Culinary Adventure
Animals kept for food production purposes are a large source of CO2 emission that contribute to climate change, especially due to the large scale distribution and packaging that is involved. I have been trying to reduce my consumption of animal based products to help reduce my carbon footprint as well as trying to source more food products locally. This also has the added benefit of helping reduce the demand for factory farming and will hopefully help lead to change in the farming industry in regards to animal welfare and help smaller family run farms.
By no means am I absolving corporations of responsibility for climate change. I went into more detail about that in a previous post you can find here. However, I do think we as individuals also have a responsibility to do our best to make choices that have a positive impact on our environment. I go into more depth on changes we are making at the end of the post.
I have been trying to start small and make at least one dinner per week that does not contain any meat. I chose dinner because I often already have breakfast and lunch that don't have meat so that wouldn’t have been as impactful, but I do want to switch to a full day without meat and expand from there moving forward.
This week, my wife and I decided to try tofu. Even though I had suggested it, I was slightly hesitant to try it. I feel like tofu has kind of been a dirty word until more recently. As a kid, I always remember people talking about it like it was a disgusting food that only people trying to be super healthy would eat. It seems like it has been picking up more steam lately; so, I figured since we are trying to reduce meat consumption, why not try the original meat alternative?
The first thing I think of when I think of a meatless dinner is noodles and vegetables. I think this is mostly because I have always loved hibachi and that is a staple of those dinners. We decided to make the tofu with a side of udon noodles and vegetables. We used a recipe similar to the salmon we made to marinade the tofu and to season the noodles. We decided to use broccoli and onions for the vegetables as those are our go-tos, but we regularly also use carrots and mushrooms.
The tofu was definitely the most challenging to cook. I hadn’t made udon noodles before but they were fairly straight forward. The tofu wasn’t nearly as straight forward. After marinating it we sliced it into 1/3” slices and I think this was our first mistake. The marinade didn’t really penetrate far into the block and I think it would have benefitted from being sliced before we marinated it to get the marinade fully saturated into the tofu.
After slicing the tofu, I tried a couple of different ways to cook it. The first thing I tried was putting a little bit of butter in a pan. This seemed to work decently but the butter didn’t quite get it as brown as I would have liked and the butter itself was burning very quickly. I decided to just cook some of it in a hot pan. This worked a little better as the tops and bottoms browned better but the edges were browning much faster and started to burn before I could get a good brown on the centers.
I think this is mostly because the marinade didn't get to the center so there isn't enough sugar content to facilitate proper browning in the tofu naturally. The last method I tried was shallow frying it in a little bit of vegetable oil. This was by far the least successful. The tops and the bottoms were soggy and not browned at all and the perimeter was just burnt.
Overall, though, it was a pretty good dinner. I didn’t mind the texture of the tofu nearly as much as I thought I would and it almost tasted like teriyaki chicken. I think I might try to incorporate tofu more to reduce my meat consumption. The recipe used butter so it is definitely not totally vegan but I have also been trying to reduce my consumption of other animal based products and I am trying to better source what we do consume.
I want to start off by saying I am one of those weird people who loves milk. I used to go through a gallon of milk a week by myself. Both because I am watching my weight and because I am trying to cut back on things like milk, I managed to reduce my milk consumption to less than a pint a week. I never thought I would be able to give up milk and I probably never will, which is why I am particularly excited about synthetic milk alternatives that are being worked on by companies like Perfect Day.
Perfect Day has created a way to make genuine milk protein without the need of an actual cow. This will allow for real dairy without the worry of animal cruelty, a significantly lower carbon footprint, and with a lot less water. I know a lot of people are skeptical about things like this, but this kind of technology is something I am super excited about. I think the next step is lab grown meat to fully replace animals as food sources.
These are lofty goals and they are probably far into the future so for now we have to do what we can. Along with reducing meat consumption, we are switching to a local farm, Maiden Creek Beef. We plan on placing an order soon so I will do an update/review once we do.
We decided to switch to a local farm for our meat so we can be more confident in knowing the animals are being treated humanely and it helps support small local businesses. We also plan on getting our eggs from a friend who raises chickens. Shopping locally also helps reduce your carbon footprint because instead of buying a product that was shipped across the country you are buying a product that only had to be shipped across the county. Whole Foods is a good place for this because they clearly mark the products that are produced locally.
I don’t think we should shame anyone into living a certain way; the goal should be to educate people on what is available and the impacts of certain choices. A lot of the time it is really hard to see the larger scale implications of seemingly simple every day actions. I think The Good Place had a really good point: modern life is so complex and convoluted that it is hard to know every implication of every choice you make. The only thing we can do is make the best choices with the information we have, afterall, we only have one Earth.
