The Gospel of Food

I once read that Americans view food with the kind of passion and imbue it with the kind of higher meaning usually reserved for religion; I think the comment was meant to be disparaging of such an attitude, but when I mentioned it to Mike, we both took a shine to the idea. Now our running joke is that food is our religion, and in fact when we tell our friends on a Saturday afternoon that we're headed to "church," they know we mean Whole Foods.

Three years ago Mike and I decided together to become vegetarians, for ethical reasons. I don't usually talk about the animal rights aspect of this decision, because I feel it tends to annoy more than convert; so suffice to say, we think animals have feelings and we decided not to eat them anymore.

Even if you don't believe that pigs have personalities, there are so many reasons to eat vegetarian, or at least limit your consumption of meat, it's hard for us to understand sometimes why more people don't eat this way.

*It's environmentally friendly. Everyone knows about cow farts and methane gas, but there are many other aspects of meat production that damage the environment, from animal waste to deforestation to the use of petrochemicals. The farm animals that we eat - including cows, pigs, chickens, and even salmon - are fed mainly on corn, because corn is subsidized by the government and corn is cheap and corn is fattening. But corn also takes up a lot of arable land and is grown with a lot of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides. Here's one crazy true fact: if every American ate the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers per week, the positive effect on the environment would be like taking every SUV in the country off the road. Here's another: if everyone on the planet ate the way Americans eat, we would need two and half more planets to sustain that level of meat consumption.

*It's better for your health. Everywhere you look in medical recommendations, you find the same exact nutritional advice: eat whole grains, "good fats" (nuts, seeds, olive oil), lots of produce, and not too much of animal products. Diabetes? Same advice. Heart health? Same advice. Cancer prevention? Same advice. And yet where people usually turn for nutritional advice is either TV fast food commericals or fad diets (eat no carbs! eat no fat! eat this insanely specific combination of carbs and fat!). Most Americans eat way more meat than is necessary or even beneficial to their bodies - you only need the equivalent of 2-3 ounces of lean meat per day, yet the average American eats more like 12 ounces daily. One of my heroes is food writer Michael Pollan, who boils it down to a wonderfully simple maxim: Eat food [meaning real, not processed food], not too much, mostly plants. It is that simple.

(Also, did you know that over 70% of the dioxins - icky toxic chemicals - that end up in the human body get there from food consumption? All the fuss about BPA in water bottles and you could actually do more to reduce your exposure to these pollutants by not eating meat. Dioxins are stored in animal fat, which means every time you eat animals, you consume those chemicals.)

*It's cheaper. This isn't always the easiest argument to make, and certainly there are exceptions. If you are a lower income person who lives in the city, lacks easy access to transportation, and mostly shops at bodegas, no - it's not cheaper, and in fact it would be pretty difficult to be a healthy vegetarian. But for the average middle class person with easy access to supermarkets, you can save a lot of money by dropping meat from your grocery list, or just limiting it to a few meals a week. Staples like rice, beans, raw nuts, potatoes and pasta are some of the most inexpensive things you can buy at the supermarket. Produce can be found at reasonable prices if you buy seasonally (which many people do not). In addition, meat has hidden costs that we don't think about but most certainly do pay for - agricultural subsidies paid for by tax dollars to prop up all that corn-based animal feed, and health costs and insurance premiums that come from chronic diseases caused partly by poor nutrition, like diabetes and heart disease.

*It's delicious and easy to stick to. This is not a diet. Mike and I have both lost weight since we stopped eating meat and started eating better (real) foods, but it hasn't been something we've had to go out of our way to do. Initially, yes, we had to do a little research and learn how to make & eat meals that were not centered around meat, as most American meals are. But once you make the mental switch, it's not that challenging, you don't really miss meat, and the food is delicious. One thing that Mike and I have in common is that we love food. We never would have been able to stay with a "diet" that wasn't full of tasty, enjoyable food, or that forced us to nibble on grass while our stomachs growled. But, surprisingly (even to me), going vegetarian has been one of the easiest things we've ever done.

It's never too late to try something new, and no one says you have to go whole hog (as it were) and cut all meat consumption tomorrow. But try eating one more vegetarian meal per week and see how that goes. Then maybe try two. Three and we get all the metaphorical SUVs off the road and you might start to lose some pounds too. If you hate it, forget it. But chances are it won't be as hard as you might think, and who knows, you might even like it.