Recently we were on a lovely, Halloween candy detoxing, ramble through the local woods when the conversation turned to pollution and greenhouse gases. My eight-year-old chimed in with the sober, mostly accurate news that cows burp methane, a greenhouse gas, at alarming rates. Yep, they sure do, I agreed, though I don’t know if your numbers are exactly accurate and there are many factors to consider regarding meat.

I talked some about what I do, which is try to source our meat as carefully as possible, from farmers I feel are doing their best for their land and their animals, and to try to eat nose-to-tail, and then we talked about what more we could do. He suggested if we have salad with every meal we might eat less meat. I brought up meatless Mondays. The truth is neither of us (or anyone else in the household) wants to give up meat altogether. I’ve learned, through trying many different ways of eating, that eating meat makes my body and brain feel better than being vegetarian or vegan, despite knowing something about nutrition and how to prepare a good vegetarian diet. I also have a younger child who already limits what he’ll eat to relatively few things; eliminating chicken and ham would take out major protein sources, eliminating milk would be a huge nutritional blow. In the end, we didn’t come to any conclusions.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do about this question. I want my family to eat delicious, nurturing food. I want to live responsibly in the world. I’m a car driving American who is very fond of good steak, living in a place where it’s much much easier to make a good salad in July than it is in November. I have a kid who would gladly live solely on bread, butter, and milk if I let him and will rarely try something new. (I have another kid who is an adventurous eater, for which I am grateful, but I still have to feed both of them.) I think about this, a lot. I also, sometimes, just feed my family hotdogs and boxed mac and cheese.