This is a quote from a good friend and it got me to thinking. I am a meat eater but I have many good friends who chose not to eat meat. I have done a fair amount of research into the pros and cons from a health angle and also from a socially responsible angle. The health benefits of eating a plant based diet are enormous BUT that’s only if the plants you can get your hands on haven’t been genetically modified and where appropriate have been allowed to ripen on the vine as it were.
Coming from the Cayman Islands, I would say there’s a very fine line between the health benefits of eating the produce that is shipped in there - if one only shops and eats from the farmers market that’s one thing but if one is supplementing ones veggies from those that have been mass produced and shipped in to the Island I would offer that meat is an equally healthy alternative.
Decision made? Not quite.......I now have to disagree with the above considering the majority of the meat that is brought in to the Island is from the US, and I would hazard a guess that certainly where beef is concerned much of it comes to us from cows who live their lives on what is called a “CAFO” (a concentrated animal feeding operation) or at the very least an “AFO” (animal feeding operation) and rarely if ever sees grass so I’m back to voting for the veggies. Shockingly, there are now 257,000 AFO’s in the US of which 15,500 meet the criteria for being designated CAFO’s. One of these CAFO’s was responsible for one of the biggest environmental spills in US history (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_Animal_Feeding_Operations). There are many sources for further reading on the subject - I’ll end the CAFO lesson there in the hopes that today’s blog won’t get too dull!
This brings me to France where I am surrounded by happy cows in fields (the photo above was taken from a field next door to ours). This is the way a cow was meant to spend its life before ending up on my plate (steak tartare recently enjoyed pictured below)!
This is also the only way to stop the spread of e-coli and stop the damage to rivers and lakes and fields from the toxic manure that is produced as a result of keeping animals in such high concentration and feeding them only what they were not made to eat and therefore supplementing them with drugs to keep them “healthy”! In France, I feel a balanced diet to include meat is an equally healthy option (and good luck trying to last as a vegetarian in rural France anyway - you will be met with incredulity and horror equal to that in the scene from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”!!).
In France (and possibly many other places), we still have chicken breeds with genes resistant to salmonella which I find absolutely fascinating - obviously breeds that have not been genetically modified and possibly fed a diet suitable to a chicken and not suitable to us and our purses and our greed and our seemingly endless quest for quantity over quality to the detriment of ourselves and our fellow man.
So, our plan is still to keep chickens and while we find our salmonella resistant chickens (so that I can make a chocolate mousse with raw egg and feed it to young children and older adults!!), I shall continue to enjoy a slice of the happy cow that occasionally ends up on my plate!
NOTE: Seed Savers Exchange (mentioned in a previous blog) has an article coming out in next month’s National Geographic - makes for interesting reading (if any of this is remotely interesting to you!) - check it on the following link http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text?utm_source=Summer+2011+Enewsletter&utm_campaign=5e9b7c920e-MembershipCampaign04122011&utm_medium=email&mc_cid=5e9b7c920e&mc_eid=d773b87111
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