I finished this book a while back but didn’t get round to posting about it and how it’s influenced my new dining habits. I haven’t managed to dive straight to veganism, but I’m trying to make piecemeal changes daily, less meat, more plant-forward menus.
I still enjoy my seafood and some happy chickens at the source every now and then. I’ve mostly reduced red meat – beef, pork and lamb from my diet, except on occasions at yumcha and where the provenance of ingredients and where happy fairly treated animals were raised.
Pork is the backbone of Chinese cuisine, but with Chinese cuisine, (not strictly) vegetarian meals are not difficult to settle on as there’s always plenty of greens done different ways stir-fried with oyster sauce or some seafood-based broth.
“Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory – disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own.”
Jonathan Safran’s Eating Animals explores similar issues that are raised in Michael Pollen’s Omnivore dilemma.
