So, why aren't you eating like this already?
Well, you probably cook like your mom and dad cooked.
And, of course, the way you're told to
by marketing people.
- ‘Where's the beef?’
- ‘Imagine a nice, juicy, lean pork roast.’
- ‘Beef, it's what's for dinner.’
- That looks f*ckin’ delicious.
I'm not gonna try and convince you
to be a vegetarian because I'll never be one,
but there's a different way to think about dinner.
- If you start to get kind of outside of this
traditional mindset of having a meat
and building some flavors around it,
I think the food can start getting
much more interesting.
- Why do this?
Well, if you're trying to conserve natural resources
like water, and you should be,
skipping a shower isn't gonna do much.
But how you eat could make a much bigger difference.
It takes about 100 showers worth of water
to make just one pound of beef.
So cut your beef consumption in half,
and that starts to have an impact.
- So maybe not everybody can buy an electric car
and maybe, you know, not everybody
can put solar on their house,
but everyone can change their eating habits.
- This is Hard Reset, a series about
rebuilding our world from scratch.
- When I went to culinary school,
the focus was always around cooking meat.
The emphasis was all about what’s the star on your plate.
- That's Laurine, professional chef by day
and home cook by night.
- When you go to a restaurant,
the menu description starts with the chicken,
the pork, the fish, the beef.
It's kind of ingrained into us to believe that we
need to have meat for our protein, for our wellness;
that meat kind of feeds our bodies.
And the problem is, especially in wealthier countries
like the United States, we're eating far too much meat.
- The average American eats over
every year.
And more if I can get away with it.
- The idea is how do you change that thinking
to really building on understanding
flavor profile.
So, without the meat you need to
kind of build on your flavors.
So you need to add some umami,
salt, sweet, smokey, spicy,
and kind of emphasize those flavors.
So you get the same satisfaction out of a meal
that you would if you had eaten meat.
- But how do you practically go about doing that?
Chef Laurine showed us how she does it.
Sometimes it does mean that meat is still the star.
There's just less of it.
- So, one of the things we're gonna do
is two chicken tacos.
There's chicken on the plate,
but there's also gonna be rice, there's gonna be beans,
there's gonna be sweet potatoes,
fresh tortillas.
- And she showed us you can get a lot more
out of something like a chicken
with just a little extra effort.
- We're gonna make a chicken soup
with garbanzo beans, kale, some onions, carrot, celery.
Take a whole chicken, boil it, make a nice stock.
Pick some of the meat.
Some of that meat might go into the soup.
Then we have this chicken that could go into
a chicken salad sandwich, some enchiladas.
One chicken, all of a sudden, is not for one meal.
It's been stretched out throughout
the week in many different forms.
- Or, it's rethinking traditional meat dishes
with a plant-based alternative.
- Instead of a pasta bolognese with sauce,
we're gonna do a pasta with Beyond Meat,
and it kinda looks like ground beef.
So this Beyond Beef also makes a great burger,
or you can make this into meatballs,
or you could flavor it for tacos.
- But it turns out veggies can also be a star.
She just cooks it with a little extra effort.
So it's not some boiled, bland thing.
- A play on what I would say a steak,
we're gonna do a cauliflower steak.
The idea is to keep all the stem part intact.
And so I have this on a pretty high heat,
just like if I was gonna be searing up
a piece of steak.
And over a little bit of farro and some spinach.
A Romesco sauce on it.
And so, this really is our vegetarian dish
where we're playing on the whole concept
of this big piece of meat on our plate.
But instead of being meat, it's gonna be cauliflower.
So now, meat is not center-stage.
There's kind of all these supporting roles,
and meat is just one of the many kind of
flavors on that dish.
- If you've noticed the weather is getting a little crazy
and wondering why everything is on fire or flooded—
well, it actually has a lot to do with
what we eat and how we raise that food.
You see, half the world's habitable land
is used for agriculture, and of that land,
That means fewer forests, more pollution, and less water.
And the animals don't seem to love it either.
- ‘Attack!’
- When we talk about animal protein,
when we talk about both the poultry world
and the beef world,
we really have kind of had a disconnect
from how intense those operations are.
- That's Merril,
cannabis consultant, and food and beverage expert.
- It’s not to say, “Oh, we should never run animals.”
Animals are actually good when they're done right.
They naturally graze that soil.
You want them turning it,
the manure going in, the composting,
you know, that's not a bad thing.
It's when you have them right on top of each other
and you're force feeding them,
and you're not, you know,
letting them have their natural way of living their life.
Every time you do that,
you're taking more out than you're putting in.
- To get rid of the most negative impacts
of raising livestock, you don't need to
eliminate meat consumption, just reduce the demand.
- The less demand for big factory farming
allows that to maybe start to regroup,
and become the future because we're
giving over to plants and vegetables,
which are much less stress on the animal,
less stress on the environment,
and not necessarily having to say it has to go away,
it just has to be a smaller impact.
- Food is nutrition
and it's interlinked with our planet's health.
So picture a scenario where people changed
how they thought about dinner.
And as a result, we cut our meat consumption in half.
We could return
square kilometers of land to nature.
Just for comparison, the area of the United States
is about 9 million square kilometers.
The benefits in terms of
reducing carbon emissions
and pollution would be incalculable,
but that's only part of it.
- Maybe just one day a week.
Maybe you have a ‘Meatless Monday’
and you start there, and you figure out what that meal is.
And once you kind of get comfortable,
you have that meal and you're like,
“Oh, I didn't even miss the meat!
I was fine.
I survived.”
- Human health benefits greatly
from more plants in our diet.
So you can add lower healthcare costs
and longer lifespans to those benefits.
- I look at food as agriculture.
I look at it as sustenance.
I look at it as a way in which we come together,
but also how we take care of each other,
and how we need to take care of the world around us.
- Your car, your light bulbs, your showers—
there's lots of things you can do to impact the environment.
But the biggest impact you can make
might just be sitting on your dinner table.
So anyway, what's for dinner?
I'll come over around six.
Come back next time for another episode
of Hard Reset.
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