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In reply to the discussion: Is vegetarianism dead? These days it seems you have to go full vegan to show you really care [View all]hunter
(38,485 posts)If a person has secure housing they can buy rice and beans in bulk quantities.
Even though I can eat any kind of food I like these days, I always get anxious if I don't have a stash of rice and beans in the cupboard.
At my poorest I had rice, beans, and cheap government subsidized powdered milk. To that I'd add whatever I could scrounge. Hot sauce packets left on the table at Taco Bell were one of my favorites. Living in California, discarded and surplus fruits and vegetables were not difficult to come by. Sometimes I'd get eggs. Meat was a problem because I often didn't have a refrigerator. I'd make my own buttermilk from the powdered milk.
When I was a kid our family lived a year without a refrigerator so I wasn't unfamiliar with a no-refrigerator diet.
A couple of days ago I realized I'd eaten rice and beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. For breakfast I had Rice Chex and soy milk. For lunch I had a rice and bean burrito. For dinner I had chickpea masala with rice.
I'm mostly vegetarian to reduce my environmental footprint. My wife is vegetarian approaching vegan.
In my extended family we've got everyone on the spectrum from militant meat eaters to militant vegans. I can cook for them all.
Pork is only cheap if you discount the environmental and ethical costs of factory farms, or if you kill a pig yourself, the hours spent preparing and sharing it.
When there were less than five hundred million people living on earth a diet high in animal protein didn't have the same environmental impacts as it does with seven and a half billion people.
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