CN food and meat for this post
We've been cutting down on meat again recently. We weren't eating much before the pandemic, but the various lockdown food logistics made me less picky about it in the short term, and it's taken time to have the spare brain cycles to reapproach this.
I actually don't have any issue with eating meat in and of itself, but there are some very real factors that change that. My concerns generally hinge on environmentalism, but even more compelling for me is trying to square the cognitive dissonance of how I feel about and relate to non-human forms of life. At a fundamental level, we need to acquire energy with specific nutrients to sustain our bodies, and that fairly inevitably involves deriving it from other organisms in our environment. But there are some more pressing factors of modernity which cut in, here.
First is our level of technology and abundance. We actually have the means to subsist on less meat, and the level of abundance means there are few barriers or restrictions how much meat we can/will consume if we do so without reflection.
I use 'us' here in two senses: first, humanity at large, but also, importantly, us as in 'me and my immediate family specifically'. The distinction matters. It's too easy to make a moral issue of meat consumption from a comfortable middle-class perspective, ignoring the huge disparity in food availability both globally and in this country. So, this is not to moralise, or ignore other people's realities. But it is true for me that I have the latitude to choose, and therefore, I think, a greater moral burden.
The second is that the real problem is the scale at which humanity produces and consumes food. A lot of this hooks into core capitalist and consumerist problems, but it all amounts to: producing meat ethically at scale while sustaining existing expectations around personal consumption habits is impossible. (Just think about how much more it costs to produce and buy high-quality, more ethical meat.)
All of which pushes me to be more conscious in how I consume meat.
This isn't as simple for me as just 'giving it up', though. I have various other food issues that means further narrowing what's available for me to eat can cause problems, particularly in contexts where I don't have such direct control of my food prep and consumption. There are also other concerns with meat-alternatives or other non-meat foods that have different environmental or ethical problems.
So my current planning is around the sourcing and quality of the meat I consume. I'm being mindful of quantity on top of that, but generally being properly selective on these criteria has that effect anyway.
My main heuristic is whether I'm able to find reasonable-sounding information about the sourcing and production of the meat that I buy. I don't always have the context and expertise to clearly evaluate that information where it exists -- or guarantee that it's not being misrepresented in some form -- but the ability to find such information from a restaurant or butcher in the first place (with no obvious red flags) is a shortcut towards a certain kind of quality.
In practice, this has worked out to us largely not eating meat (except when travelling where there are few or no other options), and buying and cooking it only on occasions where the extra labour is worth it.
(I also feel better where I can use a piece of meat more thoroughly, e.g. buying a couple of pork chops, turning them into a few dishes, making stock from the bones, and picking the leftover meat off during the stock-making process for another meal. It fosters a kind of connection with the thing you're actually cooking, and feels vastly less wasteful.)