Member-only story
How to Buy a Whole Cow
And three reasons why you should.
Nice to Meat You
It’s important that I start by telling you this: I stopped eating poultry and red meat in 2006. I spent more than a decade on veggie burgers, beans, lentils, soy products, tofu and just being hungry. I’ve passed on pepperoni pizza, steak tips, chicken barbecues and ball game hot dogs.
Then in 2016, after the birth of my second son, I learned that I had become fairly anemic. I started taking iron supplements and trying to eat more dark green leafy vegetables with my tofu-dogs and Quorn brand meatless meat. I stuck to my guns and continued to steer clear of the meat aisle.
But in the decade or so that I had spent shopping for and feasting on alternatives to meat, I noticed a slow but steady shift. In the early years, there were one or two veggie burger brands and two or three types of tofu. In more recent years, those numbers have grown from single digits into the dozens.
It used to seem like the non-meat alternatives were a healthier choice, compared to animal protein. But over the last year, as I sat at dinner with my family — all meat eaters — watching them eat organic chicken breasts, as I ate a meatless veggie burger with 35 ingredients, most of them unpronounceable and chemical sounding, my thinking started to shift.
So earlier this spring, I started eating little bits of meat. Aside from one hilarious incident that involved sprinting out of my classroom to the bathroom, I haven’t experienced any negative side effects.
In fact, I feel great.
Except for the fact that I am now a participant in the troubling world of factory farming. While I am happy about the not being anemic, qualifying for the super-platinum level of life insurance and running faster than I have since my early 20s, I feel a lot of guilt about the terrible agricultural practices I am now supporting.
Which is why I decided it was time for me to buy a cow. I wanted to purchase and eat a whole cow, so that I could stop worrying about the animal abuse, contamination issues, environmental degradation and human rights violations that are related to factory farming.
