A good point. A "pot au feu", for example, one of those traditional French dishes with meat and lots of veggies, used to be cooked on Sundays in the countryside. A temptative comment would be: "ah because it took a long time to cook?" (ps: takes over 3 hours), but the most probable answer is because meat was something you wouldn't eat very often, which you'd, for example, keep for church day.

Hey, maybe I'm on to something here. It would be interesting to note how religion and meat have been entangled in the past. And I'm not thinking about the Cathars, Buddhists, or even Japanese edo-era edicts banning meat, but about bans on meat in some parts of Europe during the Middle-Ages. I think there were some, who knows anything about this? Maybe some catholic ruler of France did this for some time, I have a faint recollection of something along those lines.

I wasn't thinking of the meat as the substitute. I was more thinking of combining the different plant foods. For example lentils has many of the amino acids missing in most veggis. However, here lentils and beans for a long time have been considered poor peoples food and thus avoided. Now with the meat scandals, BSF, hormons etc. even chi-chi restaurants start serving fancy lentil dishes again. I would say unless you live way up north, there is no real need for meat as a food source. I do not mind people eating a little meat, if they do it consciously and even with a little gratefulness to the animal that gave its life so that the human can live, or better in most cases just tickle his taste buds.

But for this you have to go back from intensive monoculture to extensive crop rotation.

It is clear what the CAP moneys should be used for, but just like with peak oil, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room because we're too focused on me, me, me, and my right to eat what I want when I want, and "our way of life is non-negotiable", yadda, yadda, yadda.

A little more churning and policy proposals on all areas will be flowing out of this blog like you wouldn't believe.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman