Tag: vegetarian

Vegetables = Happiness?

Or it could be that Happiness = Vegetables. Either way, researchers have established a correlation (and, yes, I’ve been waiting for this a long time):

People who eat more vegetables and fruits are significantly happier than those who eschew such foods.

Dartmouth University’s Daniel Blanchflower looked at the eating habits of 80,000 British citizens. He, alongside two British researchers, saw that mental well being — satisfaction with one’s life on a scale of one to 10 — rose alongside each serving of produce consumed daily…

[snip]…There is one big, outstanding question that he acknowledges: What’s the causal relationship? It could be that eating vegetables make people happy — or that happier people tend to chow down on more salads.

“It might be that we just have all these vegetarians that are richer or happier,” Blanchflower says. “There are definitely issues of causality. At the same time, I think what we’ve done here is establish correlation. I don’t think we expected to see the relationship we did. The reason you’re calling me is because this was unexpected.”

Nevermind they haven’t figured out which way the causation runs. The correlation alone is just one more reason to at least think like a vegetarian.

Now all they need to show is that vegetarians have more sex and we’ll be getting somewhere.

A Tale Of Two Calves

Let’s start the week on an upbeat note, with this video story, courtesy of Farm Sanctuary, about the bonds between an adopted calf and his accidental family.

It’s a sweet story, and also a reminder that it would be very hard for people to keep eating animals if they knew anything at all about their emotional lives. Meat-eating requires a purposeful ignorance, which the meat industry is only too happy to encourage.

If you want to know more about Farm Sanctuary, and the vision of its creator, Gene Baur, I’ve got you covered:

Seeing Is Important: More On Meat

Okay, at some point it will simply be gratuitous to keep posting these horrific slaughterhouse videos. But I am not at that point yet, because I want to convey that this is an industry problem, and not just isolated to one or two rogue slaughterhouses.

This video was made by Mercy For Animals (I first saw it here), at a plant they say supplies Burger King (additional info after the jump):

Video-related info from Mercy For Animals:

Are your Burger King purchases funding horrific animal abuse? Continue reading “Seeing Is Important: More On Meat”

Seeing Is Important: The Torture Of Meat “Processing”

Okay, I’ve been sitting on this one a while because it is pretty tough to watch.

But I think it is very important to see and bear witness to reality (previous here and here) because images elicit an emotional and visceral reaction that words sometimes do not.

Here’s the backstory on this video:

Aug. 21, 2012: An undercover video, filmed by a Compassion Over Killing investigator, exposes rampant animal abuse and suffering inside Central Valley Meat Co. (CVM), a slaughterhouse in Hanford, California. CVM is a major supplier to the USDA’s National School Lunch Program and other federal food initiatives.

Like all federally inspected slaughterhouses, CVM is required to comply with federal animal welfare requirements as well as California’s animal protection laws. However, COK’s whistleblowing video uncovers acts of cruelty that appear to violate both state and federal laws.

And you can read more here.

I do not post this lightly, but it IS what we call meat “processing” has come to–which is, to be blunt, animal torture. And it is too easy to just keep slinging hamburgers abetted by willful ignorance of what goes on behind the factory walls.

Do you really have faith that this sort of thing isn’t going on all over the world? Do you really want to keep eating meat that involves this degree of cruelty?

There are so many reasons not to eat meat. This is just one. But it should be all you need.

End Times For Meat?

Asks Time’s Josh Ozersky…

Catte Feed Lot CAFOSure hope so. Ozersky explains that the future for meat is looking grim:

But while the bacon panic wasn’t real, there is a crisis in our meat supply and it’s no joke. We produce a lot of meat, but we feed a lot of Americans, and more all the time, thanks to the simple laws of multiplication, along with the simple addition of immigration. There is a drought, so there is less grain and corn for the animals to eat. Most of the producers are marginally profitable at best, and Americans refuse to pay more for meat than they do for Froot Loops, despite the fact that no one has to raise and feed and kill and process Froot Loops. I’m not kidding about this: go to the supermarket and see how much a package of pork chops cost, or half a chicken, and then compare that price to a box of Froot Loops.

All the things that consumers have, rightly, come to fear and distrust about the meat industry are a result of this problem. Hormones, to make the animals grow faster? Check. Antibiotics, to allow animals be cramped and crammed and stressed without dying of infections? Check. Farrowing crates and beak clipping, so as to squeeze more meat more efficiently out of factories? Check. Even the vile pink slime that everyone hates so much is simply a product, literally, of the beef industry’s need to get maximal yield out of each animal. We all love happy animals on small farms, but there’s no way to feed Americans living in or near poverty, as well as having tons of meat to export to China and elsewhere. The result is that producers are bumping off animals as fast as they can and getting out of the business before feed costs get worse and they are forced out. That’s where the bacon shortage comes in. Less pigs, less pork, less pork bellies for yummy, smoky bacon.

To Ozersky, this means a future of expensive, unhealthy meat and abused animals. I would argue we already have two of the three (yes, meat is cheap). He seems to lament the prospect. However, he doesn’t really have much to say on what to do about it.

So I’ll help him out: when a product is getting more expensive, more unhealthy, more ethically execrable, and more environmentally costly (which Ozersky doesn’t really go into), then perhaps the public should stop consuming that product.

I know. Radical idea. But Is it really that hard for Americans and the rest of humanity to imagine a future that isn’t fueled by cheap, factory-farmed meat?

Fish Fry

People sometimes ask me whether I eat fish, and when I tell them I don’t they want to know why. My stock answer is that I doubt that any fish are being fished sustainably, or farmed in a way that is net neutral when it comes to the environment and health.

Yes, there are fish guides that supposedly tell you what fish species are “safe” to eat. But then you see gross data, like that contained in this WWF Living Planet Report, which show an unrelenting, and appalling, human devastation of global fish stocks. Against that backdrop, it is simply hard for me to believe that anyone who cares about the future of fish and the oceans should do anything other than stop contributing to the insatiable demand for fish protein that is strip mining the seas. Against that backdrop, it makes sense to be overcautious, to not place our faith in subjective and imprecise assertions that some fish are doing fine. In other words, it makes sense to give fish everywhere a break.

Here’s a graphic from the WWF report, which says it all:

Yep. that’s a lot of red. And it’s not like it doesn’t follow many warnings that humanity’s estimations of “sustainable” fishing are pure fantasy. Here’s one of the best, which is in fact the analysis that prompted me to stop eating any and all fish.

Anyhow, this is the Washington Post‘s take on what has been happening:

Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted….

[snip]…Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.

This interactive graphic from the WWF report shows the overall population trends over the past few decades (hint: it doesn’t look very good). But we knew that already. The question is: what are you going to do about it? And what are you going to put on your plate?

How Would You Like Your Test Tube Burger?

Right now they are very rare (get it?). But scientists, as they will, are plowing ahead with the development of in vitro meat, also dubbed Frankenmeat.

Isn't technology fun?

From a moral and environmental point of view, the logic is unassailable:

So-called test-tube meat is being developed to slash the environmental impacts of factory farming, improve consumer health and lessen the suffering of animals. Last June, an Oxford University study concluded that compared with conventionally grown and produced meat, “in vitro” or “cultured” meat would generate 96% lower greenhouse gas emissions, use 45% less energy, reduce land use by 99% and cut water use by 96%.

“Animal farming is by far the biggest ongoing global catastrophe,” Patrick Brown of the Stanford University School of Medicine told reporters, AFP says. “More to the point, it’s incredibly ready to topple … it’s inefficient technology that hasn’t changed fundamentally for millennia.”

From a culinary point of view it sounds (and looks–so far) pretty disgusting.

Yum. Can't wait.

The meat-eating world is already starting to argue that it will be incumbent upon vegans and vegetarians to eat the stuff, to help it take off commercially.

Actually, I think it is incumbent upon me to keep making the argument that the simplest thing is for people to stop eating meat (why do some technological solutions sometimes seem so grotesque? Not sure I want to see what unintended consequences Frankenmeat will arrive with). And that meat should be taxed according to the environmental and health costs it imposes on the planet (it would be impossible to quantify or even compensate for the suffering factory meat-farming inflicts on animals).

Simply making people pay what meat really costs would be by far the fastest and simplest way to solve the meat problem (and the strongest incentive for going vegetarian). And for any die-hards who would prefer test-tube meat to no meat at all, the right price on factory-farmed meat would make lab-farmed meat commercially viable in a hurry.

So, no thanks. I’ll pass on that Frankenburger.

Factory Farms Are Killing You (Reason #463)

"Mmm, there's nothing better than tetracycline in the morning."

One of the most short-sighted and objectionable practices of factory farms (sadly, there are so many to choose from) is the massive use of antibiotics on healthy animals in an effort to stave off illness that might prevent getting them to the slaughter. And when I say massive, I mean massive. US factory farms pour some 30 million pounds of antibiotics into their animals every year (in contrast, humans consume just a few million pounds).

That’s a lot of antibiotics, and it is a practice that helps boost the profit margins of both Big Agriculture and Big Pharma. There’s a problem, though. A big one. Using such outsize quantities of antibiotics helps breed antibiotic resistant bacteria. And those hardy little bacteria kill lots of people every year.

The smart policy response is obvious: stop feeding healthy animals so many antibiotics. Europe, which so many American politicians like to scorn, has banned use of antibiotics in this manner since 1998. And what has the FDA, which has understood this problem since 1976, done? Nothing. Well, actually more than nothing. It just made a lot of farm and pharma lobbyists happy, and reneged on a commitment to ban the practice of feeding healthy animals antibiotics:

The FDA has been aware of the resistance problem for many years. In 1977, it decided to act on scientific evidence and order farmers to stop using penicillin and tetracycline in farm animals. The law required the agency to act immediately. But under pressure from Big Ag and Big Pharma (80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the United States are fed to healthy animals), the agency dragged its feet and did nothing, even though public health and environmental organizations, including the American Medical Association(PDF), urged it to act.

With scientific appeals falling on deaf ears for decades, the Natural Resource Defense Council, joined by other plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit last spring seeking to make the FDA follow its own rules. In a calculated attempt to undermine the legal basis for the NRDC suit, the FDA’s recent reversal simply nullified the original 1977 order, in effect wiping out 35 years of history and scientific research.

So there you have it: your (totally corrupted) government at work.

Your smart policy response? Stop eating factory-farmed meat. Even better, stop eating all meat.

Where’s The Beef?

You may not know it, but the single most powerful act you as a human being can take to fight global warming, fight the abuse of animals, and fight the outbreak of global superbugs like avian flu is to become a vegetarian (if you want to know why, read this book). How’s that for a three-fer?

So against that context, we have a good news/bad news situation to report.

The good news: Americans are eating less meat.

The bad news: Americans are still meat gluttons (we consume one-sixth of the total meat consumed annually by the planet, but represent only one-twentieth of the population).

(Source: Daily Livestock Report)

The NYT’s Mark Bittman digs into the data, and the possible reasons Americans are slightly reducing their meat consumption. At least part of the reduction seems to be that Americans are increasingly concerned about the moral and environmental implications of eating meat.

That’s a big deal, I think, because it suggests that awareness and knowledge (and not just cost) can change people’s attitudes about meat, and the frequency with which they eat it. And I hope to do a lot more writing about this because the consumption of meat has such a huge impact on so many critical issues.

Meatless

The Humane Society makes the (video) case for Meatless Monday.

Actually, they make the case for meatless Monday-Sunday–otherwise known as vegetarianism. Lots of people feel helpless when it comes to the scale of environmental destruction humans are inflicting on the planet. I always tell them the simplest, most powerful, thing they can do right away is stop eating meat. Not only is industrial beef (and chicken, and pork) farming killing the planet, it’s killing you.

Quitting meat cold-turkey (sorry) isn’t that easy, if only because meat is so ingrained in our food culture. So it’s hard to think of what else to eat, and we crave fat. But it’s easy in this sense: you will feel a lot better, and you will lose weight. AND you will be doing something meaningful for the planet. AND for our health care costs.

But while I think it’s okay, if you want to, to eat some meat on occasion, and that any cutbacks you can make are a good thing, I think asking Americans to go without meat just one day a week is a pretty lame target. Yes, I am sure that a single meat-free day a week is all the Humane Society figures they can ask meat-addled Americans to aspire to. But as noted earlier, these times call for radical, not incremental, solutions. And Meatless Monday just isn’t very radical. So let’s aim for Meatless, full stop, instead.

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