April 01, 2006
Thoughts on Breakfast
I had some name brand nonMeat sausage this morning, and had to come face to face with some of the problems of eating vegetarian.
I'm all for the idea of living lightly on the planet. And if each American eats nearly two hundred pounds of meat each year (my estimate), that makes for 60 billion pounds of slaughtering a year. Ethics aside this is a disturbing statistic.
I've always heard that raising meat is very inefficient. Cows eat thousands of pounds of vegetable matter to bring forth a small fraction of that in meat.
To do our part and to avoid clogging my arteries any more than necessary, I've been eating Morning Star or Boca sausages. We buy them in ten ounce packages at four dollars a package, as opposed to sausage which can be had at three dollars a pound. So it's hard to see how the efficiencies of not passing our vegetables through a cow are making their way to the consumer.
So let's look at nonMeat products like TVP:
TVP® is a food product made from soybeans. It is produced from soy flour after the soybean oil has been extracted, then cooked under pressure, extruded, and dried.
First off, food that has a copyright by its name makes me nervous. The crux of the matter is that we're looking at a fairly processed food by the time it winds up as sausage (Don't tell me it's not sausage, because the definition of sausage is anything you can stick in a casing, and actually you don't even need the casing.), enclosed in a plastic lining and colorful cardboard box.
My hunch is that we can lighten our load on the planet without our doomed bovine friends. Though the urge to have processed and packaged foods foils even vegan purists. How many petrochemicals go into manufacturing and shipping the product, how much waste packaging does the product create, what's the premium in price?
I guess I could just eat the soybeans (edamame) themselves, which I like to do. But I grew up eating sausage for breakfast, and I might as well pay a premium to keep my arteries clean and keep eating soy-sages. I don't think that my conscience is any cleaner for it, though.
Posted by mastr at April 1, 2006 09:31 AM