I like meat. I like the taste, texture, and the way it pairs with a great red wine. I wish I could say I was a sustainable meat eater, but the truth is that as a grad student i get the best quality I can afford and sometimes that grass-fed sustainable and other times it's what I find on sale. I know meat comes from cute cuddly animals and I sort of don't care. I'm not even in the Ted Nugent category of "if you can kill it you can eat it". I couldn't kill what I eat and I realize that's total hypocrisy but oh well.
Realistically, however, I don't eat that much meat. Lunch and Breakfast are always vegetarian, and I'd say only 2 meals a week contain meat proteins. And when I say meat proteins, meat ends up being a part of a dish (like a 2-3 sausage links in a batch of pasta sauce that lasts us 3-4 meals) rather than the center pieces (like a roast), except on special occasions. So it's pretty rare I eat red meat more than once or twice a month, and poultry maybe once or twice a week, but on the whole we eat mostly dairy and plant proteins. I know, what has happened to my pro-meat agenda? Well, the wallet is part of it, and the diet is another part (meat dishes tend to have higher calories, not as much fiber, blah blah, lentils are great, and so on and so on ). This weekend I found a third, unexpected, component: getting old.
I'm putting this in the category of my relationship to caffeine/coffee. Until about 3 years ago, I could have a full cup of coffee after dinner and get to be w/ no problems. I can still do that with espresso, but real coffee or green tea after 6pm and i'm never falling asleep. This weekend we went camping in SLO and took a beautiful drive down the 101. Not thinking about it I had pastrami on Friday, a roast beef sandwich for lunch on Sat, lamb and salami with dinner on Sat, and i think something else (I know, you can hear my arteries slam shut - this is why I run). By the time I got home on Sunday I felt awful. My stomach was pretty bloated and I just felt gross. I'm getting too old to be a militant omnivore!
This has less to do with my actual missing meat - I still plan on eating like I normally do, which means meat occasionally - but more to do with noticing another change in my body as I get older, and finally understanding why most of the food blogs I follow switch heavily to pescatarian or vegetarian w/ only the occasional meat eating entry after the blogger hits her early to mid-thirties. Christ, I can't even count the number of women I know with IBS (mild or otherwise) who have found that meat was a large part of the problem. And this makes me sad - because little lambs and cows are so tasty!
In other news, evals are in grades are done, and now I turn to diss work and 2 conference papers. Also, blogger has a new layout tool that I intent to peruse more extensively in the future, so there may be some changes in the way this blog looks. Yeah, I know I change it pretty frequently, but I'm sort of like that with everything in my life. Change is good.
No comments:
Post a Comment