unappealing as a lifestyle change to me right now.

[curvemudgeon.livejournal.com]

Nomlette?

[etcet.livejournal.com]

err, full recipe was posted a few months back.

executive summary: mixed scramble with fresh salsa and a bit of meat. essentially a western omelet with less coherency and more kick.