I think this is a good idea.
As a physician, I see health reasons to eat meat—B12 and other micronutrient deficiencies, and sufficient protein intake to keep and build muscle. During their rehabilitation, I often encourage my patients to eat more protein, and there is evidence for this. I have seen lots of anecdotal evidence of carnivore/ruminant diets helping with metabolic and inflammatory disease, and mental health (ref: diagnosisdiet.com).
I also understand the animal welfare arguments, I want the animals I eat to have a good life.
In our family, we have settled this discordance by buying whole or large fractions of a grass fed cow from a local farmer (Dobson Farm), and that happy cow can feed our family for months (requires a large freezer). The farmer has proudly invited us to come visit the cows and see how happy they are in their field.
Grass fed beef is not as tasty, and this is known in the industry. The other things is that marrow bones and organ meats are quite nutritious, we also sometimes get ground beef with liver ground into it. Eating these parts of the animal is cheaper, and means that potentially fewer animals can feed us, as it is likely most beef cattle is produced for steak. Marketing the health and animal welfare benefits of grass fed and ‘non-steak’ cuts may lead to better animal health and efficiency of the industry.
Also - I’ve heard of a farm in Ontario, Canada, which posts videos on their social media to show their happy chicks, if I lived closer, I would buy from this farm. Maybe more farms should live-stream their happy animals?
My kids are now almost 6 and 8, we live in Canada. Our kids are hilarious and add a lot of joy to our lives.
Thankfully, we have grandparent support, though we still have had years where we paid 50K CAD for childcare and housekeeping, in order for us to both work big jobs.
At this stage of life, we want to spend lots of time with our kids as they really get more out of time with us than time in public school. We often speak about if we should optimize their schooling situation, our daughter is gifted and our son (likely like many other children of EAs) has high functioning autism and ADHD. Our son now has expensive therapy/tutoring 4 times a week. Our kids have lovely lives and will likely have significant impact, but I caution that their lives are valuable even if they can’t produce impact.
If someone starts an EA school accepting neuro atypical kids, please let me know.
I’m a 39 year old physician, so not in a high impact career (rather doing targeted donations), and I have found my motivation to work big hours/make more has waned in the last few years, as I increasingly value my time and energy. I do travel less as we have to trade off. I don’t know that my working less is directly because of my kids, but having kids provides a ‘good reason’ (read:socially acceptable especially for a woman) to say no to things I don’t want to do. There is a certain mental energy drained by family/household management.
Given that we have awesome kids and the infrastructure they require, we need my consistent income to sustain this, so that my husband can take a risk (he left his executive job) to have a greater impact.
I think many of the above issues would also extend to other caregiver roles, e.g. caring for a parent after a stroke.