We are how we eat.

I was reading this month’s issue of Backpacker Magazine. The issue focused on global warming and how it impacted the backpacking community. A large section was dedicated to what we could do to cut our carbon foot print. The magazine gave estimates on how much a particular activity (or change of) would cut our carbon output. The section on the methodology for such calculations were vague but for the most part I accepted them as most of the suggestions seemed intuitive. Of the intuitive suggestions, most were geared towards increasing efficiency or decreasing use of carbon producing activities. However there were a couple of suggestions that caught my eye. These suggestions focused on mainly eating habits. The one’s that seemed most likely to be followed were ones like use a drip watering system for your garden, grow an organic (whatever the heck that means) garden for produce, subscribe to a local farming co-op to have fresh produce delivered to you and so on. Then there were the suggestions that I think will not happen. The highest one on my list of things that won’t happen is cutting a serving of meat out of your diet every day. Yep that’s it just cut one serving of meat out of your daily intake.

I wondered why I thought that. I realized that first the USA has a large diet problem as is. It has already been proven beyond doubt that poor eating habit leads to poor health, yet we still do it anyways. Poor eating habits yields pretty immediate and long term consequences, yet, we still has a whole, refuse to change. I found this particularly funny, because as I was thinking all this I was eating a Twinkie. When I ate the Twinkie it tasted well like nothing really good, yet I went and ate another one just to eat it. But back to the point, if we as a people can’t even get it together when it serves all our personal best interest to do so on a concrete matter where there is no dispute, how are we expected to get our eating habits in order to stave off global warming? Just a side note I believe that global warming is a concrete matter where there is no real dispute, but I’m talking about societies perception as a whole, and plus there is a lot of nuance to the issue that I just can’t seem to articulate at the moment.

Meat is expensive. Gandhi once asked the question of what we could do if we spent our recourses that we spent to acquire meat to something nobler. I often wonder how noble we are when we are asked to give up just a little of a perceived convince as a society and yet refuse to do so. I think that speaks volumes as to who we are. Then again it might not be such a simple task as Gandhi did say that of all things the pallet was the most difficult to master.