Asparagus Seaweed Pasta

I went through a seaweed phase a few years ago and while I no longer add it to everything, I do still enjoy it as an Earth-friendly, tasty ingredient. So it was disappointing when "Creamy Asparagus Pasta" (NYT Cooking; subscription required) did not have a distinctly seaweed flavor, despite the claim in the recipe description that "umami-rich seaweed stars twice".

The dish (which I made with gluten-free elbow pasta) tasted fine, but I don't really need to be consuming all that fattening cream from greenhouse-gas-producing cows, especially when I could add seaweed to a similar yet vegan recipe, as I suggested back in 2020. And that vegan recipe requires no subscription, so check that out. Off you pop, as my fellow Brits might say.

In cleaning up my email inbox recently, an exercise in futility that I do from time to time, I came across a 2022 edition of The Guardian's "Down To Earth" newsletter with some great and still-relevant stats about why it's important to minimize meat and dairy consumption. 

Author Damian Carrington wrote: "It’s unlikely we’ll end the climate crisis without tackling the vast environmental hoofprint of livestock....We already knew that cattle and other livestock use 83% of the world’s farmland for pasture and fodder, while producing just 18% of protein. In rich countries, 70% of food-related emissions come from livestock. What the new study shows is that if people in developed nations adopted a healthy, low-meat diet, a huge amount of carbon dioxide could be sucked out of the air by letting farmland revert back to natural forests and grasslands....the study did not assume everyone in the 54 nations analysed all went vegan, Instead, they used the 'planetary health diet', which allows a beef burger and two servings of fish a week, plus some dairy products every day."

It is this last part--we don't have to cut out animal-based foods entirely--that is so heartening, because as you know, I have always thought meat is delicious.

My Facebook "memory" today

I still eat meat on not-rare occasions, mostly as a treat when I go out to eat, and yes, that's partly and sadly because such a low percentage of restaurants offer good vegetarian entrees. At home I am pretty solidly vegetarian. If more of us chose the "planetary heath diet," we could slow down the rate of climate change. Presumably you saw headlines this week like "World likely to breach 1.5C climate threshold by 2027, scientists warn" (again, from The Guardian, which does a stellar job of reporting on the climate crisis). 

This sign, from a climate march I attended in Bristol, England last November, refers to the best-case scenario of keeping global warming to a maximum of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial-era temperatures - a goal that is rapidly becoming unattainable because people are failing to make changes sufficient to address the crisis.

To avoid leaving you with a heavy heart when you consider what the world is going to be like when the kids in that picture grow up, I'll also share this amusing picture I took last week. Raise your hand if it never would have crossed your mind to lean on the button, but now ALL YOU WANT TO DO IS LEAN ON THE BUTTON. 🙋