Meatless Monday, but avoid the soy noid
Fellow blogger, Kerri, from Living Large In Our Little House fame, brings up an excellent idea that her family has been doing for a while, "Meatless Mondays". So what are the alternatives?
Well, here in TUT, there really aren't many. We're rural enough that vegetarianism is viewed in the same manner as any other "big city craziness". We've been to the "local" WalMart and asked "you eat that?" when putting a zucchini on the checkout counter. Another encounter was even more precious:
Clerk: you forgot the meat, you wanna go back and get it? My wife: we're not getting meat this time. Clerk: wow, I couldn't eat just cooked vegetables. My wife: who said we're cooking them? Clerk: --blank stare and mind blown at the concept of raw vegetables for several meals in a row
I guess the easiest alternative around here, if you need something like meat that isn't meat, is soy. The problem with soy is that it's now an industrial crop like corn or the meat you're avoiding so it's tough to find anything made with soy that's worth eating. I mean, if you don't eat meat to avoid the environmental damage caused by raising cattle, you should see what soy farming is doing to the Amazon rain forest and US soil conditions! Don't get me wrong, you can find sources or soy that may not have such problems, especially if they're organic and farmed responsibly.
Rice, nuts and legume's are all viable alternatives to soy products, if you can get them. The oxymoronic irony of living rurally is that you usually have less opportunity to get unprocessed, natural or organic foods than if you lived in the city. Unless you grow it yourself.
The real alternative to industrial meat is permaculture; locally produced foods, including meat, which are raised in such a fashion as to have no "impact" on their environment, but instead play a symbiotic role in it. I know smaller animals like rabbits and chickens can work in that system, but I don't know enough to even guess whether cows could. One thing's for sure, you couldn't do it for anything on the industrial scale we now farm. Less than 1% of our population has the responsibility of feeding all of us. A system that skewed can't work without using petroleum-based fertilizers and other nastiness, so more of us have to grow/raise our own food or food for our local communities. Then, maybe meat wouldn't be so "bad".
Given all that, Meatless Monday's sound like a great addition to any and all households, if for no other reason than a budgetary one. Industrial meat is expensive and all our budgets could use a bit of a break.
