Having your pork and eating it too: The Wastivore's Manifesto

In February of this year, I became a vegetarian. This decision quite surprised my friends, who’d known me as an enthusiastic devourer of all things heterotrophic. They predicted that my new convictions would prove ephemeral; in defiance of their doubt, I vowed to stay strong, to unilaterally reject all things furred, feathered, finned, etc.

History vindicated the haters. Though I held out for the rest of the semester, my resolve weakened as soon as I returned home to a fridge perpetually stocked with delicious, fleshy leftovers. With no critics around to observe and comment upon my hypocrisy, I put the microwave through its paces; spaghetti bolognese, chicken tacos, and broiled salmon fell prey to my furtive cravings.

But though I violated my original principle, I began holding myself to a new one: the meat I ate had to have been prepared and purchased on someone else’s behalf, and, sans my intervention, be destined for the dumpster. In short, I ate only waste – a diet at once both narrowly specialized and all-encompassing. No meat was off limits, as long as it was at least a day old and congealed in a Tupperware.

Trying to decide how this wallaby would taste in a stale casserole.

I termed my new policy wasteatarianism, and nicknamed its practitioners (for, optimistically and/or arrogantly, I believe that there will eventually be more than one) wastivores**.

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Perhaps oxymoronically, the central tenet of wasteatarianism is a hatred of waste.

The Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation is the most wasteful institution humanity has ever devised. I’ll leave the proselytizing and statistics-reciting to Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Eric Schlosser, and other great food industry writers (and I’ll leave, too, the animal rights arguments to Peter Singer – that’s a very different, though also critical, story). Suffice to say that industrial meat wastes water (by polluting and expending it); soil (by eroding it); forests (by clear-cutting them); arable land that could be used to feed humans; and fossil fuels. These modes of misuse – each a disaster unto itself – are together major contributors to climate change, the process that is rapidly laying, yes, waste to our planet. To this wastivore, it is apparent that to support industrial meat is to participate in the degradation of the earth.

But what does it mean to support the industry? A vegetarian would contend that it’s the eating that fuels the meat factories, and, insofar as the factories exist to feed us, that’s true. But that contention isn’t quite accurate: it’s the buying that powers the industry. CAFOs are sustained by the money you give them; once that money is in the industry pockets, whether the buyer actually consumes the meat is no longer germane to the industry’s success.

The scrupulous wastivore, then, never buys meat, a principle he shares with the vegetarian. Where their dogmas diverge is that the wastivore has no qualms about eating meat bought for another person’s benefit: the damage was done when the meat was purchased, and consuming it cannot possibly inflict further environmental harm. As long as the wastivore was not the original intended recipient of the meat, the remnants of that hapless chicken/cow/pig are fair game. The wastivore, in summation, neither buys meat in stores nor orders it in restaurants; but partakes freely in most other situations.

The true wastivore would never have helped prepare and eat this fresh chicken;
instead, he would have waited for it to be frozen, defrosted, and microwaved
up to six months after its creation.

Many critics of wasteatarianism have questioned whether eating leftovers merely rationalizes omnivory for persons too weak-willed for vegetarianism. To those people I say, guilty as charged. But the policy also confers a legitimate environmental benefit: by consuming leftovers otherwise destined for disposal, the wastivore is reducing his need to consume other, potentially wasteful goods. Although meat is the most prominently and disgustingly wasteful form of agriculture, industrial cropping isn’t much better. The epic transportation, petroleum-based pesticides, and habitat destruction associated with fruits, vegetables and grains are appalling; even tofu, that staple of vegetarianism, is culpable, guilty of Amazonian deforestation for sake of soy beans. Thus, when the wastivore fills his belly with a week-old Jamaican patty instead of a mango that has traveled 5000 miles, he has significantly minimized his footprint.

Just as the wastivore does not embrace all plant products, nor does he reject all fresh meats. Locally-grown, pasture-raised, non-modified meat is a perfectly acceptable and efficient form of nourishment (with the exception of cows, which will always be a poor use of resources). The wastivore, in fact, avails himself of local meat freely, secure in the knowledge that, by supporting a local farmer instead of a CAFO, he is contributing to America’s ultimate transition away from industrial livestock.

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Although I am wasteatarianism’s inventor (sorry, freegans), I am hardly a devout practitioner. I am – as any refrigerator that has ever been blighted by my presence can attest – an avid consumer of all things aluminum foiled, Saran-wrapped, or Tupperwared. In my purchases, however, I fall short of the true wastivore’s standard: I order fish in restaurants; eat avocadoes and bananas with reckless abandon; and lately, have even been known to buy the occasional wad of turkey. (In my defense, my only source of protein for ten days has been peanut butter.)

Still, I’m trying to practice what I preach. Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has inspired to make more considered food choices, and I have no doubt that my upcoming time at Hell’s Backbone Grill will further propel me to expand upon, and maybe even adhere to, the wasteatarian doctrine. Until then, keep hitting those refrigerators.

And remember the wastivore’s mantra: When shit happens, eat it.

The sacred text of the wastivore.

** There’s an interesting, and substantial, semantic difference between wastivore and wasteatarian; if you don’t believe me, call a vegetarian an herbivore and prepare for the protest. The suffix -vore means “one that eats,” and typically refers to the uncalculated feeding ecology of animals. The suffix –arian, on the other hand, implies a doctrine or set of principles. Therefore, wasteatarian actually describes me with more precision than wastivore, though the latter is also apt. I’m a wastivore only because it’s easier to say and spell, and because it allows me the Michael Pollan pun that is the title of this blog.