What to Eat: Practices

One way to eat in a more healthy and holy way is to cut back on your meat intake. This is a difficult one for me, because I have always loved meat. There were years in my childhood when I ate very little besides the meat offering at each meal. I still, to this day, crave meat more than other types of food. And, if I wanted to, I could eat meat at every meal, because these days, I have easy access to affordable meat. In the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father kills the fatted calf to celebrate his son’s return. That is a big statement of the father’s excitement. Killing a cow was a bigger deal in years passed, because it was just harder to get your hands on meat like that. Today, we are at no shortage for however much meat of any kind we want.

The dilemma is that too much meat is not just bad for our bodies. It takes far more grain to feed a meat producing animal than it does to make bread. That grain that goes into producing a hamburger or pork chop or chicken breast could be used to feed far more people than its meat counterpart. Also, lots of land has to be cleared for pasture for these animals. That is land that could be oxygen enriching forests. We are disconnected from this, because most of us have no involvement in the process of getting the meat we eat until we buy it. Like in the prodigal son story, meat eating has been much more of a luxury in the past. Meat is much more difficult to produce whether you grow the animal or hunt it.

So, think about that the next time you order a hamburger or have that cold cut combo. Appreciate the difficulty that is involved in getting meat to your plate. Thank the God who created life and set this cycle of life into place. Celebrate like the father that you get to eat in such a way.