The consumption of meat is more than a meal in America; it’s a national past-time, right up there with baseball and heart disease. But that doesn’t mean you have to eat it in the sickening quantities that have inspired blogs like This Is Why You’re Fat. It is possible to balance a broader sense of global compassion while also continuing to eat meat; it just takes practice, planning, and a willingness to seek out better alternatives to the constant flow of low-quality and dubiously produced food we’ve grown up eating. Is it work? Yes, a little. But it’s worth it to know you’re not damaging the environment or eating potentially tainted food.

1. Stop eating fast food: McDonald’s, Burger King, and every other drive-thru burger joint gets its meat from farms where cattle and other animals are kept in tight quarters, stuffed with grains they can’t properly digest, and slaughtered with machine-life efficiency that overlooks the fact that, despite the fact that they’re raised to be eaten, these animals are just as capable of feeling discomfort or pain as any human. If you want to be a more compassionate carnivore — and it is possible — you have to stop eating at places like these.
2. Only eat at restaurants with humanely raised meat: Do a little research before heading out for a meal. For instance, Chipotle Mexican Grill has made good strides toward buying humanely raised animals, with 100 percent of their pork and 80 percent of their beef coming from producers who follow guidelines about raising the animals in healthy environments where they’re allowed to move freely, eat healthily, and avoid chemical injections.
3. Check the label for WSPA info: The World Society for the Protection of Animals is a great resource for learning about how we raise the food we eat, and what it means to live ethically while caring for livestock. The WSPA has offered helpful guidelines for consumers to let them know where their food falls on the humane scale, from “a good start” to “the best options.” The former includes things like cage-free eggs and grass-fed beef, while the latter includes foods that are certified humane or animal welfare approved.
4. Get grass-fed beef: What’s grass-fed beef? Just that: meat from cattle that have been raised eating grass, not grain products. Cattle are naturally disposed to graze in pastures, not subsist on the concentrated diet of grain, soy, and other products many modern producers use to bulk them up. It’s bad for the animal to eat that way, and it’s only done to create a fatter cow without regard for the humaneness of the situation. Make sure the beef you buy has been grass-fed.
5. Shop locally as often as possible: One of the best ways to make sure you’re getting properly raised meat is to buy it from local sellers. And I mean really local: go to your farmers’ market, visit your neighborhood butcher, and do everything you can to find out directly from the seller how the meat was raised and what steps they’ve taken to ensure that their ranching and slaughtering processes are as humane as possible. LocalHarvest is a great way to find markets near you and start to shop with a purpose.
6. Go meatless one day a week: Meatless Monday is just one of the many groups calling for carnivores to take one day a week off from eating meat. The personal health benefits are myriad: you can help reduce your risk for heart disease and diabetes, as well as balance your diet. But it also makes you a more compassionate meat-eater by reducing the number of cattle, poultry, and pork being consumed. There are also broader environmental benefits that come into play: eating less meat means using fewer natural resources to produce and ship that meat, and those conservation methods can help repair the planet in ways we can only imagine.
7. Get free-range poultry: Free-range chickens are allowed to live with almost no restricted movements, in an enclosed area that keeps them safe but doesn’t pin them down the way some producers do. Many chickens and other birds kept in close quarters are subject to debeaking, in which part of the beak is snipped off to reduce the fallout from the psychotic cannibalism that tends to emerge when large quantities of the birds and sandwiched together in pens. If you want to eat some chicken, it’d be nice to know the meat came from an animal that was at least allowed to walk around without fear of cannibalism.
8. Cut back on your portions: Obvious but true: eating less meat will reduce the demand placed on meat producers in the United States, which can lead to an easing of the farming and ranching process and a better life for the animals involved. If every carnivore reduced their meat intake by 10 percent — seriously, that little — millions of animals would be spared each year, allowing the remaining ones to be more easily cared for by ranchers in search of humane options.
9. Cook it yourself: One of the best ways to know what’s in your meat is to take responsibility for preparing it yourself. I’m not saying you need to do the actual killing, which would be traumatizing. Rather, you need to learn how to cook for yourself. Cheaply produced meats come from fast-food restaurants and other places that serve consumers that don’t want to think about what’s in their burger or how it got to their plate, but compassionate meat-eating means getting involved in the local produce scene and taking responsibility for your own meals. Plus food always tastes better when you make it yourself.
10. Use your leftovers: Eat every bit of the meat you buy and cook for yourself. Why? Because throwing out the odds and ends will continue to perpetuate the imbalanced demand on a struggling supply of meat producers, which will only lead to increasingly questionable manufacturing processes. Putting your leftovers to good use, even if it’s just a microwave reheat, will let you see how much meat you actually eat and how much you really need to get by.
11. Know your packaging: This is another tip that’s related both to the treatment of the animals and the broader environmental impact of eating them. Meat sold at supermarkets tends to come packaged in plastic wrap and foam trays that are devastating to the Earth in terms of production, storage, and disposal. A great way to think about the environment while shopping for meat is to buy from a butcher or other source that uses paper wrapping, and a minimum at that. A reduction in bad packaging would work wonders for the planet’s health.
12. Get used to spending more: No one likes to hear this, but it’s true: the good stuff always costs more. Meat has become so cheap in this country because of the mass production enabled by inhumane treatment of livestock. Raising animals properly — in other words, pasture-fed and kindly treated — costs more because it’s a direct refusal to participate in the environmentally damaging practices that have become entrenched in U.S. meat production and consumption for decades. News flash: a burger should not cost 99 cents.