I was worried that a serious steak-craving would set in around ten days, but the whole thing has been so painless that I didn’t even notice how long it had been.

There are still adjustments to be made, for sure. I’ve invested in a vegetarian cookbook, simply because my entire frame of reference for meal preparation over the past 8 years (ever since I had a kitchen of my own and the curiosity to experiment in it) has been based around meat dishes; more often than not some kind of “standard” meat-and-two-veg combination.

Without a little study and inspiration, I’m worried that this habit will continue and I’ll end up eating 1001 different combinations of (variously marinated tofu)-and-two-veg. That would get dull quickly.

And no, so far I’ve not even been tempted by anything meaty. The only time I came close was in the office cafeteria the other day, when I wandered past something involving duck leg. “Ooh, duck!” said my primitive lizard-brain, but then I looked closer and remembered how mass-farmed/catered duck always offers the promise of succulent, flavoursome bird-meat but provides the reality of tough stringy “generic protein”. Bleuch. At least tofu doesn’t have sinews which get stuck in your teeth…

And I feel so much healthier having cut the meat out! Over the past year I’ve found myself feeling more and more lethargic and out-of-sorts. But in the last three weeks, my energy levels have increased hugely. I feel less dopey, no longer suffer from weird painful hunger-pangs at odd times and feel so much more satisfied when I do eat.

And no, vegetarians are not necessarily anaemic or protein-deficient. But I’ll cover that stuff in another post.

So, yeah, good riddance to American meat. I don’t exactly what it is about the industrial farmsteads, slaughter-houses and packing plants, but something really bad is coming out of the whole process. If I ever eat meat in America again (ie. if a steak-craving springs up at some point), it will be from an organic supplier who personally knows the farmer who grew it.

In other news (I’ll also post more about this later), I should have the keys to my new SF apartment (the “perfect location” of posts past) next week, and I’ll probably be moving my furniture up the week after that. Roll on life in the city!

At the centre of this plan is my “Meat List” – quite simply a list of all the meat-based dishes that I really like; the things I might miss if I turn my back on a carnivorous lifestyle forever.

The plan itself is quite simple – to eat as many of these dishes as I can over the next month or so, for two basic reasons. First, in the event that I do cross over to the Veg Side for good, I will have said a fond farewell to the things I’ve enjoyed in the past. Secondly, and more importantly, it gives me a real chance to work out honestly how much I actually enjoy being a meat-eater.

Phase 2 of the plan comes in January when I’ll stop eating meat again. And then comes the interesting part of the experiment. I’ll either find that after a couple of months I really can’t live without meat, or I’ll decide that I don’t miss either the meat, or the previously-explored ethical quandries it entails.

So without further ado, here (in no particular order) is the list in full:

• Proper English Fish’n'Chips (sorry guys – no matter how hard you try, America cannot provide this)
• A really good steak (I’m thinking Argentinian or Brazillian steakhouse)
• Calf’s Liver (Hopefully still on the menu at Carluccio’s in Islington)
• A good beef lasange
• Bacon Butties (“sandwiches” for any Americans in the audience)
• A full English fry-up (including black pudding and pigs’ kidneys)
• Bangers’n'mash
• Steak and Kidney Pie
• A ‘Double Double’ from In’n'out
• A proper English roast dinner (Christmas should see to that)
• A Chicken Tikka Masala
• Whitebait
• Oysters (May not be possible really – wrong season)
• Corned Beef Sandwiches (I know, eww, but they got me through childhood and student days)
• Peri-Peri Chicken (I’ve missed Nando’s quite a bit)
• Peking Duck
• BBQ Pork Ribs

There are many more items which could go on the list, but that pretty much covers my favourites.

And with that, I’m taking a sorely needed vacation back in Blighty. Coming up in the New Year – the no-doubt amusing story of my move 40 miles north, lightly sprinkled with meat-free shenanigans.

Merry Denominational Religious Celebration and a Gregorian New Year to you all.

That might seem like a strange sentiment given the content of this blog so far but here’s the thing: I’m not really a hippy; probably more of a pragmatic idealist. I know how I’d like the world to be, but I understand that it’s unlikely and I prefer focussing on what I can do right here and right now, rather than on the general state of humanity.

The problem with your real “I’m a world-changer me” nutters is that they pursue their beliefs about wrong and right with an almost religious fervour, thrusting leaflets into your face at Muni entrances and preaching every-which-where about the dangers of capitalism.

Each to their own, but as an opponent of the American christian right will tell you, religious fervour can be a dangerous thing. It changes people; wraps them up in the belief that they (or their god, be he Jehova or Karl Marx) are undebatably right. And when that happens, the truth starts to slip away into middle-distance. After all, what’s a little distortion or exaggeration when you’re supporting the adoption of the One True Way?

But it’s bloody annoying, especially when it comes from those hippies.

It’s annoying because I can easily come to the same basic conclusions which they do regarding issues like meat production. But I’m a software engineer – I want to make my decisions based on reasonably verifiable facts; preferably hard data – not hyperbole.

And it’s really hard to get those facts. I’ve read “statistics” which claim that an average meat eater’s diet uses 16 times as much grain in a year as a vegetarian one. Yes, feeding cows is wasteful, but those numbers push the limits of believability.

So I’ve had to spend some time searching for information on the environmental and ethical concerns surrounding meat production in order to find just a few sources which I feel I can trust. I’ve come down to just two. Bear in mind that these are “primary sources” whose overall agenda doesn’t seem tainted by wild-eyed “Socialist-Worker”-waving fervour, and whose basic premises and facts are verifiable via other sources.

Those two sources are the Beyond Beef campaign (who came under particularly close scrutiny given their ties to McSpotlight) and Erik Schlosser’s book “Fast Food Nation”, which is ultimately a surprisingly sober and balanced overview of the fast food market.

And based on those sources and the facts that I’m pretty sure about, here are three reasons why I’m increasingly struggling to enjoy a good steak.

These are mostly US-centric, but then, so are my domestic arangements these days.

1) Meat production is Environmentally damaging

• The annual beef consumption of an average American family of four requires more than 260 gallons of fuel and releases 2.5 tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere, as much as the average car over a six month period.
• The United States has lost one third of its topsoil. An estimated six of the seven billion tons of eroded soil is directly attributable to grazing and unsustainable methods of producing feed crops for cattle and other livestock.
• Cattle ranching is a primary cause of deforestation in Latin America. Since 1960, more than one quarter of all Central American forests have been razed to make pasture for cattle.
• The world’s 1.3 billion ruminant livestock emit approximately 60 million tons or 17 percent of the world’s total Methane emissions. One methane molecule traps 21 times as much solar heat as a molecule of CO₂

2) Meat production is a waste of  resources

• Nearly half of the earth’s landmass is used as pasture for cattle and other livestock.
• Nearly half of the total amount of water used annually in the U. S. goes to grow feed and provide drinking water for cattle and other livestock.
• Seventy percent of all U.S. grain — and one third of the world’s total grain harvest — is fed to cattle and other livestock.
• Asian adults consume between 300 and 400 pounds of grain a year. A middle-class American, by contrast, consumes over a ton of grain each year, 80 percent of it through eating cattle and other grain-fed livestock.

3) Meat production is unbelievably cruel
No, I’m not about to start going all PETA at this point. Frankly, I think PETA are an awful pantomime of an organisation, and I find it very hard to believe a single word they publish.

Whilst I touched on the issues of killing animals for food last time, I’m more concerned (from an ethical standpoint) with the way that the meat industry finds and uses its workers.

• Every year, 29 out of every 100 meat processing workers sustains a work-related injury or illness that requires treatment beyond first aid.
• Slaughterhouses typically recruit unskilled, recent immigrants many of whom are unfamiliar with U.S. labor laws, and/or unable to speak English and who are unlikely to file complaints about company policies or attempt to organize labor unions.
• In 2002, employees in meatpacking plants made, on average, 24 percent less than their counterparts in other factory jobs.

There are far more graphic descriptions of the day-to-day life of a meatpacker in places like “Fast Food Nation”. Let’s just say that the job they do for a pittance, in highly dangerous conditions, isn’t a pleasant one.

I should make it clear here – I really don’t want to put anyone else off meat, unless I’m inadvertantly helping them along to a conclusion they were already making for themselves. But the issues above (and countless more surrounding and intersecting with them) are what have driven me to consider vegetarianism for the first time in my life. And I should also point out that, had I never moved to the US, I might never have made this decision – whilst the meat industry in the UK isn’t all happy, fluffy farmsteads and ruddy-cheeked rural folk, it’s not quite the over-the-edge conveyor-o-cheap-protein which the US meat industry has become.

Finally, whilst a lot of the reasoning quoted above focuses on red-meat (particularly beef) production, there are similar (if less severe) issues with production of almost any other kind of meat. Now, I could switch to only buying meat from verifiable, organic small-farm sources, I’m sure. But honestly, it wouldn’t be long before the more factory-farmed sources started slipping back in, whether in restaurant meals, or in “picking up a quick meal at Safeways, ‘cos it’s right there.”

Next time on “I’m not a hippy, I just play one on Yahoo! 360″ we’ll look at how an omnivore turns into a herbivore, and what he decides to do before he gets there.

“Could you become a vegetarian?”

It’s a topic of conversation which has come up with friends from time to time over the years, especially, say, in the middle of a steak dinner. And my answer has always been “no”, followed by various reasons (not quite excuses, but close) for that being the case.

But I’ve been examining some of those reasons recently.

1) “I could never live without steak. or Bacon.”
All well and good. I do really like good steak. But to say that I couldn’t live without it is rather overstating the case, quite simply because I’ve never tried. It’s an untested hypothesis, and I can’t really keep saying it without backing it up with hard proof. “I tried living without steak and couldn’t” – now there’s a position worth having.

As for bacon, well, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been forced to (more or less) live without bacon since I moved to the US, because Americans don’t understand what good bacon is (hint: there’s a picture at the top of this post). Americans think that this crap can pass for bacon. Poor fools.

Proper, European-style back bacon is well nigh impossible to get Stateside. Supermarkets have never seen such a thing, and even quality butchers are often sorely lacking. The only reliable source I’ve found is the Rain Tree Cafe in San Francisco, who do a very agreeable Irish Breakfast with proper bacon. But my visits there are few and far between. And “bacon butties” (look it up) are right out.

2) “Hitler was a vegetarian”
Okay, I’ve never actually used that as a serious argument. Maybe, just a couple of times, it’s proved highly effective in winding up overly-preachy “meat is murder” types who think they’ve single-handedly saved the Universe by going vegan.

I’m a bad man.

3) “We’re omnivores. We’re supposed to eat meat.”
It’s very true that we’re omnivores – we have the multi-purpose teeth and the digestive system for it. But the argument is disingenous all the same, because the human being as an animal is not built to be a predator. Take away our low cunning and our opposable thumbs and you’re basically looking at some fairly appealing prey. Our “claws”, such as they are, are brittle and badly adapted to violent confrontation. And our jaw musculature is not designed to deliver a killing bite.

Nor are our brains wired in a predatory fashion. Housecats, even after millenia of domestication, still have that killing insinct. Present them with a fast-moving object smaller than they are, be it a bird or a piece of string, and they will pounce and stab with their claws. Very few of us, on the other hand, sit in the garden of a summer and feel an irrepressible urge to pin a bird down and rip its throat out.

We’re scavangers at heart, taking what food is available, and that’s why we’re omnivores – it broadens the potential avenues of sustenance, whether they be a recently deceased mammouth, a tree full of berries or a box of Krispy Kreme donuts.

Only we’re not scavengers any more, because with our low cunning and our opposable thumbs we developed agriculture and supermarkets. We no longer have to eat what we find; we can choose. And we have the ability to choose only plant matter for sustenance.

4) “If you’re going to eat meat, you should be prepared to kill an animal yourself”
The implication of this statement, of course, being that I would be prepared to do such a thing. Only I’ve never actually put myself in a position where that’s the case. Not through any highly active avoidance – it’s just that the situation has never arisen and I’ve never sought it out.

And honestly, thinking about this now, I’m not sure that I could do it. I’m not particularly squeamish, but I just don’t believe strongly enough that humans actually have the right to take other creatures’ lives with impunity. And if that creature is, say, a 200 pound pig which is screaming its lungs out, I have a feeling that compassion would come before pork chops.

Which puts me in the awkward position of being a bit of a hypocrite, and leads me to effectively argue myself into vegetarianism.

Whoops.

All of which is to say that I don’t have any concrete arguments which should stop me from eschewing meat. Ultimately, it comes down to this: which is more important to me; the enjoyment I derive from certain meats, or the moral and enviromental reasons against meat production and consumption, which I’m becoming ever more aware of and concerned about?

I can’t fully answer that question until I’ve explored those issues in a little more depth. But that’s a job for another day.

Factory farmed, treated with anti-biotics and growth hormones, it’s not even really meat. And when it’s added to a pasta sauce or risotto, made up into a stew, minced into flash-fried burgers  or roughly cubed and wrapped in tortillas, it becomes little more than “generic protein” – something to bulk up a meal without adding anything much in the way of flavour and texture.

As for buying meat in American  supermarkets… Chicken doesn’t look like chicken. Bleached white and sandwiched in plastic, it looks like the stuff of vat-grown nightmares. Beef is a weird colour too, as though the Meat Fairy came along in the night and painted it an unnatural crimson. Everything is… just a little wrong.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great pleasures to be had from meat. Purchased from organic sources, good butchers and quality-driven restaurants, a top-notch steak or a perfect slice of calves’ liver; a non-intensively reared chicken (carefully roasted)  or a thick rasher of back bacon have the power to bring intense, mind-blowing pleasure to the diner.

I love good meat. I just don’t get to eat it very often.

Which is why I’ve developed a periodic vegetarian habit. Nothing big, really, but once in a while I consciously go a week or so without eating anything containing bits of animals. It’s a truly interesting experience, because it forces you to look at everyday restaurant menus through new eyes, and it also forces you to move away from the typical “meat+veg+veg” schtick which infects so many meal compositions. And here’s the thing – I actually feel better – more alert and more energetic – when I’m not sucking down cubed, processed bits of some poorly-treated farmyard beast.

And yes, part of what has prompted this post is the fact that I’m currently 5 days into one of my meat-free odysseys. This one was prompted by the fact that, just slightly hungover after last Saturday’s Yahoo! Year End Party, I snuck into a McDonalds for a couple of cheeseburgers and immediately felt heartily ill.

But anyway (to bring this all back to one of the major themes I seem to cover on 360 – sustainability), I’ve been thinking and reading about the environmental (and associated ethical) issues surrounding meat production recently, and various things have come to a head to make me consider seriously, for the first time in my life, whether I should think about making meat-free eating a little more permanent.

Which leaves you all free to have a good laugh at just how much of a West Coast Hippy I’m becoming these days.

More details on my meaty ethical musings and future plans regarding them will follow…

The Boring Bits

• Serves 3-4
• Preparation time: 25-30 minutes
• Cooking time: 40 minutes

Ingredients

• 14 oz (400g) tofu, chopped into 1/2 centimetre cubes
• 6 oz (170g) onion, finely chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 tsp of finely-chopped dried hot chillis
• 1 oz (28g) butter
• 3 vegetable stock cubes
• 1/2 cup (110ml) boiling water (for the stock cubes)
• 4oz (110g) finely-chopped closed-cap mushrooms
• 3 1/2 oz (100g) pine nuts
• 9 oz (250g) cashew nuts
• 3 oz (80g) walnuts, halved =or= 3oz (80g) chestnuts, halved
• 3 eggs, lightly beaten
• 2 tsp fresh basil (or 3 tsp dried)
• salt and black pepper

Throwing it all together

It’s worth preparing the nuts and veg before you do anything else, because there’s quite a lot of them.

The garlic needs to be crushed – just place the unpeeled clove on a chopping board, place the blade of the knife flat on top of it, and press down reasonably hard. The skin should flake away as the clove crushes. Then just separate out the crushed chunks.

The cashew nuts need to be finely ground. This is possible in a blender if you stop once in a while to jumble up the remaining whole nuts, but a food processor is probably easier if you’ve got one. Your other option is a reasonable-sized pestle and mortar.

The other ingredients (tofu, onions, mushrooms, walnuts/chestnuts) should be prepared as described in the ingredients list.

Now make up your stock from the cubes (alternatively you can use fresh stock if you have it, of course). Add it to a large saucepan, and then add the onions, chilli and garlic. Bring it to the boil, and simmer for about 10 minutes. There should still be enough liquid to cover most of the onions at the end of simmering. Top the pan up if it runs low.

In a large bowl, combine the tofu, eggs, butter, basil, walnuts/chestnuts, pine and cashew nuts and mushrooms. They come together best if you stir them all in with a fork. Season with as much salt and pepper as you like.

Once the stock and onion mixture are ready, fold it into the tofu and egg mixture, mixing thoroughly so that all the ingredients are evenly distributed.

(Note: it’s possible to put the mixture in a container and refrigerate overnight, if you want to prepare it ahead of time.)

Now, grease a loaf tin with some butter, and place the mixture in the tin. Frankly, it’ll look pretty unappetising at this point, but it’ll cook beautifully. Really. I promise.

Cook it for 40 minutes at 350F (180C). If you don’t have a fan oven then make sure it’s on the shelf nearest the heating element (yes, American ovens with the element down at the bottom, I’m looking at you…)

When you stick a knife or a skewer into the loaf it should come out clean, without any liquid mixture stuck to it. Leave it for another ten minutes or so if it doesn’t quite seem cooked at 40 minutes.

You can serve this with just about anything which would go with meat. Roast potatoes can be fantastic, or you can try something different. Last time I did this, I cooked it along with honey-mustard baby carrots and asparagus garnished with parmesan.

On the other hand, the first time I ever cooked it was as part of a Christmas dinner (where the assembled meat-eaters proceeded to ignore the turkey I’d spent 5 hours over, and tuck into this instead, ingrates…) To give it a more christmassy feel that time, I used the Chestnuts in place of the Walnuts on the ingredients list.

However you serve it, the veggies in your life will love you for this. Just don’t lose the recipe; they might never forgive you…