The Centre of the Plate

'Meat being the centre of the plate...'
 Hormones? No hormones? John van Tiggelen, Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend, February 26th

I had finished one of my Sri Lankan cooking classes this morning and had had my usual rant against the practice of running menus with an overwhelming preponderance on meat dishes as opposed to vegetable dishes by South Asian restaurants as I've encountered them in Australia. I do this because (a) it's so clearly an unbalanced representation of the balance of food at any meal in most South Asian households in my experience and (b) it usually means that the veg options are limited to 'Western-friendly' vegetables - potato, peas, eggplant, dhal, spinach, and tomato - which again is vastly underepresentative of the vegetables that appear in home meals in South Asia - beetroot, melons, bitter gourd, pumpkin, beans, and greens, greens and more greens.

I once did a survey of some 64 South Asian restaurants in Australia, mostly in Sydney where I live, using for this latter menus of all restaurants listed in the 2005 Good Food Guide and the SBSGuide (in its day the only useful guide to eating 'ethnic' in Sydney) adding in menus from restaurants in the same local areas as those in the two main lists. In all but a handful, the proportion of vegetable dishes to meat dishes (counting both entrees and mains) was never more than 50:50, with some as low as 30:70. [You can read the full article I wrote on the status of food in South Asian restaurants in Sydney at Friday Night at Faheem's http://www.buthkuddeh.com.au/index.php?pageid=3499


But it's not only in these restaurants that this re-balancing is happening. Economic writers - food oriented and otherwise  - point to the demand for meat, meat and more meat by the growing middle classes in India and China as a significant factor in the rise in food prices in the last years. This, the writers say, is just another round of the typical progression in diet as one progresses up the class ladder in any society (wow, how old is that term!). With this shift also come diet-related health issues like obesity and higher incidences of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, granted not all, and no only, related to shifting to a higher proportion of meat in the diet.


Now, I am not a vegetarian or vegan, as past blogs will have shown. I enjoy eating meat, but I have never believed that a meal to be satisfying has to have meat at its centre. As I read more about where putting meat at the centre of a plate is leading in terms of its impact on foodways generally (for example that 55 square feet of tropical rainforest is consumed in every quarter-pound of rainforest beef, or that 80% of all the corn grown in the US is eaten by livestock, or that nearly half the water used for all purposes in the US is used to water livestock - see http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/09/how-to-win-an-argument-with-a-meat-eater.html for more of the same) the more I accept that those of us who are committed to food sustainability and security ought to argue for downsizing that hunk of steak and pushing it out to the margin of the plate, and even off it entirely more meals than not.