Yesterday I went to the supermarket for the first time in two weeks, and let me tell you, I just about fell over from sticker shock. Meat was especially expensive, showing significant increases in only a couple of week’s time. The cheapest package of chicken breasts cost $3.99 per pound, and that was the kind I’ve come to call ‘nuclear chicken’ because it’s grown at a corporate farm and irradiated, shot full of god knows what, and sent to market before it even had half a chance to know it even was a chicken.

Normally I don’t buy nuclear chicken. I don’t want to eat a chicken that I know has been raised in a pen the size of a tennis ball can and pumped up with enough hormones to give it three beaks. I can’t feel good about myself if I eat something like that, plus, it scares me.

I’ve known since the 1970s that meat production is wasteful and expensive. Consider the following nugget from the British group VegFarm: A ten-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, ten people growing corn, and only two people producing cattle. 90% of the grain consumption of a person who eats meat goes into the meat itself, that is, it is feed for the animal. Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer estimates that if the US alone reduced meat consumption by only 10%, it would free up enough grain to feed 60 million people.

And consider this all of you Southwestern Americans: According to authors Anne and Paul Erlich, a pound of wheat takes 60 pounds of water to bring to market. A pound of meat takes between 2,500 and 6,000 pounds of water. So quit eyeing Lake Michigan and order a salad.

I’ve known meat is resource intensive and bad for the environment (more than a third of all fossil fuels used in America are used for meat production, making that cheeseburger you crave more polluting than the Hummer you drove to MacDonald’s to get it) for many years, but I’ve kept buying it and eating it because, well, I like it. Lots of people like it. Lots of people would eat meat if they could get their hands on it. But standing there in the supermarket holding a $7.62 package of nuclear chicken that I normally would not have purchased at one quarter of that price, I had a mini-epiphany.

Or maybe I just got a little nauseous. Epiphanies, nausea, it’s so hard to tell them apart.

Does it matter? The bald fact is that meat is going to get more expensive. A LOT more expensive. With corn and soybeans suffering badly already due to the severe flooding in the Iowa and other parts of the Midwest, look for meat prices to steadily increase, and then spike right off the chart in anywhere from six months to a year. I’m thinking, that would not be such a bad thing. Bill and I went to breakfast yesterday and he ordered a side of bacon. It was about the size of a couple of postage stamps. We laughed, but it isn’t really funny. And yes, it is changing our outlook.

Over the past couple of years, we have cut our meat consumption dramatically, not out of any sense of virtue or spiritual evolution or even environmental concern but simply because 1) we can’t afford it anymore, and 2) it’s disgusting. One of the many alarming practices in the selling of meat right now (and there are so, so many) involves pumping carbon dioxide into the plastic packages to keep the meat eternally bright red, even after it has spoiled. Turns out people are less likely to purchase spoiled meat.

Go figure. Picky ass people.

At present, about half of the weekly meals in this household contain no meat, and that is likely to increase dramatically as the cost of grain to feed the meat and diesel fuel to transport the meat rises. This is not a bad thing. As Americans we know that we eat way too much meat, much of it consumed at fast food restaurants that we drive to in cars that waste lots of gas. We know that it is very bad for us. We know that it is making us fat and sick. We know that it is hurting the rest of the world.

Reducing meat consumption is not that hard, and you don’t have to run out and buy a Yurt and start wearing hemp sandals or anything like that unless you want to; all you really have to do is stop eating meat everyday. It definitely will save you money.

Here are some meals we eat regularly that even most kids like, and contain no meat: baked macaroni and cheese (I make it from scratch), spaghetti with marinara or pesto and cheese, cheese pizza, refried beans (I buy the no-fat variety) and rice, sauteed mushrooms over jasmine rice (you can sautee any veggie you happen to like and put it over rice, and it makes a light, satisfying meal), stuffed baked potatoes, winter squash with baked apples and greens, cheese quesadillas, and bread pudding with raisins.

Socialist author Upton Sinclair wrote the The Jungle in 1906. The Jungle is an expose of the horrifying practices at meat-packing plants across the US at the turn of the 20th century. Sinclair wrote it not so much to encourage people to stop eating meat, as to show the need for labor unions and humane workplace conditions. One hundred years later, as if it were Groundhog’s Day, we are right back to the same place, same dangerous exploitive workplace conditions, same filth and squalor and poor oversight. Those poison tomatoes? Almost certainly a result of run-off fecal matter from meat-packing plants.

So, do vegetarians save more money? Well, yeah. And so much more.