These days I find myself eating less and less meat.

Not because I have some ideological aversion to eating meat but because it’s generally unhealthy and expensive during these inflationary times. It’s also hard to get quality, healthy meats compared to run of the mill vegetable proteins like legumes and eggs.

Most vegetarians have a strong ideological component to choosing not to eat meat. I’m not one of them – I don’t get upset about eating meat, I don’t have mythical views of forest or the farm. In the real world animals die, often in really unpleasant ways. I like bacon, as a special treat but it’s not a daily thing for me.

A lot of people eat much more meat then I do. But I worry a lot about the high levels of saturated fats that are part of a meat rich diet. Omega 6 fatty acids are particularly bad for the body. A combination of alternative proteins like beans and lentils combined with rice can get you most of the way with complete proteins along with dairy products such as geek yogurt and cottage cheese – plus nutritional yeast. And I like milk in my coffee.

Animal agriculture has a lot of benefits to the land, it keeps it working, undeveloped and returns valuable manure to the land. But just because there is benefits to eating animal products doesn’t mean your diet should be dominated by it – rather it should be a portion along side a much larger plate of vegetables and fruits.