SEVEN: the coleslaw. Fast food creamy coleslaw is always, always the worst thing, you guys. Like, creamy coleslaw is already pretty bad – if you need an excuse to eat sour cream, maybe you can just tell people your doctor said you need to eat it or you’ll die, you’d have more dignity that way – but fast food creamy coleslaw is never anything else than gross. If you put this next to KFC’s creamy coleslaw you would not be able to tell the difference. I think there is just one factory that makes all the fast food creamy coleslaw in the world and they, like, freeze it into giant bricks, and then the individual restaurants just chip off some of the coleslaw brick and let it thaw out each day.

SIX: the Cajun fries. They’re just spicy fries, and they’re not even good spicy fries, because good spicy fries are good on at least one of two levels: either they are really nice and spicy or they are really good fries with spice on them. Popeye’s fries are White Person Spicy (i.e. they are not really spicy at all, unless you think onion powder counts as a spice) and they are kinda stringy and not good fries in the “yes, this is definitely some nice fried potato” sense. Chicken places never have good fries so I’m not really surprised by this. I think the angry souls of the chickens have something to do with it. The reason McDonald’s fries are good is probably because McDonald’s “chicken” isn’t actually chicken. Or maybe they converted to McWorship, those chickens. (Coming soon to a church near you. McWorship: all the spirituality in one-fifth the time! The prayer you need for your busy schedule.)

FIVE: the green beans. They actually don’t do the green beans in Canada but I had them once in America and they are not particularly good, but on the other hand you’re eating green beans in a fast food restaurant and that is definitely something of a novelty, and green beans don’t really go below “eh” unless they are burned to a cinder, so you can do worse. Of course, the reason they aren’t that good is because Popeyes decided – probably not incorrectly – that people wouldn’t eat green beans when they go get fast food, so they smothered them in really bad bacon. Actually I just looked at Popeye’s website and it’s not even real bacon, it’s turkey bacon, that is like counterfeit bacon to people who care about bacon. (I don’t really care about bacon.)

FOUR: the mac and cheese. It’s not bad at all. It’s mass-produced mac and cheese. It’s better than Kraft Dinner, but it’s not proper mac and cheese, but you knew coming in this wasn’t going to be proper mac and cheese anyway so what are you complaining about? You probably eat pizza with a fork, don’t you, Mister Special. Anyway, when you pour some of Popeye’s hot sauce on the mac and cheese it becomes quite good, because Popeye’s has decent hot sauce and decent hot sauce makes any mac and cheese nice. And besides I like Kraft Dinner.

THREE: the mashed potatoes and gravy. The mashed potatoes are above-average fast food mashed potatoes in that they actually appear to have been real potatoes at one point, but nobody gets this for the potatoes. You get this side dish for the gravy, which is actually proper slightly lumpy slightly spicy gravy; it is REAL GRAVY and in fast food that is distinctly rare. FUN FACT: If you just ask for some gravy, they look at you weird. Then they ask “are you sure you don’t want the potatoes?” Then they try to give you the potatoes and the gravy separately. Then, when you say “no I just want a little cup of gravy so I can dip things in the gravy” they look at you weird like when you said that you meant things other than the other items of food that you ordered. Which you didn’t. Because that would be weird. What is so wrong about wanting to dip your biscuit in gravy? Nothing, that’s what I say.

TWO: the Cajun rice. It’s good. More restaurants should offer rice dishes as sides, really. I don’t have anything else to say about the Cajun rice though because of the next item on the list.

ONE: the red beans and rice. The rice is only okay – it’s just plain rice without the nice seasoning and whatever the little bits in the Cajun rice are, it doesn’t have those. But who cares? You order this for the red bean goop. The tasty, tasty red bean goop. It is like primordial DNA, the stuff that Life Itself emerged from, except it is edible, nay delicious, and you are creating new life by eating it because the bacterias that live in your stomach (don’t worry, they’re supposed to be there because of science) get the red bean goop and then they start inventing algebra. You can even pretend this side dish is healthy because it is protein, that is how good the red beans and rice are, they let you lie to yourself convincingly. And also you get an algebra stomach and probably that has real-world applications of some kind.

NOT RANKED: the biscuits. Because even if Popeye’s wants to call the biscuits a side dish, they aren’t a side dish. They are the reason you go to Popeye’s.

So Taco Bell is apparently giving away free tacos for the next seven days. This is fine and good, but of course some people are complaining about it because Taco Bell meat is, basically, about half made of oatmeal.

To which my response is a hearty “so what?” Hey, do you remember those Taco Bell commercials from a couple years ago, where they were promising to fill you up with a massive amount of food for $1.99? Yeah, you remember those, and in fairness Taco Bell did indeed deliver a relatively massive amount of food for said amount of money. Did you really think that it was going to be all-natural premium ingredients? Here’s a quick fun experiment you can do: go to the supermarket and look to see how much a pound of beef costs. Do you think that pound of beef was really going to turn into a profit source for Taco Bell selling tacos from it at dirt-cheap prices? No. No it wasn’t. So what people are complaining about here is that Taco Bell was not able to make meat appear by magic and then sell it.

Of course, what’s even sillier are people proclaiming they will never eat Taco Bell again because the meat has been “adulterated.” These people are acting like oats in the meat somehow poisons it. It is frigging oatmeal. It is basically the healthiest thing in the world. At worst, what Taco Bell has been doing is making vaguely Mexican-flavoured meatloaf, grinding it up, and putting it in their tacos. At best, they’ve been actively improving the flavour and health value of what is, let’s be honest, industrial-grade beef, and making it cheaper for you to eat it at the same time.

This is not me endorsing Taco Bell as a restaurant, because I don’t like Taco Bell much at all. (I do like their fries.) But if you like Taco Bell, I don’t see why you wouldn’t go get yourself a free taco this week, because you apparently liked that until somebody told you you weren’t being a super-awesome carnivore as much as you thought you were.

Peanut butter cookies are and will always be inferior to regular cookies with peanut butter smeared on them.

The best type of homemade fried rice is hot dog fried rice.

If you reduce 7Up enough, you eventually get something suitable for glazing ham that looks like Crystal Gravy from that SNL fake ad.

Beer can chicken is for wimps. Real cooks make Zima chicken.

If more people ate peameal roast, then the internet would probably shut up about bacon.

If you go to a state fair where they have a contest serving the weirdest fried food, sometimes a creepy little girl will hand you a plate of fried something and then seven days later you will die.

The next step in pizza is no-crust pizza. That’s right: pizza made entirely of cheese.

DISCUSS NERDS

So apparently the big thing in hot American restaurant desserts is “crack pie,” which commands $44 per pie. Because I was intrigued, I made it for a dinner party we had last night.

It is basically a giant butter tart with a cookie crust rather than a pastry shell. I’m not gonna lie: the cookie crust definitely adds something to it. Of course, I knew that the first time I made cookie-crust butter tarts, which was maybe a decade ago.

In short, we did it first and we didn’t pretend it was worth $44 per pie, because that is not how Canada rolls.

“Damn it all, Jeeves, I was just about to settle into my afternoon kip.”
“Understandable, sir, but you asked to be alerted when the new trials came from the factory.”
“And have they, Jeeves?”
“I would not be alerting you otherwise, sir.”
“Well, I did rather ask for them, didn’t I? Guess we’d better see to it. then. Did they arrive on a silver tray like last time? I do so enjoy the visual.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Smashing. So, what have we first, Jeeves?”
“The first is an attempt to comply with your request for a “thicky,” sir.”
“Very good. And let’s see… Well. It’s certainly a big thick bar of chocolate, Jeeves.”
“As you requested.”
“Yes, but I was thinking… something more blocky. This is a bunch of squares.”
“Are the squares not blocky enough for your liking?”
“Well, I had it in my head, you see. I was going to call this bar ‘The Yorkshireman.’ Chocolate for real… for real…”
“Chums, sir?”
“Yes, that’s it. Chums. One might even say blokes.”
“From Yorkshire.”
“You know what they say about Yorkshire, Jeeves.”
“I’m afraid I am not enlightened as such.”
“In any case, this bar simply will not do.”
“Might I ask as to why, sir?”
“Well, look at it, Jeeves. I wanted to have ‘Yorkshireman’ written across the top of the bar in big block letters. But this is a bunch of squares. We can’t possibly fit it all onto the squares.”
“Perhaps if you somewhat alter the name…?”
“Dash it all, how can you improve on ‘Yorkshireman’ as a name for a bar of chocolate?”
“Well, it is intended for children, sir. Perhaps ‘Yorkie‘ might suffice? It is, after all, six letters. And there are six blocks in the bar.”
“But if we call it ‘Yorkie’ people might think it’s dog food, Jeeves.”
“Because of the terrier.”
“Of course because of the terrier! They’ll think it’s a bar for dogs, and they’ll feed it to their dogs. Then the dogs will die, because dogs can’t eat chocolate.”
“They certainly can’t.”
“I can already hear Aunt Agatha lecturing me about how I murdered a generation of English canines.”
“A good point, sir. Perhaps you might consider it some more at your leisure, and turn to the second bar?”
“I suppose so. Drat. Now I’ve come over all glum because of this business.”
“We carry on, sir.”
“Well said. What’s the second bar?”
“Mr. Drumwell down in the factory said that you had asked about a bar with wafer.”
“I do love a good bit of wafer.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Drumwell and I discussed the matter at some length, and we were also reminded of your love of caramel.”
“The stickier the better.”
“Indeed. So, after some work, Mr. Drumwell – with my input – has invented this.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, sir?”
“Seems sort of small.”
“I believe the idea was that a packet would contain two bars of this sort.”
“Two bars? In a single packet? Seems sort of flagrant, doesn’t it?”
“I have reviewed the list of ingredients, sir, and I concur with Mr. Drumwell when he says that he can make two of these bars for the cost of a single larger sort of bar.”
“Still. Very indulgent.”
“Is indulgence something to be avoided when selling chocolates, sir?”
“No need to be snippy, Jeeves. Mmm. Mpph. Mmph.”
“You approve, sir?”
“Mmmph. This is a serious bit of nosh Drumwell’s cooked up here.”
“Ah.”
“I mean it. This is a lot of work to eat. How long did it take me to chew that one bite?”
“I was not timing you, sir.”
“Seemed like a long time, didn’t it?”
“Is that bad?”
“Not at all. But as I said – serious bit of nosh. This is a chocolate bar that demands work and rewards it. Much like boarding school.”
“Really, sir?”
“Actually no. It’s nothing like boarding school. Forget I said that bit.”
“What do Americans call those men who go around looking for work?”
“Sir?”
“You know the ones.”
“I believe the term is ‘hobo,’ sir.”
“That’s the name of our chocolate bar! Hobo! The bar that looks to give you work! That’ll – Jeeves, you’re making that face again.”
“I promise you that this is my only face, Master Bertie.”
“Oh ho, and no you’ve gone and called me Master Bertie too. All right, Jeeves, fess up. You don’t like ‘Hobo.’ That’s it, isn’t it?”
“My opinion is entirely secondary to yours, sir.”
“And if your secondary opinion were to register as to the name of the bar in question, what then?”
“Perhaps I might consider a synonym more pleasing to the ear.”
“Well, I’ll think about it. But I do think ‘Hobo’ has a ring to it. Tell Drummy to ready production lines on both of those and we’ll get the boys down in wrapping to do some mockups. Oh, but I’ve worked a long day today! Any new business, Jeeves?”
“One thing, sir. Young master Fink-Nottle sent a telegram inquiring as to whether you had given his idea for chocolate newts any further thought.”
“Have I in fact seen that telegram yet, Jeeves?”
“I believe it may have been lost in transit, sir.”
“Good show.”

Deep-fried butter.

LIKED

– The Web is the first of JMS’ “Red Circle” comics that I’ve actually really enjoyed. This is not to say that Hangman and Inferno were bad comics; they were competently made bland ones, featuring Yet Another Spectre and a kinda boring guy-who-transforms-into-another-guy-who’s-on-fire. The Web actually has a pretty good hook, though, in that its hero is a guy who knows he’s kind of a shithead and has decided he doesn’t want to be a shithead (and has billions of dollars so he can be a superhero), and then his first time trying to not be a shithead manages to be a shithead anyway, but just a superheroic one. And then he learns a lesson. It’s kind of a twisted take on the Spider-Man origin and it works pretty well.

– I’m really enjoying Overlord II, more for its sense of humour than its occasionally annoying gameplay. Having command over an army of annoying hyperactive murderous runts is, it appears, endlessly entertaining. Listening to the heroic elves champion “all creatures, so long as they are fluffy and cute” is hilarious too. Really, it’s just a funny game with occasionally annoying controls.

– District 9 is good. (Insert dialogue about potential racist aspects of movie here.)

MEH

– How inessential a comic is Power Girl? Lemme put it this way: while hunting for a torrent of old Golden Age crime comics, I saw one for the new issue of Power Girl. It would have taken me one click to read it. I did not click. That is how inessential Power Girl is. And that comes from somebody who likes Power Girl and Amanda Conner’s art.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Wendy’s is doing this new line of “boneless wings,” which might be better called “nuggets in sauce.” They taste like you would expect nuggets in sauce to taste. The Asian Chicken ones are my least favorite, as they are nuggets basically dipped in a mix of honey and cheap, not particularly spicy sriracha. The Buffalo ones are worse. Given that Wendy’s has what is easily my favorite fast-food chicken item of all time (the Spicy Chicken sandwich), this comes as a disappointment.

After my last post, there were many insightful questions raised in the comments (including a well-reasoned debate on British standards of attractiveness. Surprisingly, no one has yet brought up Alan Rickman.) Anyway, among the questions was:

CB: Also, Elizabeth, is it true that Brits have terrible food? Because every time I read a Harry Potter book it all sounds terribly DELICIOUS, so I have a hard time believing it’s as bad as they say…

A good point, CB, and well made. well made. British food does have that reputation– and, of course, you can find bad food here, as you can in most other places. (For example, if an American national should find themselves here, for the love of god don’t order a hamburger.) I’m not about to try to defend haggis or black pudding either, but there are certain things the British do wonderfully well. So here is my official short list of:

GOOD BRITISH FOOD ITEMS

SAUSAGES. Britain doesn’t really enter the salami stakes– the Continentals have that one sorted– but we produce endless variations on the sausage theme. They’re called “bangers” because the British like to mix food and cartoon sound effects (see also “bubble and squeak.”) Bangers and mash are an excellent cold-weather pub dinner.

FISH AND CHIPS. We are a sea-girt isle, and fish are tasty, especially when you pull them out of the ocean and deep-fry the fuck out of them. Chips are not your thin, elongated US-style fries; ideally they should look like they’ve been done with a chisel, with a good ratio of small-and-crunchies to large-and-soggies. The chip-purveyor will then ask “saltnvinegar”? If you assent, they will dump an entire salt mine’s worth of the white stuff on there, followed by a liberal squirt of malt vinegar (cuts tangily through the grease; also soaks through the paper wrapping, permeating your hands, clothes, etc.) British people, especially on cold nights, have developed a Pavlovian response to the scent of malt vinegar– especially wafting from someone else’s order of chips. Damn.

Fish and chips are also frequently accompanied by mushy peas, which are — well, you know that Dr Seuss book, Bartholomew and the Oobleck? Yeah. Like that… but tasty.

BEER. In the UK, this is a food item. During the wars, beer was never rationed– they knew there’d be mutiny if they tried. These days, it comes in a Baskin-Robbins variety of flavours. A normal-to-crap pub will have four or five of the big brands on tap; a good pub will have those plus a good scrumpy cider and a few ales from the smaller breweries; a REALLY good pub will have a changing selection of weird stuff that it sources at dead of night from mysterious men with beards. Americans mock British people for serving beer at room temperature; British people mock Americans for drinking American beer at all.

SCOTTISH WHISKY: because dude, Scottish whisky. I mean, Scottish whisky.

CHEESE. I’m writing this post while nibbling on some Cornish Yarg, which comes wrapped in nettle leaves (or sometimes wild garlic). Stinking Bishop is soft and runny, its rind washed in perry (a drink like cider, but made from pears, which if you don’t wash cheese with it will get you very drunk indeed.) Seator’s Orkney is crumbly, sort of tangy and sweet at the same time; Cheshire is similar but sharper in flavour. Cheddar, Red Leicester, Double Gloucester and Stilton all hail from here. In short, cheese is awesome and the Brits do it exceedingly well.

CREAM TEA. This isn’t a single foodstuff, but a combination: First, you pour yourself a cup of tea. Then you help yourself to a freshly baked scone (not as sweet as the American sort). You split them in half, then pile on a layer of clotted cream– that’s cream so thick it’s almost butter. Then you smear jam on top of that– traditionally strawberry, but whatever. After the ensuing sugar-and-caffeine rush subsides, you may find that you have annexed a bunch of random countries for your empire. It is understood that you will spend the rest of your days losing to them at cricket.

And now, a handy guide to HOW TO FIND GOOD FOOD IN BRITAIN
1. Go where the farms are. Large swathes of the UK are given over to farming, and in those places anything that comes off a farm is going to be fresh and tasty. The West Country (Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Cornwall) is one such place; Wales has astonishing food; and the Scots do beef like no one else. The West Country does amazing cider, while the North of England and Scotland do some fantastic beer. Also dude, Scottish whisky.

2. Similarly, for good seafood, go where the sea is. This is the big blue wobbly thing round the edges.

3. Avoid Glasgow. Seriously, stay the hell away or they will feed you deep-fried Mars Bars.

My homie Karen asks:

What do you normally eat for dinner when you cook for yourself?

I really like to bake, but I don’t bake myself food for dinner because most of what I bake is desserts and I’m not so far abased as to eat strawberry rhubarb pie for a meal and I am in my thirties and can’t eat a whole trayful of oatmeal cookies any more.1 I would like to avoid diabetes for as long as possible, thanks, and given my sweet tooth baking is something I can only do infrequently. That having been said, I do make a damn good cornbread and socca when it comes to non-sweet baking.

When I cook for myself, usually it ends up being one of two things:

1.) A sandwich. I almost never use deli cuts (notable exception: ham).2 I like loose meat, preferably some that I’ve just grilled or sauteed or broiled. I tend to prefer pork because you can do a lot to pork but still retain its essential flavours; chicken is good too but it’s easy to overpower with spices, and I love to spice meat when I cook it. The other benefit of cooking the meat is that I can cook vegetables at the same time and put them in the sandwich: sweet peppers are my favorite but hot peppers, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumber and snap peas are all quite nice cooked up and tossed in a sandwich. Toss on some lettuce or cold cucumber, some cheese and mustard and maybe a little horseradish or Miracle Whip?3 Perfect. That’s a meal. And the bread has to be good bread. I’ll often grill the completed sandwich on a Foreman grill or similar when it is done.

Also: peanut butter, or egg salad, or tunafish. All will work, all are healthy and delicious, and all are quick.

2.) If I don’t do a sandwich, I usually don’t bother with meat at all: I do a potato-chickpea curry, or rice cooked with various things (often chickpeas – I love chickpeas), or pasta – usually with pesto, but a tomato sauce is nice and a bean medley and olive oil is very good too. If I’m too bored too cook, vegetables and hummus/baba ghanoush of some kind with some pita bread is doable. I’m not that big on salads; I like salad, don’t get me wrong, but other than buying the crappy bags of salad you need to store a lot of produce to make a good salad regularly, and I don’t want it that regularly, and until I have a full-time job of some kind I have to share fridge space with roommates.

Wasn’t that thrilling?

1. Well, not without avoiding serious repercussions. [↩]
2. Okay, and pan-fried bologna. Shut up. [↩]
3. Do NOT mock my love of Miracle Whip. It is a joyful creation of Science. Also, possibly an intelligent life form. [↩]

In a thread over at Metafilter about Tim Horton’s expanding into New York, someone notes:

As a new immigrant to Canada (Toronto in particular), I still don’t understand the Tim Hortons thing.

There’s a reason Timmie’s is so universal an element of Canadian culture: it’s particularly Canadian in that it transcends class. Tim’s coffee isn’t particularly good coffee and the doughnuts are average at best (they used to be quite good, then the delivery model took over and now the selection is hit-and-miss – although the pumpkin spice donuts, when they show up, are brilliant).

But absolutely everybody will be satisfied with it in any situation. The glory of Tim’s is that everybody in Canada is familiar with it and it’s okay food; CEOs eat Tim’s donuts as often as their plant workers do. You show up at work and no matter what type of work you do or how important your job is, once or twice a week somebody brings a box of Tim’s donuts for everybody. I’ve been to law firms that have their own enormous, well-staffed kitchens with private menus – and they have empty Tim’s boxes in the lounge. Always.

That’s a very egalitarian thing; the well-to-do of American society just aren’t the same way about, say, McDonald’s. Tim’s is a reminder to Canadians that we’re all the same, deep down, and to Canadians that’s a very satisfying thing to remember.

LIKED

– The Hangover justifies the hype; it is bust-a-gut funny and often, for a comedy where a guy humps a tiger, wickedly smart. If you had told me a couple of years ago that Bradley Cooper would finally make the jump to true stardom in a comedy where the funniest bits all go to Zach Galifianakis, I would probably have looked at you funny and said “how does that go again?” But it’s true, because Cooper is obviously the leading man in this movie and Galifianakis and Ed Helms are his support.

– President’s Choice makes passionfruit (and diet passionfruit) pop now? I sometimes think there is a little room at President’s Choice headquarters where there’s this one guy whose sole job is coming up with new flavors of pop. (I mean, it would explain the lychee soda they introduced last year.) But the passionfruit is easily their best entry since blackcurrant a couple of years ago (and why did they discontinue blackcurrant)?

– Holy shit, The Brothers Bloom is staggeringly good. Clever, funny, charming (even if I didn’t already have a massive crush on Rachel Weisz I would have one now), and it has plot twists that you genuinely sometimes do not see coming, which is all too rare in modern moviegoing these days. Terrific performances, dialogue, visual conception, everything. It is hard to explain how amazingly good this movie is.

– Okay, I’ll admit it: Wipeout is a guilty pleasure. The jokes have gotten better since last year (not much better, but still), and the obstacles have gotten more clever. It’s still television gone stupid, but it’s good for a laugh.

DID NOT LIKE

– Flash: Rebirth reads like Geoff Johns trying out his greatest hits album on repeat. “Hey, Green Lantern Flash is back from the dead but there’s a problem and also Sinestro Professor Zoom is not, in fact, dead but actually behind a lot of the new problems that Hal Barry face, plus everybody else who was ever a Green Lantern Flash gets to look vaguely incompetent as well.” Beyond a nice, brief interaction with Superman, this is almost more offensive than Ultimatum due to sheer badness.

Because if you like making cupcakes, and more importantly if you like making THEME cupcakes, then you should enter this contest and make a cupcake and try to win ACTUAL MONEY.

(Personally, I mostly dislike cupcakes. Most fancy cupcakes are vehicles for a huge mound of unpleasantly-made icing. But I know most people like cupcakes. So.)

Top comment: I will decorate mine like a hockey puck, and have it taste like shit. That’s what toronto is to me. (Yes, I live in Ottawa, why do you ask) — bunnyofdoom

Hosea? Really?

I mean, as usual the judging at the final round was head-scratchingly nuts. Stefan’s dessert plate – which looked perfectly tasty – was in fact excellent food, but got widely panned by the judges on the basis that it “didn’t feel fully conceived,” which is food-speak for “I wanted pie or something like that.” Not because it didn’t taste good.

(Gail Simmons’s return to active judging has just reminded me how much I do not understand that she is the editor of a magazine devoted to food.)

Sorry, but I like Stefan. He is full of shit, but he is entertainingly full of shit. He doesn’t hold grudges (unlike Hosea). Most importantly it was clear from pretty much the first episode that he was the best chef in the competition, both capable of doing his own thing and usually able to acquit himself well outside of his comfort zone. There was a reason he kept winning challenges! It was because he was the best at them!

In comparison, Hosea’s track record was medium-to-spotty and he had a firm preference for sticking to the seafood courses he was used to cooking in his work life. There hasn’t been a cheftestant who played it as safe as Hosea since Ilan in season two. Of course, Ilan at least never fucked up his endless array of Spanish courses and more Spanish courses; Hosea, in comparison, majorly screwed up seafood dishes – which are his specialty, remember – at least twice that I can remember.

Least satisfying Top Chef winner since Ilan – who didn’t deserve to beat Marcel, I have said it before and will say it again.

(As for Carla – taking advice from Casey, the most outmatched runner-up in the history of the show? No. Do not do that, Carla! Season three was a walk for Hung and Casey was part of the reason why! Look at every area Carla got fucked and you see that it was Casey’s idea – a more complex souffle instead of cheese tart, doing the sirloin sous vide rather than just grilling it, etc.)

I recently got into an argument with a friend who is vegetarian about vegetarianism.

For the record, I am not one of those people who thinks vegetarianism is stupid or proof of lack of moral character or something. I am similarly not one of those people who fetishizes the act of eating meat. (You know, the “ooooh I love MEEEEAT” people. The ones who seem to confuse eating meat with, say, sex. For the record: meat can indeed be quite delicious, but if you think eating it is a better experience than getting head, seek medical attention immediately.) And if someone wants to advance vegetarianism from the moral perspective of causing as little harm as possible to those species most like us, that strikes me as being a perfectly valid tack to argue from, albeit one with which I don’t agree.

But my friend was arguing from the environmental standpoint. You’re probably aware of the general thrust of the argument, so I’ll merely go over the bullet points: breeding animals for the purpose of slaughter generates a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, from numerous sources (their farts, their feed, et cetera). Furthermore, factory farming is more directly bad for the environment in that you get mountainous piles of toxic animal shit that can, for instance, poison groundwater. Factory farms also require us to pump animals full of antibiotics so they don’t die of disease and the like, which in turn not only reduces the quality of the meat they produce but also means that the meat they produce is similarly stuffed chock-full of things we probably don’t want in our meat anyway.

All of this is undeniably true, and there exists a perfectly valid and rational environmental argument to reduce meat consumption and eat organically produced meat – free-range, wild-fed animals are better for us to eat (and, as anybody who has eaten them can attest, taste far superior to factory-farmed meat anyway). Meat should be more expensive for us to eat; we don’t need to eat that much of it in order to stay healthy and as a result we tend to overconsume it when it becomes available by simple virtue of math. (Remember: the average amount of meta you need at a given meal? About the size of a deck of playing cards.) This is the point of things like the PB&J Campaign.

But it’s not an environmental argument for vegetarianism; it’s an environmental argument for eating less meat, which is not the same thing. (Honestly, if you want to encourage healthier meat production, doing it by refusing to buy meat is counterintuitive; doing it by buying meat that is raised in an ethical, ecologically friendly and healthy manner makes more sense, because you aren’t just monetarily punishing factory farmers, but also rewarding the free-range meat producer.) My friend was arguing that mass vegetarianism was the only environmentally acceptable solution to issues of agricultural supply. And that, I am afraid, just doesn’t fly.

It doesn’t fly because while the ills of factory farming of meat are more dramatic and obvious than those of the mass farming of fruits and vegetables, this doesn’t mean that the latter don’t exist. Oceanic dead zones are the direct result of mass plant farming, because mass plant farming requires fertilizer to come from somewhere, and if it’s not coming from animals (IE, “organic fertilizer”), it has to come from artificial fertilizer, which not incidentally demands the consumption of a great deal of fossil fuels in its production. And that means nitrates – a lot of nitrates – being dumped into the soil, and consequently into river and stream runoff, and consequently into oceans. (Simply using animal manure isn’t nitrate-free, of course, but it’s a lot less intensive because plants are, you know, designed to eat poop.)

Up until the 20th century, of course, all of this was not nearly so much an issue, because large organized mono-crop farming (“I’m a beet farmer,” “I’m a pig farmer,” “I’m a cabbage farmer,” et cetera) was relatively rare; farms existed as small, self-contained entities, with farmers having a variety of crops of both animal and plant varieties, using their obvious symbiosis to maximize production of both basic types of crop, and using the surplus produced beyond what was necessary to keep the farm healthy and stable to live off of and trade for amenities.

That’s where modern agriculture must return. Not reducing the overall yield, but gaining it from myriad small producers rather than a few macro-farms with no crop diversification. It’s healthier for the farms, healthier for us and healthier for the planet. And until we get to the point where we can really invest in massive self-contained “vertical farms” where all the plants are grown hydroponically, it’s the only realistic option we’ve got.