Everyone Take Two Against CAFO Meat

Just the other day, I wrote about how to talk to restaurants about their meat sources. I wanted to expand just a bit on my thinking and address some comments I’ve heard on Twitter regarding this post.

I am a big fan of local food and of local businesses. If a restaurant doesn’t source their meat from an ethical source, but they do a lot of other positive things for the community, I’m still going to support them, I’m just not going to eat meat there. For example, there’s one restaurant in the University District that sent me a very nice response to my email. They were sorry that they didn’t yet source ethically, but thanked us for educating them about the issues and pledged to work towards ethical sources. Because they want to move towards ethical sourcing, and they are excellent community members otherwise, I am still willing to eat there, I will simply not order meat there.

As John put it in the comments to my previous post, this isn’t about berating the restauranteurs, it is about educating them about (or at least suggesting) better options. I’ve always believed in the old adage that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and I want restaurants to know that I realize that sourcing ethically can be more expensive so I’m willing to be a little patient with them if they are willing to be open and honest with me.

Now, onto the next steps. We’re working on a list of restaurants that source ethically. We’ll have the beginnings of a list posted sometime this week. We’ve also printed up business cards that we plan on leaving at restaurants whenever we patronize a restaurant that does not yet source ethically. Those cards read:

Thank you for an excellent meal. However, you may have noticed that no meat was ordered. I have decided that I will no longer eat meat from factory farms. I hope that you will consider adding organic, free-range, pasture fed, and hormone and antibiotic free meats to your menu. If you need help locating meat sources, see http://www.eatwild.com.

We’ve created a PDF of a sheet of 8 of these cards. Feel free to download the PDF and print your own. We’ll also have these cards with us at all times, so if you ever see us at a farmers market, flag us down, say hi, and ask us for some. If everyone who reads this post orders vegetarian and leaves these cards at just two local restaurants, we’ll go a long way to making our voices heard.

Note: We had an error in the URL for Eat Wild. That has since been corrected in the post and in the downloadable PDF.