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Are you already using every bit of the chicken?
This is also VERY important IMO. I see great amount of hypocrisy when tripe or gizard is on the menu.
Consuming less and consuming the good stuff IF you can afford is the way to go. The real challenge could be how to educate the fact that IF you can't consume the good stuff, instead of buying cheap meat consider the alternatives which could be veggie.
And if you kill an animal consume it responsibly like they do in the developing world.
Being a vegan in the first world is an extremely privileged thing to do, if you can afford it and like it; great!
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Currently I approach the whole thing by eating veggie/vegan at home as much as possible. I buy some milk and butter, but only sourced from small dairies with more traditional breeds, and I'm trying to reduce that to the bare minimum. We get some meat from my partner's dad, who does conservation farming on the New Forest, so we know precisely the welfare credentials (and indeed the names of the animals). We'll be keeping chickens as soon as we get the shed set up for eggs. Kate brings home roadkill sometimes. If I buy stuff to cook, it's almost always from a butcher and I know where it's coming from, and regularly game meat.
So far so good. On the other hand, I do cave in every so often and buy black pudding and eggs, and when I'm out I'm quite lax - generally the sort of places I'm eating are those that are also onboard with the local, seasonal thing, but sometimes not. That's not more than a couple of times a month though, so I don't worry about it too much.
What I'd like to see is wholesale adoption of local, non-intensive farming, for both meat and veggies. Meat SHOULD be expensive if you don't rear it yourself, the fact that you can get a bag of chicken giblets or a steak from Iceland for £3 is pretty horrific. Even on the veg side, our half-allotment has meat that we've bought almost nothing but onions, garlic and tofu-type stuff for the last 4 months, so this kind of thing really should be possible on a larger scale.
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If your budget doesn't stretch to cover good meat, that sucks, but I'm not sure how anyone who's struggling to feed their family but eating meat 5 nights a week wouldn't eat better and healthier on a completely vegetarian diet. I'll admit I haven't exactly costed this out, and am willing to be proven wrong
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Some random counterpoints to earlier posts:
- The deforestation argument isn't intrinsically valid against either meat or soy consumption. What matters is whether you eat meat or soy from an area that has been deforested.
- Similarly, I think soil erosion is a bit of a red herring if we're taking about locally sourced meat. Most of Britain's grazing land was deforested hundreds of years ago.
Tl;Dr - eating Welsh lamb won't deforested the Amazon and is unlikely to increase soil erosion beyond what has already occurred.
- The deforestation argument isn't intrinsically valid against either meat or soy consumption. What matters is whether you eat meat or soy from an area that has been deforested.
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Also, I'd sooner have a world of pragmatic minimal meat eaters than one consisting of opposing hardline vegans and thoughtless KFC guzzlers.
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Being a vegan in the first world is an extremely privileged thing to do, if you can afford it and like it; great!
I spend less as a vegan than I ever did as a meat/dairy person. Most of the protein comes from lentils, pulses, grains etc. - all extremely cheap. Nuts too, but they're not quite as cheap - still, they're only about twice the price of supermarket chicken breast by a "cost per gram of protein" metric, and they've gotta be cheaper as cost per calorie. Most of the rest of the stuff I eat is fresh veg.
I could easily live on £15/week I reckon, if I ate more rice etc. and less vegetables. Currently spend about £20-30/week.
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Not sure how you're more qualified to talk about what I spend on food
Check for yourself, here's what I spent in July and August on food shopping - £149 in total plus a few quid here and there that weren't on my card
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I'm not saying it's a good idea to live on £15/week, and it's certainly not something that everyone is able to do, especially if you've got kids. But as a healthy 26-year-old with no dependants it's quite possible for me to feed myself for under £1/meal.
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My point was just that a vegan/vegetarian diet tends to be cheaper. Poor people in developing countries can't afford to eat meat twice a day like people in the UK. You're saying that being vegan is only an option for privileged people - well no, it's not quite that simple.
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The deforestation argument isn't intrinsically valid against either meat or soy consumption. What matters is whether you eat meat or soy from an area that has been deforested.
Not on the assumption that the markets are so closely linked nowadays. If you go out of your way to find out where either comes from, you still add to the demand and still add value to those closely-linked markets. Also, what's happened in some cases (I can't remember the example that I'm thinking of) is that increased demand, sometimes by celebrity chefs who make particular ingredients very fashionable, has caused further environmental degradation in areas where that came from. Lastly, what is clear is that we need more forests (again), what some people call the 're-wilding' of an (increasingly urbanised) world, and that could conceivably occur in many more places than those that have recently been deforested.
Similarly, I think soil erosion is a bit of a red herring if we're taking about locally sourced meat. Most of Britain's grazing land was deforested hundreds of years ago.
I don't know much about that, but Monbiot's implication in one of the extracts that I posted further up is that more recent developments in the Lake District have turned it away from the bucolic vision of peaceful shepherding that is often conjured up into more 'ranch-style' farming that has led to accelerated damage. Again, I don't know if that's true, though it seems plausible.
On the issue in general, two articles that have impressed the urgency on me lately:
(As posted by myself and adroit in the Climate change thread.)
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One thing we should be eating more of is deer: as the late Oliver Rackham said, if you want to 'save' the British countryside, "eat Bambi".
There is a large deer population which unlike in previous centuries is not controlled by poaching. They are pretty much single handedly destroying the biodiversity of much of the UK's ancient woodland by eating it, so perhaps we should be eating them. It's as 'natural' meat as you're going to get
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I more mean those who eat meat five or six times a week and that stretches their budget, but bemoan seasonal artisanal local himalayan sea salt quinoa or whatever. I'll bet a shiny new non-vegan tenner that cutting down to an almost vegetarian diet with the odd good bit of game would be both cheaper, healthier and a damn sight more interesting, in basically every case.
People being on the actual breadline is an entirely different issue.
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Yes but more food education and social mobility and less instavegans .. the classic since brexit "more dialogue".
On a personal note, I hardly consume meat, I have the 90% veggie 5% offal (out of personal taste rather than taking the high ground) 5% quality meat diet. Only buy the good stuff, even in veggies as much as I can because I can afford to do so.
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Eh, if we carry on down this road we'll have to conclude that eating anything at all is a privilege. Which is true.
Regardless considering we're on a forum for somewhat impractical bikes I think the privilege thing is irrelevant so let's move on
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Responsible meat-eating
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@AlexD
I think 'picking your battles' is kind of what this thread is about. There's shit loads of ways I'm an awful consumer and I can try and justify it (work, kids, mortgage, Japanese ambient records) or I can just change stuff I'm willing to and go from there.
Also, as much as I do feel a need to be more responsible, there's a big element of just not wanting to eat shitty food. My experience of chicken, for instance, is that each time I go cheap (cheep?) I regret it because it tastes of nothing, just seems to be full of water and sometimes smells positively rotten. If better tasting chicken is also ethically better in some way then that's great too.