So we can just never eat meat again? Is that what all the science is telling us? Before you start gagging down fake bacon or eating your al pastor tacos behind a garbage bin on the other side of town out of sustainable food shame, let’s talk about the real problem.

Yes, beef is a hog when it comes to energy. And the Science News report correctly points out that it takes more energy input to output one pound of pasture-raised beef than it does a pound of feedlot CAFO Schwarzen-burger. Yes, the developing world is getting a taste for the cow, like blue jeans or Michael Jackson before, which could catapult the problem.

Don’t get hysterical! I just can’t blame those adorable sad-eyed critters. It isn’t the cow we need to nix. It is our centralized, monolithic, soulless food system. Sure, it takes a larger patch of earth and more calories to raise an animal on pasture. However, there are some benefits to many grass-fed operations that are more long-term, like biodiversity and sustainability. I know many ranchers that don’t fertilize with anything besides good old, nutrient rich poop.

The real energy suck in the beef industry is transportation, processing and packaging. If you want to save some carbon, help develop a local food system where animals travel relatively short distances to slaughter and then to butcher and then to consumer. Start a meat CSA! Buy a whole animal and start a garden and don’t drive to the grocery store so much, where you’ll be tempted to purchase other carbon-licious snacks.

And another thing: there ARE other animals to eat. As Science News mentioned, pigs are more efficient on feed and in breeding. They also yield more edible meat from the carcass. Eat some lardo, save the ozone. But there are also lambs and goats and chickens. According the USDA, Americans ate 28.1 billion pounds of beef in 2007.We eat about 100^th of that amount of lamb every year. If we diversify our meat choices, we would choose animals that are naturally less energy intensive and destructive than the Almighty Cow.

When I worry about the Third World being as gluttonous as us, it isn’t ribeyes that dance in my mind, it is factory farms and processing plants the size of small cities. The ‘blanding’ of our taste away from meat with any flavor is part of the institutionalization of a food system where everything comes from some other place. A place where styrofoam gently encases every machine-cut morsel.

Of course, it is crucial that everyone, from policy makers to home cooks, thinks about the implications of our food choices. That is a bedrock of the sustainability movement. And I encourage the discussion of whether, on a commercial scale, grass-fed beef is viable.

In the end, though, I think we tend to worry so much that a good idea isn’t perfect, in the meantime continuing to do something we know is bad. On my ethical calculator, I end up with the following equation: buy local from someone you trust who treats their animal with respect + cook all parts of the animal to value it’s contribution to your well-being = a hell of a lot better choice than anything from a feedlot.

Diversity is health, in living things and in solutions. Grass fed practices may not be the only right solution for a hungry world, but are one part of a better world.

Buying whole animals might sound macho. It might bring to mind flikr photos of smug carnivores committing heroic feats of nose-to-tail cookery, and mewling over every last, high-stakes moment of it. (And to folks that tackle 500 pounds of beef with such gusto, I raise my PBR beer can in congratulations.) But unless you require such theatrics, the process does not need to be so excessive.

My confidence has been hard earned. For over a year and half, Ethicurian blogger Bonnie Powell and I worked to create a whole-animal purchasing model that we used to divide animals we bought directly from farmers into pre-purchased ten- to fifteen-pound shares, distributed through what we called the Bay Area Meat CSA. Over grueling months as a two-lady distribution-company—during which we realized that meat CSAs should really be administered by farms—we seeded ranch-based CSAs and developed a system that kind of, well, worked.

Now that a few fledgling meat CSAs have used the tools we developed, with the help of Slow Food Berkeley, I am trying to put our model online. If it works, the web-based toolbox (meat 2.0?) should relieve some of the trepidation (and drama) associated with the process of buying something nose-to-tail.

Buying an animal “whole” means that you get the total weight of one animal (not the whole hanging carcass and a hacksaw). When you buy all of an animal, you pay one per-pound price for all of it: three dollars a pound, for instance, for the chuck and the brisket and the flank and for the strip steaks and t-bones and filet mignon. And it shows up cut and packaged, just like it does to the grocery store.

Here is how it works: The new site represents an online community, still called the Bay Area Meat CSA (bamcsa.ning.com). It is a “Ning,” a free social networking site with easy-to-use message boards and forums. Once people have become members of the site, they can look along the home page’s left margin and find a “group” of concerned meat-eaters in their neighborhood. The rest of the site is dedicated to templates: butchery specifications, cut-descriptions, worksheets on which to divvy up meat, and local meat resources: ranchers, slaughterhouses, recipes, and helpful hints.

When Bonnie and I created our CSA-modeled buying group, the idea was to help people without big freezers get city-apartment-sized quantities of locally-raised meat as inexpensively as possible. People who had invested in their own industrial meat grinders and walk-in coolers, we reasoned, were able manage a quarter cow or half pig, the smallest quantities many ranchers sell. So we geared our model toward people who would only be able to buy direct if they shared with a lot of neighbors.

Our theory was that if we could give butchery instructions to ranchers, emphasizing a need for everything in as small and many cuts as possible, and create broad categories into which we would separate the cuts, we could divide anything up, more or less equitably, among members.

No matter how you butcher a cow, or pig, or lamb, there are always approximately the same percentages of cuts on them: whether a butcher chooses to grind it into hamburger or cube it for stew, about half of any cow is pretty tough stuff trimmed from other, more tender muscles. So every share we made would contain about half of that tough meat. The rest of the cuts we organized according to ease of preparation instead of their perceived values. For cows, all steaks went into one category (for pigs, all chops, shoulder chops, and sirloin), all two-pound roasts for braising into another, and all smaller braising cuts into another. If one share got only flank steak from the first category, we would try to make sure it also got short-ribs, an easily recognizable and recipe-friendly cut.

It worked. Dividing cuts of meat into the categories that we did enabled us to split a 500-pound cow into fifty small shares, instead of requiring Herculean meat-eating of any of our members. When we finally gave up the ad hoc distribution business, I vowed to make our lessons open source, so that people who had gotten accustomed to shares of local meat could repeat the process themselves.

On January 10, at Leo Cotella’s produce stand at the Oakland produce terminal, Slow Food Berkeley launched our new social networking/meat instructional/revolutionary meat-purchasing guide site. Its sixty members are already organizing whole-hog purchases and coordinated chicken pick-ups, and most of them have only met online, even though they live doors down from each other. We are hoping the very commonness of it all—the absence of fireworks or double-dares—gives it enough fuel to take off.