IT’S ABOUT MUCH MORE THAN MEAT

• Joan Dye Gussow

Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emerita and former chair, Nutrition Education Program, Teachers College, Columbia University, and author of Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables

“Meatless.” In the United States, the operative word for a meal prepared entirely with vegetable matter is not a joyous invitation to what’s on the plate—“crunchy,” “rich,” “spicy,” or even “light”—but what’s not there: the meal is “meatless.” Although meat consumption appears to be suffering a moment of slightly waning popularity, our national eaters have for centuries been serious consumers of animal flesh.

Although the earliest settlers were accomplished as neither fisherfolk nor hunters, fish, shellfish and game were so abundant on this rich continent that they almost asked to be eaten. “The diet of the seventeenth century was indeed dominated by game,” food historians Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont wrote, “that of the eighteenth leaned heavily upon it, and it remained important in the nineteenth up to the Civil War. . . . For a considerable time after the arrival of the first settlers, game was not only the main meat of the colonists, it was often the main food.” So meat eating was our national norm, and we regularly ate enough of it to be the envy of the people we left behind. When the Irish immigrants wrote letters home saying they ate meat every day, their relatives wrote back in disbelief.

And now? “Every day” is putting it modestly, “every meal” is more like it. The Web site of the seriously conservationist David Suzuki Foundation currently recommends: “Try to eat at least one meat-free meal per day.”

Something over 100 years ago each of us annually ate a little over 100 pounds of flesh, about half of it beef. Four decades later, it was pork Spammed for the troops that spiked World War II meat consumption, and after the war, steaks on the backyard grill and McDonald’s burgers pushed beef to its 1976 high of almost 89 pounds a year for each of us, pushing the total flesh on our plates to the then record of 138 pounds. At that point, beef consumption began declining, by roughly 10 pounds a decade.

But thanks to the buckets and breasts of chicken we increasingly brought to our tables, poultry consumption climbed during those years at almost the same rate, pushing our flesh consumption to its 2004 peak of just over 170 pounds.

In short, we’re persistent meat eaters, and a recent slight decline in consumption likely reflects a depressed supply, not a change in our tastes. Although figures vary by source, only 2 to 3+ percent of American adults are currently flesh abstainers, 10 percent have been vegetarian or vegan at one time or another, and a Vegetarian Times study found that a mere 5.2 percent were “definitely interested” in trying such a diet in the future.

Given the obvious stubbornness of our meat habit, what will it take to move people to leave half of the flesh off their plates? I used to think just calling it “flesh” would help make eating meat less attractive, like calling fat “grease,” but grossness is too ordinary now to provoke a diet change.

One would like to believe that simple pleas for compassion could win over even serious consumers, but the brutalities of confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are increasingly familiar and, like the repeated efforts in print and on film to make us see flesh on the table as dead animals, seem to have had little obvious impact on how much of those animals we all eat. People don’t want to know how their red or white meat got into those plastic packages, and telling them clearly doesn’t turn most of them toward flesh-free meals. Indeed, several years ago the New York Times ran an op-ed piece actually suggesting that because CAFOs were here to stay, we could genetically engineer animals to suffer less in their hellholes.

There are lots of other ideas out there. You can teach people how to enjoy vegetable matter by having them over for dinner, failing to announce that the meal is meat free. I remember a guest of mine remarking, as she savored pasta rich with a meatless tomato sauce, how difficult it was to plan a meal for a vegetarian. On a larger scale, we could make feeding oneself without meat a mandatory survival skill to be taught in school so coming generations could learn how to prepare plant-based meals that are quick, easy, and delicious. And we could make our public efforts more positive: Vegetable Garden Tuesdays might seem more appealing than Meatless Mondays.

And because people are eating out so much, we need to convince ordinary eateries—not just gourmet dining spots—to make a vegetarian option the daily special from time to time. And to make their standard portion sizes of meat smaller—I was recently served an eight-ounce hamburger as if it were normal—which would also help solve our obesity problem. And of course it would be useful to ban “all you can eat” advertising. As long as the meat lobby has the clout to buy off legislators, however, rational national dietary guidance that might reduce our flesh consumption will be blocked by Congress.

But in the end, convincing people to reduce their meat consumption is probably not the task we need to undertake. Not that it wouldn’t help to eat less beef, given the amount of grain, forage, water, land, and energy it takes to make each quarter-pound burger, but we could all stop eating meat tomorrow and if we kept devouring the rest of the world’s resources at our present rate, we would still be driving fast toward disaster.

Because the issue really isn’t meat, but lack of mindfulness about our impact on the planet. Our national extravagance in regard to meat—our on-average consumption of twice as much as we need—is merely a single example of our national overconsumption of everything. And it’s everything—our throw-away cheap clothes, our rapidly outdated (and replaced!) electronics, our bloated vehicles, our mansions—that’s going to kill us in the end.

So just as the papal encyclical wasn’t really about planetary warming but about the cruel global fall-outs from the century or so that us rich folks have devoted to devouring the planet, our meat problem is simply part of our mindless consumption, part of our throwaway culture, as Laudato si’ puts it, of “compulsive consumerism” that “quickly reduces things to rubbish.”

Whenever we buy something, anything, we are investing in our planet’s future. If it is a material object, someone somewhere made it, and the wood or metal or fiber or soil or water it took to produce it came from somewhere, and your purchase either contributed to making that someone’s life tolerable or not and to sustaining the planet’s web of life or not. We’re well overdue to pay attention and stop devouring a lot more than meat.