You don’t have to be a hardcore vegan to eat a plant-based diet (although you can be). There’s a whole variety of degrees people adopt phasing out meat from their plates. One kind is even called flexitarian for goodness sake. Seems pretty welcoming to us.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the introduction to 'Stuff You Should Know'?
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, and this is a good old-fashioned rootin' tootin' down-home episode of Stuff You Should Know.
Technical difficulties, please stand by.
Yeah, we're a good 20 minutes late, Chuck.
Man, because of, well, it's about to say me. It's not my fault.
No, it's not your fault. It's the computer's fault.
Not even. But who cares about computers? This is, I mean, this is probably literally the opposite of computers because we're talking about plants.
Yeah, yeah. I was going to ask you, old school, Chuck, have you ever eaten a plant?
I love living things, so I do not kill plants and eat them.
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Chapter 2: How does a plant-based diet differ from vegetarianism?
A lot of people say, like, you know, it really depends on how much you eat and a certain percentage, like maybe 80 percent of your diet is plant based. And that's easily Emily. She eats vegetables constantly.
She always has like a radish in her hand.
No, but just her meals like her meal. She'll cook like we try to eat the same stuff, but I don't want to sit down and eat Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cauliflower for dinner.
That's a plant-based diet for sure.
Yeah. But she'll throw some chicken in there and some fish. So she's sort of pescatarian plus maybe.
Yeah. Pescapoultry-tarian.
Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of terms for all this stuff. I didn't know about a third of these probably.
Yeah, they all seem to fall under the umbrella term, like you said, a plant-based diet. So like a vegan diet is a plant-based diet, but not all plant-based diets are like vegan diets.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What are the historical roots of plant-based diets?
So if you look back through time and you go back to, say, like Ireland in the 19th century before the potato famine, they were eating tons of potatoes. There were a lot of poor people in Ireland that were like, hey, we can grow potatoes. They have some vitamins and minerals. Maybe we can milk a cow and eat a little pickled herring. But other than that, we're eating lots and lots of potatoes.
Yeah, for sure. This was before the famine when a potato blight came. And when the Irish immigrants really started to come en masse to the United States in the 19th century, they were quite surprised at the abundance and availability and cheapness of meat in the United States.
And that apparently dates back to colonial times where colonists in, well, what would become the United States were eating more meat than the average person back in England. They were eating essentially the same amount of meat as elites back in the U.K., And that's the longstanding thing where meat consumption throughout history in most places is associated with a higher status, an elite status.
You're wealthier because it's always been harder to come by. Well, the colonies had a lot more land, so they could grow a lot more livestock and then hence eat a lot more meat.
Yeah. Had a lot more land, asterisk.
Right.
Well put. Yeah. Everyone knows what we mean by that. Yeah. And, you know, there's a who helped us with the original version of this. Was it Libya? No, Laura. All right. The claw. Dr. Claw. Dr. Claw. She dug up a graph basically about how Italians eat and.
Prior to, well, not that long ago, they ate what you would call the Mediterranean diet now, and they just called it what we eat because that's what's around here.
Right, the diet.
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Chapter 4: How do global meat consumption patterns vary?
Right. Yeah. And hey, what a great time to set up where countries are now, because remember those numbers I told you about the United States. We're going to walk you around the world, everybody. Not in the Wayback Machine. What do we call this? Yeah. When we're just currently. The Gophar Machine. Yeah. The Gophar and Wide Machine.
It still has that new imaginary machine smell in it.
Nice. Modern day, jump in the go far and wide machine and come with us at first to Africa. If you look at continent wide, the stat is about 65 grams, I'm sorry, 65 kilograms of meat per capita
I wonder about that number, because if you break it down for per country, South Africa, they eat about sixty five point two kilograms compared to, let's say, the Democratic Republic of Congo at just over four kilograms. Who's who's eating more red meat in Africa than South Africa to make that average sixty five?
I don't know. One thing that I recognized from researching this is that there are so many stats that are so different and estimates that are just so different and don't understand why it's so hard to track something like meat consumption. Like we've got that so commoditized that, I mean, I don't understand how we can't track it.
Even for the United States, you rattled off three different estimates for how much meat the United States eats. So who knows, Chuck, who really knows whether any of these numbers are correct or not?
Well, no one's ever asked me how much meat I eat. I could skew that. Oh, really? Have you?
Oh, I get that all the time. Usually because I have like a big chunk of like steak in my teeth.
No, no, no. I mean like an official study. Like I don't know how they do any of that stuff. It's sort of like weird black magic to me. But we do know that generally speaking, West African nations eat a little more meat. It's a little more meat heavy than East African nations.
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Chapter 5: How do religious beliefs influence dietary choices?
Yeah, some of the most famous ones are kosher. That's a big one where you have to actually separate certain kinds of food. Like you separate meat, you separate dairy. There's also like restrictions and guidelines on how animals are slaughtered. So it's not particularly vegetarian by nature, keeping kosher is.
But it makes you so much more mindful that a lot of people just eventually end up being vegetarian just by following a kosher diet. There's also halal is very similar. It has all sorts of permissions and bans and stuff like that on what animals can be eaten. But it's different in that, like, there's no shellfish allowed or birds of prey, but you can eat rabbits.
But they're both similar-ish in that you really have to pay attention to what you're eating if you are a genuine adherent of this religious diet that's being prescribed to you.
yeah and if you're wondering like well how does that affect the rate of vegetarianism in israel uh they are second behind india that's not the only factor of course but uh i think the the highest percentage of veganism is in israel too which is uh yeah that i don't know why that surprised me but it did Okay, good. Noted.
There's, I think, so this is another thing too, like a lot of people just end up being default vegetarians because of their religious diet. And another good example is the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church, which we talked about in our Hali Selassie episode, I think. They have 200 days a year that are considered fast days where you just can't eat meat, but you can eat plants.
So, I mean, for all intents and purposes, you're at least the majority of the year a vegetarian if you're Ethiopian Orthodox.
I wonder if 165 days a year they just party down on some steak.
Probably.
What, Seventh-day Adventist? It's not a requirement to be a vegetarian, but they're like, it's not a bad way to live. They kind of endorse it.
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Chapter 6: What are some practical tips for adopting a plant-based diet?
I can. I've done that dance, but I did not know that was a eating scale.
Well, so this guy in 1993, Dr. Kazim Maugi, came up with this way of doing it. It's been widely adopted, but I had no idea that's what it was called.
It's a great name. What I do, we host a lot of, especially in the spring and summertime, of people when we go to the lake and just at our house here. We throw dinner parties. We just do a lot of that kind of stuff. And aside from being exhausting, one thing... I'm just kidding. It's actually a lot of fun.
But one thing I do, and this goes along with like how you think about meat and how much meat you have, is I don't cook up like, you know, 20 chicken breasts if there's 20 people there. I cook up a bunch of, you know, whatever kind of cut of chicken and or steak. Sometimes I'll do a couple of meats and I will just I will slice it all up on a big platter.
And then you can just get a portion of something rather than saying, like, here's a gigantic chicken breast on your plate that you now feel responsible for. Right. And people seem to really like that, you know, like maybe I'll have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And then the rest is our veggie sides. Nice. Yeah. So that's a tip from Chucky.
Yeah. You should just set up a carving station and ask to see each person's thumb size.
Yeah.
That'd save you a bunch of money.
Totally.
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