I have a number of friends who eat meat only 2 times per week. I used to be vegetarian for about 15 years until I met my wife and we agreed to eat meat, but only organic/otherwise sustainable and only a limited number of times per week.

When eating out, I still eat vegetarian unless I know where the restaurant got its meat from. Increasing numbers of restaurants in Amsterdam do care where their meat comes from, fortunately.

Organic and sustainable are not the same thing.

That's why I mention them both. I'm generally fine with anything that has animals outside rather than locked up in a tiny cage, but I prefer meat grown locally in a field that's not certified over meat that's technically certified but shipped from the other side of the world.

As much as I'd love to brain the next deer that's eating under my apple tree I'm also aware that that deer might have been stuffing its face at god knows what dumpster or drinking from the river downstream of town (which has a several hundred year manufacturing history so I wouldn't drink the river water).

Farming animals for meat has its problems but it does impose much stricter controls on the inputs. No farmer raising livestock for human consumption is feeding their animals contaminated food and water if there are other options available. If DuPont is upstream of your farm you're probably SOL but that's the exception not the rule.

As a rule of thumb I would say there is good overlap. In support of my claim, I suggest the report from Olivier de Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food [0].

[0] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-03-09/un-report-supp...

Organic according the USDA means that you use manure to fertilize instead of biosolids and you use something like copper-based pesticides instead of glyphosate.

I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.

> I don't know enough about agriculture to understand what that means, but I have heard that the US uses a different, presumably lower, standard for organic crops than the EU does.

It means exactly what you heard. The USDA Organic label doesn't mean that organic crops are sustainable. The organic label doesn't address problems associated with commercial agriculture: monocultures, wide-spread use of pesticides, fertilizer run-off into streams/rivers/ponds/lakes causing them to become hypoxic, destruction of wetlands to create arable land etc.

> Low meat dishes seem to have a serious branding problem.

I think the way you make this work is using meat for flavor rather than as a centerpiece- a lot of noodle dishes from China do this (e.g. https://thewoksoflife.com/2014/11/dan-dan-noodles/).

Exactly, the whole "diaspora Asian" thing has this figured out just fine. But every food tradition has a great variety of low-meat options, with the possible exception of pure hunter/herder communities. But in the west they are traditionally mostly restricted to home cooking and what little still made it to professional kitchens is now increasingly getting squeezed out by fully meatless choices (the choice in status meat somehow never gets less).

(I say "diaspora Asian" because I can only talk about what we get under the Asian brand in Europe, which for all I know might be completely unrelated to what actually happens in the namesake regions. But that's completely unrelated to the point we are making here: meat for flavor instead of for status, kudos to them)

> It would be more impactful get three people to reduce meat by 50% than to get one to reduce by 100%. Unfortunately, "meals that don't have a chunk of meat as their centerpiece but that are still far from vegetarian" does not have the same ideological zeal as veganism

So, work to get people to try a different appreciate meatless options; as you note, they are getting better. You can reduce meat consumption by eating meat-centered meals less frequently as well as eating some-but-less meat in each meal.

The thing is, I really don't like those dishes that bend over sideways to eradicate even the last bit of meat. I'd be fine making that steak-sized chunk an extremely rare occasion, but don't take away my little flavor bits. Polarized "we cater for vegans and for big-steak aficionados" and then controlling your dosage via some foodie variety of pulse width modulation might be fine for some, but it's not for me. When low meat options disappear from the menu to make room for vegan options while the high meat dishes stay, then people like me are likely to end up eating more meat, not less, without really wanting to.

> I really don't like those dishes that bend over sideways to eradicate even the last bit of meat.

It's not like meat is a natural part of every dish that must be eradicated at some kind of effort to produce a meatless dish, though I'd agree that dishes they start with a meat dish and take that approach are often among the worst of meatless dishes.

I agree! This has been bothering me ever since I stopped eating vegetarian. My ideal dish would have lots of tasty vegetables with a side of meat. Unfortunately I suspect that most customers would consider they're not getting their money's worth.