As a fellow American, I also just eat a few hamburgers per year. I actually prefer non meat burgers to regular, though I love high quality meat (though I don't it it very often). I like to primary source stuff and can't find a hard, verified number in my limited Googling, but as far as I can tell our consumption is incredibly low compared to the per capita average (over a hundred per year, into the multi hundreds per year depending on region). The key is not to get people who are eating 2 per year down to 0, but to get people eating hundreds per year down to, I dunno, 10? Either way we can picture a sustainable economy in which high quality plant based meals are cheap, and then everyone gets their high quality meat meals less frequently and for an amount of money that is commensurate with their ecological impact.
I'm naively asking this as someone from England, I can easily go to a farm nearby. Even though I live on the outskirts of a city there are numerous options within say 10 miles of me. I go to the farm and the chances are they have a shop selling fresh or frozen in season meat (as well as cheese, eggs, veg or unpasturised milk). I can get advice on cuts and cooking from the butcher there and it will cost 50-100% more than it would in the supermarket. It will also taste twice as good.
I don't do this that often, but it's a good experience, and I'd like to do it more in the future. Of course these places will mail frozen meat to your house too.
Is this kind of thing an option in the US? I'm pretty sure it's common in most of Europe still.
That’s really cool! I’m in the US, and the farms I have seen are so large, I don’t think a normal person could pop in and ask questions. I’ve never seen a building near one of these farms because the rows of vegetation goes on for miles it seems like.
That said, smaller farms and dining experiences are popping up all over. I feel like the local, craft experience has been really popular and is trending us back to seasonal, organic ingredients. I was just saying to a friend the other day that I feel like I don’t know what season anything is in because we can get so much produce all year round. We’ve started little veggie gardens in our yards and were trying to sus out what we could plant.
