Social Carnivore

I saw Food, Inc. the other night, and was a little disappointed that it seemed to take M. Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and E. Schlosser's Fast Food Nation from books straight into screenplay. It didn't do the written material justice.

There wasn't anything more in the movie that can be gleaned from the reading of those books, except, maybe, to gain some visualizations into the manufacturing of our food...but even those weren't sufficient to overcome my own mental visualizations that I've developed over the years while reading those books.

Nonetheless, while there might have been something lost in the adaptation, I know the movie format has reached several of my co-workers who wouldn't have heard about all this otherwise, and in fact, a co-worker clued me in to the movie.

I have again embarked on a vegetarian quest. I will avoid meat, but I won't stop eating it. I will become a social carnivore -- if I get invited to dinner I'll eat the tri-tip, yes, but I'll take more effort to eat the side dishes.

Last year I calculated that the world production of meat is 90# per person -- simply taking the production poundage and dividing by 6.2 billion, and I have tried to keep my own meat intake below the world average. This works out to no more than 3oz. a day, and where I've had whole weeks without meat this is really easy to achieve. I just assumed the U.S. average was twice that, and indeed Food Inc. indicated that our average is just over 200# per person per year. That's a lot of meat -- and a lot of gallstones, colitis, atherosclerosis, osteoporosis, and prostate cancer.

Considering how we are admonished to eat a high-fiber low-fat diet, while meat is low-fiber and high-fat, considering how much water and grain is used to grow meat, and considering that I am trying to tread as lightly as reasonable with renewable energies and bicycling, changing away from the standard American diet makes sense to me. We'll see.

Although, I might just live a little bit longer. A lot of good it does trying to "save the world" and all that other green horseshit if I'm just hanging around for a few more revolutions around the sun...