May 20, 2007
I don't eat meat in the U.S. for sustainable reasons. It takes something like ten times the amount of land to produce one gram of meat protein versus one gram of grain protein and at the current population growth rate, coupled with the industrialization of large countries like China and India and the fact that as people have more money they traditionally consume more meat, not eating meat is a very, very small way for me to stem the tide of overuse of available land.
But I do eat meat when we travel. It's too hard to be a vegetarian in most countries: it doesn't make sense to probably 99% of the world. Plus, it's hideously rude to refuse meat when we're being fed by people for whom meat is really expensive. So, as our friend Helena said, I'm a flexitarian.
All of which is to say that now we're traveling again, despite the fact that I could be a vegetarian in Scotland fairly easily, I'm back to eating meat. The reality of this was brought home by the fact that I tried some of David's haggis and thought it was quite good. Who knew?
