economics

Surprisingly enough, there are many vegan and vegetarian restaurants I enjoy. When I am out with vegetarian friends, I don't mind getting a bowl of various vegetables and some of these restaurants are actually fairly good. Overall, when confronted with a choice between meat from a questionable source and a vegan entree, I'll often chose the latter.

But one restaurant I will not be eating at is Otarian. Besides insulting resource economists everywhere by using questionable calculations to make their food look "low carbon," it appears the owners are a bunch of dietary fascists:

 Indian Australian billionaires Pankaj and Radhika Oswal have banned workers building their Peppermint Grove mansion from eating meat, attracting the ire of the Western Australian construction union.

The building workers have been told that they cannot eat ham sandwiches or meat pies at the building site of the 70 million dollar mega-mansion.

Workers at the site said yesterday there was one small shed at the bottom of the site which they were allowed to eat meat in.

A source close to the Oswals, who did not want to be named, said some workers had continued to eat meat on the site "just to spite them".

Oswal, who is in New York this week helping his wife prepare for the launch of her vegetarian fast-food chain, Otarian, defended the meat ban, saying "This is our home".

Radhika Oswal has previously accused the meat industry of "raping the earth".

"Meat eating is creating bad karma and you are also creating a vicious cycle. It's destroying us environmentally, economically and socially. I'm putting my money where my mouth is. I've always been a vegetarian so I have always felt strongly about it," she said.

The house, expected to be finished at the end of 2011, will have a gymnasium the size of a regular Perth house, a beauty salon, an observatory, parking for 17 cars and a swimming pool 10 times bigger than the average backyard

Hmm...in the words of Midtown Lunch " I wonder how many Tex Mex Burgers you’d need to eat to off set their 17 car garage?" Meanwhile, vegans are rightfully angry that the restaurant serves dairy. I'm sorry to break it to the owners, but Bessie the cow doesn't go to Florida for retirement when her milk production slows.

That's the difference between the paleo diet and ideological diets. The paleo diet is about you feeling your best. While many people who eat this way enjoy telling others about the benefits, we have no reason to try to force it on others through coercive language or policy.

I'll admit their "Sweet potato chiplets" looked kind of good...until I read the ingredients "Sweet Potatoes, Breadcrumbs, Corn Starch, Lemon Juice, Vegetable Oil, Wheat Flour, Garlic, Salt, Water." Yeah, there is nothing more sustainable than corn starch grown 500 miles away. I wonder where the dairy in the salads is from? They say they are working with a top supplier, but that's all the information they'll provide. They also say they are working to not have the cows slaughtered after their production ends, but that's not exactly compatible with environmental friendliness as that means the cows will be eating and producing methane for many more years. That's a laughably low feed conversion ratio.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of restaurants that offer food that supports our local community both animal and vegetable. The great thing about local food is that you are intimately connected with the effects of your purchase. When people tell me about the rainforest being cut down to feed beef I tell them I'm glad I don't eat beef that's a. lived in Brazil b. eaten anything grown in Brazil.

Probably the most efficient system would be a mixed local one based on growing things appropriate for each ecosystem. Framing the argument as vegetarian or bust obscures the complexity of environmental economics and ignores the fact that meat is an inevitable by product of dairy and egg production and that sustainable agriculture involves animal-based fertilizer. I know an egg farmer is a good one if he or she is selling spent hens and rooster meat. Not only is a young rooster flavorful and cheap, but it means that they didn't just waste the male chicks that were born. I also highly respect goat dairies that sell wonderful goat meat. MMM- there is nothing like a nice goat curry.

No matter what your political opinion is of food stamps, if you stand on the side of real food, this article about buying "gourmet" food on food stamps and the comments are a bit incendiary.

Apparently people are having the audacity to buy food that tastes good and is appropriate for humans, like wild fish and rabbit. Egads, don't they know poor people should be eating beans? 

At nearly every food justice conference I go to I hear that. I'll go from one seminar on raising heritage poultry for fancy restaurants to another seminar on how we can save all the poor people from obesity by teaching them to cook dried beans bought in bulk. At the same conference where we talk in the livestock feed seminar about feeding cattle diets appropriate for their species, no one every questions whether beans are good food for humans. And while we talk about heirloom lettuce and fatty Ossabow pigs, we forget to acknowledge that desire for good tasting things is universal among humans.

Either way, the reason that wild fish and decent meat are out of reach from poor people is due to artificial distortions in our economy and how we live.

This weekend I went to Jackson Lander's locavore hunting seminar. He puts delicious nutritious wild meat on his family's table for just the cost of a gun and ammo. Just like my dirt poor ancestors did in Arkansas and Lousiana. They ate rabbit, turtle, venison, crawfish... the kind of food you get at gourmet restaurants these days. Back then poor people weren't obese and my ancestors lived into their 80s despite the tough conditions they endured.

I can tell you that campaigns to get beloved "veggies" and vegetable gardens into low income schools have their merits, but they will probably do little to alter the overall dietary makeup. Lettuce has vitamins and minerals, but little in the way of calories. Beans? With bacon they are pretty good, but most do gooders are advocating a vegetarian diet that would probably send most people with tastebuds back to KFC.

Teaching low income people to butchers, hunt (deer in particular are overpopulated in most areas), fish, and raise animals for food would go a long way in altering their diets as while as providing them valuable and in-demand skills for jobs.

But we already knew that...."teach a man to fish..."