How to Be a Conscious Eater

AFTER LESS MEAT COMES BETTER MEAT.

WHAT COUNTS?

There’s a trope in my line of work that when you ask children

where their steak comes from, they’ll say “the supermarket.”

Because animal flesh comes to us wrapped in cellophane, the

act of consuming it is deeply disconnected from the reality

that it came from an animal, and at a high environmental cost.

After learning about the litany of problems that livestock

production creates for not just the environment but our own

welfare, can we really believe in such a thing as a “conscious

carnivore”? I say yes, absolutely. Especially because the vast

majority of Americans are meat eaters. And I’d guess that most

of us intend to remain so.

The problems stem from one key issue: In the industrial

model, efficiency trumps all. “All” means the health of the envi-

ronment, the communities, and the animals that become food.

Their overcrowded living conditions in turn further damage

the health of the human population as a whole. In treating ani-

mals raised for food as little widgets in an assembly line, with

the goal of getting as much sellable meat per animal in as little

time as possible, growth hormones and all the wrong types of

feed are doled out like candy on Halloween. Unlike more nutri-

tious pasture-based diets, this combination works great for

fattening up livestock quickly—and pretty much nothing else.

So, better meat comes from animals not treated this way.

Better meat comes from animals not fed corn all their lives,

or raised in CAFOs, or routinely given antibiotics important to

human medicine, or pumped with hormones to make them

grow faster.

There’s a lot to juggle, so here’s my list of four practical

things you can reasonably do to enjoy meat with a relatively

clear conscience:

Stuff That comes from animals 93

Conscious Eater_02 PT_4th patches.indd 93 10/23/19 1:31 PM