I suspect for the average city-dwelling westerner the change in amount would require eating enough new greens and grains to make it look almost like turning vegetarian.

yup, like in many chinese dishes, the meat is almost token amounts, or in moroccan cuisine, stewed tajin of veggies together with a big old marrowbone.

~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~

If it's salted, dried and/or smoked on-site, it will keep for long enough to be transported by ship, which is not terribly energy-intensive. Good sausage or properly smoked and dried ham (not the kind of watery crap we get in Scandinavia) will easily stay both tasty and healthy for a month or two without refrigeration, as long as it is kept dry. Add vacuum-packing and a sterile processing environment, and you could easily push unrefrigerated lifetime into the range you need for intercontinental transportation.

And as long as it's produced on the same continent, there's the option of running an electric rail line out there and refrigerating it for transport using sustainable electricity production. Trivial? No. Cheap? No. But at this point in time, nothing about creating a sustainable industrial society is going to be easy and cheap - the window of opportunity for easy closed a decade ago, and the window of opportunity for cheap closed a decade before that, at least.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.