How I eat now

I gave up eating meat 16 months ago. At the time it was an easy choice. I was living in Rishikesh, India, a religious town on the banks of the Ganges in the foothills of the Himalayas that is a magnet for millions of Hindu pilgrims and one of the few places on earth where you can be arrested for eating a hamburger.

My initial anxiety about adopting a meatless diet quickly gave way to gratefulness for the opportunity to live out a set of values that I had held for some time but never had the courage to substantiate. I had long agreed with the strong arguments against eating industrially produced meat offered by Peter Singer, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, but before going to India, I couldn't see how I could possibly reject something that I had always regarded as an irreplaceable fixture of my diet. But after a summer of enforced subsistence on little more than lentils and rice, I returned home confident that I could thrive on a diet without meat.

A meatless diet is harder to pull off in Princeton than in Rishikesh, but I made the transition without much trouble. At the age of 21, I discovered hummus, quiche, tofu, omelettes and a whole new world of proteins. My mother in her seemingly limitless grace not only tolerated this latest of her son's phases, but also learned and taught me meatless recipes that have kept me a healthy herbivore.

While I did thrive on my new diet, I also wondered if I had taken things too far. I had never been convinced that there was anything wrong with eating a small amount of meat from animals raised locally using sustainable agricultural practices — Americans and their country would almost definitely be better off if we all chose to eat meat in this limited way. Since I do not subscribe to a religious tradition that forbids it and have no particular emotional attachment to livestock, eating a small amount of sustainably produced meat seemed inoffensive to my values.

And so about three weeks ago, I set out to reintroduce small amounts of meat into my diet. Finding meat that met my standards wasn't simple. It would be harder than going to Whole Foods or Wild Oats, markets that, as Michael Pollan reminded me in his new book "The Omnivore's Dilemma," are more similar to their conventional brethren than their efforts at branding themselves as pastoral would imply. Grass-fed steaks flown in from Argentina wouldn't do — the carbon emissions from transporting the meat across the globe undercuts any notion that the meat itself is produced in a sustainable way.

Eventually, I found just the kind of place where I wanted my meat to come from. At Cherry Grove Farm, a 400-acre patchwork of pasture and woods just a few miles from campus down Route 206, cattle, pigs and chickens are raised in a way that respects the land and the animals themselves. Farm manager Kelly Harding operates the farm on a simple but radical principle: that "management intensive" animal husbandry can produce great-tasting meat, eggs and dairy free of hormones and antibiotics. In stark contrast to the industrial agriculturalists who are by all accounts poisoning our country's air, land and water in order to maximize production and profits, Harding has introduced patterns of grazing that are actually making the land healthier. Soil that had up until a few years ago been leached of almost all its nutrients by the cultivation of corn is slowly returning to health.

Last week, 16 months after meat had last passed my lips, I made lasagna with ground beef from cows raised on Cherry Grove Farm, and it tasted great. But it wasn't cheap — their ground beef is about twice the price of what you would find in a supermarket, and Cherry Grove's fresh eggs cost about four times what they do at ShopRite. Because of this I won't be eating Cherry Grove meat or eggs more than a couple of times per month, but this is probably for the best. Buying meat and eggs from Cherry Grove Farm in limited quantities is a model for how in a better country, we might all eventually get our animal products: in small doses from ecologically conscious local farms. Thomas Bohnett is a Wilson School major from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.