“Mmm, tofu.”
That will soon be a more common phrase thanks to Meatless Monday and several other well-intentioned organizations. From now on there will be more vegan options in UF’s feeding troughs.
Of course, we can only hope that soon UF will cease to see any point in keeping meat on the menu on Mondays.
I mean, sure, vegan food sucks, but there’s countless benefits to counterbalance this fact, right?
First, meat is unhealthy. It’s full of fat and other animal byproducts and bacteria. No chance of mad cow without the cow, right? Sure, salmonella can be spread through peanut butter, but it’s meat that is the real problem, right? And, sure, you can easily purchase super-lean cuts of both pork and beef, but that would require personal responsibility and discernment. And sure, we get vitamin B-12 almost exclusively through meat, and, more specifically, the bacteria in meat, but let’s cling to that easy view of all bacteria being harmful.
Second, meat is unnecessary. What do we need meat for, anyway? Yes, it contains B-12, which, unless we take multivitamins or eat feces, we won’t get without meat, but what’s one essential vitamin? And yes, meat has complete proteins that contain all the essential amino acids all in one place, but hey, it’s probably more efficient to spend time, money and effort getting together all the essential amino acids piecemeal. Yeah, I’m almost positive it makes sense to figure out exactly what plants contain — which of the twenty essential amino acids — and make sure that you eat enough of them on a regular enough basis to ensure you won’t be malnourished.
Third, meat is inefficient. Surely the huge carbon meatprint I hear about is avoidable. It makes sense that, if cows eat corn to produce the meat we take from them, we can just cut the middleman and eat the corn ourselves. Never mind the fact that a huge portion of their diet is grass. Maybe grass is the next cilantro. Or we could just take the farmland that’s currently being used for livestock and grow corn on it, right? This is a perfect solution, disregarding the immense amount of development and unnatural measures it would take to convert current livestock land to crop land, rendering the trade-off basically pointless.
For all these reasons and others, it’s more than apparent that Meatless Monday has the right idea. My question is, why aren’t we going to fully meatless Monday? Or meatless UF, for that matter. If meat really is this bad and pointless, why are we allowing this scourge on our campus at all?
Shouldn’t we be looking out for our students, protecting them from the bad choices they may make?
Sure, we want college students to feel like they’re adults, but we can’t really trust them to make the right decisions — even the most basic ones like what to eat.
So, to the Meatless Monday folks, I say: Press on, fight the good fight for making other people’s decisions for them under the assumption that the average layman doesn’t have the time or wherewithal to truly know what’s best for himself or herself.
I mean, really, where would we be if we let people truly exercise personal freedom? Nowhere good, that’s for sure.
Nate Rushing is a UF political science student. His column appears every Thursday.
