Do greens come under vegetarian food ? I asked for it at the cafetaria in my workplace and got the answer that the greens are cooked with pork. The person who was dispensing it knew I consistently chose vegetarian food from the menu and she offered this valuable tidbit of information. I had eaten those greens before(under the assumption that they were vegetarian) and had never seen any sign to the effect that they used meat in cooking it. I eat meat, though sporadically and enjoy it as long as it is cooked well. However, my selection of greens was under the assumption that it was vegetarian.
As far as I know, vegetarian food refers to those food choices that require body parts of plants. Meat includes all the food products that require body parts of animals. By that classification, greens are classified as vegetarian food. After all, it involves boiling greens, that come from plants ,and adding salt to it. What happens when the boiling portion is done with pork which comes from pig and as such represents meat ? Is the cafetaria under any obligation to clearly state greens contains pork ? What is such a food classified under ?
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced the current way of producing and distributing food on an industrial scale in US is seriously flawed and misleads the consumer. As Michael Pollan lays it out in the omnivore's dilemma, the industrial basis of food production and distribution in the US has made it into an unhealthy concoction of chemicals that perform the function of delivering calories without any regard to the health of the consumer and cost to the environment. In the process of manufacturing meat, the industrial producers have gone as far away from a sustainable model as possible.
You have corn farmers having difficulty farming their land with variety of crops, instead relying on corn to give them some return over initial investment. The farm subsidies provided from the US government helps a corn farmer eke out a better living than if they planted any other crop. The farmers produce more corn, than would be consumed by the population, and flood it into the market. The excess corn goes into feeding animals in feedlots which are then slaughtered to produce meat. That these animals do not have the constitution to digest corn is not a concern for the food industry. They inject the animals with chemicals that make it possible. The industrial mentality treats animals as machines that generate caloric content, in the form of meat, from a specified amount of input, in the form of feed. The food producer can reduce their costs by
(1) reducing the cost of input provided to the animals. Produce more corn and drive down the cost of input ever more. Corn farmers can always use the subsidy from the US government to make up any losses due to the low price of corn.
(2) making the machinery of the animal more efficient. If the machinery that is the animal body throws up a wrench in the industrial food production, treat it with chemicals so the machinery starts to work smoothly again at maximum, not optimum efficiency. Optimum efficiency would have to take into account the cost of serious damage that is done to these animals, physically and emotionally, due to their extended confinement and seriously out-of-whack feed in feed lots.
(3) spreading the usage of output from these animals to as many categories of end users as possible. If more corn is produced, find a market for that corn. Some of the corn is factored further to produce products like high fructose corn syrup that is ubiquituous in soft drinks.
The food distributor strives to reduce their costs by purchasing from food producers that have economies of scale which only encourages even more standardization of corn fed animals.
The over dependence on corn means that the end consumer is overloaded with it even when they think they are having food the way earlier generations did, only cheaper. How else could consumers gorge on it and put on oodles of flesh and fat that they, ultimately, pay the price for ?
As for my experience, I didnt expect to see greens contain pork. I stood there repeating, again and again, 'Why?'. All she could tell me was that that was always the way they cooked.
