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"New York City prices," I replied.
Your book will be released next week. Have you had any reaction so far?
I received an email yesterday from Frank Reese [a poultry farmer mentioned in the book], and he is suddenly getting a ton of orders. “Your book must be out,” he wrote.
Well, first of all, the information keeps changing. Just this week, a UK climate expert wrote that people are going to have to rethink what it means to eat meat in a deeply cultural way. Also World Watch Institute published a study that estimated that livestock accounts for 51 percent of the global greenhouse gases, up from an estimated 18% in 2006, which is the figure I used in my book.
People are going to reach very different conclusions on whether they want to eat meat, and that is absolutely fine; I have no qualms, at all, with someone who chooses to eat meat, but American values - very traditional, very conservative - would lead people away from the kind of factory farming system we have now. There are probably very few people in the city of Austin, if they were to see what we do with farm animals, who would say, ‘I’m OK with that.’ Similarly, regardless of what you think of how far global warming has progressed, or what you think of environmental regulations, everyone agrees that it matters if the water is clean, if the air is clean. So, as it turns out, eating is the most important relationship to those two questions, yet people aren’t really talking about it or thinking about it.
One of the things that I have loved about writing this book is the realization that I don’t need to convince everyone to think like me. I don’t need to ask anyone to share my values, because we all already share these values, it’s just a matter of becoming aware of what the reality is, and making certain connections and also framing it in a way that’s not an aggressive argument, that it’s not that ‘you’re a bad person if you do this or don’t do that’ but rather that we are faced with this set of choices and we make these choices every single day. And if we can make choices that are more in line with the values we already have, that’s a good thing. It makes people feel good.
But if we have only humanly treated animals living under blue skies, won’t that mean, because of higher cost and space limitations, that we end up eating a lot less meat?
Yes. And that’s what farmers will tell you too. Farmers will actually do better if people eat less meat, because they are going to be willing to spend more per serving and pay the actual cost. When people talk about meat being so cheap, it’s just the cash register price that is low and the real costs are externalized: human health, environmental clean-up, and the decimation of land values, and probably a certain, perhaps harder to measure, price of letting this happen as a civilization. So if we ate meat a lot a less, we’d be able to do it right. Farmers would be able to do things the way they did fifty years ago and would finally make a decent living. Overabundance is the problem.
Some people might not be able to afford meat at all. To be equitable, should we subsidize meat purchases?
We already do that. Rich people already pay a lot more taxes than poorer people and it's those taxes that are underwriting the meat industry. Also you have to really believe that this is very cheap food that is supplying necessary calories, and healthy calories, to people who can’t afford otherwise. A very few corporations are making enormous amounts of money by providing this cheap food at the expense of human health, the expense of animals and the environment.
Here’s another way of thinking about it. How much more expensive would it get: three times, four times or five times? Americans now eat 150 times as much chicken as they did 80 years ago. People are still going to be able to have it at every meal, but they are just not going to have a huge piece of it in the center of their plate.
Part two of this interview will appear next week.
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For its all organic fare, Casa de Luz charges $12 (including tax and gratuity) for soup, salad, hot or cold tea, and a plate of all plate food that includes whole grains, legumes/beans, vegtables, dark leafy greens with sauce, and a picked/fermented item. The first portion is generous enough--but we're welcome to get seconds on any or all of the food. Same with the soup and salad which are self-serve. Their weekend buffet which offers more food and items is $14. Having grown up in NYC and relocated to Austin almost 12 yrs. ago, I can say with confidence that these are NOT "New York" prices. For its Thanksgiving buffet, Casa de Luz is charging $20. Compare that to $75 at Angelica's Kitchen--which is not buffet style.