Meatless, by Emma

December 16, 2020

It's Monday afternoon, and a small crowd of excited Portlanders gathers under a canopy that shields them from the pelting rain in Southwest Portland's Gabriel Park. Every Monday since 2015 a local vegetarian restaurant called Senza Carne has had a free vegetarian lunch in the park to promote vegetarianism. Many other restaurants and associations across the globe are teaching the public about the effects of eating factory farmed meat. Just this year, hundreds of Portlanders have become vegetarian, and thousands more vow to only eat grass-fed, free-range, and organic beef, which means the animals are kept in natural conditions, not fed antibiotics, graze on grass, not corn, and have freedom of movement.

Maria Clote a chef for Senza Carne who is serving the delicious tempeh stir fry tells us, "I love seeing the look on my customers faces when tell them it's all vegetarian! They never imagined a meal with no meat could taste so good!" As a lifelong vegetarian, Maria says that forcing people to not eat meat is the wrong approach. "The best we can do is educate consumers about their choices, because at the end of the day it's really their choice what they eat." She adds, "It helps if you serve them delicious vegetarian food."

In front of Senza Carne's picnic table half a dozen banners flutter in the wind. One says, "The beaks of chickens, turkeys and ducks are often removed in factory farms to reduce the excessive feather pecking and cannibalism seen among stressed, overcrowded birds."

Another states that, "American animals raised for meat eat more than 30 million pounds of antibiotics a year." Most supermarket meat today comes from operations that routinely feed animals low-to-heavy doses of antibiotics. Each year, food animals raised in North Carolina alone ingest more antibiotics than the entire American public. Scientists have a shelf full of studies proving that dozens of antibiotic-resistant pathogens have evolved inside factory-farms as a result of the meat industry's practice of feeding antibiotics to animals. The most tame pathogens cause "stomach flu" in humans, while more serious varieties, like Swine Flu, can be fatal to us.

Senza Carne and many other organisations are trying to help educate people about the Meat Crisis that is now happening around the world. "People just don't seem to care where their food comes from any more, and they aren't making the connection between meat and ecological damage," says Professor Gwen Smitle, a professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkley. "But places like Senza Carne are trying to change that." Smitle, at the Senza Carne Gabriel Park table the day we visited, also notes that it takes 1,857 gallons of water to make a single pound of beef, but it only takes 25 gallons to grow an eggplant. In other words, it takes much less water to eat vegetarian.

Senza Carne was also passing out literature to raise the public's consciousness about how factory farming is a leading contributor to global warming. On a pamphet laying on their table, one reads that way back in 2013, the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer was among many pointing out that raising animals for food was "arguably the No. 1 cause of global warming: The United Nations reports the livestock business generates more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined" (http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/28/opinion.jonathan.foer/.) The combined carbon dioxide emissions from slaughterhouse to packing to shipping to refrigeration to retail store is staggering.

In short, eating vegetarian uses much less energy, water, pathogen-causing antibiotics-while also reducing pollution and global warming-than meat does. Senza Carne is asking us to think of all the vegetables that could be grown in a pasture where cows graze. Eating vegetarian can not only improve your health, but the ecological health of the world. "It's your choice what you eat," Maria says, smiling, "but just think before you buy."