Eating animals

Brian and I have gotten weird about eating meat. Or maybe we've gotten better about eating meat. Or maybe we've gotten weird about eating better meat.
Let me explain.

In June, Brian started reading the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. He wanted me to read it too. I wasn't sure I wanted to, especially right before we traveled to the land of barbecues and burgers. But when he started ordering pizza without meat on it, I knew that he was going through something serious. In order to experience it with him, I read the book.

Eating Animals is not a book that says meat is bad and you have to become a vegetarian. It's not about cute animals that are killed by mean humans. What it does do is examines the way that livestock are raised and slaughtered in the U.S., and what that means for the environment, for agriculture, and for people who eat. Foer takes a detailed look at factory farming and puts together a lot of issues that I had heard about in the past: how much corn is fed to livestock and what impact it has on global grain prices, making grain unaffordable for people in developing countries, the growing demand for meat in a globalized world and how there's no way that the Earth can support that much farming, how much by-catch is killed in open water fishing, how many antibiotics and hormones are fed to the animals we eat, how toxic the conditions of factory farms and slaughterhouses are to the people who work there, and how sick the animals we eventually eat actually are. He visits slaughterhouses and interviews ranchers. He writes about warm memories of his grandmother's chicken, family Thanksgiving meals, and his own on and off meat-eating habits.

I can't say that this book was the sole reason we decided to change how we eat, but it made Brian and I realize that we just couldn't ignore the issues.

It was tough not to eat meat in the U.S., especially when we were often the guests of family and friends who greeted us with warm hugs and corn-fed beef. But now that we are back in Germany and cooking at home, we've tried to reach a new solution: we will eat meat that is raised in a responsible, sustainable way. We know that it costs more and is harder to find than the regular staff, so we just won't eat meat as often. We've also been doing research on which types of fish are farmed in a disease-free environment that's not built on an endangered mangrove swamp. It is a little hard not to replace meat with just eating more cheese. I can be a vegetarian but giving up dairy products would stink.

I'd like to think that buying "happy meat" as I now call it would be easier if we were in the U.S. I could more readily talk to a butcher or order stuff online. There would be more vegetarian products at the grocery store. But that might just be an excuse.

There is a stand in the Markthalle in Hannover that sells meat from happy chickens and turkeys. There's some sort of certificate they have posted and the man working there told me something I half-understood about how the animals come from small farms where they are not fed anything artificial, or something like that. Then there are stands at the farmers markets in town that have a 'bio' or 'organic' sign. I'm not sure what that means. I did end up buying pork from a place that had a couple of certificates posted and photos of happy animals running around on the farm... I guess I just have to trust them in the end.

So what are we eating for dinner tonight? I am going to attempt to make falafels. If that fails, there's still some happy bacon in the fridge.