Have You Got Anything Without Spam?

“It is not the quantity of the meat, but the cheerfulness of the guests, which makes the feast” - Edward Hyde

I realized a couple of days ago that I was remiss in not including a link to Meatless Monday in my post of links, so I have corrected this. I also figured now would be a great time to talk about some of our pursuits to cut down on meat.

We like to eat meat. Unfortunately we like to eat too much meat, which is pretty much typical of the average American's diet. This is one area of our unsustainable eating habits that we identified a while back and decided to work on by finding ways to have meatless meals and meatless days. That's not to say we want to go vegetarian or even vegan, but we recognize that meat production has a substantial negative impact on our environment so we want to decrease how much we eat and work toward quality (local farms that practice safe, sanitary, humane, eco-friendly meat production) over quantity (hey, the supermarket has a family pack of factory produced steaks on sale! let's get that for dinner!).

We have a lot of beans in various forms: dry, canned (not by choice, but we get a lot of them from the food pantry and WIC right now during these hard economic times), refried. The thing to be mindful of is whether our source of protein is complete, meaning it contains all of the essential amino acids. Meat by default is complete, but we can also find some plant sources for complete protein (soy, buckwheat, quinoa) or combine foods (beans and rice, beans and grains, beans and corn, beans and nuts, beans and pasta, etc.) to get a complete protein source. Hummus is a great complete protein so we've started experimenting with making our own hummus. We've also been eating casseroles made with beans and rice, and adding beans to pasta dishes.

For lunches we use cheese in place of meats, especially with salads. We have also added nuts to salads or made bean dishes for lunch if we're doing something different for dinner. We've learned through experience not to do everything bean because it burns you out on them real quick. I enjoy eggs, so I eat eggs for breakfast just about every day anyway (usually an omelet with veggies and maybe some cheese). Kathy can't do eggs because they make her sick, so we usually try to find something for her that is meatless and eggless. We don't have as much problem with eggs and cheese because you don't have to raise a bunch of cows or chickens and slaughter them to get these things. You can get by on fewer animals and go back to them again and again to get the food.

The key is to make sure we find a variety of ways to find complete proteins and not overdo one particular food. In addition, we're looking at meat as a "sprinkling" additive with our food instead of the main portion of our meal. This reduces our meat consumption but still keeps us healthy and getting some meat which we enjoy, thus reducing our carbon footprint. We could go vegetarian, and perhaps someday we will, but even finding a balance is much more sustainable than our habitual overconsumption of meat.