beans

I was wondering in an idle moment, of which I have an abundance, what the total effect of substituting beans for meat would be. I don't mean just for me, but for everybody everywhere, all the time.

Vegetarians frequently cite their desire to be kind to animals by not eating them as the primary motive for their dietary restrictions. But there's a more practical reason to eliminate meat, or, at the very least, pork and beef, from the menu. The Scientific American reports that "according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), our diets and, specifically, the meat in them cause more greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and the like to spew into the atmosphere than either transportation or industry." What we're looking at is warming due to deforestation to open up grazing land and the heat produced by fecal contamination, not to mention the price paid in transporting millions of animals and industrially processing them into meat.

The world's billions of cattle also belch and fart constantly and prodigiously, releasing enormous amounts of methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So the price of that hamburger is higher than you thought.

But wait! There's more! There's also cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Now how much would you pay? By substituting pinto beans for steak at dinner time, you'll eliminate an unhealthful dose of cholesterol from your diet and simultaneously add a significant helping of fiber. Some researchers, such as Mark Brick of Colorado State University, actually suspect that certain varieties of beans might contain ingredients that actually help prevent cancer and diabetes.

This becomes a political issue when you think about the possible savings in our enormous annual expenditure on medical care, which most experts agree is the single most critical element driving the ballooning national deficit.

Considering all this, here's tonight's menu. For one person, steam 1/2 a cup of brown rice. In another pot, boil 1/2 a cup of washed pinto beans. The rice takes about half an hour, the beans two hours. During the last 20 minutes of cooking, add six to eight ounces of fresh organic spinach to the beans. Then as you're eating it, consider all the implications of such a diet if 95 percent of the people on earth followed it all the time.

And one more thing -- if and when you do eat meat, keep in mind that chicken husbandry produces about 1/13 the environmental impact of an equivalent amount of pork or cattle raising.

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