Last night I found myself looking at my dinner and feeling pretty good about my choices.  Healthy, homemade, frugal and tasty.  Not to mention that it’s actual food.  When you live by yourself it can be awfully easy to fall into a diet of beverages and snacks.  I’m trying to be good about cooking for one, even though it seems kind of silly.

Here it is – dinner: (I promise there’s a reason for the detailed breakdown that follows.)

Plate Contents

Organic salad:

• Mixed greens
• Carrots
• Celery
• Snap peas
• Annie’s Goddess dressing (this stuff is so good!)

Homemade chili from the freezer:

• Ground beef (don’t remember the source on this – it was purchased a long time ago.  possibly ammonia beef – I’m trying not to think about that.)
• Canned tomatoes (probably organic)
• Green peppers (always organic because they’re on the worst veggies list)
• Onion (local and organic from the co-op)
• Beans (mixed bag, maybe organic?, cooked with half water and half homemade chicken stock)
• Spices

The portions fulfill my primary meal criteria of the last several years: less meat.  As you may or may not have heard, one of the most powerful changes an individual can make in their own lives to fight climate change is to eat less meat.  Conveniently, eating less meat is also good for your health and your wallet.  So the fact that my salad is huge and my bowl of chili is tiny gave me a warm fuzzy feeling.  Especially considering that I bought and prepared the chili for someone else, so this is really someone else’s leftover chili.  It’s not quite “free meat,” but it’s pretty close.  (Like how my head just rationalizes that away?)

Happy about the meat, I examined the veggies and stopped short.  Well shoot.  None of these things are in season here (I don’t think?).  None of these things are local.  They’re all organic, but industrial organic is its own animal these days.  Suddenly my dinner looked crummy to my consciously directed eye, because local and in season are also goals of mine.  I’m not leaping into being a locavore, but I’m moving towards it gradually and in an overly researched fashion.  Hopefully by the time the hubby gets home I’ll have the local thing figured out in a way that will make sense for both of us.

The thing is, I’ve read a lot about vegetarian and vegan diets.  And I’ve read a lot about locavore diets.  But I haven’t come across… well, anything at all about the two combined.

So here are my three new food questions as of last night:

• Is it feasible to eat both a locally sourced and a vegetarian or vegan diet, particularly in climates where there is a definite winter?
• If you are eating locally, is it even necessary from an emissions standpoint to eat a vegetarian diet?  Is it the nature of meat or is it CAFOs that make eating meat so bad for the planet?
• How does it balance out?  Non-local vegetarian or veganism versus locavore meat-eater?  (I am asking in terms of emissions only.  Clearly other issues such as community resilience and ethical treatment of animals factor into the overall equation.)

Anyone out there know the answers?

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