You don't have to go vegan to save the world, just eat like a Mexican

Welcome to spring of 2020: the Coronavirus pandemic is raging and we’ve been in quarantine for over a month. While climate activists like me celebrate clean skies and waterways, repopulating wildlife and the sharp drop in pollution that has come from ceasing non-essential transportation, one alarming side effect is that massive amounts of food are being wasted. Mountains of produce, lakes of milk and millions of eggs are being destroyed, just as people plunged into unemployment and poverty find it harder to get the food they need.

Maybe because my parents endured poverty in childhood and they taught me to never waste food, I find this especially horrifying. What can we do to prevent these problems?

When I was growing up my grandmother Lalita had a small farm where I spent many vacations. It was a different world from our daily life in the enormous, cosmopolitan but poverty-ridden Mexico City. Grandma rose every morning at 5 to milk her cows and then led them to pasture in her neighbor’s field, who was happy to get his grass mowed and fertilized for free. My grandma drank raw milk, but she pasteurized and bottled most of it, then drove it around to neighbors who had children, a gift to them of the abundance in her life.

Lalita raised cows, pigs, chickens and the occasional goat or turkey people gave her in gratitude for her services. She was a country midwife who delivered thousands of babies, beginning when she was a newlywed in the 1930s in the wilds of northern Mexico, where my grandpa taught in a one-room schoolhouse, four days on mule from the nearest highway.

Grandma also kept bees. She wore no protective gear and never got stung. Lalita had an understanding with all the beings of nature. Her mother raised her as a Quaker, but she was a born nature mystic.

(Photo captions: On the left I stand with my younger sister, my mom and my grandpa in front of the entrance to the farm, Lalita´s concord grape blooming in the background. On the right, grandma Lalita and grandpa Luis.)

Although we've lost it to the drug wars, my grandma's little farm is suspended in my memory like a dragonfly in amber, untouched by time. If I close my eyes, I see the cobblestoned street that gave way to the dirt road, the spill of pink concord grape blossoms covering her arbor. Through the gate, over the irrigation acequia, was the carport where her talking parrot, Lorenzo, greeted us in her voice, and my grandpa sat in the evenings on his rocking chair to enjoy the evening breeze.

Outside the kitchen window stood an avocado, a lime tree, and the orange grove, with a hammock strung between two trunks. Down the path to the left, the chicken coop where we gathered eggs in the mornings. On Sundays grandma used to strut around, hands on her waist, “Which of you are we going to eat today?” Her deep love and understanding of animals did not stop grandma Lalita, so intimately familiar with the forces of life and death, from killing and eating them.

I must have been five or so when I first saw her pick up a hen that was past her egg-laying years, twist its neck, hang it up on the clothesline by the feet and slit the neck to drain out the blood. Then she submerged it in a huge zinc tub of boiling water and tore out the feathers. No hiding where our food came from.

Years later, a friend in Mexico City told me that until middle school she’d been under the impression that chicken breasts were manufactured in the back of the grocery store. I stared wide-eyed at her. How could she not know about all the blood and feathers?

Grandma's village of about a thousand inhabitants had two butchers. One killed a cow on Tuesday and a pig on Sunday, and the other killed a pig on Tuesday and a cow on Sunday. The agonizing squeal of the dying pig could be heard all over town. The entire village ate from these four animals. From bone marrow soup to brain tacos, from the steak that richer folks could afford to the scraps that the butchers threw out for the street dogs, nothing was wasted.

Lalita didn't grow a vegetable garden, she shopped at the verdulería down the street, but she also foraged. She fed us a variety of cactus and made exotic Tamaulipan dishes like pan fried yucca flower in tomato sauce. She was not above killing any rattlesnake that crept into her house and eating it, proudly showing us the rattle afterward.

All of these delicacies were the high notes of a variation on the basic melody of beans and corn. Grandma always had a pot of beans going. Whole beans the first day, cream of bean soup the next, and refried from then on until a fresh pot was made. Grandpa stood in line at the tortillería every day and was home at noon sharp with fresh tortillas, expecting his lunch.

One year I fell in love with one of my grandma's calves, a black beauty with huge eyes that let me stroke her glossy coat. I treated it like my pet all summer long. When fall drew near, two men showed up to load the calves into a truck. “They’re going to be fattened for slaughter,” grandma said.

I cried and railed and swore I would never eat meat again.

“You give the animal a good life,” she said, “And it sacrifices itself for you.”

I have to admit that my crisis was short-lived. I was no better than Fern from Charlotte's Web, making friends with Wilbur, the pig, while sitting down to a bacon breakfast.

Fast forward twenty years. I was living on a farm again. Founded as an intentional community by 60s hippies, Lost Valley Educational Center had a certified vegetarian kitchen. We were not allowed to cook or store any animal products outside of eggs and dairy in our fridges and pantries.

Community members ranged from ovo-lacto-vegetarian to hard core vegans and even raw-foodists. I had lived with vegetarians before, but this was my first time exposed to other, sometimes fundamentalist, food religions. Some avoided meat to avoid cruelty to animals, others were serious critics of the industrialized food production system, others eco-feminists who decried the exploitation of females for meat, eggs and honey and avoided leather shoes and beeswax lip balm.

I wasn't willing to give up milk, eggs or cheese, but I gave vegetarianism a serious try for a year. My main job on the farm was cooking. In no time I was leading kitchen shifts, cooking for conferences of up to 150 people. I mastered nutritional yeast gravy, made tempeh reubens, tofu paté, and one Thanksgiving I even tried a rubbery tofurkey.

Mostly I enjoyed pairing grains and legumes, as I was taught to do back home, and serving produce from of our vast and abundant gardens. But although I was eating 100% organic and local food of the best quality in the most nutritious vegetarian combinations, I gained 30 pounds, had low energy and felt perennially unsatisfied.

Toward the end of my year at the farm, there was an underground rebellion against the vegetarian/vegan factions. Julie, a woman in her 40s who'd been vegan for a while and had tried and failed to conceive a second child was told by her naturopathic doctor that if she wanted to have another baby she needed to eat meat. The doctor introduced her to the Weston Price Foundation and their food philosophy (detailed in the Nourishing Traditions cookbook), which recommends pre-industrial ways of eating, including raw dairy, fermented foods, meat, bone marrow and bone broths. Once she started eating this way, she got pregnant and had a healthy baby.

One day Julie invited me and other farm cooks to her house for lunch, and gave us an impassioned lecture about the benefits of bone broth, spooning the gelatin onto vegetables as if it were gold. I had to laugh, “Julie, you don't have to lecture me. I´d been eating like that all my life, until I came to this farm.”

The irony of having a vegetarian kitchen deepened as I learned about the farm’s need to import manure to enrich our soil. We had chickens and ducks, but local farmers who raised mammalian livestock gave us their animals' droppings so we could rot them in our compost pile for premium compost. The truth any vegetable grower knows is that you need animals to grow healthy vegetables.

I further understood that some humans like me, who have O type blood, are prone to diabetes and require animal protein and fats to be healthy. All of this evolved into a holistic vision where plants and animals, humans and soils feed and help each other.

There is no minimizing the pain of killing an animal for food, and goodness knows I’d eat less of them if I had to do the killing myself, but the way I was taught to eat in my traditional culture is to use meat sparingly, as a flavoring and nutritional addition to a diet based on beans, corn and abundant vegetables.

Eating this way allows my family to afford an almost completely organic diet, which protects everyone: our health, the soil, and the farmers who grow our food. I tend to buy inexpensive cuts of meat on bone, slow cooking them and getting the incredible mineral richness of broth. We still eat many vegetarian meals, but all of us, including my 3-year-old daughter, enjoy small amounts of meat and love rich soups and stews. I wonder if this way of eating helped me have a healthy baby at age 42.

Some people can thrive as vegetarians, but I am not one of them. When I hear the dictum to go vegan to save the Earth from environmental disaster, I think it is too narrow-minded. Large-scale industrial food production exploits people, depletes soil, poisons water, abuses animals and requires huge amounts of fossil fuels for transportation and packaging. This is true of the meat industry, but also of soy, nuts, and other cash crops marketed to vegetarians.

Maybe the mathematics of growing food respectfully, reducing the need to transport it over great distances, and eating animal products in small amounts is a more attainable way to mitigate the climate crisis. I think grandma Lalita would agree that two happy Mexicans are better than one reluctant vegan, and save the same amount of carbon emissions.

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Whether in vegan form or made with a big ham bone, this beans and greens soup is a staple of our home and certainly our quarantine. I'm sharing it here because my FB post about it got tons of likes and recipe requests. Yumm!

This is the vegan recipe: Sauté in olive oil 1/2 onion and 4 cloves garlic, chopped. Add 2 stalks celery and 3 carrots, chopped. Add 6 rainbow chard leaves and 6 collard leaves, cut. Add 2 quarts previously cooked beans (red kidney in this case) and water/broth to your desired consistency. Sprinkle with dried oregano and thyme, salt and pepper. Let simmer for 20 min at least. Finish off with fresh chopped cilantro 😊.

I cook my beans overnight in the crock pot, 8 hours on low, with plenty of water, some salt, a few cloves of garlic and a few sprigs of epazote (a Mexican herb that makes them more digestible).

For the omnivorous among you: I put a ham shank in the pot with the beans, and do not add any salt. It cooks all night until the meat falls off the bone. I then place the ham shank on a plate and separate the meat from the bone, cartilage and tough exterior. Sometimes I boil the bones and those other bits again with a dash of apple cider vinegar to get some extra rich super gelatinous bone broth. I freeze some for later and I add some to the soup.

En español: saltear media cebolla picada y cuatro dientes de ajo picados en aceite de oliva. Añadir dos tallos de apio, tres zanahorias y un manojo de acelgas o espinacas (todas la verduras en trocitos o picadas). Añadir dos litros de frijoles previamente cocidos. Agregar sal, pimienta, orégano y tomillo al gusto. Hervir y luego cocer a fuego lento 20 minutos hasta que las verduras estén blandas. Añadir cilantro picado y listo!