"Lunchtime!"

So far in this blog I've laid some of the groundwork about my personal food commitment and have tried to explain my reasons for those decisions. This blog is not meant to be an instructional guide for others; I'm not well practiced or interested in preaching. But I'm absolutely thrilled that people are reading and commenting and that it's generating discussion. My initial aim for the blog was to chart and track my own challenges and triumphs with my sustainable food commitment. I'm just warning you - not every entry is going to be a well turned tome on the rights and wrongs of the food industry.

So. My recent food pitfalls.

Buying ethical meat is easy enough. Once you find the right places to shop and accept the fact it's going to cost you more, it's all pretty standard. We cook a lot less meat in our house than we used to, and when we do we can feel fairly confident that it's ethical.*

My weak spot is buying food when I'm out and about.

I buy my lunch almost every work day, and in Richmond we're spoilt for choice. I'm surrounded by heaps of delicious, affordable food, and generally the temptation for something yummy (and animal based) overrides my goal to be ethical. There's the delicious Vietnamese where I love the vermicelli with chilli and lemongrass seafood – prawns and god knows what (but surely unsustainable) sort of fish. There's a place that does a terribly fancy chicken and celery baguette that's to die for. Sometimes there's a sneaky pie. Sometimes there's the green chicken curry from the Thai place next door that's oh-so-delicious and only costs $7.50. Yum! I love lunch time! I always have. As a little kid when I was asked my favourite thing about school I would always say “Lunchtime!” (If pressed further I would say “Hometime!”). Not much has changed.

But the upshot of all this delicious food and this constant want for protein, is that I fall short of my sustainable food commitment almost every day around noon.

What to do about it?

My options are:

1. Blanket rule of no animal protein except at home.
2. Ask about the animals they use. Maybe the fancy chicken baguette does use ethical chicken. It would certainly explain the cost, and maybe then I could eat it guilt free (except for the tonne of calories in the ever-so-delicious mayonnaise).
3. Become vegetarian altogether so I don't have to think about it all anymore.

I grapple with all three options and have not found a comfortable place to land.

Certainly I should eat less animal protein. It's crazy how many animals we put down the little red lane every day. Surely one serve is more than enough. There are plenty of places in the world where animal protein is a huge treat and sometimes only enjoyed once a year. But we seem to want to shovel it down at every sitting.

The problem is that vego options at lunch time are so unappealing. I'm more than happy to cook vegetarian at home. But if I do that, then I'm not supporting the ethical meat business and am probably making bad, ill-informed choices while I'm out. My best bet might be to prepare my lunches at home. That would be great for the hip pocket too. But frankly, I'm too lazy. Actually, lazy is not really the right word. Because of my illness, I have incredibly limited energy. Going to and from work and cooking an evening meal takes everything I have. By the time dinner is over I'm exhausted, in pain, and need to go to bed. Mornings are also a painful and exhausting time, and have the added rigmarole of taking a gamut of drugs, so it's hard to find time and energy to pack a lunch - even when it's just scraping leftovers into a container.

Sometimes because of bad health our dinners at home are a kinda scant affair... so at lunchtime it's a big treat to have a cooked meal put in front of you with no preparation and no cleaning up. Giving up lunches is going to be hard. So maybe concentrating on options 1 and 2 is the way to go.

Dilemma. I'm tired. And Rambling. You were warned.

* With little regulation around labelling things 'free range', I'm very sceptical of some chicken at the market or some butchers which claim to be free range but are at a comparable price to the regular chicken. Need to do more research about this.