Like many other vegans or vegetarians, my first foray into a plant-based diet was after watching a documentary encouraging veganism. It happened during a family movie night when it was my turn to pick. I saw a documentary about the food system and was interested; my parents might not have been. The documentary was titled What the Health and was aimed at the risks of a diet high in processed meat and dairy products, and how health related nonprofits like The American Diabetes Association have been accepting sponsorship from companies that make money from processed dairy and meat products. Meat and dairy sponsorships bias them against investigating the effect our diets have on health and chronic diseases. It was the first time we had seen anything like it and we rashly decided to go vegan. This quickly failed as it was a spur of the moment decision and we had done literally nothing to prepare. I will now give you an example of how and why suddenly going vegan does not work out. A few days after our rapid conversion, I and my mother went to a new restaurant in town that was supposed to be a specialty breakfast restaurant. The only vegan option was oat bran with withered restaurant fruit, so instead we awkwardly got vegetarian meals, not willing to sacrifice actually good food for the principles. You can be vegetarian without the sacrifice. The veggie Florentine with skillet potatoes is wonderful. My household has always been low meat and try's to purchase our food locally; my dad has been influenced in this by the excellent works of Michael Pollan. After our vegan train wreck, we continued to be a low meat household. Not doing much of something is always a helpful start to not doing it. Two and a half years ago I became vegetarian, and my parents became pescatarian. Part of why I have found it easier to commit to vegetarianism is that it has become more prevalent in our society. Almost everyone knows what it means, and most restaurants have a vegetarian option that is not comparable to ingesting sadness. One of the factors that will determine how sustainable any change in your life will be is how much work it is to maintain around others. I understand that I am privileged in having a cooperative family and that making changes like this are very hard for many people. I am in no position to preach to anyone and just want to honestly state my current situation and the reasons I am here so that those reading my blog will fully understand if I have any biases in my writing. If you are considering becoming vegetarian, here are some recipes for easy side dishes and other simple vegetarian resources my family uses. Recipe: roasted cabbage https://www.food.com/recipe/oven-roasted-cabbage-441862 (we leave off the sugar and balsamic vinegar) Recipe: roasted cauliflower https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/roasted-cauliflower-recipe-1945072 Recipe: good, cooked brussels sprouts start off with buying fresh brussels sprouts. Peel off sketchy outer leaves like you would with a cabbage. Cut off the stalk on the bottom, slice sprouts in half. Place in hot pan with oil, turn once ensuring sprouts are browned on both sides. Add water to the pan and turn heat down and cover. Test every few minutes until sprouts are to your liking. Recipe: mixed vegetable soup. Start with flavor additives such as tomato paste, minced onions, garlic, and celery, brown flavor ingredients in bottom of pot for additional flavor. Add the stock. Add potatoes or pasta as a starch, then a root vegetable such as carrots, turnips, parsnips or sweet potatoes. A type of greens. Lentils or beans or tofu or broccoli for protein.
Extra ingredients include peas or corn and herbs, fresh or dried. all of these should be added roughly 5 minutes before the soup is finished cooking. Zatarain’s red bean and rice for when you are in college or have only 25 minutes to prepare dinner
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This method of food consumption aims to reduce emissions by reducing the amount of fuel needed to transport food cross country or the fossil fuels used to grow food in artificial light and temperature-controlled greenhouses. Food grown out of season in industrial greenhouses require more water and large amounts of chemical fertilizers to grow to maturity. Food that has been shipped from far away is often more processed, even if it doesn’t appear to be. Many kinds of produce are picked while still green to survive transport and forced to ripen with gas after arriving at stores. This process is part of why a farmers market or home-grown tomatoes taste so much better than a store bought tomato. It is estimated that we currently put almost 10 kcal of fossil fuel energy into our food system for every 1 kcal of energy we get as food. These processes must stop if we are going to get a handle on climate change before the ocean consumes us all Local and seasonal eating is often tied to supporting small business and small farms. Buying from local market stands, self-pick fields and CSA boxes, which is a box of seasonal produce from the farm you signed up with, support local businesses along with local food. Both CSA boxes and farmers markets directly empower small farmers by allowing them to charge store prices and not have a middleman. These alternative methods of shopping are often much easier than finding local and seasonal food in large stores. If you live in Louisville for example, you have access to upwards of eight farmers markets. If living through Louisville’s slate gray winters has you bulking at the lack of produce, try Garden Girl Foods in Louisville which sells natural canned goods and helps to teach kids cooking and gardening skills. Local and seasonal eating requires the most work on the part of the consumer out of all the rules of eating I have talked about. To eat locally and seasonally you must research good places to buy food, recipes for what produce is available at different times, and it is useful to do some basic food preserving for when your favorite vegetable is out of season.
Finding good produce in winter can be extremely challenging for people who live in remote areas or in areas where it is hard to access fresh food to begin with. However, there are online resources that can help people wanting to eat more seasonally, such as seasonalfoodguide.org and many other websites for different regions; search your area with a seasonality guide to begin your journey. I have listed sources for simple recipes using seasonal vegetables https://blog.seasonalroots.com/winter-recipes https://www.healthyseasonalrecipes.com/recipes/occasion-and-season/winter/ https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/slideshow/spring-recipes If you want help preserving your favorite vegetable https://marysnest.com/ Sources https://cuesa.org/learn/how-far-does-your-food-travel-get-your-plate https://www.slowfood.com/about-us/ https://www.seasonalfoodguide.org/about The Bardstown Road farmers market had the best omelets in the world. I would pay nearly anything to experience that omelet stall again. Our omelet of choice, the vegetarian omelet, had cubed potatoes, beets, goat cheese and spinach. Most weeks the ingredients were all sourced from the farmers market. Once, when I was about 5, we were in line at that omelet stand. A couple behind us asked if we liked the vegetarian omelet and little me replied with great excitement, “Yes, it’s got beets!” The omelet stand was so successful it became the Harvest restaurant in downtown Louisville. This market and wandering through the collection of raised beds at one end of my parents’ back yard are my first memories of sustainable food. After four years we changed to the Jeffersonville farmers market which is much closer to our house and is located partly under a walking bridge giving its vendors additional protection from rain and sun. The best way to get to know a farmers market is to learn about the vendors, so I have comprised a list of those that we have gotten to know over the years. The Italian lady sells homemade baked goods and excellent jams. Her best item is the vegetable pocket, a completely flat hand pie filed with magic and dill. There is also an apple and cheese variant. As I have gotten older I go to her stand with a set amount of money while my dad is in line for something else to make the trip more efficient. The fruit ladies are a fixture of the market that I look forward to each year. They are the only stall that has three kinds of apples and Asian pears which are like normal pears but have a firm crunchy texture when ripe. Mr. and Mrs. Crumb are the most senior of the farmers market vendors. For some reason they always call my dad by his first name even though he can’t remember how they learned it. They always have unique items on their table. I owe their stand my first experience with papaws and unshelled chestnuts. In these last years of the pandemic, they have decided not to come. The Mennonite family is who we usually get our eggs from. They have always had a baked goods table, but Friendship Bread and pies have slowly taken over their stall. Possibly because they have found that is what sells best for them or is easiest to produce. This seems to be a trend. Almost all the new vendors at the market are selling a nonvegetable product: candles, baked goods, knitted bags, hot sauce and woodworking. Golden Watermelon, Pink Blackberries, and the Honey Stick
The farmers market has always brought variety and new experiences into my life. I remember bringing home what I can only describe as translucent pink blackberries that I genuinely believed to be magical. The anticipation of each year’s berries is my earliest farmers market memory. The second truly magical fruit I have encountered is the golden watermelon; it looks like a normal watermelon from the outside, slicing it open reveals a flesh of pale gold with evenly spaced white seeds. Its flavor is more delicate and floral than a normal melon. It appears at the Jeffersonville farmers market, and I have never heard of it in a store. When I was around four or five, my dad brought one home for the first time. He made me recite the magic words the farmer had given him to say right before slicing it open. I hardly believed that a watermelon could be gold. I loved it. The honey stick is the candy of the farmers market, a plastic tube filled with plain or flavored honey. The end is bitten through, and the honey is eaten much as you would a pixie stick. You never grow too old for a honey stick. Plain, inexpensive and good, the nature of the honey stick makes it the item that best summarizes the farmers market’s joys. Even though going to the farmers market takes up less than an hour a week during the growing seasons, it has an outsized place in my memory. It is a harbinger of spring and fall. There are people at the Jeffersonville farmers market that have known me since I was ten. Wherever I land in the future, I hope there will be a farmers market with blackberries, and honey sticks. A diet that substitutes grass fed meat for factory farmed meat reduces emissions by lessening the amount of land, water and energy needed to produce the meat, as well as needing less drugs. The amount of land and water needed to grow meat is reduced by grass fed operations because factory farms need to use grains to feed livestock. The grains must be watered and fertilized then processed and shipped to the location of the farm greatly increasing the amount of land, water and energy needed to produce the meat. Also, land that is unsuitable for traditional crops can be turned into heathy pastures increasing the total amount of food we can produce for ourselves. Responsible Farmers A responsible farmer can calculate the amount of nitrogen each field can absorb and how much nitrogen the average animal will create with their waste each day and adjust their grazing patterns accordingly. These calculations eliminate waste runoff pollution and fertilize the pastures. Ranchers can prevent the desertification of pastures by managing their herds to exploit the natural rhythms of grass. Grass growth follows an S curve. The growth after being grazed once starts out slow, but after a few days of initial recovery it starts to increase rapidly. As the grass starts to bloom and produce seed the curve flattens, usually around 14 days from the first bite. Ideally each pasture is grazed right at the top of its blaze of growth to maximize the growth it will yield in a year by moving livestock from one small pasture to another as they become mature, never letting the animals eat from grass that has not had a chance to recover and thus degrading it. In nature you always find birds following herbivories. The egret perches on rhinos and the turkeys trail after bison. The birds dine on insects that would overwise bother the herbivore. They also pickup insect lave and parasites breaking the cycle of infection and disease. Farmers can reduce diseases and parasites by grazing poultry where herbivores have recently been mimicking nature’s cycle. Conclusion
The heavy use of antibiotics on industrial farms is not necessary on well-run, pastured operations. The animals’ rotations, as well as the use of poultry in fields that the herbivores have passed through to forage for insects and parasites attracted by cow waste, greatly limit disease. Grass fed farmers often don't need to treat their livestock with de worming agent or parasiticides. If you live in a place that does not have land that is well suited for row crops, eating local pastured meat could be better for the Environment than becoming a vegetarian who eats many imported foods which must be transported hundreds of miles consuming fossil fuels. Resources https://extension.psu.edu/grass-fed-beef-production Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. Penguin Books, 2016. Foer, Jonathan Safran. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Penguin Books, 2020. https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Organic%20Livestock%20Requirements.pdf |
AuthorI am a high school student who is creating her own blog for the first time for school about our food system and environmental issues Archives
May 2022
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