The Environmental Ethics of Buying Clearance Meat

Eating less or no meat is one of the top lifestyle choices you can make to reduce your carbon footprint – the top choice to reduce your overall environmental impact.

But if your inner carnivore rules, then at least buy meat on sale. It prevents food waste while deincentivizing meat production.

Prevents Food Waste

Here in the USA, 40% of food is wasted. By buying and eating meat on clearance, you're preventing that meat from being thrown away. The water, land, feed, and fuel has already been sunk into that meat. Don't let it be trashed.

Deincentivizes Meat Production

At the same time, buying that meat doesn't signal the farmers, ranchers, meat packers, wholesalers, and retailers to raise and slaughter more animals. Grocery stores are the final profit maker on food. Industry profit margins average only 1.3%, so that clearance meat isn't earning them any money. While your purchase reduces their losses, it encourages the grocers to order less from wholesalers in the future, ultimately reducing the amount of meat produced and environmental resources used.

However, it's not a perfect choice economically. Grocery stores benefit from shoppers perceiving abundance on the shelves. They are willing to overstock a bit and take losses on a few items in order to attract customers. Ideally, they'd like stock to exactly equal what they sell, and have it all move over quickly. But a few items on sale are worth it to get close to that goal.

Sale items also attract budget consumers, who likely will buy other items that are not on discount.

Looking more deeply, discounted meat isn't always trashed. It's sometimes cooked into deli products, donated to food banks, donated to animal refuges, or reused in other was. So buying clearance meat doesn't necessarily keep it out of the trash. On balance, however, your purchase doesn't signal the marketplace to produce more meat. It's still a win for the environment.

Giving Up Meat Is Better

Many vegans don't eat meat for three reasons: environmental impact, animal welfare, and personal health impact.

Above, I've addressed the first consideration. But what I wrote applies to animal welfare as well. Signaling the market to produce less meat means fewer animals suffering.

However, the counter points are that buying and consuming meat at all has two negatives for the environment and animal welfare.

First, it normalizes meat production and consumption, supporting it's cultural influence. Don't underestimate this. Humans are "monkey see, monkey do." That's why public anti-smoking campaigns have included outlawing tobacco advertising to denormalize tobacco use. If eating meat became culturally gauche, it would reduce meat production and consumption far more, better helping the environment and animal welfare.

Second, seeing that people will buy meat at a lower price signals to producers and retailers to reduce the price of meat. They are encouraged to find even cheaper ways to produce and distribute meat, which might make the environmental and animal welfare effects even worse. (Lab-grown meat might counter this.)

As for personal health, eating less or no meat is good for your health. Healthier people have lower health care costs. Economic costs are coupled to environmental costs, so being healthier is better for the environment, too.

The Bottom Line

Going vegan would have the greatest positive environmental impact. But if you can't do that, go ovo-lacto vegetarian. If you can't even do that, eat less meat and buy your meat on clearance. You'll still be moving the market and the world in the right direction.

Making Tofu Is Too Much Trouble

Yesterday, I utterly failed to make tofu. It didn't set up. Don't believe I'm going to try again, either. There are too many steps and too much cleanup.

I'll stick with my homemade seitan, boiled beans, and soynut butter. I might try making fermented nut cheeses at some point.

Even though I'm moving back toward a plant-based diet for health and savings, I'll likely keep eating eggs, too. A lot of people say that they couldn't give up cheese to go vegan. For me, it's eggs, especially the orange-yolk pastured kind. Nothing beats a couple fried eggs with sourdough toast in the morning.

Maybe I'll get my own chickens at some point, but honestly, keeping livestock seems like a hassle. Except maybe mealworms. They're easy.

By the way, I was going to make tofu as a possible egg substitute, cooked with a little black salt for that sulfury note. But as I said, too much trouble. And no, I'm not going to buy tofu at the store. It's pricey and inferior in these parts.

We go as far as we're willing to go, and no more. Until something changes.

Saving Money Is My New Job

Two weeks ago, I quit a perfectly good job. Well, not perfectly good. Among the downsides was getting yelled at once or twice a day by customers.

But this isn't the first job I've quit in the last few years. It's the fourth.

The lesson here is that I won't probably won't put up with the bullshit of any job – and they all have bullshit – unless and until I'm completely broke and in debt.

I wish to put that day off as long as possible, maybe even the rest of my life. So my new job is saving money. In other words, penny pinching.

The good news is I'm in a great position to do that: I have investments earning money and own my house outright. The risks are recessions and unexpected expenses.

The bad news is that I can't pare down much more. The home taxes are what they are, and there are no cheaper homes, except for remote, rural land. The homeowner's insurance probably won't go down as I live on a pier-and-beam house at 22 ft. altitude in a hurricane zone. Utilities are trimmed, including phone and internet. And the auto insurance is down about as low as it can go. (Giving up the van isn't something I'm willing to do.)

Fortunately, I found a way to get nearly free health insurance!

That leaves food and discretionary spending. Solution? Cooking at home from scratch (even mayonnaise and jams!), growing most or all of my food, and becoming Mr. Garage Sale and Mr. Fixit for the rest.

I already stopped eating out in any way, shape, or form – even the $1 corn dogs and $1 soda refills at Stripes. Just as well. Don't need that crap in my life. And restaurant food is almost always worse than my own cooking.

Even so, I'll likely need to make an extra bob or two for those unexpected expenses. Sooner or later, I'll do some kind of little microbusinesses. Not sure what. Plenty of ideas.

Maybe the lifestyle I'm describing sounds extreme. Maybe it's not how you'd like to live. But Man, I sure prefer it to a job. They suck the life right out of me. Plus they cost the one thing I value most in life – time.

Sweet, Sharp Homemade White Vinegar!

Yesterday I got a happy surprise! As I was about to throw out my failed first attempt at making white vinegar, I gave it a taste. Turned out it'd come up sharp after all!

Making plain vinegar for household cleaning and canning is another of my many penny-pinching schemes. I estimate that a gallon of homemade vinegar, made from cheap granulated sugar, costs about $0.30 a gallon versus more than $3 a gallon at the store for white distilled vinegar. Plus I help Mother Earth by reusing my jugs.

The process for making vinegar is no mystery. You basically let air into alcohol to spoil it on purpose. Or you can help the process along by mixing in some unpasteurized vinegar, what they call a "mother."

But I found no instructions online for making plain white vinegar. Posts on homemade vinegar are mostly for wine, cider, and flavored vinegars. Not what I needed.

So what I did was create a roughly 10% solution of sugar in water by weight by mixing 1.5 C white sugar into 12 C (3/4 gallon) of water. (That's a 1/8 ratio by volume.) Then I added a tsp of bread yeast, taped a napkin over the opening to keep bugs out, and let it ferment about 3 weeks. Finally, I added some Bragg's unpasteurized cider vinegar and left it alone another month or so.

When I first tasted it a couple weeks after adding the mother, it seemed too sweet and not vinegary enough. I was tempted to throw out my failure, but I was busy and left it where it sat. Yesterday I was organizing the kitchen and about to throw it for reals out when, as I wrote above, I sampled it one last time. Sharp and oddly delicious! Perfect for cleaning or cooking.

A friend of mine who's expert in home fermenting tells me there's an easier way. She advises mixing some of my current batch at 1/3 straight into my 10% by weight (1/8 by volume) sugar solution and letting it do its thing. Should be much faster. I'll give it a try.

BTW, that picture at top is a Chinese classic, "The Vinegar Tasters." Check out the link. Interesting allegory.