The Future is (Somewhat) Meatless
Two interesting pieces came on my radar this weekend. I’m not about to give up meat entirely, but it has become less and less of my diet of late, and after my birthday early next month, I’m probably going to end up cutting it out almost entirely for a couple of months while I work to get my weight down under 200. (And calorie counting, etc. I’m not just cutting meat out because I think that’ll make me instantly slimmer.)
The first, from the Times, a piece by Mark Bittman about the high cost of meat production:
Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.
Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.
The second, this profile in the Wall Street Journal of Kansas City tight-end Tony Gonzalez, who has gone from a high-meat diet to a vegan one:
Three weeks later, he walked into the weight room at the Chiefs’ training facility and got a shock. The 100-pound dumbbells he used to easily throw around felt like lead weights. “I was scared out of my mind,” he says. Standing on the scale, he learned he’d lost 10 pounds.
Mr. Gonzalez considered scrapping the diet altogether and returning to the Chiefs’ standard gut-busting menu. First, though, he called Mr. Campbell, who put him in touch with Jon Hinds, himself a vegan and the former strength coach for the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Mr. Hinds suggested plant foods with more protein.
Original post by Joel