artifacts/incoming

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I don’t mind using meat for B12, fat, and flavor. I expect we will probably always have meat.

Just not so much meat.

Properly managed, wild deer, hog, fish, and bird populations could feed us some meat indefinitely. Not an industrial amount. Not a surplus. Just enough — bounded by effort, skill, season, and attention.

For me, that boundary looks roughly like this:

With a bow and arrows, I’m willing to take one (typically small) deer per year, two hogs, one turkey, some assorted small game, and a modest amount of fish from a farm pond. I don’t enjoy fishing alone in lakes, rivers, or oceans, and I don’t like shooting arrows at birds in flight. With guns it feels unfair — an almost unbalanceable force in an ecology — and bowhunting flying birds requires specialized arrows I don’t want to bother with. Bow fishing falls into the same category for me.

This isn’t a purity test. It’s just what I’m willing to do.

Taken together, that level of hunting produces on the order of 125–165 pounds of usable meat per year. Call it 150 pounds, generously.

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

Among the people I know, maybe one quarter enjoy hunting or would be willing to raise equivalent domestic stock. That feels like a conservative estimate, and it leaves plenty of slack for downtime, injury, bad seasons, or simply opting out.

So assume one hunter supports four people.

At 150 pounds per hunter-year, that works out to about 37 pounds of meat per person per year.

That’s roughly:

• Three pounds per month
• Less than a pound per week
• One or two modest servings, or meat used as an ingredient rather than a centerpiece

This aligns closely with how most humans ate meat for most of history. Not as an identity. Not as a default calorie source. But as something dense, valued, and limited.

Before going any further, I want to be very clear about something.

This is just my experience.

I have no idea how the rest of the world works, or how you live. I don’t know your land, your body, your culture, your history, your metabolism, your labor, or your appetites. I’m not trying to tell anyone what they should eat, how they should live, or what tradeoffs they should accept.

This is simply how I resolve my own ethics.

My own ethics, because as far as I can tell there are no universal ethics — only personal ones, worked out honestly (or not) within the limits of a particular life.

What follows is not a moral claim about meat. It’s a claim about me.

If, on average, I eat more meat than that — more than what this level of effort would provide when shared — then I am outsourcing something.

I’m outsourcing labor. I’m outsourcing risk. I’m outsourcing ecological load. I’m outsourcing the discomfort of killing, processing, storing, and accounting.

I might be paying for it with money earned in other ways, but money is just abstraction. It doesn’t negate the underlying work. It just moves it out of sight.

And here’s the part that matters most to me:

I don’t want to work that hard for meat.

That’s not a critique of anyone who does. It’s an admission about myself. If I didn’t have above-average income, I would not eat above-average meat, because I would not get off my butt and go procure it.

So when I eat more than this baseline, I’m not just making a dietary choice. I’m making an extraction choice.

That doesn’t make me evil. It doesn’t even make me wrong. It just means I should be honest about what I’m consuming.

If I choose to eat more meat than I would personally hunt, I’m choosing to draw from systems I am not willing to physically participate in.

Do it if you want. I sometimes do.

Just understand what’s happening.

For me, this framing replaces ecological abstraction with personal clarity. I don’t need perfect data. I don’t need global models. I don’t need to resolve what seven billion people should do.

I only need to know whether my consumption matches my willingness.

When it does, I feel grounded. When it doesn’t, I know I’m benefiting from distance — from other people’s effort, other people’s risk, and other people’s bodies.

That awareness doesn’t dictate my behavior.

But it does end the illusion that my choices are weightless.

And for me, that’s what ethics actually is: not a universal rule, but an honest accounting of what I’m willing to carry myself — and what I’m asking others to carry for me.