I came to love cooking as I came to love food. My appetite was undiscerning; everything was open for exploration. I knew only that I wanted to eat.
I also came to love cooking at what would turn out to be the end of a five-year stint as a vegetarian. Few things smell as good to me as a pork loin browning in the pan. Or sound as good as a duck breast crackling over heat. And so, as I learned to eat, legumes gave way to lardons. They simply satisfied an appetite that vegetables hadn’t touched in half a decade.
But for those of us who care about our carbon footprint, the decision of what to eat can often be immensely complicated. Short of becoming a vegetarian, the simplest, and for many, most compelling answer to emerge in recent years is the mandate to think globally by eating locally.
The locavore movement was challenged recently by a study released in Environmental Science and Technology called “Do Food Miles Matter?” The study suggests that it’s “how food is produced, not how far it is transported, that matters most for global warming.”
According to the lead author, Christopher Weber of Carnegie Mellon University, “eating less red meat and dairy can be a more effective way to lower an average U.S. household’s food-related climate footprint than buying local food.”
The article continues to say: “A relatively small dietary shift can accomplish about the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally…Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.”
This comes as a surprise — and a blow — to those of us who have come to justify our avocation for cooking with a commitment to seeking out meats from locally produced farmers, people we often meet and form a relationship with over time. When I lived in New York, for instance, I bought a lot of meat from Flying Pig Farms as I enjoyed not only the quality of the product, but the quality of the people selling it as well.
Despite the fact that I had spent more money on meat than I would have at a grocery store, the purchase left me feeling enriched; I had learned about the meat I was eating, I had taken mass-transit to buy it, I had interacted with the farmer, and I was injecting money in the local economy to help support farmers — a disappearing, and struggling, class.
What more could I do?
This study suggests that the potential for carbon reduction by eating less meat is compelling enough to change your eating habits — if only slightly. It’s not that you shouldn’t eat any meat, but to eat less meat, and more vegetables, more of the time. (May we pause and nod to Michael Pollan.)
I would also suggest that the value of the growing interaction between the American citizen and the farmer has a value that cannot be priced. If we want to solve our food crisis, more people need to know where their food comes from. It’s an educational process, as much as anything else. I find that eating locally serves to satisfy an appetite for information.
It’s this mental appetite that has lead me to consume materials — books, videos, articles — that have changed my physical appetite. What began as a seduction by meat, and lead to a discovery of food as narrative, and as interaction, has led to a conviction that I should eat less of it.
This is nothing new. As Mark Bittman put it, “If you’re a progressive, if you’re driving a Prius, if you’re shopping green or looking for organics, you should probably be a semi-vegetarian.” (More on this talk later.)
I agree. But I still want my bacon, if only on Sunday mornings.
(Note: See this post for a full discussion of Mark Bittman and eating less meat.)
Source: Originally published in On Earth on June 10, 2008.