Are you just sick of beans and rice or have you not found a recipe you like? If the latter, try this one. I made it a day or two ago and it’s good.

Serious Eats Foolproof Pan Pizza is one of my regulars. You can put all kinds of stuff on a pizza and it’s still good. I’m vegetarian so I use fake chicken and such, but here are a few of my favorites. (they all have mozzarella)

• Teriyaki sauce base, fried tofu, green beans, mushrooms, red onion, fried eggplant
• Barbecue sauce base, chicken, mushrooms, red onions, pickled jalapenos, sweet corn
• Refried bean base, cheddar, onions, mushrooms, pickled jalapenos. Top with Romain salad w/ ranch.
• Tomato sauce base, mushrooms, onions, peppers, olives. (flexible, use what you like)

You can make the pickled jalapenos. And the refried bean base is just a can of beans with a little water, garlic, and salt. Heat to cook the garlic then blend/mash.

I also like a good vegetable pot pie. That one is made with simple ingredients like potatoes, carrots, celery, and mushrooms, along with any spices you like. She has a nice pie crust recipe too. Turned out well when I made it.

Well, your showerthought post was basically rich people cause suffering and climate change. It’s true they generate a hugely disproportionate amount of CO2. But my point (and maybe it wasn’t clear) was that when there is an easy energy resource just sitting underground, it’s going to get used whether by rich people or not. It provides too much of an advantage. Having coal and oil at your disposal is like having a near endless supply of free workers. One liter of gasoline, when used in an engine, produces roughly 2 to 4 kWh of mechanical energy, equivalent to the daily labor of about 100 people. No society is going to turn down that many guiltless slave workers. We were told 100 years ago it was going to cause climate change, but we didn’t have the technology to replace it with electric at the time. Effective batteries are a recent invention. So there really was no alternative. Your neighbor country is making use of millions of ‘energy slaves’ and growing their population like crazy. Are you going to continue plowing your fields with donkeys and hoping you can feed your people? No, using that energy was inevitable.

And now? Theoretically we could replace our energy infrastructure with renewables. In the US it would take at least 5 trillion dollars and who knows how long and how much energy to do it. But I don’t think it’ll stop climate change. Call me a doomer, but I think it’s already too late for that. We’ve already released enough CO2 to kill the planet. The effects just take about ten years or more to show.

Sure, we want to blame climate change on the fossil fuel industry, the capitalist owners thereof, the big industries, long haul ocean shipping, etc. But I don’t think it’s realistic. Imagine the situation a few hundred years ago. We burned wood to keep warm in the winter. We cut down forests and pre-burned them in vast quantities to make charcoal which we then used in smelters to make iron and steel, in kilns to make pottery and glass, in steam engines to turn all sorts of things. We were on track to cut down every tree on the planet to use for one of those things. Then we found fossil fuels. They were better than wood in every way, except that the generated CO2 wasn’t renewable. Any nation that used them surged ahead of all others in productivity, defense, offense, and quality of life. To refuse to use them, even if you knew they would kill us all a few hundred years later, meant that you got outcompeted, and probably overrun or conquered. There was no option. So everyone used them more and more. That’s been the story ever since. It’s a Faustian bargain. You get comfort and success now and someday your ancestors will suffer. But you figure that they will be smart enough then to solve the problem so you don’t worry about it. Yes, our economic system guarantees that a small number of people will profit from it the most. And they will make it worse one way or another. But climate getting worse just a matter of time. Even if we had the most enlightened people making decisions for us who would agree when they said we all had to stop using fossil fuels? There is almost nothing you use in your life that isn’t made with fossil fuels somehow. And it’s too late now. We can’t go back. We can’t all be subsistence farmers. There are too many of us. We can’t survive without fossil fuels.

tl;dr - yeah, the capital owners are awful, but climate change would have happened without them.