A friend writes:
I’ll drive an electric car if it means my child can grow up in a world breathing clean air! Clothing can be made from hemp, plant fibres and animal hide from the meat we eat…time for us all to sacrifice a little to give back some of what Earth has given us. Stop spending money on space exploration, destroying one planet is enough. Let’s fix on our existing planet, and saving our existing resources.
This is a response:
Course, if you wanted to be a true tree-hugger, you know you’d have to stop eating meat of all sorts too, right? Especially pork and beef (but everything else, too…) Cause meat – production and consumption is bad for the environment too, according to vegan theory. (Seriously, most vegans believe the mere consumption of beef pollutes the environment)
I do love the world … don’t get me wrong…But I also learned years ago that there isn’t much that I personally can do to make any real difference. Only the extremely wealthy can afford hybrids or electric vehicles, big cities, which is where the worst pollution comes from, will continue to get -bigger- and not smaller, and about the only way that the biggest steps toward progress can be made, is by literally sacrificing the poor parts of the earth’s population.
I love the vegan theory myself. I never have gotten the straight answer though for this question:
If meat and saturated fats sate you so you do not eat as much, do you realize you need to triple or even quadruple your consumption of vegetables, fruit AND carbohydrates to make up the difference?
Then you need to raze forests to plant all that wheat, veggies, and fruits. You need to pollute to produce the supplies for the inevitable diabetes plague that will hit the world by this method of eating.
Electric cars, etc: Remember that the energy has to come from somewhere. One could argue that “clean” energy such as hydro is not clean at all. Ask a native who lost their land to supply energy needs for countries. Perhaps wind mills might do, if you don’t mind shit loads of windmills (and the dangers of losing your head.)
I think the answer is consume less. You can do it right from your home. Consume stuff that is in your area as much as possible, or that has a least amount of impact. Eat local, sustainable, or better yet, grow your own if you can. Stop eating cucumbers that are not pickled in January. Those little bits will help more than ever.
Finally, lay off the grains! Might not be popular, but think on this. It takes a shitload of land to grow corn to use for sweeteners. (You know, in those pops we all like to drink.) That land is not used for any other value.
Now, to focus on showing you all how.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Good points. The U.S. heavily subsidizes corn and wheat, and corn sugar is cheaper than importing cane sugar. The government made sure of that. I’m not sure how things work in Canada.
I do have a couple questions. How does your new philosophy affect your restaurant? And how does it affect the way you cook? I would assume you are still tasting and testing recipes.
@Mike – Great pointsm and a great question!
Canada is a funny beast when it comes to agriculture. In a lot of ways, we follow the states hand in hand. (I guess it depends on who is in office!) A lot of our product comes up from the states, as we are not capable of producing our own products. The sad fact is that we import around 90% of all fruits and vegetables to make way for the growing of grain and canola for oil.
For the restaurant – I actually run the hotel admin side of things, and banquets. My philosopy is reflected on that side as I have most things local and sustainable. It makes for some fun juggling client needs 9 months in advance with corporate contracts, as one has to envision what will be available then.
As for tasting items, I do still taste things. What I mean is, I actually only taste them now. Before, tasting was really eating. If I am making grain-based dishes, I will taste them, but not ingest them. As gross as that is, that means I will taste it, chew it, and spit it out. I have not had many ill effects so far.
Interesting discussion Jason and one that I’ve been interested in for the last many years…
I have a few comments I guess:
1) You say that laying off grain will somehow help environmental problems but at the same time you don’t point out that most of the grains grown in the US are actually used to feed livestock. I believe it takes something like 20 pounds of grain and 2500 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat… So you would have a much larger effect on grain production to reduce your meat intake rather than just reduce grain intake. Your grain impact if you cut back on grains is 1-to-1. Your grain impact if you reduce meat consumption is 20-to-1. I agree though that the grain subsidies are ridiculous.
2) I think people eat WAY more meat than they need. I’m very far from a vegetarian but I’ve been experimenting the last year by drastically cutting down on my meat intake. Once you get over the mental shock of “oh my god wheres the meat?!” you’ll find that your body doesn’t NEED it. You just want it. And there’s a difference between those two things. I probably eat 1 pound of meat a week now on average. This might be up a bit in the summer due to grilling season.
3) Your use less idea is spot on. I think nature will force this upon us sometime in the next 20 years unless we gradually make the change ourselves (yeah right). But there’s really no way we can continue consuming natural resources as the rate we have in the past 30-40 years.
@Nick – Thank you for the comments. I believe the 20 lbs of grain and water comes from PETA – a statistic that is dubious at best. When they made the mistake of visiting our high school (in Calgary, Alberta of all places!) I posed the question:
It may take 20 sacks of grain for 1 pound of meat, but how many people can you feed with grass fed beef? How much land does that take up? No answer… they were not prepared for that question. I even asked, if we all switched to vegetarian, how are we going to feed all those people? Chop down the rainforests? It may take 31 times the land to raise a cow, but a cow can feed more than one person, and supply a hell of a lot more than just meat. What can grains and veggies do? How will the land be fertilized? With chemicals?
Calorie per calorie, meat and fat are more dense than carbs. A gram of fat has 7 calories verses a gram of carbs, which has 4 calories. Further, eat 30 grams of fat verses 30 grams of carbs, and you will find that the fat or meat will fill you more. It takes 4 to 7 times as much carbs to fill you.
Protein sates you at a rate of triple that of plant or carb based items. You can indeed get protien from wheat, but at the cost of a glucose spike. If you do not believe me, watch the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” the scene where he tried to eat a tonne of eggs. You just cannot take it. It is way easier to eat 2 bowls of pasta with garlic bread, and you might even still think you are hungry thereafter. Time to reach for the cookies. Perhaps a trip at the chinese buffet will show you that as well. You can eat a whole lot of stuff and really get nothing in saiety.
You can get by with .7 grams of protien per lean muscle mass in your body and feel sated, without the insulin spike. That is important, because by eating to your satiety level with plants and grains, you run the risk of insulin resistance.
Worse, the more carbs you eat in a day, the more steady your weight gain. I agree that we definately eat way too much meat. I think we eat way more grains and carbs than we should, in the name of “low fat”.
Finally, if you can believe it, think on this: Insulin resistance leads to diabetes. Right now type 2 diabetes is an epidemic. People try and lay the blame on the diabetic person, saying they are fat and lazy. I think it has way more to do with the 500 or so grams of carbs we eat on average per day.
If you want to talk pollution, think on all those testing supplies, the needles these people need to use every day in order to survive, or the pills that these people need to take to lower insulin resistance. Diabetes is a multi-billion dollar industry. Testing machines, strips, lancelets of plastic and metal, vials of insulin. We need to stop worrying about the effects of beef and start worrying about the epidemic of insulin resistant people.
The only way is to live off the locale. Grass fed, free range meat. Organic eggs. Local produce, that is in season. Lay off the grains. We could eat them, but not in the portions we do now.
Finally, you are lucky, you live in D.C. Imagine the people up here who are eating strawberries in January. Imagine the amount of fossil fuels it takes to get that stuff up here to Canada. Then tell me that beef is more damaging to the environment. I prefer to eat something I can get here, than something that is picked in Florida by someone who is nothing more than a slave, opposed to what grows in my back yard.
I sound harsh, but that is reality. There is no fast and easy way to fix the shit that we are in. The best we can do is start with what we can control, and that is what goes onto our table.
I will get off my soapbox now. Cheers, and on with the debate!
There’s a fair number of assumptions in your response Jason.
For starters, the 20pounds of grain/pound of meat is pretty well documented, but even if you half it, it’s still a lot of resources. 10 pounds of wheat say, can maybe make 8 pounds of flour, which can make roughly (I’m approximating) 8 loafs of bread. Obviously it’s tough to live off of just bread (although there are cultures that get very close to this), I have a hard time believing that one pound of meat is more efficient than 8 loafs of bread. There’s an argument for meat yes, but I think it has to be based in a grass-fed situation. You’re just going to lose the grain-efficiency debate every time.
“A gram of fat has 7 calories verses a gram of carbs, which has 4 calories. Further, eat 30 grams of fat verses 30 grams of carbs, and you will find that the fat or meat will fill you more. It takes 4 to 7 times as much carbs to fill you.”
This is bad math my friend. Just on a calorie basis, 1 g. of fat has 7 calories. 1 g of carbs has 4 calories. That makes the fat 7-to-4 ratio more calorie laden, or 1.75 times. I’m not sure where you get the 4-to-7 times number.
On the fat argument, there’s a lot to address here, but you can get FAT off of eating too much of anything. You could eat nothing but meat and become FAT. I hate the low-fat diet campaign as much as you, but I’m not sure that there’s a link between hi-carb or hi-fat and becoming FAT. At the end of the day, it’s very hard to tell why one individual is FAT and one is not.
I agree with your diabetes point about it being an industry. But I disagree on the cause of the epidemic. Eating a varied diet is essential to being healthy. You need protein, fiber, fat, etc. Too much or too little of any one of those and it makes sense that your body would go into crazy-mode. Also, I think the diabetic craze can be linked to lack of exercise in a number of cases as well.
I also agree completely with your local campaign. People should eat first what’s available in their areas.
@Nick – You need to read the book Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. A calorie is not the same across the board. Math-wise, it may not make sense, but the same can be said about equal amounts of apples vs oranges. They are just not the same.
While you can eat 30 grams of fat and 30 grams of carbohydrates, they are not in fact the same. The fat will make you feel fuller before the carbs will. As for the link of high carb making you fat? Read the book, and you will see what I mean.
Since you talk about math, let’s look at logic. If it is just an equation, calories burned vs eaten, then why is it with all the low calorie meals we are eating, why are we all getting way fatter?
I suggest that it is insulin resistance that is the key. Insulin tells your cells to burn the glucose as fuel. Your pancreas creates the insulin, but then your become resistant to it. Your pancreas makes more insulin to counter the effect. The cells become more resistant. The problem with the body ignoring the insulin is that it stores the glucose as fat. That exacerbates the problem further by making it so your body weight makes you more resistant to the insulin. When your pancreas produces more than it can handle, it burns out. Then you are diabetic, like me.
Finally, I agree that the sedientary life is a factor in diabetes. I will tell you though, I could punch someone in the throat when they tell me that I am lazy. I am up all the time, running around as a chef, trust me. I can attribute my diet as what was part of my downfall, and bad genes. (Diabetes runs in my family.)
I have actually been more energetic since cutting the grains drastically. I get my carbs from more natural sources, like veggies, fruits and nuts. I actually eat healthier now than I did when I ate around 500g of carbs a day. (Imagine working with pasta and rice…) To tell you the truth, I don’t really miss them. There is a whole new world out there.
Remember the old addage, “You are what you eat, from your head to your feet?” I think that really applies here. Health-wise, and environmental wise.
I commend you on your “Make it or don’t eat it” diet. That is the spirit of what I am talking about. Now, eat locally, and you are in business. No insispid strawberry can beat what I picked in my garden yesterday, with next to no environmental impact. No pesticides, fossil fuels, herbacides, fetilizer went into that ground. The taste was f*ing amazing as well.
Chef,
Have you read The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith? If so, what did you think? If not, put it on the top of your reading list.
JLG
@JLG – I have heard a lot of great things about the book, and it is indeed on my list. Now, to figure out how to conjure up more hours in the day…
Jason
The much bigger and unpopular topic here is spiritual. People NEED something to believe in. If they don’t believe in an entity bigger and more supernatural than themselves, they resort to worshipping nature and controlling their world with dietary rules. This is universal from the beginning of man.
The term “mother earth” is a good example. Yet, you can’t control this mother. She brings hurricanes, floods, droughts, and earthquakes along with beauty and bounty. It’s her nature. As unpleasant as this is, we were “designed” to eat from the lower chain of animals and I have no problems with this. We were not designed to eat a cow a day. But, we weren’t designed to watch 10 hours of TV a day either. This doesn’t mean you can’t eat a steak or be entertained. It means we are driven by the “marketing” machine of a consumer economy.
I’m all for responsible living. But, all too often, there is someone behind it making a ton of money telling me how to live.
@Angela – Well said! Our ancestors surely did not eat a cow a day either. They ate what they could get their hands on, and that was it. Civilization brought us excess, and history is wrought with examples of hedonistic ways. The Romans and Greeks were a good example. Diabetes existed back in Greek times!
I am not saying we should completely shun everything form a certain group. What I am saying is that a BALANCED diet includes everything, not something that is force fed us through various interest groups in government.
One thing about the Mother personification of Nature. I am in full belief that the term was coined to demonstrate a truth to us. Our mothers might let us get away with murder, for a time. I tell you what though, there will come a time though when she has a sharp lesson for us. There is no controlling Mother, she is the one who guides us where to go.
That is about as spiritual as I get today.