It's OK to Have a Little Steak With Your Veggies

by Andrea Millar — April 13, 2008

It's a strange fact of human psychology that if we feel powerless to fix everything, it just seems easier to let go and fix nothing. I sometimes feel this way when it comes to confronting the exacting sense of urgency behind the facts of a planet in trouble. It can seem tricky to reconcile my desired personal comfort levels with all the practices I know I should keep in mind. I look at my lifestyle now--usually two hot showers a day, occasional car use, sometimes purchasing food covered in matryoshka-esque layers of packaging--and where I know it could be, and it's easy to get a little discouraged. What's the point? If I can't get over stinking for a few days out of the week, getting my booty on my bike more often, and doing myself the favor of eating out of the produce and bulk sections, why bother with any of it?

Of course, I know why I bother, why we're all "bothering," and that it goes beyond one person's attachment to overly processed cookies. But we all have our attachments, and for some people I know, it's meat. Meat production is generally accepted as a pretty uneconomical use of resources, especially land, but I know the Pull of That which Tastes Good. Luckily for some of us, a recent report by Cornell University suggests that moderating our meat consumption can help as much with minimizing agricultural land footprint as eliminating meat from our diet altogether.

From the report on ENN.com, a low-fat vegetarian diet was indicated as the best one for truly sustainable saintliness...but how many people really follow that? I keep a vegetarian diet, but I don't think "low-fat" is the adjective I'd use. Next comes a diet high in vegetables, with about 2 ounces of cooked meat per day, then a high-fat vegetarian diet, and high-fat carnivorous diets trailing dead last.

Two ounces of meat makes for a decent sandwich, eh? It makes sense that even if you can't do everything right, you can do some things to make a difference day to day. If you love meat, you can keep on loving it as a conscious consumer--just in smaller quantities. (Me, I'm down to one shower a day. OK, one and a half.)