Haste makes waste

Hello Friends,

I am bad at planning, this leads to bad veggie outcomes:

In the interest of integrity and my own guilty conscience, I have to admit that I hate some meat the past week. (Insert: boo's, hisses, and throwing of tomatoes or hunks of cow flesh for my non-vegetarian haters)

1. I flew to San Francisco, CA for a week and forgot to pre-book vegetarian. The choice was throw the chicken piece away or eat it, I ate it. Second meal I had a choice with no meat, I took it. The really shitty chicken was not at all enjoyable, so I couldn't decide if I felt worse because of that (breaking the vegetarian thing for the worst meal ever, Virgin Atlantic is not all that great) or better (I didn't enjoy breaking the veggie thing).

2. In San Fran, I was at an amazing restaurant with my parents and brother that is owned by the husband of my former boss...it is awesome, you have to go when in the Bay Area, and you have to make reservations as well as it is only opened on the weekend and can only hold maybe 20 people max. Anyway, the point was it's hard to order the eggplant parm when you have the option of his specialty creole crawfish pasta, seafood etouffee, grilled Hawaiian fish that he has flown in daily from a fisherman friend there, or you get the picture (disclaimer: I see he is doing an exotic mushroom risotto this week, but I promise that wasn't an option when I was there---menu changes every week). Knowing the Hawaiian fish might be hard to justify, I went with his standard creole crawfish pasta. It was exquisite.

This brings me to the part where I suck at planning...

3. I came back to find that I forgot to use up my mushrooms and tomatoes before I left. So I threw away a whole pack of both as mold was growing on the mushrooms and the tomatoes looked pretty awful. That got me thinking that throwing away food may be worse than eating meat. This website has some useful facts and figures: http://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com (If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road.)

The whole rotten food thing brings me to point 4....

4. So it is Sunday and since the UK has some crazy law about making sure everyone is completely inconvenienced on Sunday, groceries stores (e.g. my local Sainsburry's) are only open from 11am to 5pm for instance. I wake up at 9am, too early to go shopping for the day so I start working at my computer...day passes....make some phone calls....pretty soon it is 5:15pm I realize I haven't eaten since breakfast (bowl of cereal with roommates milk--don't tell him), and am now starving. Also given point 3, everything I had that wasn't dry or canned is rotten or used before I left. So I mix together some lentils, kidney beans, onions, and started cooking....OK I also have to admit that I have been keeping weird hours lately, only had lunch on Saturday followed by beer for dinner and late night chips.....so I was feeling bad and more and more hungry....I spied the canned tuna I bought over a month ago. Well I assume you know what happened. I ate another animal, but do fish have feelings? The can said it was caught by pole and line and apparently tuna like it better when they die that way instead of being caught in a huge net :). OK so I need to look up carbon footprints for Tuna and for Crawfish, cause I really enjoy eating seafood.

Just bought: The unnatural history of the sea By Callum Roberts on Amazon to make myself do something about all this.

Cheers,
CpO