Love It Or Leaven It

I have failed.

I've failed to keep my yearly intake of meat under 60 lbs. I don't really know about the actual number, but after a week and a half in Germany with food like this:


I blew through my artificial ceiling rather quickly, I'm sure. I couldn't even wait to snap the picture before I started eating it...

I discovered last year that on a per capita basis the world consumes 90# of meat per person. And of course, living in the U.S. instead of Mauritania, U.S. consumption must be approaching 180+ yearly pounds. I don't really know the U.S. number, but it is high. High, and so are U.S. cancer rates. Obesity rates. Gall stones, diverticulitis, heart disease, type II diabetes-- all of which are increased as a result of high meat intake.

Now, I am not sure of German rates of disease, but damn, that nation is not overweight. Whatever factors are present that keep that affluent meat-dominate society thin are also likely to keep that affluent meat-dominate society healthy. So tell me, why is America exploding with obesity? Why are our "love-it-or-leave-it" nation's inhabitants so out of shape and addled with disease?

You know my answer; it lies in a continuum with my answer to every other topic I've raised on my monologue -- we are a totally fucked up society here in the U.S. It would be very easy to say that because we choose to live hyper-consumptive lives buying cheaply made foreign shit by the truckload and building a fully paved over nation of freeway slums to deliver all that poorly made shit, we also do the same with our food.

But wa-hey! Wouldn't you know that the answer is pretty much just that! We've destroyed our historical relationships between land and food by surburbanizing prime farmlands, destroyed farming as a culture in the process, and moved our food production to giant monocultures of genetically altered soy and corn. Massive fossil fuel inputs are needed to harvest, process, and deliver all this in the form of high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oils that form the base of our food pyramid and the base of damn near every processed food we eat. This has to be it. This has to be the answer IMO. I can't think of any other plausible explanation why we are such physical wrecks.

I've recently tried baking my own whole wheat bread. It isn't something you can pick up immediately; my initial results were disappointing to say the least. There's an exacting set of skills needed to prepare food, and these skills are falling off a cliff here in America in favor of watching NASCAR and eating store-bought bread. If you look at the ingredients in any commercial loaf, you will always find two things that had historically never been used, high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil, and will never find one that historically was always there -- fiber. But my loaves -- while not picture perfect, at least contain real food ingredients and mirror the ingredients humans have used for four thousand years. With my bread you either love it or leaven it.

I was, for the better part of four decades, ignorant of my food and ignorant of what I ate. I struggle immensely with that legacy...I am as much an American foodie as the next guy. I try to be a responsible eater and then the Krakauer mit broten comes along and I'll eat ten of them!

So I continue to struggle to keep my personal bet to try to eat less than the world average. I settled on the arbitrary and capricious value of 60#. I would like to decrease my risk of dietary ailments to that of the rest of the world.