Making the Change
If it were just me, it would be easy to switch to a lifestyle where I only eat humanely, sustainably-raised meat. It’s getting easier to find: “In the Chesapeake region, we have incredible small farms that are picking up a lot of steam on the popularity of getting back to becoming acquainted with your plate. The sources are becoming more and more abundant,” says Desmond. Besides grocery stores that carry sustainable meat, many local farmers’ markets have small farms that sell beef, pork and chicken. But there are two reasons I hesitate: money, and the man I married.
Humanely-raised meat costs more—sometimes a lot more. The trick, says Desmond, is “making meat a team player, rather than the star of the show.” And that doesn’t mean cutting back on flavor: using meat as one component of a dish (rather than simply a slab of steak) “is so much more interesting than eating 13 ounces of meat—that’s the same flacor and texture bite after bite. It’s a much more enjoyable way to eat.”
“The hormones and additives and farming conditions have given me great cause for concern in a moral sphere and a health sphere,” says Lise Bruneau, mom to two-year-old Percy. Bruneau, who’s been a pescetarian (a vegetarian who eats fish and seafood) for many years, admits that the cost is a problem. “The healthy meat is pretty expensive and not very easy to come by,” she admits.
“The issue with cost is absolutely valid,” says Tara Mataraza Desmond, a food writer, recipe developer and co-author (with Joy Manning) of “Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planet.” “That’s one of the huge elements of the book—if you’re using smaller quantities of better-quality meat, you’re getting more bang for your buck. If you’re spending $10-12 on a chicken you know has been raised well and is clean…yeah, you’re going to pay five dollars more, but if you buy a whole chicken, you can make three recipes from the book with that one chicken.”
Middleton is also a big proponent of stretching what meat you do buy—not only to cut down on costs, but to streamline weeknight meals. “I make my mom’s spaghetti sauce and chili and make tacos and lasagna and freeze it. The thing about cooking from scratch is it takes some extra time. It might take a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, and we get four or five meals from that.”
