Eating For The Planet

Going vegetarian or even vegan used to be considered as promoting a greener, healthier individual lifestyle.  With global warming coming in faster than anyone ever imagined, it now may be a moral imperative to save the planet and human civilization as well:

"'The planetary health diet is based on really hard epidemiological evidence, where researchers followed large cohorts of people for decades,' said Marco Springmann at Oxford University and part of the commission. 'It so happens that if you put all that evidence together you get a diet that looks similar to some of the healthiest diets that exist in the real world.'

The report acknowledges the radical change it advocates and the difficulty of achieving it: 'Humanity has never aimed to change the global food system on the scale envisioned. Achieving this goal will require rapid adoption of numerous changes and unprecedented global collaboration and commitment: nothing less than a Great Food Transformation.'”

My New Year's resolution was to cut down on meat and go up on fruit and veg intake.

And I'm not sure if there's a harder place to do this than in South Korea.  Especially outside of more progressive cities like Seoul, vegetarianism just isn't happening.  Daegu has a couple of vegan joints with mediocre food and terrible service that happen to be run by a literal cult, so that doesn't help much either.  Indeed, the idea of a "salad" as a whole meal unto itself rather than a side-dish is anathema.

Baby steps, I guess.  There is a really good juice bar near my office, and I've come to like plain tofu with kimchi on top for a quick and very cheap lunch or dinner.  (If we're getting technical, kimchi is not vegetarian, but I think the food gods will forgive me if it's that or a can of Spam.)

So like everyone and everything else, I'm workin' on it.