Veggie Karma

KFC - Double Down on an aneurysm

2010-04-09T09:39:00.003-05:00

Wow. The KFC Double Down.
There is so much for a vegan blogger to say about this that it actually renders you speechless.

Here's a news story on this new menu item from the L.A. Times. That should cover the basics for you. Additionally, I'll let all the other vegan and diet bloggers do the ranting.

Here's my main thought right now - in 2010, when you're talking about the primary problems facing N. America, you're talking about climate change and health issues. And by health issues the big topics are the diabetes and obesity epidemics hitting both the U.S. and Canada.

Other companies are starting to see the light on the health front. Pepsi for example has recently dedicated itself to making all of its snack foods less "junky". The CEO has flat out said that they feel a certain amount of corporate responsibility for N. American health problems, and want to be part of the solution.

So this kind of thought is percolating in some company's head offices, but KFC? Well, KFC has suddenly decided upon a "What would Homer Simpson do" approach to menu planning.

A funny side-story to all this is that about a year or two ago, KFC in Canada succumbed to pressure from some animal rights groups, and started offering something close to a veggie-burger. The Double-Down must be their little "f*^k you!" to the forces that put a non-meat item on their menu.

Meatlessness hitting the mainstream

2010-03-24T13:22:00.002-05:00

The March 29 issue of Maclean's magazine (this is Canada's national news magazine, something like Time and Newsweek in the U.S.) devoted a four page spread to a story called "Save the Planet / Stop Eating Meat."

Wow - Due to the environmental movement, and the C02 emissions related to the meat industry, "anti-meat" stories have been getting more space in the mainstream media. I'm still surprised though at this four page spread in what I imagine is Canada's best selling magazine.

The content is pretty good and wide-ranging. For readers (and writers) of veggie blogs it is probably well-known stuff, but for your aunt who doesn't know what a vegan is, this is a good introduction.

Some things I learned from the article are the following:

The American Meat Institute has launched a website called Meat Fuels America to fight back against the attacks being made upon them by environmental groups. Interestingly, their only argument seems to be economic - Meat is a Big Industry, so let's keep it going!

The Baltimore Public School system has instituted Meatless Mondays! This is awesome, and I'm impressed they did this despite the fact that they must have known it would make them the target of attack from the meat industry.

Of course, this isn't such a big deal when the meat industry is inept. They apparently wrote to Baltimore school officials and said that meatless mondays were wrong because they were preventing children from getting adequate protein. They did not seem to know that other foods apart from meat contain protein:

If [the meat lobby] had bothered to contact the Baltimore City Schools [it] would have found that each meat-free meal contains more than the amount of protein required by the USDA

Live and let die

2009-12-10T13:27:00.002-05:00

I've never met her, and had never even heard of her before yesterday, but I'm currently hating an Irish politician named Mairead McGuinness.

For reference, here are the two stories where all my information is coming from, primarily the first link:
Beatles star Paul McCartney 'knocked out' by Louth MEP Mairead McGuinness

Carnivore versus crooner: Meat-eating MEP bites back at ex-Beatle

So here's the intro to the story: Vegetarian and now environmental crusader Paul McCartney was invited to the European Union parliament to give a presentation on why Meat Free Mondays should be promoted across the EU as a way to fight climate change. However, he ran into McGuinness, whose riding back home is full of meat and dairy farmers, who apparently shot down all his arguments (that's the way those two news stories tell it, I find it hard to believe that McCartney could really lose this argument however).

Here are some highlights of McGuinness's argument, and some of her key points:

- McGuinness dismissed McCartney's claims that reducing livestock and embracing vegetarianism would help to combat climate change. "Getting rid of livestock from the planet as a solution to climate change is too far-fetched and unrealistic a proposition to be credible," she said.

- "Research shows that a change in European diets with considerably less dairy and meat products would have only a marginal impact on the environment," she said.

- "Those who see vegetarianism as a better way of life or who are vegetarian because they do not want to eat animals should also not jump on the climate change bandwagon."

- McGuinness added: "Lastly, those of us who enjoy a roast on Sunday and who hope to continue to do so, would never even consider a meat free Monday.

- "We have the left-overs on Monday and in this era of 'waste not, want not', calling for a Meat Free Monday, as Sir Paul is doing, could be a call to waste food, something which none of us should be promoting."

Oh my God all that drives me crazy!! I find it hard to believe that she is so shockingly ignorant of all the good research linking climate change to meat production. I mean, she could look through my blog alone and find dozens of stories & articles on this topic. The most interesting one recently was the paper in the journal Climatic Change (Feb 4, 2009) which stated that a worldwide switch to vegetarianism (however unlikely) would be worth the equivalent of $20 trillion spent on other climate change prevention techniques.

No, she can't be that ignorant. She must be a politican with lots of meat farming and meat eating voters, and she must be more willing to appease her voters than she is to suck it up and acknowledge that meat farming is a massive environmental problem.

Food Inc is a must-see

2009-12-06T12:31:00.005-05:00

If you've read Omnivore's Dilemma, and Fast Food Nation, and Way We Eat, and have been waiting for a film equivalent of these thoughtful and intelligent books, Food Inc is it.

Food Inc is investigative journalism. It's intelligent and made for adults, and while it does have some footage from the factory floor that isn't the point of this documentary. The point is to paint an overall picture of the North American food industry. And the food industry, you'll quickly learn, is completely engineered to protect the interests and profits of large corporations - NOT the health of North Americans.

Most of the food politics movies that are out come from the militant veggie side of life, and being very one-sided and blind in their rage these things are pretty off-putting, and useless to show to friends and family whose brains turn off after a few seconds of factory farm imagery. Food Inc draws you in with thoughtful explanations of why Tyson and Monsanto etc are afraid to let you see how food is really made, and why they have teams of lawyers and private investigators at their disposal to haul farmers into court if they don't follow company line. The approach in Food Inc is general and rational and thoughtful enough that your friends who don't really want to think about where their food comes from will give the movie a chance (where they wouldn't give a PETA video a chance).
After watching this movie, they will be very hard pressed not to make significant changes in their diet, because this movie is a life-changer.

Plus it ends with a live Bruce Springsteen track.
: )

Of fish and alaskan governors

2009-11-29T14:24:00.004-05:00

I think I mentioned a documentary titled End of the Line a while back, simply saying that I couldn't wait to see it. It's now out on video from Mongrel Media, and I've finally been seen this documentary, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I've read enough about the fishing industry that not a lot in it was new to me, but the documentary was still fascinating because visually a lot of it is gorgeous, and the interviews with the scientists were really interesting - all these profs with data at their fingerprints saying "it doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, the charts show that 90% of the fish are gone, and that's the truth!"

The only real quibble I have with it is a very brief stat they give, saying that 10% of the fish brought up out of the ocean by those deep sea trawlers are bycatch that just get thrown dead back into the water. I've read other books where that number is much much higher... as in 1/3 of the fish (and dolphins and turtles and whales) pulled out of the water get thrown back dead. I'm curious about where they got the 10% number from.

P.S. another great thing to watch regarding the state of the oceans is a TED talk by Sylvia Earle: Protect Our Oceans.

Sarah Palin both exasperates me and amuses me. Her biography Going Rogue: An American Life is now out, and of course she takes a shot at vegetarians:

Besides addressing her views on the McCain campaign and the media, Palin, a passionate Alaskan hunter, takes aim at vegetarians. Palin states, “If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?”

The accommodating host went on to explain, “I love meat. I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there's plenty of room for all Alaska's animals -- right next to the mashed potatoes.”

Is she really such a simpleton?

a) the "right next to the mashed potatoes" line just makes you groan because that's a joke that has been on T-Shirts for at least ten years now.
b) The article I link to above mentions that Palin actually identifies herself in her book as a carnivore. A carnivore, Sarah? Really? A carnivore? Not an omnivore?
c) The most annoying thing is that this groan-inducing poke at vegetarians will appeal to a huge swath of American voters, and might even make them vote for her. Can't you just see Joe-Bob in Texas chuckling over the "right next to the potatoes" joke and going "God I like that Palin, maybe I'll even vote for her in 2012."

If gets the republican nomination, and actually wins the presidency, maybe the world will end in 2012.

Will work for zucchinis

2009-09-13T13:07:00.003-05:00

A friend at school offered to bring me in a zucchini from her garden recently. I said sure, and she showed up with a zucchini big enough to knock out a grizzly bear.

The only thing I really do with zucchinis is make my Zucchini Bread dessert. If you check the recipe, it calls for 1 1/2 cups of zucchini, and in brackets tells you that this is about two small zucchinis. From this sucker, about 1/6th of it amounted to 2 cups of shredded zucchini.

Choose Veg on the TTC

2009-08-11T10:01:00.004-05:00

I haven't seen it personally, but a coworker who was in Toronto came back up north and started telling me about an animal rights poster campaign that she saw on TTC buses and subway trains.

The full details are at Choose Veg, and the project seems to have been financed by Mercy For Animals. They have a set of three posters, like the dog vs. cow one below, and they're up on the buses and subway cars of one of the busiest and largest mass transit systems in North America.

I think that's awesome. When I was living in downtown Toronto and working in Oshawa, doing a bicycle / Go Train trip to and from work, I started daydreaming about winning the lottery and funding a really "in your face" veggie poster campaign, with the posters plastered all over the train cars of Go Transit, forcing thousands of suburban commuters to read about factory farming, red meat & cancer, battery hens, commercial deep sea fishing, etc etc.

But - I always assumed that the large transit systems would never accept the ad campaign. I mean, they'll bombard you with chocolate bar ads and help contribute towards childhood obesity and heart attacks, but how many social justice ads do you ever see up on your local transit system? Not too many, and certainly none that are basically telling 97% of the population (i.e. all the omnivores) that they better open their eyes and make some serious decisions about what type of farming they'll support with their money.

So anyway - while Choose Veg and Mercy for Animals deserve some cudos for getting this project going, I think we also need to congratulate the TTC for actually accepting the ad campaign. I wonder how helpful it was that a couple of high profile city councilors are vegetarians??

Colour me confused

2009-07-02T10:18:00.004-05:00

So if you keep your eyes open, or set up a feed using Google News Alerts, you come across stuff like this all the time:
President's Choice beef flagged for E. coli. Somewhere, with some meat product, there is always a problem. Yes it happens with vegetables as well - but trust me... it is far more common with meat products.

Similarly, if you keep your eyes open and follow the news... you come across stuff like this all the time:
Being a vegetarian can cut your risk of cancer by a half.

There is always some study saying that a vegetarian diet is healthier than a meat-rich diet. The one I'm linking to here is a brand new study, based on about 61 000 people in Britain, aged between 20 and 90, who were followed for about 12 years. Point being that this is very good and very well executed research.

I've mused about this many times before (most notably here), but what the hell?!! If one diet reduces your risk of serious disease, and the other increases the risk, what in the world would make you choose the bad one!!??

P.S. the pictures are from a story about the Heart Attack Grill in Arizona.

This is the caption under the photo of the pretty waitress holding the hamburger:

The Heart Attack Grill is a hospital-themed restaurant in Chandler, Arizona, which has become famous for embracing and promoting an unhealthy diet of extremely large hamburgers.

That's awesome - honesty from a burger joint. Too bad it is only decorated like a hospital... it should actually be housed within a hospital so that the heart-attack victims don't have as far to travel.

Pickler? Really?

2009-06-17T04:16:00.002-05:00

Wow - Kellie Pickler has been named by PETA as the sexiest vegetarian in America.

I guess that's great - I watched the season of American Idol that she was on (Chris Daltry was in her season, wasn't he?), and I'm thinking that with Pickler's grassroots appeal, and with her rural background, she could make vegetarianism popular with a swath of North Americans who otherwise would barely know what vegetarianism was all about.

Still - remembering what Pickler was like on American Idol makes me wonder how the heck SHE decided to go veggie.

Another story on the web mentions that she got some guidance with going veggie from another American Idol graduate, Carrie Underwood. I don't know anything about Underwood, but my general impression is that she's a fairly intelligent, world-aware person, so bravo - good for her for spreading the word.

The story above also mentions that Pickler learned about vegetarianism by googling around and watching PETA videos. That makes me a little nervous - PETA stuff is so unbelievably biased that they make it hard for someone with a research background to take them seriously, but oh well. To be fair, I guess we all kind of start with those videos.

From the news today

2009-06-06T05:17:00.003-05:00

I make fairly good use of google news alerts, and here are some items that came my way via a (vegan OR vegetarian) news alert today:

I'm not sure if this is really the website for the prestigious (and right-wing) Foreign Policy journal (a few things about the site make me suspicious), but the site has a piece called Meat: The Slavery of our time. How the coming vegetarian revolution will arrive by force.

Then, from the Huffington Post, there is a piece called Why I'm almost a vegetarian, but not yet. He makes some interesting points, although if you've read Michael Pollan you've seen these arguments before.

However, Harris's piece gets a thumbs-up because it refers to a documentary I've never heard of before, and which looks great: Food, Inc.

The flu and the orange

2009-05-18T04:59:00.002-05:00

Newsweek has a good article called The Path of a Pandemic which deals nicely (and without hysteria) with the swine flu story.

At the end - after saying that eating meat won't give you the swine flu, and that the cull of 300 000 pigs in Egypt was pointless, the article describes how the problem comes from the farming system:

"A wiser set of pig-related actions would turn to the strange ecology we have created to feed meat to our massive human population. It is a strange world wherein billions of animals are concentrated into tiny spaces, breeding stock is flown to production sites all over the world and poorly paid migrant workers are exposed to infected animals. And it's going to get much worse, as the world's once poor populations of India and China enter the middle class. Back in 1980 the per capita meat consumption in China was about 44 pounds a year: it now tops 110 pounds. In 1983 the world consumed 152 million tons of meat a year. By 1997 consumption was up to 233 million tons. And the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that by 2020 world consumption could top 386 million tons of pork, chicken, beef and farmed fish.

This is the ecology that, in the cases of pigs and chickens, is breeding influenza. It is an ecology that promotes viral evolution. And if we don't do something about it, this ecology will one day spawn a severe pandemic that will dwarf that of 1918."

----------------
This isn't a veggie story, but since veggies are generally concerned with what we're putting in our bodies, I thought I'd mention this new book called Squeezed: What you don't know about orange juice.

It's not really an "expose" of the orange juice industry, because the author wasn't really trying to turn people away from orange juice. However, the author definitely wanted you to know that the commercials describing this or that orange juice as "fresh" and "pure" are pretty much lying - oranges do not get squeezed, the juice put in cartons and directly taken to your local supermarket. Instead, the oranges are squeezed, the juice stored in vats for six months to a year, during which time all its flavour is lost, and when it is time to be put in cartons, they add chemical packs (the "Tropicana" flavour pack, or the "Minute Maid" flavour pack) to the juice to give it its taste.

From a Boston Globe interview:

IDEAS: What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

IDEAS: What goes into these flavor packs?

HAMILTON: They're technically made from orange-derived substances, essence and oils. Flavor companies break down the essence and oils into individual chemicals and recombine them. I spoke to many people in the industry at Firmenich, different flavorists, and at Tropicana, and what you're getting looks nothing like the original substance. To call it natural at this point is a real stretch.

Hachooo.... oh, I mean "oinkchoo"

2009-04-29T10:05:00.003-05:00

May 1st Update - Well, since I wrote this post a day or two ago, the "confirmed deaths" number has dropped down quite a bit. Quoting the World Health Organization's numbers, Bloomberg says there are only 10 confirmed deaths. Beware the difference between suspected deaths and confirmed deaths, and the need of the mainstream media to sensationalize their stories!

--------------------------

I haven't been in a rush to write about the swine flu, because no one needs a vegan saying "I told you so!" right now, and also because health officials have not been able to pinpoint the cause of the flu, i.e. they haven't said what all us veggies are probably thinking, that it started at a factory pig farming operation.

Within the counter-press however, connections are starting to be made. In Grist Online, Tom Philpott covers some evidence that the flu originated with a Smithfield owned pig farm.

An article yesterday in the Associated Press covers the same ground:

LA GLORIA, Mexico (AP) — Residents in this community of 3,000 believe their town is ground zero for the swine flu epidemic, even if health officials aren't saying so.

More than 450 residents say they're suffering from respiratory problems from contamination spread by pig waste at nearby breeding farms co-owned by a U.S. company. Officials with the company say they've found no sign of swine flu on its farms, and Mexican authorities haven't determined the outbreak's origin.

As far back as late March, roughly one-sixth of the residents here in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz began complaining of respiratory infections that they say can be traced to a farm that lies upwind five miles (8.5 kilometers) to the north, in the town of Xaltepec.

But Jose Luis Martinez, a 34-year-old resident of La Gloria, said he knew the minute he learned about the outbreak on the news and heard a description of the symptoms: fever, coughing, joint aches, severe headache and, in some cases, vomiting and diarrhea.

"When we saw it on the television, we said to ourselves, 'This is what we had,'" he said Monday. "It all came from here. ... The symptoms they are suffering are the same that we had here."

If this new outbreak of the Swine Flu (it has existed before) did indeed start at this Smithfield Farm, do you think we'll actually learn a lesson from the 120 or so deaths that have occurred so far?

Probably not. There is no end to the evidence that factory farming is simply outrageous. I've written about this before (many times) and so has just about everyone else. But if hog farmers continue to win senate seats and bend legislation so that it protects environmentally catastrophic hog operations instead of penalizes them, what chance do we have to start making improvements?

P.S. - Smithfield is the company behind this God awful story from Rolling Stone a few years back.

well, I don't "love" tofu...

2009-04-18T16:17:00.003-05:00

There's a story on youtube about the Colorado Motor Vehicles department changing its mind, and taking away a woman's ILVTOFU license plate.

Oh well - I don't blame Colorado Motor Vehicles all that much. It was probably the right decision. What I'm wondering is if the woman who requested the license plate actually noticed the other interpretation of the letters she was asking for.

And this quote is from coverage of this story from Denver Westword News:

Not surprisingly, PETA has already weighed in on this shocking rejection of not-exactly-free speech (after all, you have to pay for vanity plates). "It's shocking to us that the DMV calls a vegetarian plate offensive," says spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt. "We think the DMV can do a lot of good by reconsidering its decision and allowing people to discover the joy of soy."

Hmmmm.... ILVTOFU... I hope that readers of veggie blogs would look at that plate and say "Hey! That guy loves tofu", but I suspect that the majority of the population would see it the other way, and the plate would rather be allowing people to discover the joy of f*&cking.

I mean, do you guys remember the Roger Clemens Vegan story? This is an adult multi-millionaire American who had never even heard the word vegan.

wells and divining rods

2009-04-16T15:05:00.005-05:00

Economist magazine has an article in its April 11 - 17 issue titled Sin Aqua Non. Their take on the international water situation is that the world has enough water, but we're wasting so much of it that we're creating water shortages.

How are we wasting it? Well - one primary way is by eating too much meat.

--------

Two global trends have added to the pressure on water. Both are likely to accelerate over coming decades.

The first is demography. Over the past 50 years, as the world’s population rose from 3 billion to 6.5 billion, water use roughly trebled. On current estimates, the population is likely to rise by a further 2 billion by 2025 and by 3 billion by 2050. Demand for water will rise accordingly.

Or rather, by more. Possibly a lot more. It is not the absolute number of people that makes the biggest difference to water use but changing habits and diet. Diet matters more than any single factor because agriculture is the modern Agasthya, the mythical Indian giant who drank the seas dry. Farmers use about three-quarters of the world’s water; industry uses less than a fifth and domestic or municipal use accounts for a mere tenth.

Different foods require radically different amounts of water. To grow a kilogram of wheat requires around 1,000 litres. But it takes as much as 15,000 litres of water to produce a kilo of beef. The meaty diet of Americans and Europeans requires around 5,000 litres of water a day to produce. The vegetarian diets of Africa and Asia use about 2,000 litres a day (for comparison, Westerners use just 100-250 litres a day in drinking and washing).

So the shift from vegetarian diets to meaty ones—which contributed to the food-price rise of 2007-08—has big implications for water, too. In 1985 Chinese people ate, on average, 20kg of meat; this year, they will eat around 50kg. This difference translates into 390km3 (1km3 is 1 trillion litres) of water—almost as much as total water use in Europe.

The shift of diet will be impossible to reverse since it is a product of rising wealth and urbanisation. In general, “water intensity” in food increases fastest as people begin to climb out of poverty, because that is when they start eating more meat. So if living standards in the poorest countries start to rise again, water use is likely to soar.

Moreover, almost all the 2 billion people who will be added to the world’s population between now and 2030 are going to be third-world city dwellers—and city people use more water than rural folk. The Food and Agriculture Organisation reckons that, without changes in efficiency, the world will need as much as 60% more water for agriculture to feed those 2 billion extra mouths. That is roughly 1,500km3 of the stuff—as much as is currently used for all purposes in the world outside Asia.

zucchini bread!

2009-04-05T17:26:00.003-05:00

Perhaps because vegans are geniuses, AND because great (or "genius") minds tend to think alike, Andie over at Newbie Vegetarian and I are both writing about Zucchini Bread at the moment.

Along with a poor man's bean salad (that I found somewhere on the internet), Zucchini Bread is one of the few staple dishes that I make. It can serve as either a dessert, or, because it is so filling, a full-on meal.

My wife found this recipe in a book called Breaking the food seduction which was written by the guy behind the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. I like these guys (and agree with them that meat is basically unhealthy), but you have to understand that they are the medical version of PETA. They once tried to have hot dogs and processed meats banned from U.S. schools because of the well proven links between these meats and problems like cancer.

Anyway - the zucchini bread is pretty simple to make. Basically you put all the dry ingredients together in one bowl, mix all the wet ingredients together in another bowl, and then combine them and bake.

2 cups whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp ground cloves

1 ½ cups shredded zucchini (about 2 small)
½ cup unsweetened apple sauce
¼ cup apple juice concentrate, thawed (undiluted) – I use orange juice concentrate sometimes too
¼ cup maple syrup
1 Tbsp oil (sunflower or canola)
1 tsp vanilla

½ cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees (F). Spray pan with nonstick cooking spray (I use a 8 x 11ish glass baking dish OR a regular loaf tin). In a large mixing bowl, stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and cloves. In a separate smaller bowl, mix together remaining (wet) ingredients, excluding walnuts.

Pour wet ingredients into dry and mix just until dry ingredients are evenly moistened. Stir in walnuts and mix until evenly distributed. Spoon batter into baking dish and bake on centre rack for 50 to 55 minutes. Turn onto cooling rack and let cool completely before slicing or wrapping. It will keep at room temperature up to 3 days or refrigerate for up to 7 days.

open up your veins

2009-04-01T09:54:00.003-05:00

I think I've alluded to the problem of how antibiotic use in factory farming leads to super viruses, but I don't think I've ever done a post about it. I heard a piece on the radio about it this morning, and then used google news to find some stories on the topic. The best one I could find was from the Los Angeles Times and called A healthy resistance to antibiotics.

The problem is this:
- The sheer unhealthiness of factory farming (the confinement, the injection of steroids, the lack of exercise, and even completely f%$*cking up the animals' diet as when cows, who eat grass, are fed soy and estrogen instead) would kill all the animals unless they were pumped full of antibiotics to try and keep them alive.

- Bacteria, viruses and pathogens such as MRSA are in the livestock and are constantly battling with the antibiotics fed to the animals. Through this battle they get stronger and become resistant to the antibiotics (which are the same drugs that humans use and need to fight infections etc).

- So, these antibiotic resistant pathogens then make their way into the human population, and since the pathogens have already encountered and defeated our medications while in the animal population, we no longer have any way to treat humans infected with the virus.

As the above mentioned LA Times article mentions, MRSA all by itself kills more people in the U.S. each year than AIDS.
The rise of bacteria such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which kills more people in this country each year than AIDS, is believed to be a consequence of the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals. Low doses of the medications have become ubiquitous in the livestock industry, mixed into feed to enhance growth and prevent the diseases that sweep through crowded pens.

A panel of experts found "clear evidence of adverse human health consequences due to resistant organisms resulting from nonhuman usage of antimicrobials," the World Health Organization reported in 2004.

Image is from an online article titled From Dyes to Peptides: The Evolution of Antibiotic Drugs. It also provides some nice coverage of this issue:

In the 1950s, it was noted that antibiotics fed to livestock increased growth rates and animal size leading and thus increased production. It quickly became common practice to include antibiotics in animal feed. When antibiotics began to be used as food additives, there was no regulation behind it. Any antibiotic including those used for human therapy could be used.

At the same time, it became common practice to house livestock in confined and concentrated quarters. Farm animals such as chickens when allowed to roam free have limited egg and meat production, so farmers began to collect large numbers of chickens together to increase production. Factory farming led to the rapid spread of infections throughout farms and the use of antibiotics vastly increased to try to counter it. With the common use of antibiotics in farming, resistant genes were emerging in livestock bacteria and residual antibiotics were being ingested by humans, contributing to antibiotic resistance in human pathogens.

Yippee-Kai-Yay: the research shows...

2009-03-25T14:45:00.007-05:00

The "red meat tied to cancer" story has certainly swept the news industry. I like this story about the reaction of Saskatchewan cattle ranchers to the new study:

Ed Bothner, president of the Saskatchewan Stock Growers Association, questions those findings.

"There's societies that eat three to four times as much red meat or three to four times as much beef as we do," Bothner told CBC News. "And I can remember in my lifetime when our per capita consumption in Canada was over 100 pounds. Right now it is lower than 50, so I don't think it's the consumption of red meat, per se, that's the problem."

Joe Kleinsasser, the chairman of SaskPork, said that when he heard about the study, his first reaction was to dismiss it.

"These studies are a dime a dozen," Kleinsasser said. "One day eggs are bad for you, the next day you can't eat enough of them."

I'm sorry dude - BUT WHERE IN THE HELL are people eating three to four times more red meat than North Americans? That's goddamned ludicrous. And the other guy is priceless as well... these studies are a dime a dozen.... Yeah I know. Troll through the archives of this blog... there is NO END to the amount of research saying Whatever the f*&^k you do, don't eat red meat!

---------

Wow - am I the only one who completely missed this Pew Commission Report that came out in April 2008?

Pew Commission Says Industrial Scale Farm Animal Production Poses “Unacceptable” Risks to Public Health, Environment

Washington, DC - 04/29/2008 - The current industrial farm animal production (IFAP) system often poses unacceptable risks to public health, the environment and the welfare of the animals themselves, according to an extensive 2½-year examination conducted by the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production (PCIFAP), in a study released today.

Commissioners have determined that the negative effects of the IFAP system are too great and the scientific evidence is too strong to ignore. Significant changes must be implemented and must start now. And while some areas of animal agriculture have recognized these threats and have taken action, it is clear that the industry has a long way to go.

------

I found the Pew Commission report while scanning through the references at the end of this article:

Common Foods and Farming Methods Thought to Promote Health: What the Data Show
Primary Care: Clinics in Office Practice - Volume 35, Issue 4 (December 2008)
John Chahbazi, MD & Shelly Grow, MS

If you don't have access to the journal "Primary Care" shoot me an email (check my profile) and I'll see if I can send you a copy.

Here are some exerpts:

On how hard it is to figure out what the healthiest diets are, when our whole lifestyle is so sick

Even if the POEMs needed for evidence-based dietary counseling and farming practice recommendations are available, there is the difficulty of applying proven interventions to a population that has such a high rate of lifestyle-associated disease. This is a population that has continued to gain weight and become diabetic at ever-increasing rates in the face of improved food label reading and dietary changes as reported in Healthy People 2010. Trying for different results while maintaining the basic elements of a lifestyle that already has caused poor health could explain why only a small portion of proven dietary interventions have been shown to improve long-term health or longevity.

Quote from Diet for a New America on the benefits of adopting a vegetarian diet

“The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis … hormonal imbalances causing miscarriages and aberrations of sexual development similarly drop away, as we cease ingesting with our meat, poultry and milk the drugs pumped into our livestock. So do the neurologic disorders and birth defects due to pesticides and other chemicals, as we begin to eat lower on the food chain where the poisons are far less concentrated … We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have been able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale … We find ourselves also relieved of fear. For on a semiconscious level we knew all along that the old disparities in consumption were turning our planet into a tinder box, breeding resentments and desperations that could only eventuate in war.”

On the blood type diets like Eat Right for Your Type

Blood-type diets claiming benefits from different dietary components based on genotypes[37] are dismissed commonly as baseless theory.[38] Evidence is scarce and limited to secondary prevention. The most interesting study showed that a particular blood type in diabetics predisposed to more effective low-density lipoprotein lowering in response to increased dietary fiber.

Antibiotic Use

Cattle in 83% of United States commercial beef and dairy feedlots routinely receive antibiotics for disease prevention and to promote growth, resulting in the use of over 24 million pounds of antimicrobials annually for nontherapeutic purposes.
Many of these antimicrobials, such as tetracycline and penicillin, are important for human use. Drug-resistant bacteria and pathogens have emerged because of the widespread use of antibiotics in the animal reservoir, and these theoretically are able to be passed to people through the consumption of meat products. Health implications of antimicrobial resistance are infections that otherwise would not have occurred and increased rates of treatment failures and infection severity. An antibiotic-resistant urinary tract infection already may have been linked to this practice.

In general

This article is an overview of research on diets and nutrition, and the most common theme is this one:

For now, amelioration of unhealthy choices may be the best approach. Serial substitutions using nonanimal foods and snacks to reduce animal product consumption over time, encouragement of daily vigorous exercise, and increased consumption of organic and locally grown foods appear to be the best strategies toward that end.

End hunger by having a sirloin?

2009-03-20T14:49:00.003-05:00

A local community group just started advertising something they're doing to raise money for a food bank - it's obvious that no vegetarians or vegans were part of this. The premise is that you have a steak dinner at a local restaurant for $20.00, and $2.00 from each meal goes to the food bank.

I couldn't help myself. I wrote the community group a nice email detailing the intimate connection between the meat-rich (particularly beef) diet and world hunger.

I came across some neat stuff while writing my email.

In the Independent Online I found The Big Question: Is changing our diet the key to resolving the global food crisis?

How does eating meat cause hunger?
Because it is a very inefficient way of producing food. It takes 8kg of grain to produce 1kg of beef, and large tracts of forest have been cleared for grazing land that might have been used to grow crops. Chicken is more efficient to produce – it takes 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of meat. To maximise food production it is best to be vegan. According to Simon Fairlie, in his magazine The Land, it would take just 3 million hectares of arable land to meet Britain's food needs, half the current total, if the population were vegan.

From WorldWatch, 2004, 17(4) pg12-19 I found a fairly devastating (for the meat industry) article with the very long title Now, it's not personal! But like it or not, meat-eating is becoming a problem for everyone on the planet.
Here's an excerpt from the article abstract:

As environmental science has advanced, it has become apparent that the human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening humanity - deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.

The WorldWatch group is biased by the way. I happen to think they're right and I agree with them, but they're the group behind Happier Meals (which you can find a free copy of if you google it) and they've been on about the meat industry for a long time now.

Here are the other links I provided in my letter to this community group, some of which you've seen before on this blog:

Wired Online - Food Riots Begin: Will you go vegetarian?

BBC - Hungry World Must Eat less meat

Guardian - Only a radical change of diet can halt looming food crises

U.N. Food & Agricultural Association: Livestock's Long Shadow

from Irish research to Vancouver newspapers

2009-03-12T19:43:00.005-05:00

While pissing off vegans everywhere, here is a good illustration of something like the joke about how there are three types of lies (punchline being - Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics). In this case, we have the grey fuzzy gap between research, and how research gets portrayed in a newspaper.

First - the Vancouver Sun runs a story called Vegan diet tied to birth defects.

So read that, but then definitely read a follow up piece in the same newspaper called Is eating vegan while pregnant as bad as smoking and drinking? What you are particularly going to want to read are the string of comments below this piece, where pissed off vegans tear both stories to shreds.

A) All the hoopla in both stories is about women who are B12 deficient. Vegans are not necessarily B12 deficient... especially mothers who have probably read up on this and are taking their supplements.

B) The data in the study is 20 years old (which is fine) but comes from a test group in Ireland where neural tube defects are already common - i.e. this is already a fairly biased test group.

C) None of the women in the study actually identified as vegetarian or vegan - some happened to have low B12 levels... and no offense... but in Ireland in 1989 they were probably meat eaters, not veggies.

Food and sustainability

2009-02-22T19:26:00.003-05:00

I knew that the meat-rich diet was bad for the environment, but until the last few days I didn't realize that meat production emits more greenhouse gases than the international transportation industry.

I put together some details on this for a little project at work, and thought I'd post it up here as well.

Guess what – more and more research is showing that you can more to reduce your carbon footprint by going vegetarian, than by switching from an SUV to a hybrid car.

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization released Livestock's Long Shadow, which identified the meat industry as a greater producer of greenhouse gases than the entire international transportation industry.

New Scientist magazine agrees, stating in 2008 that a family's food consumption accounts for double the greenhouse gases as their household driving habits.

The industrialized production of meat (approximately 15 billion animals each year in the U.S. alone) is an incredibly carbon intensive process. The problem begins with the fact that it takes 7 tons of plant protein (cows in industrial farms aren't fed grass, but soy, which can be eaten by humans) to make 1 ton of meat protein – resulting in 6 tons of wasted food (and wasted farmland, fertilizer, pesticides, oil/energy, and tremendous amounts of wasted water).
Not only does the production of meat create greenhouse gases, but by replacing forests (which act as carbon sinks to soak up C02) with farmland to grow soy for the animals, the meat industry reduces the planet's natural ability to absorb greenhouse gases. As well, cows account for approximately 40% of all the methane in the atmosphere.

In a February 2009 report, Stehfest et al state that the combined problems of methane, the C02 emissions caused by the meat industry, and the elimination of carbon sinks, are so significant that a worldwide switch to a vegetarian diet (however unlikely) would achieve the equivalent of $20 trillion spent on other climate change solutions (such as carbon sequestriation).

In Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble (looks like a version 3.0 was just released), Lester Brown writes that at a North American level of food consumption (ie heavy on meat), the planet can support 2.5 billion people, while at the other extreme, on the more veggie Indian diet, the earth could support 10 billion people (there are 6 billion people on the planet right now, with 9 billion expected by 2050).

Apart from greenhouse gas emissions, the industrialized meat industry creates many other environmental problems, including the toxic waste lagoons caused by pig farms (which create as much waste as cities the size of Cincinnati) and the reduction of oxygen levels in water bodies like the Gulf of Mexico, which kills all sealife in these areas.

Brown, L. (2006). Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. Washington: Earth Policy Institute.

Nierenber, D. (2005). Happier meals: Rethinking the global meat industry. Danvers, MA: Worldwatch Institute.

Stehfest, E. & Bouwman, L. (2009). Climate benefits of changing diet. Climatic Change, published in Online First edition, Feb. 4, 2009.

Steinfeld, H. & Gerber, P. (2006) Livestock's long shadow: Environmental issues and options. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Trivedi, B. (2008). Dinner's dirty secret: your shopping basket is spewing greenhouse gases. New Scientist, 199(2673), 28-32.
PS - looks like the online version was titled What is your dinner doing to the climate?

End of the Line

2009-01-31T13:45:00.003-05:00

The book is sitting on my bedside table.

I can't wait to see the movie.

Pg 4
...it comes with the realization that in a single human lifetime we have inflicted a crisis on the oceans greater than any yet caused by pollution. That crisis compares with the destruction of mammoths, bison, and whales, the rape of rain forests, and the pursuit of bush meat. As a method of mass destruction, fishing with modern technology is the most destructive activity on Earth.

Pg 5
This book argues that, as a result of overfishing, we are nearing the end of the line for fish stocks and whole ecosystems in the world's oceans, and that it is time we arranged things differently.

Dolphins evolve opposable thumbs

2009-01-18T11:23:00.005-05:00

One of my favourite George Bush lines is included here: "I believe that human beings and fish can coexist peacefully". I assume he was asked a question about overfishing, and that was his response, but out of context it sounds like most other ridiculous George Bush comments. To give Bush credit, I mentioned over here that I'm tremendously impressed by his decision to create massive marine protected zones (i.e. oceanic equivalents of National Parks).

This is tremendously important, and ties in to a post I've been meaning to write about Pescatarians. Now, to each his own and all that, but I really think that pescatarians need to read more. I assume that pescatarians are otherwise veggie only because of the animal cruelty issue, and think that fish lack the intelligence to know suffering, and therefore the pescies (this shall be my new shortform of pescatarians) feel alright about eating fish. Now the first flaw here, if we stick with animal cruelty, is that you have to believe that hyper-intelligent dolphins, and also porpoises and whales, have the intelligence to suffer, and since deep sea nets catch and slowly kill 1000 of these creatures a day - 1000 A DAY FOR GOD'S SAKE!!! (for no purpose by the way, simple bycatch of trawlers actually going after fish) - the cans of tuna you buy at the supermarket help support the torture of dolphins. Commercial fishing by the way is a phenomenally wasteful industry - how can you support a business practice where 1/3 of the fish caught get thrown back dead into the ocean because they weren't the species that the trawler was going for?

My other response to pescatarianism is that, unless you honestly and truly cannot survive without the protein from fish (which I suspect only applies to people in the third world) you are misguidedly supporting an industry which is completely f*&%king up the planet.
As far right and conservative a magazine as the Economist has published alarm-sounding special reports (see Troubled Water) about the links between overfishing, marine diversity, climate change, and our own survival as a species.
First - we've already reached a point where all commercial fish stocks could be gone by 2048. The collapse of fish populations makes it harder for the trawlers to get their quotas, so the holes in fish nets get smaller and smaller, catching younger and younger fish - meaning fish which never get the chance to reach breeding stage, thereby eliminating the ability of fish populations to recover from overfishing. Also - the desperation ship captains feel to get their quotas leads to fish nets being dragged over and over across the floors of bays and gulfs and other shallow water areas, destroying any vegetation on the seabottom (vegetation that either feeds or protects fish).

The loss of one species of fish leads to the rise of another type, and then the downfall of another (i.e. if all the sharks die, the fish that sharks ate prosper, and they eat much more of their prey, devastating that stock). The ripple effects of this lead include things like seabirds starving, and bears in B.C. unable to eat salmon.

Meanwhile, while we all know that oceans in general are massive carbon sinks (helping suck up all of our C02 emissions), to date we didn't fully understand how oceans helped us out this way. New research shows that fish excrete a type of calcium that buffers the acidification that C02 causes in the ocean. We're already pumping so much C02 into the atmosphere, and thereby into the ocean, that the skeletons of some sea creatures are dissolving.
Lose all the fish, you lose much of the ocean's carbon sink ability, you lose your elderly aunt to a respiratory problem caused by increasing levels of C02 in the atmosphere.

P.S. - you really should watch Sharkwater and learn about shark finning, and the title of this post comes from one of my favourite articles in the Onion.

P.P.S. - this and this are random but good introductions to this topic, the first for younger audiences, and the second for adults. This one is good on coral reefs and the importance of oceans as carbon sinks.

swimming in your ocean

2008-12-22T16:05:00.003-05:00

There's no end to the sheer idiocy of the factory farm system.
After an article back in April about how C02 intensive the meat rich diet is, Discovery News now has one about the nitrogen runoff from Factory Farms destroying oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

---------------

Now new research shows how the leftover fertilizer is contributing to an oxygen-starved dead zone where the Mississippi River drains into the Gulf of Mexico. Last summer, the zone was nearly the size of Massachusetts.

Gidon Eshel of Bard College at Simon's Rock in Massachusetts and Pamela Martin of the University of Chicago calculate that if Americans kicked their meat habit, it would prevent seven million tons of nitrogen from spilling into the gulf -- a reduction of nearly 90 percent.

"When we did the calculations, it was astonishing," Eshel said. "The main reason is we're feeding so much corn to livestock. It takes 4.5 times more cropland to do that than if you feed people a plant diet, and corn is so nitrogen-intensive."

Cutting down on nitrogen run-off is a big deal, because if it continues unchecked it could threaten shrimp and fishing industries in the gulf, said William Battaglin of the United States Geological Survey.

"Conditions have not been catastrophic to fisheries yet," he said. "The concern is that if this keeps up, you could turn the whole place into the Black Sea, with everything dead."

Fight the power (with lentils!)

2008-12-20T07:00:00.003-05:00

Anybody watched all of Earthlings?

EARTHLINGS is a feature length documentary about humanity's absolute dependence on animals (for pets, food, clothing, entertainment, and scientific research) but also illustrates our complete disrespect for these so-called "non-human providers." The film is narrated by Academy Award nominee Joaquin Phoenix (GLADIATOR) and features music by the critically acclaimed platinum artist Moby .

I watched the trailer and the 7 minute opening sequence, and I apologize to Joaquin, but it seems misguided to me. With the disturbing "disaster is looming" music in the background, the broad jump all the way into Peter Singer derived "speciesism" (which is a lot to confront someone with right off the bat), the references to rapists and child molesters and images of Hitler and the KKK, the focus seems to be on the perverted nature of humanity, rather than the life-affirming qualities of vegetarianism, which I think is a much more compelling way to reach people. However, everyone who commented on this You Tube video would say I'm wrong.

I prefer more playful stuff Vegetarian diet could help bail out the Big Three.

Detroit automakers - and all American manufacturers - are spending a fortune on health care because the workforce is so out of shape. Two-thirds of American adults are now overweight or obese. And as the Big Three employees get bigger, so do their health-care bills. Unfortunately, if current trends continue unchecked, almost 90 percent of American adults will be overweight or obese by 2030, according to a recent study in the journal Obesity. As a nurse practitioner specializing in the care of people with diabetes, I know that Americans' expanding waistlines bring unprecedented epidemics of diabetes and other chronic diseases.

The point being that the veggie diet, with all its various health benefits (among these, consistently well-proven diabetes prevention) would make workers much healther and cut down on all these health-care costs that employers have to pay.

Can you imagine walking up to a picket line and telling UAW workers "you can save your jobs if you go vegetarian?"

Veggie-ism taking some potshots

2008-12-17T11:15:00.005-05:00

Yikes!!!
It's been a bit of a bad week in the veggie world. Despite what I - and lots of people - thought, Clint Eastwood is not actually a vegan or vegetarian. A NY Times reporter was interviewing him, and brought up the supposedly well-known "Clint as Vegan" topic - In 1986 he bought [the restaurant, which has] a piano bar, heart-stopping views of the ocean spray on Point Lobos and plenty of meat on the menu. Despite what you might have read on Wikipedia, Mr. Eastwood is not a vegan, and he looked slightly aghast when told exactly what a vegan is. “I never look at the Internet for just that reason,” he said.

And today there's a brief story about Paul McCartney and the Dalai Lama on the news websites. Turns out the Dalai Lama is NOT a vegetarian (who'd a thunk it!) and McCartney once tried, unsuccessfully, to convert him.

AND THEN, an actress named Bijou Phillips is interviewed in the LA Times and quite happily talks about veganism being crap and returning to "real" food again:
So you feel all right?
I feel good! I'm sick and I've been sick four times since I've been vegan and I hadn't been sick for five years before that. I need to eat food because this isn't working. Every vegan I know gets sick all the time.

AND FINALLY Canada's national newsmagazine, Macleans, has a lengthy story titled Will Soy Make My Son Gay. I looked into soy a while back and as far as I could see, it was fine for you. This article doesn't come down on either side of the argument, but OF COURSE they had to title it as provocatively as they do. Reminds me of this story from a while back... Rise of the Vegan Fairyboys. This writer got really hammered in the Global Vegan group on Facebook.

The only beneficial story I've seen the last few days comes (surprisingly!) from The Economist magazine's The World in 2009 special issue. In a piece called A Water Warning the President of Nestle mentions how resource intensive the meat-rich diet is compared to a veggie diet:
Diets are another variable. Europeans and Americans have for years had high proportions of meat in their diets, but now this trend is catching on in emerging markets as incomes rise. Meat requires ten times the water withdrawn per calorie by plants. So the average daily diet in California requires some 6,000 litres of water in agriculture, compared with 3,000 litres in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.
If you've never read about the water issue before, try these:

Blue Gold

Water

As a Canadian, a shortage of water is the furthest thing from your mind, but this is really a massive problem.

PETA and the cons

2008-11-19T14:25:00.002-05:00

I often feel that PETA shoots their mouth off too often, taking any current event story that happens and recommending that that celebrity or football team go veggie for some reason.
I mean, basically I agree, but doing it all the time becomes annoying.

So today I read this story about PETA recommending that prisons implement a veggie diet so that prisoners will be more healthy when they leave. My first thought was "Holy cow, PETA... give it a rest." But then I read through the rest of the story, and it turns out that the PETA comment was inspired by the fact that one prison in Quebec let a 450 pound drug dealer out of prison several months early simply because none of their furniture or doors etc could accommodate this guy... so he was getting early release because he was obese.

Bet the Republicans and conservatives never saw this benefit of going veggie - a vegetarian diet helps you keep your prisoners in jail and your drug dealers off the streets!

A very vegan wedding

2008-10-18T06:35:00.002-05:00

Wow - I haven't posted over here since early August. I guess that's what happens when you buy a house, work at a university and have a new school year begin, organize the first ever bicycle rally in your new town, and get married... blogging gets pushed onto the back burner a fair bit.

So the big news for today is that Annalise and I got married a few weeks ago. There was never any real doubt that we were going to have a vegan wedding, but there was discussion about how militant we were going to be... i.e. would we provide a meat dish to people who really really wanted one?

The dinner was at a local restaurant that has been featured before on the Restaurant Makeover television show. They agreed, and were pretty delighted, to do a vegan dinner for us, and started us off with a carrot / ginger soup that I don't have a picture of, and which was followed by a Thai salad that was pretty darn filling all by itself.

The Main Course was served as a trio with a Tomato Basil sauce:
-Cabbage roll (stuffed with sundried tomato and garlic infused rice pilaf)
-Vegetable wellington (spinach, tomato, leeks, mushrooms, carrots wrapped with a crisp filo pastry)
-Stuffed sweet pepper (filled with a wild mushroom couscous with peas and asparagus)

And the dessert was a vegan German chocolate cake.

To answer the militant question from up above - we were pretty militant. We didn't serve any meat etc, and the only concession we made was to offer milk/cream for people who might want dairy with their coffee or tea. The "butter" we used was a vegan Earth Balance spread.

Almost no one at our wedding really cared about the lack of a meat option for dinner. In the end, I think our dithering about the menu was just part of the pre-wedding paranoia that all weddings cause the bride and groom.

Even for the most hard-core meat and potatoes people, I think they just needed time to come around to the conclusion that it wasn't their wedding, and that one vegan meal wasn't going to kill them.

Especially a meal that was delicious anyway.

Hmmm.... I'll need some energy tomorrow

2008-08-16T17:47:00.005-05:00

As mentioned over on my cycling blog, my brother and girlfriend and I are doing a team triathlon tomorrow morning. I'm doing the cycling portion, and even though it's short, I was thinking this afternoon that I really should try to eat some sort of a power-packed dinner tonight.
Traditionally you're supposed to eat pasta two nights before your race (that's how long it takes the carbs to turn themselves into energy that you can use). But, last night I totally forgot about eating properly, and in fact we were out drinking anyway.

So, for some energy, I decided to go with an old favourite tonight - curry. The recipe is pretty simple (leave some frying time between each of these steps):
a) cut and start frying an onion (one full onion)
b) add whatever veggies you want (peppers, cauliflower, mushrooms etc) Our recipe says about two cups worth, but it totally depends on how many people you're going to feed.
c) add in about four small spoonfulls of curry paste and fry for a while
d) drain and add a can of chickpeas
e) add a can of diced tomatoes, plus about 1 cup of water
f) add another four small spoonfulls of curry paste
g) let this big goopy mess heat slowly for 15 or 20 minutes. When a good amount of the water has evaporated, you're ready to go.

Usually we eat this on rice, but I decided to put it over some pasta. We sometimes buy this Farfalle stuff, which, very refreshingly, only has one ingredient - 100% durum wheat semolina.

Not really being able to cook, I'm not the type of veggie blogger who does the awesome posts full of gorgeous photos of recipes in process. So enjoy this meager attempt, these kinds of posts don't happen often around here. : )

thanking the monkey

2008-08-16T12:42:00.004-05:00

I just came across a review of a book called Thanking the Monkey by Karen Dawn. From the review and the interview with the author, it sounds like an interesting (and even kind of "fun"?) survey of animal treatment issues.

I like her take on the logic behind the vegetarian diet:
We're going to have a choice. As there are more and more and more of us, it takes an awful lot more land and resources to feed people with meat than it does [with] grain. The Earth could feed about 2.5 billion people if everyone ate the standard American diet, or it could feed 10 billion vegetarians. The fact that China is starting to eat our diet -- the more meat people eat, the more impossible it will be to eat at all.
Actually, now that I think about it, I wonder if she just finished reading Lester Brown's Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a planet under stress and a civilization in trouble. In Chapter 9 Brown writes that at a North American level of food consumption (ie heavy on meat), the planet can support 2.5 billion people, while at the other extreme, on the more veggie Indian diet, the earth could support 10 billion people.

The author also has a fairly open view of people being "mostly" veggie (and sometimes letting down their guard and cheating):

So let's say I'm an omnivore who simply cannot go without eating meat or eggs now and then. Is there anything I can do to still be as animal-conscious as possible, even though I'm eating them?

Every single time you sit down at a restaurant, you make a choice. If there's a veggie burger on the menu, don't order the turkey burger. My vegetarianism didn't happen overnight. . . . I'm still a cheating vegan: If I'm dying for Doritos -- and I know they have a bit of whey in them -- I still eat them. But I think if I wasn't a cheating vegan, I might not even be engaging in this lifestyle at all. It's not an all-or-nothing thing.

But what if I want to order or buy meat?

Some things are better than others. . . . At least if you're buying meat that has met some sort of welfare standards, you're not contributing to heinous torture. And it's better to eat an occasional piece of steak than an omelet every day, both health-wise and also because of the amount of cruelty involved. Six eggs -- what those six hens went through!

The article is here on the Washington Post website. You'd better hurry though, because I think the post quickly hides away its online articles for subscriber viewing only.

Cheney's crowd as your dieticians

2008-08-08T09:45:00.006-05:00

Here's a story for you.
The American Institute for Cancer Research has released a report titled Food, Nutrition, Physical Activity and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective. In the report they make a direct tie between meat and various forms of cancer, highlighting that processed meats in particular create a cancer risk no matter how minimal your intake of these meats might be.

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has latched onto the report, and is using it to support their quest to get processed meats out of school cafeterias. But, this has ruffled the feathers of the Center for Consumer Freedom and the American Meat Institute, which, like the tobacco companies, don't care if their products cause cancer, and will fight to the death for their right to keep selling you carcinogen rich meat because that is how they make their money.

Caught in the middle of this feud between the PCRM and the two meat lobby groups, the AICR published this news release. The release highlights the scientific credibility of all researchers involved in the Food, Nutrition... report, and reiterates this point - The evidence on processed meat is even more clear-cut than that on red meat, and the data do not show any level of intake that can confidently be shown not to be associated with risk, and concludes with this passage:

We at AICR wish the multi-billion-dollar meat industry would take the money it uses to attack the objective conclusions of independent experts and devote it to researching why diets high in processed meats are so consistently associated with troubling increases in colorectal cancer risk. With such efforts, it may prove possible to isolate the particular cause or causes and make processed meats safer.

In the meantime, no amount of meat industry spin can change the fact that the exhaustive AICR report has been embraced by the international scientific and medical community and represents overwhelming scientific consensus.

Any time you read that cars idling in drive-throughs is good for your five year old, or that there is no connection between meat and cancer, just picture Dick Cheney pointing his finger in your face and telling you these "truths". Hopefully that will scare you silly and inspire you to read a little more until you figure out who to really trust.

all the news that is fit to print

2008-07-27T06:25:00.003-05:00

I've been holding onto some news stories in order to do a "vegetarianism in the news" post, and I think I have enough now to provide you all with some interesting links to check out.

In the Huffington Post, Kathy Freston discusses why a vegan diet is much healthier for you than the infamous Atkins diet. I love this passage:
Basically, every reputable health agency knows that a mountain of evidence indicates that the saturated fat and cholesterol in animal flesh, eggs and milk clogs your arteries and increases your risk of heart disease, among an array of other problems.

Heart disease is of course just one meat-related health problem; eating animals also raises one's risk of cancer. For example, a massive Harvard study in 2006 found that people who frequently eat skinless chicken (often touted as the "healthy" way to cook chicken) had a whopping 52% higher rate of bladder cancer. The evidence that animal protein is carcinogenic is strong, and people who eat lots of it are raising their risk.

There's been a lot of coverage of the vegan "chicken" burger at KFC in Canada. I have to admit that I've found this story amusing since it first developed. Sure, it's great that KFC agreed to offer a veggie option at its restaurants, but am I not right in thinking that 99% of vegans wouldn't set foot in a KFC in the first place? I mean thanks for the veggie burger, but since I'm health conscious I don't really eat fast food, and since you still support the factory farming of chickens, I'm not giving you my money anyway.

Good for Johanna McCloy! But holy crap...
[Her efforts have] encountered pockets of hostile resistance.

Last month, after an article about McCloy appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle magazine, reader Marc Kimberly of Concord wrote: "For goodness' sakes, is there no limit to which annoying vegetarians won't go in their efforts to try to convert people from enjoying meat in favor of the bland mishmash of unappetizing and virtually tasteless 'food' these elitist snobs choke down their gullets?"

McCloy says she was equally dumbfounded when, during an appearance on a Denver radio station, her efforts were labeled un-American. Her only objective, she says, is to give fans a choice.

This one is a little boggling: A vegetarian named Jesse Simons won a hot dog eating contest in New York State. He gives up vegetarianism for contests like this one, and his prize was a gym membership and a voucher for 50 free hot dogs.

I can't be bothered to comment, but this article sympathizes with male vegetarians for being the absolute lowest forms of life. P.S. I haven't checked out the Harvard study that the writer mentions, but my own research on soy makes me think that everything will be okay.

Finally, from the U.S. News and World Report - Making meat without killing animals could fix a host of problems. This article mainly covers the scary prospect of creating "meat" in labs, instead of in factory farms, in order to solve the health and environmental problems of a meat based diet, without actually requiring people to go vegetarian. It's nice that the writer can quite happily make this statement:
It would make sense, of course, for the whole world to become vegetarian: A plant-based diet is more healthful, more economical, and more environmentally benign. (Cows are major contributors to global warming because they generate methane.)
But to otherwise imply that laboratory created meat is a better way to get away from the environmental and health consequences of factory farmed meat seems silly and scary to me. Not to mention unappetizing:
They used tissue engineering to grow two quarter-size disks of muscle on a polymer scaffold, then sautéed the steaks in a honey-garlic sauce, quartered them, and served dinner for eight. It was not a gourmet experience. The scaffold didn't degrade enough, Catts says, and the unexercised muscle had a texture reminiscent of snot. "It was fabric with jelly," he says. "Four people spit out the bits." That was five years ago, and he hasn't eaten meat since.

Veggies according to marketing groups

2008-07-19T15:13:00.002-05:00

A while back on my cycling blog, I did a post about a market research report I'd found which discussed cyclists as a target market.

Lo and behold, similar stuff exists for vegetarians!

I came across a news story about an international market research group which had recently published a slew of reports on different veggie groups. Along with some miscellaneous reports, they have written on the following groups:

Vegetarian and Vegan Consumers

Semi Vegetarian Consumers

Meat Reducing Consumers

Their work shows the following dietary preferences in the United States:
- Avid meat consumers (14%) – consume meat with “every” meal
- Regular meat consumers (47%) – consume meat with “most” meals
- Moderate meat consumers (25%) – consume meat with “about half” of meals
- Semi-vegetarians (13%) – consume meat with “fewer than half” of meals
- Vegetarians and vegans (1%) – “never” consume meat
- Vegetarians are those who never eat meat, while vegans do not consume animal products of any kind. Combined, these groups make up a small, but dedicated portion of the population, comprising 2 million individuals, or about 1% of the total U.S. adult population.

This is the summary of the vegetarian and vegan consumers report:

The vegetarian and vegan segment has the potential to grow to nearly six times its current size, which would bring the total number of such consumers to almost 18 million adults.

Vegetarians and vegans are the most frequent purchasers of meat and dairy alternatives. As a consumer segment, they are extremely receptive to trying new grocery products and they self-report as being the first among their friends to do so. Most are willing to pay premiums for items that embody their ideals, including “humane” products.

The vegetarian and vegan group tends to skew female and toward the younger end of the age spectrum when compared with the base adult population. The group is nearly two-thirds women, and more than half are under the age of 35. This skew toward younger people may account for this segment’s greater interest in humane and environmental issues, as opposed to health, which is more important to older age groups.

Vegetarians and vegans are more issue-driven than any other consumer group. They are first and foremost motivated by animal welfare issues and to a lesser extent environmental issues. Because these issues are a priority for vegetarians and vegans, they are more likely than the typical U.S. adult to contribute time or money to related causes and they integrate these issues into their dietary decisions on a daily basis.

Vegetarians and vegans are motivated by a number of different concerns, but as a group they cite animal welfare as the biggest primary motivator in choosing a vegetarian diet. This is in contrast to non-vegetarians, who clearly indicate that health is the primary (and in some cases only) motivator for meat-reducing behavior.

Vegetarians and vegans have shown a willingness to make social sacrifices in support of their philosophies; many seek out support networks of friends who share similar convictions to help them remain steadfast in their lifestyles and dietary choices.

To engage this consumer segment, food producers, retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and others involved in selling vegetarian food products should adopt sales and marketing strategies that appeal to vegetarians based on their primary motivations.

Vegetarian food industry players should also utilize established vegetarian patrons as word of mouth advocates for their products to reach other vegetarian and non-vegetarian customers through the patrons’ social networks.

The Beef Industry will be the beef cops?

2008-07-19T14:42:00.003-05:00

I don't remember what the food safety department is called in the United States, but several years ago they decided to stop doing safety inspections of slaughterhouses - to make sure that various safety procedures were in place - and decided to let the slaughterhouses self police themselves, i.e.
If you see a sick cow heading onto the disassembly line, we trust that you'll pull him off the line, instead of just prodding him on to get the couple hundred bucks his meat is worth!

Even when federal U.S. safety inspectors were on the job, you got horrendous practices like this. When the feds gave over safety inspection responsibility to the slaughterhouses themselves, the problem of downers got worse, and terrible stories like this popped up more.

As a Canadian, why do I care? Well, we're now following the American example. Health Canada is about to stop doing safety inspections at slaughterhouses, in favour of the slaughterhouses doing it themselves. "Now they have to do the inspections and record those inspections. We verify by doing checks. It puts the accountability on the industry."
The accountability is on the industry itself. I think that's great. I completely and fully trust the cattle industry to do a good job with this. To my meat-eating friends, have no worries, your hamburgers are just getting safer and safer.

Another cute thing from this news story is this - the federal government is going to pull the only incentive (besides honesty) that slaughterhouses have to destroy cattle that might have mad cow disease:
Freeman Libby of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency said Thursday the federal government may change a program brought in during the mad cow crisis in 2003 that pays producers $75 to identify every head of cattle suspected of having bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

Now, I realize that it's of no interest to the cattle industry to have their consumers dying off due to mad cow disease, but wouldn't you rather have an iffy call on whether or not a steer has mad cow being made by an food safety official with no conflict of interest in the matter? Rather than the slaughterhouse that just bought a herd of cattle and will get a greater profit for the more cattle they process?

And, let's not forget this other beauty from Health Canada, as described in the CBC Passionate Eye documentary Frankensteer: after sifting through all the research that the European Union had looked at in deciding to ban all North American beef from their market, several Health Canada scientists said "Yes, we agree, there are far too many carcinogens in Canadian beef for it to be considered safe to eat."

What did Health Canada do? They fired the scientists.

Science to the rescue

2008-07-18T12:06:00.004-05:00

I haven't been blogging very much recently, and if you're curious, my list of excuses is about three posts down on my cycling blog (you're looking for the post titled Mariposa Folk Festival).

To get back into the groove, I thought I'd check to see if any new research on vegetarianism or meat-rich diets has been appearing in the article databases, and I found a few things to help you prove to your parents and friends that a veggie diet is really the way to go.

In Australia, they studied 215 kids aged 14 and 15, and found that "Adolescents consuming predominantly vegetarian foods showed significantly better scores on markers of cardiovascular health, including, body mass index (BMI), waist circumference, Cholesterol/High density lipoprotein ratio and low density lipoprotein... Surprisingly, exercise on its own was not statistically associated with any of the risk factors tested suggesting that diet may be the most significant factor in promoting health in this age group."
The relative impact of a vegetable-rich diet on key markers of health in a cohort of Australian adolescents
ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CLINICAL NUTRITION 17(1)pp.107-115,2008

Picture One here depicts the effect on scientists of doing research on drug laced North American beef without proper safety clothing & gear.

There seems to be no doubt anymore that meat causes diabetes. A study following nearly 8500 people over a 17 year period found a 29 to 38% greater risk of diabetes when eating various types of meats, compared to a vegetarian diet. Over the long-term span of the study however it's even worse: "Long-term adherence (over a 17-year interval) to a diet that included at least weekly meat intake was associated with a 74% increase in odds of diabetes relative to long-term adherence to a vegetarian diet (zero meat intake)."
Conclusions: Our findings raise the possibility that meat intake, particularly processed meats, is a dietary risk factor for diabetes.
Meats, processed meats, obesity, weight gain and occurrence of diabetes among adults: Findings from Adventist Health Studies
ANNALS OF NUTRITION AND METABOLISM 52(2)pgs 96-104,2008

This picture is a depiction of proper meat handling precautions for North American scientists.

And, going back to the tie between cancer and meat, a Canadian study of nearly 20 000 participants found that "Total meat and processed meat were directly related to the risk of stomach, colon, rectum, pancreas, lung, breast (mainly postmenopausal), prostate, testis, kidney, bladder, and leukemia. Red meat was significantly associated with colon, lung (mainly in men), and bladder cancer... these findings add further evidence that meat, specifically red and processed meat, plays an unfavorable role in the risk of several cancers.
Meat and fish consumption and cancer in Canada
NUTRITION AND CANCER-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL 60(3)pp.313-324,2008

KFC Canada

2008-06-02T11:16:00.004-05:00

It would seem that this is only in Canada, but it looks like KFC has succumbed to some PETA-Pressure and is going to start improving their poultry purchasing policies.
Aside from some new humane treatment requirements, KFC is going to start offering a vegan chicken substitute.

This is the one that makes you go hmmmm.... - is any vegan really going to step into a KFC and order a bucket of vegan "chicken"? Especially when well-read vegans know that in California, KFC has to tell customers that their french fries are carcinogenic?

This Canadian Press story lays out most of the details, but the story is also told in a few other places if you do a google news search.

P.S. - I don't really want to talk about it, but due to a restaurant misunderstanding last night, I put meat into my belly. My belly started doing backflips just at the end of dinner, and the meat didn't stay around very long. I'm still kind of trying to convince myself that my tummy went nuts due to hot sauce or something, but no... I think it was meat. My girlfriend asked if it had tasted like meat, and I had no idea. It's been so long that I have no idea what meat tastes like anymore.

Hulk get angry

2008-05-20T12:18:00.005-05:00

AlterNet has a couple interesting articles online right now - one, by Richard Heinberg, asks whether or not we've finally hit Peak Oil.

The one of interest to this blog, is the Top 10 Reasons to go Veggie article.
Now, the article itself isn't anything to write home about - vegetarianism is healthier for you, it is a great solution to the global food crisis, prevents cruelty to animals etc. But, what really makes this article interesting are the reader comments which you'll see below the story. They'll make you want to catch some Gamma Rays and bash some heads together:

Fun comment #1: Every vegan I know is physically weak, unattractive, with sallow skin and apparent mental slowness. Whenever people mention veganism in conversation, the topic almost immediately turns to how unhealthy and unattractive the vegans are. The vegans, for their part, claim that all their ill health is due to their "de-toxing" from meat.

Fun comment #2: So let me get this straight. Everybody should just stop eating meat. Nevermind the loss of millions and millions of jobs from workers in that industry (not to mention the restaurant industry, trucking industry, and grocery store industry). Nevermind the sudden explosion of demand that would be put on grain farmers. Nevermind that we would still have to do something with all those animals. If you're a vegetarian, then you should adopt a cow or two to give them a home in a post meat-eating world. This article is a joke. And I'm sorry but I'm not going to be made to feel guilty about the environment just because I like to eat meat

Okay, so you've gone all Hulk and screamed at your computer monitor, and then you start to realize that they are just confrontational idiots in their basement somewhere, and you try to get your Zen on... like lego IronMan here, doing a bit of meditating...

Fun comment #3: If I was still in college I would probably go vegan... if it meant I'd get laid! It worked when I campaigned diligently to free Tibet for like, 2 weeks. Boo Ya!

Yeah - these guys are morons. Light some incense, get your yoga mat out, chill...

Actually, one of the few comments I like is one where the writer says that most of our fellow North Americans can't really process the intellectual argument that vegetarians make (go veggie due to social justice etc), and therefore it is incumbent upon us to concentrate on a more visceral level - taste.
If you want to truly sell vegetarianism to the American public, stop wasting your time with lists of reasons that appeal to the intellectual side of the American brain and concentrate on selling the taste. My girlfriend is an AMAZING vegetarian chef and because of her creations I literally do not miss meat when we sit down to dinner. Americans don't like to be preached to, but they LOVE to eat. So remember: sell the sizzle, not the steak!

Zen IronMan from Kung Fu Rodeo.

Vegans & light bulbs

2008-05-11T19:25:00.002-05:00

CBC Radio's Sunday Edition had a feature today (May 11) on Vegan Humour. It was actually pretty good, and pretty soon you'll be able to listen to it on this page (again, you'll be downloading the May 11 show, and the vegan episode is in the first hour).

They talked about Let's Get Baked with Mat and Dave (their more often updated My Space page is here).

They played this song, which I guess was a hit in lefty & green Seattle a little time back (it sounded funnier on radio than it reads). They also played some stuff from Steven the Vegan, and told a pretty funny "How many... light bulb" joke:

How many vegans does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Two - one to twist the bulb, and one to read the list of ingredients.

DOCUMENTARY: WHY DID THE VEGAN CROSS THE ROAD Duration: 00:13:56

In the world of right-thinking, high-minded environmentalists, chowing down on your sizzling bacon is the culinary equivalent of driving an SUV. A United Nations report says livestock farming is responsible for 40 percent more global warming than all planes, cars, trucks, and other forms of transportation in the world combined. This is no laughing matter. Meat-guzzling North Americans have a lot to feel guilty about. Even most vegetarians are on the hook - since almost all eggs, cheese, come from livestock.

But vegans? Well, they can feel pretty righteous. Vegans are the most veggie of all vegetarians. They eat no animal products whatsoever - no meat, no fish, no dairy products, not even honey. Bees, after all, are living, buzzing, feeling creatures. And by and large, vegans are a healthy lot. They eat lots of beans and fruits and grains and vegetables. They don't feel threatened by bird flu or mad cow disease.

But funny? There are those who say that the very term "vegan humour" is an oxymoron. And, for sure its, it's hard to imagine how quinoa pudding, baked bean souffle or lentil muffins produce much joie de vivre, let alone hilarity. But some in the vegan world are trying to introduce a lighter touch into a community sometimes mocked for its self-importance and grimness. Heather Barrett went looking for them. Her documentary is called Why Did the Vegan Cross the Road?

The dude abides

2008-04-22T07:34:00.003-05:00

It's biking season and I've been thinking more about bikes than veggieism recently. But, I did see a few good stories today I thought I'd mention:
Everyone knows about Paul McCartney being vegetarian and a strong veggie advocate, but hey - even Chinese politicans are getting into the act right now, at least for Earth Day.
If you had any doubt that your veggie diet was healthier than that of your omnivore friends, here is another research study to back up your "it's healthier!" argument - vegan diet helps prevent prostate cancer.

And here, from Wired Magazine, is a great piece titled Food Riots Begin: Will You Go Vegetarian?

The writer, an omnivore, kind of explores how various things had made him more and more sympathetic and receptive to vegetarianism, and now, with the worldwide food shortages, he finally feels ready to accept, without reservation, the logic of the veggie argument:

As I grew older and my palate more sophisticated, I learned to appreciate the joys of vegetables and grains and fruits. I ate more of these, and after reading Michael Pollan's This Steer's Life tried to make sure that the animals I consumed lived and died as decently as possible. But going non-meat was a non-starter. Even when environmentalists pointed to the extraordinary greenhouse gas burden of global livestock, I put it out of mind.

I'm not sure if I can sustain that willful blindness anymore.

It's a really good piece, at least for us veggies. Here's hoping more and more people learn about veggie secrets like Quinoa and serve their friends salads like this more often.

P.S. - My partner and I are getting married this autumn, and are planning to have a vegan wedding. Wish us luck!!

My protest against the conduct of the world

2008-04-04T05:26:00.002-05:00

Here's another passage I like from that New York Times article that I mentioned below:

Talking about how the rise in oil prices creates a corresponding rise in food prices, and the effect this will have on the level of meat consumption, the author writes "If price spikes don't change eating habits, perhaps the combination of deforestation, pollution, climate change, starvation, heart disease and animal cruelty will gradually encourage the simple daily act of eating more plants and fewer animals."

In a way, that quote makes me want to scream. You know how we all go through our daily lives saying to our meat-eating friends "Hey, I'm not judging you, this is just right for me" - well, a sentence like the one above that so plainly and simply makes the vegetarian argument kind of makes me want to explode and say to people "What the f$%^&*K would it take to convince you that eating meat is messed up!!!???"

Grrr.... okay... calm down...

Anyway, that quote made me think of my post about trying NOT to explain to some old friends why Annalise and I went vegan, and it makes me think of this Isaac Singer quote, which I have on my Facebook account:

"To be a vegetarian is to disagree-to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars-we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one."

And it also made me think about The Omnivore's Dilemma, that Michael Pollan book that I went on about so much last summer.

In that book, Pollan talks about how powerful the vegetarian argument is, and since he spent a lot of time on factory farms in writing the book, Pollan speaks of how it is quite simply impossible to argue that millions of animals do nothing but suffer en route to our dinner plate. When faced with this terrible fact, what do North Americans do? We either look away - or we stop eating meat.

Most people just look away. They know how terrible the situation is, and refuse to make the connection between the 20 million animals going through the factory farms, and the fact that this requires them to make a life decision.

As much as I usually try to ignore what other people do, the looking away just blows my mind.

NY Times and Meat Guzzling

2008-03-31T10:42:00.003-05:00

Wow... what the hell have I been so busy with the last two months that I missed this amazing New York Times article titled Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler? Has this already been posted on all the other veggie blogs??

I can't improve upon this article, and am extremely impressed that it appeared in the New York Times. Well done dudes.

Here are some of the passages that made me raise my fist and say "Right f#$&*'ing On!" But, hell, this article is so good... don't read what I've excerpted, just read the article!!! : )

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Though some 800 million people on the planet now suffer from hunger or malnutrition, the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens. This despite the inherent inefficiencies: about two to five times more grain is required to produce the same amount of calories through livestock as through direct grain consumption, according to Rosamond Naylor, an associate professor of economics at Stanford University. It is as much as 10 times more in the case of grain-fed beef in the United States.

The environmental impact of growing so much grain for animal feed is profound. Agriculture in the United States — much of which now serves the demand for meat — contributes to nearly three-quarters of all water-quality problems in the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficiency of mass confinement and slaughter. But it causes enough health problems that administration of antibiotics is routine, so much so that it can result in antibiotic-resistant bacteria that threaten the usefulness of medicines that treat people.

Those grain-fed animals, in turn, are contributing to health problems among the world’s wealthier citizens — heart disease, some types of cancer, diabetes. The argument that meat provides useful protein makes sense, if the quantities are small. But the “you gotta eat meat” claim collapses at American levels. Even if the amount of meat we eat weren’t harmful, it’s way more than enough.

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

Let the good times roll, except for dairy cows

2008-03-18T20:06:00.003-05:00

Today has been quite the day for "go vegetarian" news stories:

Greenpeace has released a report titled Cool Farming: Climate impacts of agriculture and mitigation potential. Basically it's a summary of how agriculture causes climate change; notably, how energy intensive the meat industry is, and, ultimately, how wasteful.

You know how some city councils are banning bottled water as a gesture towards combating climate change? Camden Town in London, U.K. is recommending that city employees give up meat to fight climate change. Alexis Rowell said the idea of taking meat off the menu was based on United Nations data showing that the livestock industry is responsible for 18 per cent of the world's carbon emissions.

Vegan diets ease arthritis. At the same time, the vegans [in the study] developed a lower body mass index, had lower levels of bad cholesterol and higher levels of immune system factors that potentially inhibit the inflammatory reaction. The research was reported in the journal Arthritis Research and Therapy.

And I have to admit that I've reached the point where I find it completely offensive that the Dairy Board of Ontario supplies school boards in this province with educational materials. I'd actually prefer it if Coca Cola and Pepsi were filling our schools with "nutritious beverages" flyers - as least those guys aren't torturing animals (as far as I know). Plus, the Dairy lobby has caused enough trouble by using lobby groups to completely pervert the food pyramid. Bastards.

Milk: From Farm to Fridge, one of the publications that the Dairy Board of Ontario gets into classrooms, covers the following:

Milk and Machines

Dairy Goodness

Cow to Carton

Careers in the Dairy Industry

Animal Care and the Environment

If the dairy board gets to supply schools with educational materials, shouldn't we ask elementary principles to make sure that classrooms are stocked up with information from humane treatment organizations as well?

I.E., the dairy industry uses pharmaceuticals and reimpregnation techniques (i.e., these cows are constantly kept pregnant), to make the cows produce ten times more milk than their bodies are meant to produce. This causes them to suffer from a whole smorgasboard (sp?) of diseases, such as Mastitis, Bovine Leukemia Virus, Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus, Johne's disease, Ketosis (which can be fatal), and Laminitis, which causes lameness. And, ironically, another dairy industry disease caused by intensive milk production is "Milk Fever." This ailment is caused by calcium deficiency, and it occurs when milk secretion depletes calcium faster than it can be replenished in the blood.

Being treated as a machine in a factory farm reduces a dairy cow's lifespan from 25 years to approximately 4 years, at which time they are forced up a ramp, with prods and electric shocks, limping because they've gone lame standing in one spot all their lives, into the slaughterhouse to become your hamburger (oh yeah, and one hamburger has the meat from around 40 cows by the way).

Yeah, let's invite these guys to send their "Dairy Goodness" picture books to our schools. That seems right. Maybe Bush and Cheney can come by and tell our third graders about how good government works.

Be fruitful and multiply

2008-03-18T14:49:00.002-05:00

You'll have to click on this image to enlarge it and be able to read it, but for a vegetarian this is a pretty good chuckle. Thanks Sue!!

You're much sweeter than me, by far

2008-03-13T07:38:00.003-05:00

Annalise, despite her recent mishap, got busy last night and whipped up two salads for us. One is Walnut Cranberry Squash "Rice" from Ani's Raw Food Kitchen. We're both hoping to introduce raw meals into our diet, and this was our (or Anna's) first recipe from this book. I didn't like it so much. Basically you run a Butternut Squash through a food processor, and then add walnuts, cranberries, cilantro, onion, cumin and coriander, but the taste of the squash was still too strong for me.

The other salad though is one of my favourites - Quinoa (scroll down the page a little) with cranberries, walnuts, sweetened with Maple Syrup, and some other seasonings that I forget at the moment.

This story about the recent meat recall is why I am so happy that none of my money is going into the pockets of meat industry executives.
I love it when the below mentioned executive says that he was shocked by the actions of his employees, when the meat industry fought for years, and, up until mad cow mania in about 2004, fought successfully, for the right to sell meat from "downers" to North American consumers.

-------------------------
The executive, Steve Mendell of the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company of Chino, Calif., said, “I was shocked. I was horrified. I was sickened,” by video that showed employees kicking or using electric prods on “downer” cattle that were too sick to walk, jabbing one in the eye with a baton and using forklifts to push animals around.

The video was taken by an undercover investigator from the Humane Society of the United States. One tape showed a worker using a garden hose to try to squirt water up the nose of a downed cow, a technique that Representative Bart Stupak, a Michigan Democrat who conducted the hearing where Mr. Mendell testified, referred to as waterboarding.

Testifying before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Mr. Mendell, who appeared only after being subpoenaed, assured lawmakers that despite his lack of knowledge about conditions at the plant, sick animals were not slaughtered for food, so no safety issue existed.

But Mr. Mendell retracted the statement when shown a second video in which a “downer” cow was shocked and abused by workers trying to move it to the “kill box,” then finally shot with a bolt gun and dragged by a chain to the processing area.

When Mr. Mendell told the committee he was unaware of the abuses, Mr. Stupak asked him, “What’s your curiosity, as president and C.E.O. of the company you’re responsible for?”

Mr. Mendell replied that after he had seen the first video, he concluded that “it was a regulatory violation, for sure, it was inhumane treatment, for sure,” but that he did not believe it was a food safety issue until he saw the second video on Wednesday.

Mr. Stupak asked if one could conclude from the video that the cow dragged into the killing area had gone into the food supply.

“That would be logical, sir,” Mr. Mendell replied.
-----------------------

Actually, I wonder if these people eat meat that comes from their own factories?

naked chicks + media = vegans!

2008-03-08T06:35:00.005-05:00

Wow, Macleans magazine definitely got more interesting a few years back when the management changed. I used to find it boring as hell, but now I quite often find myself impressed with the stories and topics they present.

The most recent issue has a story called Go Veg! Get Girls! which critiques the increasing use of sex as an advertising tool to get people (or mainly men) to go vegetarian. For a number of examples of this type of advertising, and for some good commentary on this topic, check out this post on another Ontario veggie's blog.

Basically, you have the Vegan Vixens, who go on the Howard Stern show to flash their breasts and get a couple seconds of "go vegan" airtime, and you have stars like Alicia Silverstone and Eva Mendes and Pamela Anderson who perform in "I'd rather go naked than wear fur" type of ads, and you even have a Vegan Strip Club in Portland which lures men in to the club with girls, and tries to surprise the men with the realization, halfway through the evening, that they'd been eating vegan food for a couple of hours and that it was actually good!

Now, whether or not all this advertising works, whether or not it swells the ranks of vegetarians, is beside the point to feminists like Carol J Adams, who wrote The Sexual Politics of Meat. The above mentioned Social Cripple blog argues this point much better than I ever could, but as far as I understand it, you are doing vegetarianism no favours when you dangle naked women in front of men, like the carrot at the end of a stick, to get them to go veggie. In exchange for a few converts to the cause, you demean women. This, Adams would say, is not worth it.

Now, I don't disagree, but I would like to expand on this PETA argument: "unlike our opposition, the wealthy meat industry, PETA has to rely on getting free advertising through media coverage of our campaigns and demonstrations. Experience has taught us that provocative and controversial campaigns make all the difference."

Have you ever seen an ad for vegan issues on your local public transit? Ever seen an ad saying "Buy meat from a factory farm - support the torture of animals!" in your local newspaper? Were you surprised when they wouldn't even play this advertisement at the superbowl? The mainstream media will NOT take money from animal rights groups and run their advertising, because they're too afraid of pissing off most of their viewers/readers. And so, PETA will say that they have to be sensational in order to get any media coverage at all.

And so, in response to the "you're objectifying women" argument, PETA will say "more men bought a veggie dog today, and therefore less money went to the torture industry."

Now, another article in Macleans this week kind of demonstrates the above point. Local Schmocal by Pamela Cutherbert discusses how ethical the much touted local food movement really is, when the 100 mile apples you're eating are bathed seven or eight times with chemicals, and your pork came from a local factory farm.

Cutherbert mentions the group Homegrown Ontario, which is an an alliance of Ontario Pork, the Ontario Veal Association and the Ontario Sheep Marketing Agency. These guys, obviously, are trying to convince people in Ontario to buy meat raised in the same province. In a paragraph which kind of asks the reader "do you really want to support these guys?", Cuthbert writes that the 3000 pig farms in Ontario work as follows:
the typical pig farm in Ontario has roughly 6000 sows each year, where each animal is fed on a ration of genetically modified soybean and corn that is enhanced with antibiotics and growth horomones, to a mature weight of about 250 pounds in six months. They are raised entirely indoors with an allowance in group pens of eight square feet per animal.

My point in quoting this is that the incredibly tame, neutral language of the above paragraph is the most that a writer can get away with in a mainstream news publication (for American readers who don't know what Macleans is, it is Canada's version of Time magazine).
If you read that paragraph with no background in animal rights issues, you'd probably glaze right over it without realizing what it is actually saying. You don't realize that getting a pig to 250 pounds in six months means force feeding it a diet that it's body can't actually handle, and therefore, to enable the pig to survive, you also have to force feed it antibiotics, which is promoting the rise of anti-biotic resistant viruses like the avian flus and mad cows that have been in the news. The paragraph also doesn't mention the severe problems of manure lagoons and tail docking etc.

So, I guess, the question is this, if your hands are tied, and a group can't advertise in, or voice it's opinion in the mainstream media, is okay to get coverage by being sensationalistic?

Your valleys and your farms

2008-03-05T10:18:00.002-05:00

A recent issue of Macleans magazine has a cover story about why peak oil, and the use of corn etc for bio-fuels, is going to cause a massive spike in food prices very soon (in fact, this spike has already occurred in many parts of the world).

In listing a few of the causes, one passage ends with what vegetarians know is one of the answers to this problem - stop wasting 7 tons of soy and grain by feeding it to cattle, who only return about 1 ton worth of consumable meat.
------------------------------------
Is the recent price bump due, as some argue, to passing or localized phenomena, like Australian droughts or the biofuel fad? Or is it rooted in longer-term forces that augur sustained and potentially distastrous shortages? After all, many of the conditions necessary to make the food armageddonists' predictions come true are now upon us. Water is scarce, fossil fuels are prohibitively expensive, fish stocks are near collapse and the world adds 80 million people every year. To that, you can now add global warming, which agronomists say is drying up vulnerable countries where farmlands depend on rain.

And then there's China. With ever greater purchasing power, Asian consumers are moving toward the higher-protein, better-tasting, meat-laden diet westerners have enjoyed for decades. Producing all that beef, pork and eggs requires vast quantities of grain that might otherwise be used to feed people. "On the amount of grain fed each year to cattle in the United States, you could feed 850 million people as vegetarians," says David Pimentel, a Cornell University agricultural scientist who studies the global food economy. "That's not a value judgment. It's a fact."
-------------------------------------------------
It's just boggling sometimes. There are so many reasons to be vegetarian (see previous post). Why don't more people get it?

And I came across this a little while ago, and couldn't believe it. The way that the U.S. has a strategic oil reserve to be used for emergencies, China has a strategic pork reserve.

And because I need to fantasize a little bit, here's the kind of farm I hope to be living on when peak oil hits and we all make for the hills.

you don't eat meat OR dairy?!

2008-02-24T06:47:00.006-05:00

Yesterday Annalise and I spent a day with some people that we hadn't been in touch with for a while, and who didn't know about our vegan thing.

Surprisingly, I don't actually get the "why are you vegan" question very often. It came up several times yesterday though, and I realized that it has become such a hard question to answer because vegans know that there are several extremely good reasons to give up animal products, and really, there aren't any good reasons to eat animal products. So, when we hear "why don't you eat meat" our internal and unspoken reaction is something like "Holy S%*T! Why the F&*K would I?!!?"

I find it hard to think of why people do eat meat, beyond the fact that they grew up doing it, have never in their lives given it a moment's thought, and just continue to do what they've always done.

I mean, imagine this scenario - we are able to wipe the slate clean, and sit every person in North America down at a decision making table, and say "Here is a list of reasons to eat meat, and this page here is a list of reasons to go vegan. Think it over a little while and see which you'd rather do."

Here is what the two lists would look like:

To eat meat

You might eventually start to like the taste of it

To go vegan

It's healthier for you - especially reducing risk of diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and cancer.

It's better for the environment - limiting both pollution and climate change (the rule of thumb being that you can reduce your carbon footprint more by giving up meat than by giving up your car)

You reduce the amount of your hard-earned money that goes into the pockets of some seriously corrupt corporations

You contribute far less to world starvation

You stop funding an industry that is both a) increasing the risk of diseases like avian flu and mad cow while also b) decreasing the ability of our anti-biotics to fight these diseases

Looming large behind the issue of whether or not it's ethical to eat animals, you fall on the right side of the debate about whether or not it's ethical to torture animals

Hmm, maybe I'll start refusing to answer the "why don't you eat meat?" question in social situations, and just have business cards made up with a link to this post. Then I could hand people the card and say "Let's not talk about this now, but if you're really interested, read this post, and look through my blog sometime."

If you want a good overall summary of this stuff, click here, or watch this.

Protecting corporate power against democracy

2008-02-18T17:15:00.005-05:00

I've been reading Christopher Cook's Diet for a Dead Planet, and it has got me thinking about why I'm a vegan.

The big three reasons for being vegetarian or vegan are to protect the environment, for personal health, and for animal rights. The big reason I'm increasingly proud to be veggie is a little different. The more you read, the more evident it is that "big agriculture" is as corrupt and immoral as big oil, and I simply refuse to give these people any more of my money than I have to.

The ties behind big agriculture and government go back into the distant past, but for my purposes let's start with Michael Pollan's story about how U.S. legislators in the 1970's tried to recommend eating less red meat after getting good data that this would reduce heart disease. The agricultural lobby went ballistic, and told all these legislators that they would be actively campaigned against in their next election if they put forward their new dietary guidelines. What happened? Agri-business won, the government caved, and Americans kept getting heart attacks at higher rates than they needed to.
Picture from Choose Veg's dairy page.

According to Cook (pg 40/41), the beef lobby all by itself donated $28 million to U.S. politicans between 1990 and 2003. Republicans get most of this money, receiving 83% of the $500 000 that was given to congressional candidates in 2002. What does the beef industry get in return? Well, they get members of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association hired as aides within the U.S. Agricultural department. They get politicians to quash, time and time again, laws prohibiting the sale of meat from "downers" - cattle that die en route to the slaughter house. AND THEN, when mad cow finally scares legislators enough that they do ban the use of downers, it turns out that in practice, slaughterhouse employees shove lame and dying cattle onto the kill floor anyway, and therefore you have stories like the recent recall of beef in the U.S., where a slaughterhouse is shut down for using downers.

And then you have the damned hog producers, like Wendell Murphy, who give campaign contributions to local politicians in exchange for tax breaks and subsidies to their factory farms - despite said factory farms being the worst polluters in these politicians electoral districts. And who is Wendell Murphy? Well he's a hog producer and also formerly the North Carolina senator who was the chair of the Senate's agricultural committee. He helped exempt factory farms from zoning laws that would have restricted the size of the confinement houses and effluent lagoons, even those along sensitive floodplains. In exchange for contributions to senators, the hog industry in North Carolina was able to treat the eastern part of the State as one big sewer (Cook, pg. 179).

In Canada, where we like to think our politics is a little cleaner, we need to remember stories like Frankensteer from the CBC's Fifth Estate. Among other stories, these journalists talk to Health Canada scientists who were removed from their positions when they stood up to Health Canada and said they refused to approve antibiotics for cattle which good research showed were carcinogenic.

Hmm... we know that we're feeding these animals carcinogenic drugs, but when members of our national Health agency say "we have to stop this!", they get fired?

Anyway, if I had the time I could flesh out a few more things, like how the dietary food pyramid is basically designed by the dairy industry, how North American laws regarding animal cruelty and the transport of animals are archaic because the agricultural lobby prevents them from being changed, and how, if you were a good politician who thought you might have a go at the agricultural lobby, you better be ready to take on the pharmaceutical industry as well - in 1997 they sold 985 millions pounds of pesticides to U.S. farmers, and in 2001 they sold 25 million pounds of antibiotics to U.S. farmers (Cook, pages 164 and 64).

So, why am I a vegan? Because the people behind the meat industry care more about corporate profits than they do about the health of their customers, the health of the planet, and the amount of suffering they cause the animals who are their product.

And what galls me even more? All of this is made possible, at least in part, because of bribery, collusion, and knowing smiles at power lunches.

If all I can do is keep these people from pocketing my money, that's what I'm going to do.

Alex Carey:
The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.

Vegans discuss Bourdain

2008-01-20T16:54:00.000-05:00

Our bookclub met this weekend to discuss Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, and we had a fairly good talk about it. As mentioned below, Bourdain has very strong anti-vegetarian views, and the irony is that our book club consists of four near-vegans, one wheat free vegetarian, and one omnivore nutritionist who is careful about what she eats.

The first thing that you should know, is that I actually enjoyed the book. In fact, I'd give it about a 7.5 out of 10. I thought that Bourdain was a pretty good writer, and that he provided a really interesting look at a world - that of cooking & restaurants - that I'd never thought of before, and otherwise knew nothing about.

BUT - I obviously have issues with Bourdain's feelings about vegetarians and vegans.

Here is what I believe the situation is:
a) Bourdain hates the extremist voices in the vegan movement, and in attacking them attacks all vegetarians with one big brushstroke.

b) Unable to find a truly good argument with which to fight the main reasons for being veggie (personal health, animal rights, environmental concerns), he has made up two very weak and actually irrelevant arguments which he uses to dismiss our lifestyles.

The first of these arguments, which he writes about in his book (and as i quote in the previous post), has to do with vegetarians being more prone to illness than omnivores because we handle fresh produce more often and are therefore more likely to be infected with amoebas.

Together, let's all make that "Hruuh??" sound that Scooby Doo makes when he's confused.

So the amoebas from fresh produce are worse than the carcinogens in North American factory farmed meat, which is so bad that it's not even allowed on the European market? And the amoebas are worse than all the saturated fat in red meats responsible for the obesity and diabetes epidemics in North America? And worse than the salmonella which is rampant in factory farmed chicken?
Whatever, Anthony. Nice try.

Secondly, as you can hear in this You Tube video, he's come up with a "vegetarians deny themselves life experience, and do so in a very rude way" argument. This argument is that you shouldn't travel to Mexico or Cambodia and turn your nose up at the meat filled taco, or the roasted pig, because you're denying your hosts' entire lifestyle by doing so... as he says - I'm not rejecting just your food, I'm ignoring your weird foreign lifestyle and your history and everything else.

Anthony, this is fine and dandy, and sure food is a major part of the culture of a nation, but this argument has NOTHING TO DO with why most of us are vegetarians. Would I be missing out on something, and possibly be acting rudely, by going to Japan and refusing to eat sushi with fish? Yeah, maybe. But that's an amazingly small price to pay for choosing a lifestyle which day in day out makes me healthier, is better for the planet, and keeps my money from supporting an industry in which waste and suffering are the norm. And anyway, how often am I in Cambodia for Pete's sake?!

Come on Anthony, admit it - we know from the comments in your book about how chickens are kept in terrible conditions, and that foie gras is made by force-feeding ducks and geese until they basically explode, that you know that the meat industry is actually the "torture animals" industry, and because you simply enjoy eating meat, you don't really care how it gets to your plate. Be man enough to come out and say "I support the torture of animals for my own gastronomic pleasure."
Don't make up pitiful attacks on vegetarians to move the focus from your food choices to ours.

And having just found a new Bourdain comment about animals, let me make one more point.
Bourdain, on a TV show called Chef's Story in Oct. 2007, said the following: I don't like to see animals in pain. That was very uncomfortable to me. I don't like factory farming. I'm not an advocate for the meat industry.

Okay, so if you're willing to say all this, can you at least make that nod towards vegetarians that Wolfgang Puck has, and say "I can't deny that I like meat, but at the very least, when I'm in North America and have the choice, I will not buy any meat that came from a factory farm."

Is that too much to ask? You can't be globetrotting and experiencing exotic cultures through their food all the time - aren't you in the U.S. sometimes and willing to pay the few extra bucks for naturally raised meat, or forgo the meat entirely?

Anyway, we had a fun night. Ate some great vegan food (lentil stew, beet coleslaw, spicy potatoes, zucchini soup), discussed Bourdain's book, played a bit of music, and then some board games, and didn't put any of our money into the pockets of guys sending cows through a dismembering line at the rate of 400 to 500 an hour in one single facility.

how the kitchen staff views vegetarians

2008-01-06T07:51:00.000-05:00

I'm reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential right now. This book first came out in 2000, and was a best seller back then. If you haven't heard of it, it was Bourdain's tell-all about life as a professional chef "laying out more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex and haute cuisine."

Bourdain is something of an egotistical ass, but he seems quite happy about it, and gives the impression that all chefs are similar. Anyway, I thought I'd share his feelings, and presumably the feelings of most professional chefs (except for Mr. Puck!) on vegetarians.

From page 70 of the 2007 First Harper Perennial Edition:

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It's healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I've worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I'll accommodate them, I'll rummage around for something to feed them, for a "vegetarian plate", if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

So that's his general view of veggies. He then goes on to tell an anecdote, the logic of which I don't really get, that vegetarians are prone to sickness and are germ carriers. "Amoebas are transferred most easily through the handling of raw, uncooked vegetables, particularly during the washing of salad greens and leafy produce. So think about that next time you want to exchange deep tongue kisses with a vegetarian."

Sorry Anthony, but vegetarians are pretty hot, you'll have to try harder than that to put me off exchanging "deep tongue kisses" with them.

Actually, the more I reflect on some of Bourdain's comments, the more I dislike him.

Here he is on chickens, without a moment's thought about, you know... if they are loaded with salmonella because they're treated so badly, maybe we should treat them better!?

Page 71
Pigs are filthy animals, say some, when explaining why they deny themselves the delights of pork. Maybe they should visit a chicken ranch. America's favourite menu item is also the most likely to make you ill. Commercially available chickens, for the most part (we're not talking about kosher and expensive free-range birds), are loaded with salmonella. Chickens are dirty. They eat their own feces, are kept packed close together like in a rush-hour subway, and when handled in a restaurant situation are most likely to infect other foods or cross-contaminate them. And chicken is boring. Chefs see it as a menu item for people who don't know what they want to eat.

Jerk. Chickens aren't dirty. They just get that way when they're confined in such small spaces that they have to crap all over themselves.

And finally, on page 73, here he is on foie gras (the production of which has been banned in England and California and many other areas because it is just so grotesquely immoral):
I don't know who figured out that if you crammed rich food into a goose long enough for its liver to balloon up to more than its normal body weight you'd get something as good as foie gras - I believe it was those kooky Romans - but I'm very grateful for their efforts.

Right. Well Anthony, here's hoping you're reincarnated as a goose.

The 100 mile mistletoe

2007-12-22T15:00:00.000-05:00

My Christmas message is over on the cycling blog if anyone wants to see the snowman I made today!

I bought my brother-in-law a book by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon called The 100 Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating. I was leafing through it this morning, and came across a few interesting things:

One thing I learned was that the University of British Columbia, in downtown Vancouver, operates a community farm!
The Farm is a student-driven initiative where students, faculty, staff, and the local community have been working together to create a place where anyone can come to learn, live and value the connection between land, food and community.

The UBC Farm is a 24 hectare teaching, research, and community farm located on the University of British Columbia's Campus in Vancouver, Canada. As the only working farmland within the city of Vancouver, the UBC Farm is an urban agrarian gem, featuring a landscape of unique beauty.

That is so cool. I'm going to push for my university's new campus to have a community farm!!!

I also found a couple interesting facts about food industrialization: although it is ironic enough that industrial agriculture sprang out of World War Two military innovations, and while we know that, on many fronts, industrial agriculture is ruinous for the planet (especially the meat industry), did you more specifically know the following?
a) due to the industrial farm movement, and the "which crop will make me the most money?" thought-process, of the 463 varieties of radish indexed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the early 20th century, 436 of them are now extinct?!!?
b) Twenty species of plant account for 90% of the food consumed in the world!! (If you read this book though, and learn what we've done with soy and corn, this isn't actually that surprising).

Aside from those neat facts, there are some thoughts about being vegetarian while trying to eat locally, and what you do for protein when you can not find a supply of chick peas, lentils and tofu within a 100 mile radius. I won't tell you what answers they found to this problem, but I am going to repeat some of their reasons for being vegetarian - familiar enough to anyone reading this blog, but well enough written to bear repeating:

"The decision (to go veggie) was not rooted in any unusual squeamishness about killing animals. What we chose to reject was our species' capacity to disregard life... We never will accept the idea that animals can be treated like machines that produce meat, milk, and eggs. We are equally troubled by the fact that meat production monopolizes the world's scarce agricultural land. It takes fourteen pounds of corn for a cow to gain one pound of edible meat - a fattening technique developed by industrial feedlots that goes against cows' biology; they evolved to eat only grasses. Meanwhile, cows and other livestock hog half the corn grown in America, while 800 million people go hungry worldwide."

To everyone eating tofu and chick peas this holiday season, have a great Christmas!!!!

Sexual politics of meat substitutes

2007-12-20T14:20:00.000-05:00

I was playing around in a phd database today, and found one called The Sexual Politics of Meat Substitutes by Gregory James Flail, who was at Georgia State University, and finishing his phd in 2006.

Gregory, I'm sorry if I mess this up, but I think this is how his work can be summarized:

Following Carol Adam's The Sexual Politics of Meat, Gregory decided to analyze veggie "meat" packaging, and advertisements, to see how the mass media portrays vegans, to see if "veggie" meat advertising was really any different from regular meat advertising, and to see if mass media representations of veggie meat did anything to fight the masculine "meat is power" stereotype common in society.

Here is the first sentence of his dissertation, which I think is the best start to a phd ever:
Lately, while cruising through Sevananda, my local health food store, I find myself thinking about sex toys, not for the usual reasons, but rather as cultural artifacts, because every few weeks I see ever-greater varieties of fake flesh adorning the shelves of the refrigerated aisle – much more imitation flesh than one would likely encounter at any of the local sex shops.

And here are some other good thoughts:

But, perhaps, vegetarians will be the eventual losers in the battle of image politics, as market ploys convince ever-increasing numbers of consumers that meat analogs are what you’re supposed to eat when becoming vegetarian. When accompanied by the familiar imagery of the meat-centered western meal, the terms “vegetarian” and “vegan” seem less radical, much less likely to call to mind the imagery of the slaughterhouse that makes them threatening to tradition in the first place. For the carnivorous shopper who happens upon products like Now & Zen’s UnSteak, whose mascot is a smiling cartoon cow, or The Wide World of Soy’s Tofurky, which boasts new features like imitation wish-sticks and pseudo giblet gravy, the meat analog seems designed specifically to override the negative connotation of vegetarian fare as that which wantonly lacks meat; and yet these products tend to suggest very little about why it might be beneficial to stop thinking of animals as tasty objects and start thinking of them as sentient beings with whom we share the planet. Meaty imagery serves to reassure carnivorous shoppers that their tastes are indeed correct and that all people, even those who avoid animal-based foods, are somehow biologically predisposed to preferring them. This carnivore-friendly conception of vegetarianism, which we might call veggie-lite, fails to address the issues that have inspired so many people to embrace diets that are not only delectable and delicious on their own terms, but also animalfriendly, environmentally-friendly, and nutritionally-complete.

Despite cranky vegetarian critiques like this one, manufacturers of meat analogs make huge profits from their depoliticized versions of vegetarianism, even as their companies get bought up by huge food conglomerates whose other product lines are anything but vegetarian-friendly. The increasing effectiveness of their advertising and the success of their meat analog products serves first to emphasize just how much our culture fetishizes animal-based foods, second how much consumers are beginning to realize that their continued health depends on finding alternatives to dominant dietary paradigms, and third how enduring our powers of denial can be when faced with the fact that our taste for meat analogs is derived almost entirely from our nostalgia for the belief that killing, dismembering, and eating animals is the healthiest, tastiest, and most natural course for all concerned. If meat analogs could somehow manage to displace animal-based foods as the focal point of the western diet, they just might end up doing as much for vegetarianism as the dildo does for lesbianism.

The fact is... some men are willing to try meatless meals. Furthermore, when they are represented as heterosexual, monogamous, and “family-oriented” men, the
suggestion is that carno-phallogocentrism can be revised at an infrastructural level. If fathers and husbands can be vegetarian or, gasp, even vegan, then the potential for entire families to follow such a diet is more easily realized. Such ads have some
serious implications for the sexual politics of meat because they not only suggest that men can go meatless, but also that vegetarian and vegan men are not necessarily gay, queer, or effeminate, and that, for all appearances, they have normative sexual relation with women. I’m not suggesting that male vegetarians and vegans should breed themselves into predominance, but, more simply, that the marketplace in trying to capitalize on a strange “new” foodway has inadvertently created a new stereotype: the vegetarian patriarch.

Lentils, stirred, not shaken

2007-12-10T19:10:00.000-05:00

Jen very kindly asked me to be a contributor to Sporty Vegans, and I did my first post over there a little while ago. If the bunch of us ever met up and did a ride together I think I'd be the slowpoke of the bunch, but hopefully I'll be able to contribute some good posts over there.

My superstar partner flipped through How it all Vegan! and whipped off Auntie Bonnie's Lively Lentil Stew today. It's going down as a "Anna Really Likes" and "Chris Likes" in our grading system.

So we ate the lentil stew, and then played guitar a little bit, and then both wanted dessert, so Anna grabbed Joy of Vegan Baking: Compassionate cooks' traditional treats and sinful sweets. And we made Chocolate Peanut Butter Cupcakes.

Joy of Vegan Baking also has some nice veggie jabs in it... i.e. the discussion of the calcium which is in milk. Calcium is a mineral which comes from the ground, and which cows get because they eat grass.
"Ah ha!" a veggie animal activist thinks - "how many cows eat grass anymore??" Good question, almost none of them do, instead they get that slurry of liquefied fat that the factory farms feed them, and the factory farms have to add artificial calcium to the feed to actually make the cow's milk have any calcium when it eventually gets sold to us.

Lesson? Eat the dark greens (broccoli etc) to get calcium yourself!

Ciao for now!

Wacky Belgian Psychologists

2007-12-01T07:14:00.000-05:00

Life in Orillia has been pretty busy so far, and I haven't had much time to poke around looking for neat veggie studies in the journal databases I have access to - coming up with material like this.

I did find a slightly strange article in the International Journal of Psychology today though. (If you want the citation, it's 2007 42(3), pgs 158-165). The article is titled Implicit attitudes towards meat and vegetables in vegetarians and nonvegetarians and it was written by Jan De Houwer and Els De Bruycker from Ghent University in Belgium.

I'm going to VASTLY simplify the study which they conducted using 47 vegetarians and 49 nonvegetarians - a) because I don't really understand their full methods, and b) the more I try to explain what they did, the less amusing the study becomes, and so, rather than describe their research as an Implicit Association Test (IAT) run alongside an Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST), I'll call their work the "YUCK!! GET THAT HAMBURGER AWAY FROM ME!!!!" study.

Basically, the participants were shown a bunch of pictures - happy babies, crying babies, sunsets, homeless life, vegetables and meat products etc - and were asked to press either a "negative" or a "positive" button depending on what sort of connotations the picture had for them. The two researchers were trying to provoke implicit attitudes towards meat - "Implicit attitudes can be defined as attitudes that are activated automatically, that is, when little time or process resources are available, when participants are unaware of the stimuli that activate the attitude."
So - although many vegetarians have logical reasons for their lifestyle... "Why don't you eat meat?" "Oh, you know, the animal cruelty thing is important to me, but it has also been well proven that meat farming is disastrous for the environment, and that vegetarians are much healthier than omnivores" - these guys were trying to zone in on instantaneous gut reactions towards pictures of meat.

Guess what the researchers found! "We demonstrated for the first time that vegetarians and nonvegetarians differ not only in their self-reported attitudes towards meat and vegetables, but also in their implicit attitudes towards these objects, that is, in the spontaneous, automatic affective reactions that these objects evoke.... the EAST results suggest that, compared to nonvegetarians, vegetarians have both a more negative implicit attitude towards meat and a more positive implicit attitude towards vegetables."

I just find this all amusing because I picture a bunch of vegetarians sitting at computers, seeing pictures of hamburgers and automatically associating the picture with a slaughtered cow, and hammering the negative "Dead Cow!! Dead Cow!!" button.

And actually, this study reminds me of the Joaquin Phoenix Veggie video on You Tube, where he stops dead in his tracks at the supermarket when he comes to the meat aisle.

the meat (and wheat!) free bookclub

2007-11-18T07:04:00.001-05:00

When I was in library school (full disclosure - I'm a librarian), a group of us organized a book club, which I used to blog about on this site. I gradually stopped updating that blog, and am now thinking I'll just post some "book club" thoughts on this blog.

And the reason that it fits with this blog is because we're a vegan, and mostly wheat free, group of bookworms.

Way back when we began, only three of us (Mark, Danielle and I) were vegetarian, and on book club nights we just ordered pizza. Then Annalise and I went vegan, and the group of us decided that we would turn book club into a pot-luck affair, and a vegan pot-luck to boot.

When Cindy gradually came to realize that she and wheat didn't get along very well, we took the "wheat-free" challenge upon ourselves (which isn't really that hard, as long as you have spelt in the house), and lo and behold we became a vegan and wheat free group of readers and cooks.

We had a meeting yesterday afternoon at Laura's place to discuss "A Spot of Bother" by Mark Hadden (general verdict - decent, but light, read). As the host, Laura made the main course, a vegan Sheppards pie (spelling?). I changed my plans at the last minute, and found myself surfing the net yesterday afternoon for a new dessert to make. I was initially very happy to find this meat free / wheat free blog, but the author uses lots of eggs and even fish so it wasn't going to work for me.
I eventually settled on these banana oat bundles, and with lots of help from Annalise, they turned out pretty good!

beans and salad dressing

2007-10-25T07:17:00.001-05:00

So when you read some of the veggie blogs, most notably Megan the Vegan, (and sometimes, when she writes about things like pumpkin bread, my girlfriends' blog), you cannot BELIEVE how delicious the meals they describe are, and when you're a guy like me, you cannot really comprehend how the meals are prepared.

I'm on my own up in Orillia at the moment. Annalise is still at our place in Toronto until early December, when she'll be moving up here. So that means I'm also preparing my own meals. I'm neither a good or a bad cook, I just don't have much patience for it. I tend to make an effort to learn one dish, and then just keep making it for weeks until finally I think I should try something different.

So - the point of this post is that even dumb males can be vegans if you're willing to pour salad dressing over canned beans and call it a meal. I googled "easy vegan bean salad" and the recipe pictured above was one of the first ones I found. It basically is beans covered in salad dressing. Incidentally I don't own a can-opener at the moment, ergo the Swiss Army knife in the above picture. I made a few alterations in the above recipe - I don't know what navy beans are so I just bought chick peas, and I really dislike celery so I used a red pepper instead, and I threw in some almonds and lemon juice as well.

And this is what I've been eating all week!! Fibre, protein and iron. Next time maybe I'll throw in some spinach as well for some of the health benefits of dark greens. So to bona fide cooks like Megan and our Veggie Triathlete (p.s. - the Rockies have a Canadian so I'm cheering for them) - this post isn't meant for you, but for all those clueless in the kitchen guys like me.

Luck of the veg-head

2007-10-22T16:07:00.000-05:00

It was really nice in Orillia today.

Orillia, my new hometown, is a smallish city of about 35 000 people, and Annalise and I were a little bit worried about what sort of vegetarian/vegan dining we were going to be able to find in our new town.

We decide to go to the town's main pub (there are several pubs here, but Brewery Bay is the "Cheers" of Orillia - the iconic one on the scenic main street), and when we opened up the menu we couldn't believe how many veggie options there were.

After gushing to our waitress about all the veggie alternatives, and the ability to substitute veggie "chicken" for regular meat, we learn that the owner and his entire family are all vegetarian, and therefore all the VegHead stuff.

Orillia otherwise doesn't seem to have much vegetarian cuisine on offer, though the supermarkets are well stocked with soy icecream etc etc. but thank god we at least have one place that we can go to and eat.

Canadian Thanksgiving

2007-10-07T20:10:00.000-05:00

I apologize for the lack of blogging recently. I've taken a new job and am in the process of moving cities, so finding veggie and factory farming stories to write about hasn't been possible.

This weekend is thanksgiving in Canada, and for the first time in ages I commuted INTO Toronto, rather than out of it, on a long holiday weekend. So instead of being with my parents and siblings up north, or with Annalise's parents in Waterdown, we spent the weekend on our own in the city.

Thanksgiving dinner came out of Vegan Planet - Black Bean and Sweet Potato Enchiladas. Hopefully you can get the gist of the recipe from this photo (clicking to enlarge).

I'm not the biggest fan of sweet potatos, though I should mention that I'm not a very discerning eater and can eat the same meal for about a month without getting bored of it (which I'll probably be doing a lot of when I'm cooking all by myself up in Orillia until Annalise moves up in December).
But, these enchiladas were pretty yummy - we used mild salsa though, and I think I would have enjoyed them more if we'd had medium or hot salsa.

These are the enchiladas being prepared for the oven, and this is Annalise hiding behind the finished product.

Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair

2007-09-08T19:29:00.000-05:00

Anna and I spent some time at the Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair today. I took some quick photos of random things as we walked around. I remember it being a lot busier last year, but maybe we just picked a good time to go.

Sound of Music

2007-08-31T13:39:00.000-05:00

For those few of you who only visit this blog and don't check my "everything else" blog (which is supposed to be about cycling but wanders far off topic most of the time), you're missing some good (I think!) music to download.

Check the last two posts on Story of a bike and a stubborn cyclist for the links to the zipped music files.

Have a great weekend!

Captain Caveman

2007-08-23T07:37:00.000-05:00

While Krista is playing with sprouts and our triathlete continues to make delicious sounding meals like lemon blueberry waffles and tuscan bean polenta, I've been on my own for a week (girlfriend has been canoeing in Algonquin Park) and I've basically regressed into a single male's diet (although a vegan one). I started off well, eating the leftovers in the fridge, such as spinach salads with walnuts etc. But last night I was down to two veggie burgers and thank God Anna is back today because it might have come down to me eating all the sunflower seeds in the house, along with some raisins.

Thankfully I haven't fallen this far. I found an article in the Independent newspaper about the "caveman's diet." Basing his diet on some stuff he read by Arthur DeVaney, this Independent writer spent a month eating a Stone Age diet:
Rule of thumb: If you can't gather it from a bush or tree, or spear it, it's probably best not to eat it. What you can eat: Lean meat and fish. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Eggs. Dried fruit (without added sugar or vegetable oil). Nuts and seeds. What you can't eat: Sugars, grains (no oats, wheat, barley or rye, etc.), beans, peanuts (a bean, not a nut) and starchy vegetables (such as potatoes). Dairy products.

To the writer's credit, he quotes a few people like Dean Ornish who state that the emphasis on meat in this diet will lead to heart-disease, and he also mentions some interesting stuff about how all the refining that has happened to food over the last hundred or so years is what has actually caused such a massive drop in the quality of our food (and therefore an increase in illness).

I don't know - it sounds like a fairly good diet to me. I'd obviously switch the meat for the beans (and some B12 pills), but I can see it being healthy for you (though still terrible for the animals - I wonder if he tries to get free range/organic eggs & chicken etc).

At least it isn't like like Owsley Stanley's diet. Apparently this guy ONLY eats meat.
Stanley recently posted his seven rules for healthy eating on the Internet. They are:
* Eat only food from animals
* No vegetables
* Limit liver intake
* Avoid milk (except for butter and cheese)
* Eat as much fat as you like
* Don't cook your food much
* Avoid salt
Stanley had a heart attack in recent years, but he blames it on the broccoli and other"poisonous" vegetables his mother used to feed him as a boy.

Y.I.K.E.S.

P.S. - I noticed that the Independent has an entire section of their site (and maybe their print newspaper?) devoted to the environment. Well done dudes!

Book reviews

2007-08-08T09:10:00.001-05:00

This is a pretty good review of several health/diet/food books that I found in the New York Times. The books aren't necessarily vegan/vegetarian, but are health-conscious, and even where they disagree with the "vegan is best" philosophy, at least it makes you think and (maybe) re-evaluate.

I've bolded the book titles and my favourite bits of the review.

The New Puritans By Holly Brubach
7 May 2006
The New York Times

We were already beating ourselves up about the damage we've done to our arteries. Now along comes The Ethical Gourmet: How to Enjoy Great Food That Is Humanely Raised, Sustainable, Nonendangered, and That Replenishes the Earth (Broadway Books), by Jay Weinstein, which would seem to offer all the fun of a guilt trip with a tour guide. Happily, Weinstein, a chef and an avid environmentalist, holds fire where the reader is concerned and reserves his scorn for the Bush administration, linking its cavalier disregard for our natural resources with its conviction that the rapture will occur any day now.

Weinstein is one of several agents for change publishing books this spring, and despite occasional differences of opinion, all are comrades in arms, on a mission to overhaul the way we think about food. Their message is not new, but it furthers a cause propounded most conspicuously by Alice Waters and the Slow Food movement, lately advanced by Fast Food Nation and Super Size Me, and dating all the way back to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry speak directly to our conscience in Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin), addressing the tired misconception that organic food is a luxury the human race can't afford. In What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating (North Point Press), Marion Nestle deconstructs the typical American supermarket from a nutritionist's point of view, elucidating the maddeningly convoluted means by which our options are determined. And Real Food: What to Eat and Why (Bloomsbury), by Nina Planck, poses a convincing alternative to the prevailing dietary guidelines, even those treated as gospel.

The righteous indignation is contagious. As a group, these authors document various aspects of the behind-the-scenes role that politics and big business have played in shaping our food supply. It's infuriating to read Nestle's account of the roadblocks that legislators and lobbyists erected to prevent Country of Origin Labeling (C.O.O.L.), a seemingly straightforward initiative that would allow consumers to know where the food they are buying was grown. And two years after C.O.O.L. went into effect, its implementation is still spotty. As evidence of secrecy and corruption on a scale that brings to mind the Mafia, Nestle cites the 1999 Congressional hearings convened to investigate "slotting fees," introduced in the 1980's "as a way for stores to cover the added costs of dealing with new products: shelving, tracking, inventory and removing products that do not sell." According to Nestle, the industry people who testified "were so afraid of retribution that they wore hoods and used gadgets to prevent voice recognition."

There is no shortage of appalling information here, and the authors all seem to acknowledge that change will come about only by hitting corporate America where it hurts, i.e., the bottom line. Lappe and Terry seem particularly ingenious in this regard. They report that the 10 extra pounds gained by the average American in the 1990's now require the airline industry to use 350 million more gallons of fuel per year, costing an additional $275 million. Their chart comparing food corporations to nations ranks the revenues of Nestle (Nestea, Lean Cuisine, Stouffer's, Butterfinger, KitKat, PowerBar) and Altria (Nabisco, Kraft, Maxwell House, Post, Jell-O, Kool-Aid, Oscar Mayer) somewhere between the gross domestic products of the United Arab Emirates and Nigeria.

In the course of educating readers, the authors' personalities emerge. There is Nestle, the no-nonsense reporter, at pains to take into account all sides of the story; Weinstein, the evangelist whose zeal sets the tone for his relations with the reader; and Lappe and Terry, earnest New Age hippie types offering menus accompanied by playlists and poems by their friends. (Readers accustomed to a more literary diet should proceed directly to recipes.)

Of the group, it is Planck who is the most companionable. Her capacity for humor and self-deprecation makes for good company, and her intelligence and skepticism inspire confidence. To those who proscribe dairy products on the premise that milk was designed for newborn calves, not humans (a popular, if somewhat bizarre, argument), she retorts that a tomato was designed to make more tomato plants, not pasta sauce. Cataloging her own history, which spans a series of draconian regimens, including vegan, vegetarian, low fat, low saturated fat and low cholesterol, she labels one category "New Foods I Tried to Love" and lists "Various imitation foods made with soy and rice." Planck now eats and, even more outrageously, advocates grass-fed meat and whole dairy products.

Tracking changes in the American diet over the course of a hundred years, she notes that the three most common fats in 1990 -- soybean oil, canola oil and cottonseed oil -- were unknown in 1890. They are modern inventions. Whereas, she argues, "we've been eating animal fat for three million years." She avoids egg-white omelets and skim milk ("low-quality, incomplete foods") and contends that, where milk is concerned, butterfat facilitates protein digestion and contains the vitamins A and D required for calcium absorption. She recommends "traditional" milk -- raw, unpasteurized, unhomogenized -- from grass-fed cows, as opposed to those fattened on grain.

Fat, cholesterol, carbs, red meat -- none of these, Planck contends, is the problem. Instead, she lays the blame on chemicals and industrial food, including "new" fats, many of which are often hydrogenated. Industrial food, she says, is to blame for the steep rise in rates of disease, especially heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Planck arrives at this incendiary conclusion via Darwin and research into Stone Age eating habits, which flies in the face of widespread myths and confirms that, contrary to popular assumptions, humans used to be more carnivorous, not less. "I doubt that foods we've eaten for millions of years cause cancer," she writes.

Though all these experts challenge the existing order, their advice is often contradictory. Nestle, for instance, questions the premise that a diet high in calcium is best for building bone density, but ratifies current advice to curtail fats and cholesterol. Weinstein suggests albacore tuna as an environmentally responsible choice, but Nestle cautions specifically against it for its high content of methylmercury. Planck suggests soaking dried beans before cooking them; Weinstein insists that this is unnecessary in most cases. And Lappe and Terry endorse cooking with canola oil, one of the very fats that Planck abhors.

Never mind. The zeal that animated sit-ins and antiwar protests in the 1960's hasn't died; it's gone underground, fostering small-scale, sustainable agriculture that undermines industrial food's hegemony. The "Think globally, eat locally" message comes across loud and clear, and these books provide invaluable online resources for information and hard-to-find "real food." Even the most cynical readers will come away from these books determined to change some aspect of their diets, and many people -- I, for one -- may resolve to revamp their eating habits completely. Radical as Planck's ideas may be, the case she makes for them strikes me as eminently sensible. I consider myself an enlightened eater, but when I finished her book, I threw out half the contents of my refrigerator, including the soy-based fake bacon bits, the tofu hot dogs and the nonfat sour cream. That was a few weeks ago. It is, I guess, a measure of the extent to which I've bought into all these years of nonfat propaganda that I'm still working up the nerve to eat the skin on my chicken.

all creatures great and small

2007-08-03T12:58:00.000-05:00

It is the August long weekend here in Canada, and my girlfriend and I, and our friend Cindy, are off to my parents' place in Bancroft to hang with them and my younger brother and my sister and her husband.

I love going home, but I have to be increasingly careful about shooting my mouth off around the non-vegetarians (my brother is mostly vegetarian, my sister and her husband are David Suzuki fans and try to go meatless a couple days of the week for environmental reasons, but my parents are still the same as they ever were).

Basically I'm trying not to be one of those loud and vocal vegan/vegetarians who can't let a moment go by without saying something insulting about the practice of eating meat.

For example, my sister recently posted some photos on facebook of her vacation in Cuba, and she had a few photos where she was swimming with dolphins.
So in a subsequent email I said "Hey Leeyann, did you know that 100 000 dolphins a year get killed by the fishing industry, and in fact that 1/3 of all the fish hauled out of the ocean are promptly thrown back in - dead - because they weren't the type of fish the trawler was going for?"

So I don't need to be doing that all the time, but in my own defense, when you've read all the stuff I (and probably we) have, it's sometimes hard for your brain not to make a connection between one inocuous thing (i.e. songbirds) and factory farming, and to then shoot your mouth off about it. I came across a book today about how all the songbirds are dying away, and since my mom loves birds and has two birdfeeders in the front yard, I'll probably mention it to her, and then try to stop from saying something like "by the way, eating meat is killing the planet and killing the songbirds."

I wonder why it is so easy for some of us to read the literature, understand what is happening, and decide to make a life change, and so hard for others to even contemplate doing this?

P.S. I'm curious about reading this book sometime. Apparently Kingsolver and family, while remaining anti-factory farm, do give up the vegetarianism. I suppose the argument will be on the "happy life / quick and humane death" side, and I'd like to see how she describes coming to this decision.

Have a good weekend everyone. Enjoy the quinoa and the beans and the soy/frozen fruit shakes.

Recipe from Krista

2007-07-24T07:25:00.001-05:00

Krista over at Veggin Out put a recipe up on her blog for kind of a salad using beets and apples. I don't know why, but the idea of a beet/apple salady thing really appealed to me, so my girlfriend and I made it this weekend.
It is totally simple to make (basically you shred some vegetables and mix them together), but the only problem with it is that beets are prone to stain everything they touch.

Check Krista's page for the recipe. We followed her lead and used the optional Bulgar as well. And though I'm the kind of guy who does NOT consider a salady thing to be a meal (more something that you eat AFTER the meal) this salad totally filled me up.

And this below is just a random shot of me eating a strawberry / brown sugar sherbert thing that Annalise made for dessert. : )

Life with the soy bean

2007-07-20T12:10:00.000-05:00

So most of you probably didn't know that in my professional life (i.e. when I'm not biking, reading, writing, blogging, or watching LOST and the OFFICE) I'm an academic librarian.

This means that I'm pretty happy doing research and scanning lists of journal articles and trying to see if they're any good or not for the research I'm doing. But - I really really hate science lingo. I mean for God's sake - what do these things mean?

23. Characterization of flax fiber reinforced soy protein resin based green composites modified with nano-clay particles in Composites Science and Technology (August 2007)

24. Protective Effect of Soy Isoflavones and Activity Levels of Plasma Paraoxonase and Arylesterase in the Experimental Nonalcoholic Steatohepatitis Model in Digestive Diseases and Sciences 52.8 (August 2007)

25. Analysis of ethyl carbamate in Korean soy sauce using high-performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection or tandem mass spectrometry and gas chromatography with mass spectrometry. in Food Control (August 2007)

Stupid scienticians.

Anyway, I've seen some fairly weird stories about soy recently and have been trying to do what a good librarian does - i.e. find out what the experts are saying about soy (through academic journals) rather than what any idiot with a blog is saying about soy on the internet.

So far I can't find anything all that conclusive about soy being good or bad, though I think that the needle points a bit more to the good side than the bad side. There's no proof, for example, that soy estrogens negatively effect testosterone in men, and there is some proof that soy reduces prostate cancer in men.

Some more readable things I found in the news databases are the following:

The scoop on soy: Breathe easy. Tofu and other products made from the humble soybean are far from harmful 21 March 2007 The Calgary Herald

Soy has been touted as a miracle food. But it's also been dragged through the nutritional mud as an over-hyped product that does more harm than good.

"There's so much confusion about soy," says Mark Messina, who holds a PhD in nutrition and is president of Port Townsend, Wash.-based Nutrition Matters, a consulting company.

He has studied the health effects of soy for almost 20 years and says there is so much information floating around that it's no wonder confusion reigns. As far as he's concerned, soy is just fine.

"For the most part, the evidence shows that soy is totally safe."

"Soy foods are low in saturated fat, they contain a lot of dietary fibre and they're an excellent source of protein," says Carole Dobson, a registered dietitian with Calgary-based Health Stand Nutrition Consulting.

So what's the worry? The controversy stems from a bioactive compound found in soybeans, called isoflavones. Some people are concerned about isoflavones because they're a hormone-like compound.

"They have some estrogen-like effects," says Messina. "But they are much different than the hormone estrogen and probably are very selective on what tissues they affect."

"There's just absolutely no effect of soy on testosterone levels," he says. "The few studies that have looked at semen quality in men have not found any adverse effects, as well."
[Concerning soy causing] accelerated puberty in girls, reproductive problems and increased difficulty getting pregnant - there has been no conclusive scientific research to prove this.

"There's no actual study that links soy intake in men or women with specific negative health results," says Dobson.

If anything, eating soy may help slow the onset of puberty because it is low in saturated fat.

Are Canadians Jumping For Soy? 1 May 2007 Canada NewsWire
New Study Shows Most Canadians in the Dark on Soy Health Benefits

Experts have been buzzing about super-foods and the array of health benefits they offer, but are consumers listening? A recent survey showed 62 per cent of Canadians had never consumed a soy beverage. Of those respondents, over half (57 per cent) are in the dark when it comes to the health and nutritional benefits of soy - one of the most hotly touted super-foods. Additionally, 16 per cent of respondents indicated they think soy tastes bad.

Yet, of the one-third of Canadian households that have tried soy beverages and the 15 per cent that drink it on a regular basis, 27 per cent drink soy beverages because they enjoy the taste, while more than half (52 per cent) indicated they consume soy beverages for their health benefits.

"The latest edition of Canada's Food Guide recommends soy beverages as part of a healthy diet. Not only does soy help lower cholesterol, but it could also aid in the prevention of heart disease, osteoporosis and certain cancers," said Diana Steele, a registered dietitian who recommends soy beverages as a healthy and nutritious option. "But it's obvious from this survey many Canadians don't know exactly why soy is so good for them or why it would be on the list of super-foods."

Despite experts touting soy's health and nutrition benefits there are also a number of myths currently in circulation that might be adding to consumer confusion. "Once they can get accurate information on soy, such as from a registered dietitian, and myths are dispelled, Canadians will be able to make informed decisions about soy beverages," added Steele.

The Myths
---------

1. Soy has no effect on cancer. Actually, several recent scientific
studies have shown regular intake of soy foods and beverages could
help prevent breast, prostate, and colon cancer(1). The cancer
protective effects from soy are due to the group of natural plant
elements known as isoflavones.

2. Soy is not an adequate source of protein. Only one per cent of non-soy
beverage drinkers surveyed know soy is a good source of protein. In
fact, compared to other legumes, soy offers the best quality of
protein. Soy protein contains enough of all the essential amino acids,
such as methionine, to meet a person's nutritional needs when consumed
at recommended levels.

3. Soy has no impact on heart health. Soy protein plays an important role
in a heart healthy diet. Rich in polyunsaturated fats and low in
saturated fats, some soy beverages also include dietary fibre and key
vitamins and minerals, such as calcium (if enriched) and potassium.
The consumption of 25 grams of soy protein a day, in conjunction with
an otherwise healthy diet, lowers plasma cholesterol, which has been
shown to reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease(2).

4. Soy is high in Estrogen and can reduce fertility in men. Some people
have speculated that phytoestrogens - naturally found in soy foods -
can reduce fertility in men. However, there is no evidence that
fertility is affected when men eat or drink soy as part of their
regular diet.

Anyway - it looks like soy is fine, despite the weird stories your friends might email to you. And even if it turns out that we can't eat soy, at least we can wear soy underwear.

Just ask this scientician

2007-07-13T13:16:00.000-05:00

"Don't you realize you've just been brainwashed by corporate propaganda!?"

J.M. Coetzee (and a little on KFC)

2007-07-12T08:07:00.001-05:00

I just finished The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee - winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and a two time winner of the Booker Prize.

Lives of Animals is interesting. Coetzee was asked in 1997 to give the Tanner Lectures at Princeton. He agreed, but instead of talking about literature, he wanted to talk about animal rights. But, he didn't want to get up at the podium and do the vegan "I accuse you of...!" shame on everyone else routine. So instead, he created a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello and wrote two short stories about how Elizabeth was invited to a certain university to give talks, and how she chose to talk about animal rights, and what sort of difficulties she had in sympathetically getting her points across while minimizing how many people she pissed off. Then Coetzee - for his Tanner Lectures - read his two stories about Elizabeth and because they're fiction you can't even really get a grasp on what Coetzee thinks, because it is actually his fictional character Elizabeth stating all the animal rights issues etc.

Anyway - here are three passages from the book that I like.

Pg 28
I just find this one funny. Costello is talking about experiments a psychologist named Wolfgang Kohler did around WWI with apes. Kohler does a few experiments with the smartest ape, named Sultan, to see if he can problem solve etc. For example, for the first while Kohler just puts Sultan's bananas on the floor of the pen. But then for the first test he strings them on a wire across the pen which is too high for Sultan to reach, but Kohler also gives him some crates that he can maybe use to climb on. But far more than just problem solving, Costello (or Coetzee) gives Sultan much more credit for what thoughts he's having regarding this test.
Sultan knows - the bananas are there to make me think. But what must one think? One thinks: Why is he starving me? One thinks: What have I done? Why has he stopped liking me? One thinks: Why does he not want these crates any more? But none of these is the right thought. Even a more complicated thought - for instance: What is wrong with him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana from the floor? - is wrong. The right thought to think is: How does one use the crates to reach the bananas?

Pg. 38
At a dinner, Elizabeth Costello's son is dreading the moment when someone will ask "What made you become vegetarian, Ms. Costello?"
The son knows what his mother's response will be, for it comes from Plutarch.
His mother has [the response] by heart; he can reproduce it only imperfectly. "You ask me why I refuse to eat flesh. I, for my part, am astonished that you can put in your mouth the corpse of a dead animal, astonished that you do not find it nasty to chew hacked flesh and swallow the juices of death wounds." Plutarch is a real conversation-stopper: it is the word 'juices' that does it. Producing Plutarch is like throwing down a gauntlet; after that, there is no knowing what will happen.

Pg. 44
After another person has belittled the concept of animal rights, because animals don't have consciousness and can't even appreciate the fact that they are being spared (if they're being spared), Elizabeth responds this way:
That is a good point you raise. No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. No awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness -therefore-. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

Anyway, Lives of Animals is very philosophical and a lot of it went over my head, but it was still interesting to read. I'd still go with Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" though if you were looking for a book about your food.

On another topic - KFC, in California only, will soon have health warnings on their posters etc about carcinogens in their french fries.

It has something to do with a substance called acrylamide which I guess is in a lot of foods, but especially potatoes, and when it is cooked at certain temperatures it can become carcinogenic.

When I first saw this story my eyes lit up thinking it was going to be a warning about their god awful chicken practices, but instead it's potatoes. Oh well.

The warning, in part, says: "Cooked potatoes that have been browned, such as French fries, baked potatoes and potato chips, contain acrylamide, a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer…. It is created in fried and baked potatoes made by all restaurants, by other companies, and even when you bake or fry potatoes at home."

When asked whether the company would add similar warnings at restaurants around the country, Preston said that he was unaware of any other states requiring health warnings for acrylamide and that it naturally occurs in a wide variety of cooked foods.

Snack food and fast-food companies had contended that the suit, filed by former Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer, would unnecessarily alarm the public and that it unfairly singled out their industry because many non-potato products also contain acrylamide, including coffee, toasted cereals and breads.

But the attorney general's office said a serving of French fries or potato chips has about 82 times more of the substance than is allowed under U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards for drinking water.

another pro-animal Singer

2007-07-10T10:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a good quote from the No-Nonsense Guide to Animal Rights from the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer:

To be a vegetarian is to disagree - to disagree with the course of things today. Starvation, world hunger, cruelty, waste, wars - we must make a statement against these things. Vegetarianism is my statement. And I think it's a strong one.

I also found this quote by Singer elsewhere:
People often say that humans have always eaten animals, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.

So I finished the No-Nonsense Guide. I knew a lot of the issues they talk about, but lots of the examples were new to me. For example I knew that a big criticism of the fishing industry is that somewhere around 1/3 of all the fish caught in those big trawling nets are returned - dead - to the ocean because they weren't the type of fish that that trawler was going for. I didn't know however that roughly 100 000 dolphins are killed this way each year.

I also learned something about animal testing, which I'd never really read about before. Isn't the Draize Test a wonderful thing? Because rabbits' eyes have no tear ducts to wash away irritants, and their eyes are large enough for any inflammation to be clearly visible, researchers will drip various fluids that they're testing into the rabbits' eyes to see what effects they will have - i.e. ulcerating the rabbits' eyes or burning the eyes out completely.

This is especially wonderful when the scientific community doesn't even agree that the draize test works.

Sausages in Calgary

2007-07-05T10:05:00.000-05:00

As I was puttering around the apartment this morning, the guy on the radio casually mentioned a few food facts about the upcoming Calgary Stampede.
A few of the things he mentioned are the following: During the traditional pancake breakfast, the Calgary Stampede uses over two tons of bacon and sausage, and 5,000 bottles of pancake syrup.

That makes me shudder - it's been so long since I've eaten meat that contemplating it at all makes me woozy, but wow, two tons of pig! Yikes - that really freaks a veggie out, especially when you've read stuff like this.

Coincidentally, I am currently reading the No Nonsense Guide to Animal Rights, and I read through the brief part on rodeos while on the Go Train this morning. According to this book...
In modern day rodeos, tame horses and bulls are sometimes given electric shocks to get them 'bucking' or have straps squeezed around their lower abdomens to put pressure on their groin areas. Apart from this kind of discomfort, animals are sometimes seriously injured and even killed at the rodeo. A USDA meat inspector said that the rodeo horses and cows that come to slaughterhouses are so terribly bruised that there are few places where the skin is actually attached to the muscle. Animals also commonly have broken ribs and punctured lungs.

Yep. I'm sure this calf is going to look back on today and go "Yeah - good times, he jumped off a horse onto my head, plowed me into the dirt and then wrapped a rope around my feet - beats a lazy day eating grass every time."

Here's something else that I read this morning which I wasn't aware of - the horse racing industry actually funnels thousands of horses to slaughter each year. A successful racehorse has a career of about 3 years, but a lifespan of about 30 years. To save money (why feed and house a retired racing horse?) several thousand former racing horses are slaughtered each year for human and petfood consumption.
As well, less than half the foals born in the racing industry actually do any racing, because they aren't fast enough. Once again, to care for them would be a waste of money, and so around 17000 foals, in the U.S. alone, are slaughtered for the petfood industry.

The more I read, the more astounded I am not only by the way we treat animals, but how all this crap is hidden in plain sight. The radio will tell you that the Calgary Stampede is on, and that several tons of pig will be served at the rodeo, but to find out how those pigs lived their lives, and what happens to the horses and calves at the rodeo, you have to seek the information out yourself.

My little brother was done in by Alberta actually. He went veggie years ago, way before I'd thought anything about it (I think because he'd been listening to Propagandhi). Then he moved to Alberta and got tired of explaining to everyone what a vegetarian was and having Alberta Beef waved in front of his face all the time. He started eating meat again out there, but lately he's been cutting back again, I think with the intention of giving up completely.

Matthew Scully

2007-06-29T09:43:00.000-05:00

Here's something I mentioned a while back on my (mostly) cycling blog: Every issue, Newsweek gives it's back page to either the conservative George Will, or the liberal Anna Quindlen, to discuss whatever is on their minds. Despite the fact that I myself am pretty darn liberal, I find Quindlen boring as heck and Will quite interesting.

Last summer Will did a piece on the conservative Matthew Scully's book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.

As Will writes, Scully's argument runs along these lines:
Why is cruelty to a puppy appalling and cruelty to livestock by the billions a matter of social indifference? There cannot be any intrinsic difference of worth between a puppy and a pig.

Animal suffering on a vast scale should, Scully says, be a serious issue of public policy. He does not want to take away your BLT; he does not propose to end livestock farming. He does propose a Humane Farming Act to apply to corporate farmers the elementary standards of animal husbandry and veterinary ethics: "We cannot just take from these creatures, we must give them something in return. We owe them a merciful death, and we owe them a merciful life."

The book is from 2002. If you want to take a look at his 2005 essay (which I think led Will to the book) titled - Fear Factories: The Case for Compassionate Conservatism - for Animals, it is available here.

And I cannot BELIEVE this website he mentions in the above essay:

As for the rights of animals, rights in general are best viewed in tangible terms, with a view to actual events and consequences. Take the case of a hunter in Texas named John Lockwood, who has just pioneered the online safari. At his canned-hunting ranch outside San Antonio, he's got a rifle attached to a camera and the camera wired up to the Internet, so that sportsmen going to Live-shot.com will actually be able to fire at baited animals by remote control from their computers. "If the customer were to wound the animal," explains the San Antonio Express-News, "a staff person on site could finish it off." The "trophy mounts" taken in these heroics will then be prepared and shipped to the client's door, and if it catches on Lockwood will be a rich man.

Tyson will create fuel from animal fat?

2007-06-27T07:41:00.000-05:00

Here are your sexiest vegetarians according to the PETA poll.

I really don't know what to make of Tyson's announcement that they're going to work with a synthetic fuel company named Syntroleum to make synthetic fuel from animal fat.

I guess the reason my spider sense starts tingling here is a) because it's Tyson and b) because it's fuel.

I suppose there might be some (relatively) innocent part of their (generally horrendous) production process where they get ample animal fat that they can easily sell off to Syntroleum, but my initial reaction is that they're just going to start squishing cows and pigs in giant orange juicers to get the fat.

And yikes! If this new company actually takes off, and Tyson (of all companies!!!) becomes a major energy supplier? Becomes the Saudi Arabia of the second half of the 21st century??

That makes me worried.

In a statement, the companies said they formed a joint venture, Dynamic Fuels LLC, to construct and operate more such facilities. Tyson will supply feedstock, mainly derived from animal fats, greases, and vegetable oils, to the plants.

Syntroleum, which converts natural gas to synthetic liquid fuels, said it expects the first facility to be located in south central United Sates.

The company expects the plant to produce about 78 million gallons per year of renewable synthetic fuel from 74 million gallons per year of feedstock beginning in 2010. Construction of the facility is expected to start in 2008.

Michael Moore & Peter Singer

2007-06-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

I was doing a little random blog surfing and found this post on Vegan Heart Doc about a letter that PETA wrote to Michael Moore. It looks like PETA's Ingrid Newkirk was trying to sneak in a little vegetarian awareness by congratulating Moore on SICKO while telling him that he doesn't look very healthy and should probably give up meat. (the full letter can be found here).

I kind of agree with the Heart Doc that PETA's letter wasn't the best way to approach Michael Moore. "Hey Mike, you're fat, go veggie!" Hmmm. Great.

This has got me thinking though of how many people Michael Moore could turn vegetarian if he focused his camera on the U.S. factory farming system. Although people still read Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, in today's society a Michael Moore documentary would reach far more people than Singer's book would.

I wish Ms. Newkirk had approached Moore a bit more carefully, slowly pushing the factory farming system his way, hoping he'd grab hold himself. A Michael Moore documentary on factory farming would probably have an effect similar to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and if it didn't change laws, at the very least it would force people to think about what they were eating.

Tyson and antibiotics

2007-06-21T06:58:00.000-05:00

A big story from yesterday is that Tyson Foods is going to start selling antibiotic free chicken.

Wow!

I basically think that Tyson is evil, but this is a very promising development - assuming I've put two and two together correctly here.

Aren't chickens (and cows and pigs etc) given antibiotics in order to help them survive the unbelievably wretched living conditions which are forced upon them by Tyson? So if Tyson is saying they're giving up antibiotics, doesn't that mean also that they're going to raise/house the chickens in a healthy environment which the chickens will be able to survive on their own?

I used the Google News Search to check a few different stories about Tyson, but nothing seems to mention that they're going to raise the chickens in better conditions.

Here's some industry spin for you as well, from CNN's version of the story:

(Tyson chief executive) Bond said that while the company uses antibiotics at the farm level "for therapeutic reasons" only, it believes the move to drug-free poultry is part of its strategy to "offer meaningful benefits to the masses."
Therapeutic Reasons - that's a laugh, i.e. so that they can survive the ammonia used to negate the stench of the chickencrap laced (up till now anyway) with drugs? And survive the close quarters, and the debeaking etc etc?

The National Chicken Council, a trade group, responded to Tyson's announcement by contending that all chicken marketed today is "antibiotic-free in the sense that no antibiotic residues are present in the meat, due to the withdrawal periods (following usage and before slaughter) and other precautions required by the government and observed" by poultry producers.

Hey, you can trust the National Chicken Council that nothing like this is happening.
And this guy is just a liar:
A USDA Inspector named Ronnie Sarratt was quoted in one report saying, "I've had birds that had yellow pus visibly coming out of their insides, and I was told to save the breast meat off them and even save the second joint of the wing. You might get those breasts today at a store in a package of breast fillets. And you might get the other in a pack of buffalo wings."

the willingness to avert your eyes

2007-06-14T07:20:00.000-05:00

This shall be the last time I mention Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. I've finally finished it - speed reading through the last chapter where he hunts his own meal - and the last thing I want to talk about is his take on the ethics of eating animals.

Pollan isn't a vegetarian, although he did go veggie while he was in the process of trying to justify to himself whether or not he could eat meat. Although he never actually states his position, it's fairly clear that Pollan is an omnivore who finds it defensible to eat animals raised on organic / natural farms who lived a good life and had a quick clean death. What he does not find defensible is eating animals - like the billions going through the factory farms - that did nothing but suffer for their entire existence before they reached our plates.

Pollan emphasizes several times the fact that it is incumbent upon the eater to truly look at, and make a conscious moral decision, about what he/she is eating. On page 312 he writes about the choice you have to make after you accept the evidence that an animal was tortured to get to your dinner table You look away - or you stop eating animals.

On page 317 after briefly mentioning CAFO's and how they treat animals as "production units" which can't feel pain, he writes Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one's eyes on the part of everyone else.

On page 332:
Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFO's, and even the concrete walls of the slaughterhouses, to be replaced with glass. If there's any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look...
... Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end - for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We'd probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we'd eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.

Canada's Food Guide

2007-06-12T10:04:00.000-05:00

The new Canada Food Guide has been out for a little while now. When I first looked through it I was really impressed with their MEAT section, because they simply cannot tell people fast enough that they should be switching from meat to meat alternatives. Heck, the section might as well just be called "Protein."

What I've copied below is the very first page from the Educator's Guide to the Food Guide. As you can see, they say Have meat alternatives often.. three times. It's almost the only thing your eyes see on this page.

I think this is great, especially when you remember this story about American farm lobby groups going nuts in the 70's/80's when the U.S. government made a feeble attempt to recommend that people stop eating red meat.

Veggies are sexy

2007-06-11T10:51:00.000-05:00

The June 7 Calgary Herald reprinted a story from Newsday titled Sexy greens growing about GoVeg's 2007 Sexiest Vegetarian Poll.

It was fairly interesting - in a quick hollywood gossip kind of way. Apparently Natalie Portman had fake leather shoes made for her role in V for Vendetta, and Joaquin Phoenix had fake leather cowboy boots made for Walk the Line.

But what is really interesting is this passage about an unknown (to me anyway) Democratic presidential hopeful:

Yet California isn't the only bastion for non-carnivores. If Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich were to win the 2008 U.S. presidential election, he'd break the meat barrier -- as opposed to the more hyped race and gender barriers -- as the first vegetarian in the White House.

So I went on to Kucinich's website and poked around a little bit. He's just launched his first television ad titled No More Blood for Oil, and I think it's quite good. One of the numbers flashed is Oil Company Profit from Stealing Iraq's Oil.

That's pretty funny - despite the fact that Kucinich doesn't really stand a chance, the Democrats are offering the United States the potential for their first black, female, or vegetarian president.

And the Republicans are offering very few ideas for how to get Beyond Bush:

The presidential campaign could have provided the opportunity for a national discussion of the new world we live in. So far, on the Republican side, it has turned into an exercise in chest-thumping. Whipping up hysteria requires magnifying the foe. The enemy is vast, global and relentless. Giuliani casually lumps together Iran and Al Qaeda. Mitt Romney goes further, banding together all the supposed bad guys. "This is about Shia and Sunni. This is about Hizbullah and Hamas and Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood," he recently declared.

Wolfgang and the happy life

2007-05-06T12:38:00.000-05:00

Wolfgang Puck, the superstar chef who runs the Spago restaurants and food company, has written a really impressive article in the May 7 Newsweek titled Changing Tastes: That veal calf may end up as wiener schnitzel, but one of our greatest chefs wants it to have a happy life first.

He mentions the obesity and diabetes problems that now need to be associated with the saturated fat in a meat rich diet, but his main concern is the animal cruelty issue. Regarding the fish and other animals used at his restaurants, he says "Yes, they'll be killed for food - but until then, they should have a nice stay on earth."
He goes on to promise "By the end of the year, all the chicken I buy, even for my Wolfgang Puck frozen pizzas, will have been raised cage-free. The veal on my Spago menu is now free-range. To make certain things stay above-board, I've hired someone who will police my purveyors. I want to ensure that everything labeled organic really is, and that no veal calf that finds its way into my kitchen lived its life chained inside a box."

I think that this is an awesome development. A superstar member of the food industry saying "this is wrong and I won't do it anymore". I hope that he sets a trend which other chefs / restauranteurs follow. And that a world where this crap stops happening is eventually achieved.

Annalise and I were at the Riverdale Farm in Cabbagetown today. We saw some cows and pigs with access to fresh air and sunlight.

And we saw some lambs napping and caring for their babies and "baaaaing" and it was really nice. I have mixed feelings about zoos, but with factory farming so much on my mind these days, it is really encouraging to see these animals living something close to a natural life.

The Great Vegan Dinner Party

2007-04-30T17:23:00.000-05:00

On the weekend we had some friends over for dinner and play some guitar. I meant to take a lot more photos than I did, but here are a couple.

The appetizer was Ben's Black Bean Salsa from How it all Vegan.
Aside from corn and beans etc, the more interesting ingredients are lime juice, garlic, and cilantro.

I should have stirred all this together before taking the photo, it looks like corn overload in this shot.

The main course was African Sweet Potato and Peanut Stew from Vegan Planet served with basamati rice. I totally missed getting a photo of the stew, or any photos of the group of us sitting down to dinner.

We also had two salads which I won't explain in much detail.

Dessert was a Carrot Cake. Basically it's carrots and raisins, various spices and water simmered for a while in a frying pan, then some flour and baking soda is added and the whole thing is baked for an hour.

There is also an icing made by blending tofu, lemon juice, maple syrup, vanilla and a bit more in a blender until it's all whipped up nicely.

The last dessert, or rather the end of the night "let's set something on fire" moment, was when Annalise put some pears into a frying pan, poured in some Goldschlager, and set it all on fire.

You don't see any flames in this shot, but trust me, there was indeed a fire in that frying pan at one point.

So we ate and talked about the health care system and how bad our backs were because we're old and ride bikes too much. We (the boys) drank beer. And we played some music together because four of the six of us could play guitar, and most of us could sing, and we dug up the chords for I'll Fly Away and had some fun massacring this classic.

The Lack of Media Discussion

2007-04-23T07:19:00.000-05:00

Once a person has done the reading, and I assume most people who stumble across this blog have, it becomes obvious that there's really no reason at all to eat meat.

If you start with the fact that getting your protein from meat is unnecessary, that in many ways it is bad for you, that switching to a vegetarian diet has numerous health advantages, and then go on to examine the environmental damage caused by factory farms, and the moral issues, you're left wondering why in the world anyone would even think about eating meat.

So we all know this.

The question remains - why isn't this whole topic covered in the media more often? As most writers will tell you, people simply don't want to investigate, and know, how their food got to their plate. I think this needs to change, and think we should hound the media to devote some print & air time to the various problems associated with meat-based diets in general, but factory farming in particular.

For those of you in Ontario, you may know that Television Ontario's program The Agenda is a very intelligent current affairs program hosted by Steve Paikin. What you may not know, is that on The Agenda's website there are Viewer's Forums and a Submit a show idea forum as well. The producers view the forum, which is a very busy one, and often turn the most heated discussion threads into episodes of the show.

I have started a thread titled "Factory Farming - Intensive Livestock Operations" and it has so far received a big fat zero responses from other viewers. I'd love it if we turned this into a popular thread and got an episode of the Agenda focused on factory farming issues.

If you'd like to help with this, go onto The Agenda's website, register yourself as a user, find the factory farming thread (there is a search function if you need it, but it should still be on the first or second page), and give your two cents worth about why the Agenda should talk about this issue, and why the media in general should cover it more often.

Feeding the steers

2007-04-13T12:40:00.000-05:00

So in the often mentioned Omnivore's Dilemma, Pollan buys a male calf and follows it through the farm system.
While he's on the "fatten them up fast" farm (i.e. where they exist before being sent to the slaughterhouse) - and incidentally, with the steroids and fat diet they give these creatures, they have them reaching kill weight in about 14 months these days, compared to 4 to 5 YEARS in the first half of the 20th century -

where was I... oh yeah, so Pollan is on the farm and visits the feed mill. They dump the corn in from one side (and cows are naturally grass eaters, and developed their famous four stomachs in order to do so. To get them eating the more quickly fattening corn diet, they have to drug them up so that their bodies can handle the corn) and the drugs etc from the other:

Around to the other side of the building, tanker trucks back up to silo-shaped tanks into which they pump thousands of gallons of liquefied fat and protein supplements. In a shed attached to the mill sit vats of liquid vitamins and synthetic estrogen beside pallets stacked with fifty-pound sacks of antibiotics - Rumensis and Tylosin. Along with alfafa hay and silage (for roughage), all these ingredients will be automatically blended and then piped into the parade of dump trucks that three times a day fan out from here to keep Poky's eight and a half miles of trough filled.

.... [corn kernels were] the only feed ingredient I sampled, and it wasn't half bad; not as crisp as a Kellog's flake, but with a cornier flavor. I passed on the other ingredients: the liquefied fat (which on today's menu is beef tallow, trucked in from one of the nearby slaughter-houses), and the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea. The urea is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to the fertilizer spread on a farmer's fields].

How'd you like to have all that crap in your body? And hey, the liquefied fat is beef tallow from a slaughter-house? Isn't feeding cows back to cows how mad-cow disease got started?

And I won't type much more, but Pollan goes on to explain how corn-fed beef is "demonstratably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass."

Origins of food industrialization

2007-04-12T13:59:00.000-05:00

I am SO digging The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan. I love stuff like how the industrialization of food symbolically began in 1947 when a munitions plant in Alabama had a huge surplus of ammonium nitrate (used for bombs) and was switched over to making chemical fertilizers instead (the ammonium nitrate now being used for nitrogen for plants).

Accoring to Pollan, a fairly well forgotten Nobel Prize winner is the reason why two out of every five people is alive today (or put another way, why 40% of us would be dead without him).
Fritz Haber created the process of making synthetic nitrogen by bonding nitrogen and hydrogen. Synthetic nitrogen then became a fertilizer which massively increased the size of crops and drastically changed the "sheer amount of life earth could support" (pg 42).

Solid enough work to win the man the Nobel prize back in 1920. But Haber's lifestory is actually fascinating. During World War I his work with nitrates allowed Germany to keep building bombs even after their supply of natural nitrate was cut off. He invented some of the poison gases that were used in trench warfare, and he also invented Zyklon B, which Hitler would eventually use in his concentration camps (and the irony being that Haber himself was Jewish).
In 1915, while her husband's poison gases were wafting over trenches and killing the English and French, Haber's wife, who was also a chemist, killed herself over despair at what she and her husband had created. In the 1930's, even though he had converted to Christianity, the increasing Nazism in Germany caused Haber to flee the country and he died in 1934 in Basel. About a decade later, Zyklon B would kill many of his relatives.

Low sperm count? Might be your mom's fault

2007-04-03T12:40:00.000-05:00

So, let’s not forget, the European Union has banned North American beef from its market since the late 1990’s – the reason being that American and Canadian beef producers still use antibiotics and steroids that were banned in Europe as unsafe. Some of the substances destroy your immune system, some are outright carcinogens which will give you cancer.

Here’s another problem with North American beef.

Hormone-treated beef eaten by moms linked to fertility woes in sons: Medical study. 'A large potential for concern,' scientist says
28 March 2007
Montreal Gazette
PARIS
Hormone-treated beef may be linked to low sperm counts and borderline fertility among U.S. men, according to a first-ever study that appears today in a medical journal.
The paper says men whose mothers were big eaters of beef - most of which is treated with hormones in the United States to accelerate cattle growth - have lower fertility levels compared with those whose mothers ate less or no beef.
It is the first peer-assessed investigation into the effect of food on the human reproductive system, its authors believe.
U.S. farmers have been using hormones to promote muscle growth in cattle for more than half a century.
The European Union outlawed the substances in 1988 on health grounds, triggering a huge trade row with the United States. The World Trade Organization is to issue a technical ruling on the dispute on April 17, a European Commission source said.
The study looked at 387 U.S. men born between 1949 and 1983 who were interviewed about their childhood background and their history of fertility and were asked to give a sperm sample.
Sons of women who ate more than seven beef meals a week had a sperm count that was nearly 25 percent lower than men whose mothers ate less beef.
And they were nearly three times likelier to have sperm concentrations that fell below the WHO threshold of sub-fertility. The more beef the mother ate, the lower the son's sperm quality.
"These data suggest that maternal beef consumption, and possibly xenobiotics (foreign chemicals) in beef, may alter a man's testicular development in utero and adversely affect his reproductive capacity," the study says.
The paper appears in Human Reproduction, the journal of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology.
"When you disrupt hormones prenatally, you affect a whole cascade, and in particular, oestrogens and androgens affect testicular development," lead author Shanna Swan, a professor at the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Rochester, New York, told AFP.
The "plausible hypothesis," which is also supported by previous work on lab rodents, is that hormones are the cause, Swan said. She stressed, though, that this was not a definitive conclusion and that further work, such as assessing the fertility of European men born after 1988, was needed.
The present evidence "is certainly not robust enough to affect regulations or even public-health action but it is robust enough, I think, to say that we have to have further studies," she said.
"Together with animal data, it suggests there is a large potential for concern here. I don't think we can assume that these products are risk-free."
In 1979, the FDA withdrew use of diethylstilbestrol, the synthetic hormone for cattle, eight years after it was banned for use by pregnant women following evidence it damaged male and female reproductive systems.
Other hormones are still widely and legally used in United States and also Canadian meat production: three are natural steroids (oestradiol, testosterone and progesterone) and three are synthetic (zeranol, trenbolone acetate and menegestrol acetate).

What would spanky do?

2007-03-28T14:11:00.000-05:00

The smarter your kid is, the more likely he or she’ll become a vegetarian:

IQ in childhood and vegetarianism in adulthood: 1970 British cohort study
By Gale, Deary, Schoon & Batty.

Source: BMJ: British Medical Journal. Vol 334(7587), Feb 2007, pp. 1-4

Abstract Objective: To examine the relation between IQ in childhood and vegetarianism in adulthood. Design: Prospective cohort study in which IQ was assessed by tests of mental ability at age 10 years and vegetarianism by self-report at age 30 years. Setting: Great Britain. Participants: 8170 men and women aged 30 years participating in the 1970 British cohort study, a national birth cohort. Main
outcome measures: Self-reported vegetarianism and type of diet followed. Results: 366 (4.5%) participants said they were vegetarian, although 123 (33.6%) admitted eating fish or chicken. Vegetarians were more likely to be female, to be of higher social class (both in childhood and currently), and to have attained higher academic or vocational qualifications, although these socioeconomic advantages were not reflected in their income. Higher IQ at age 10 years was associated with an increased likelihood of being vegetarian at age 30 (odds ratio for one standard deviation increase in childhood IQ score 1.38, 95% confidence interval 1.24 to 1.53). IQ remained a statistically significant predictor of being vegetarian as an adult after adjustment for social class (both in childhood and currently), academic or vocational qualifications, and sex (1.20, 1.06 to 1.36). Exclusion of those who said they were vegetarian but ate fish or chicken had little effect on the strength of this association. Conclusion: Higher scores for IQ in childhood are associated with an increased likelihood of being a vegetarian as an adult.

chew on this

2007-03-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

On Google Video, Chew on This.

Michael Pollan - Unhappy Meals

2007-03-27T08:23:00.000-05:00

In the january 28, 2007 New York Times Michael Pollan has a lengthy article called "Unhappy Meals." I'm not sure why he chose this title, because it leads you to believe that the article will be about the animal suffering that happens in the meat industry. Instead it's about nutritional claims and why "big beef" and "big agriculture" go to so much trouble to make nutrition confusing when all you really need to know is that you should, as Pollan says, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
P.s. by food he means real food, like a radish. Not a food product which probably comes wrapped up in packaging which spouts various health claims.

Pollan by the way is the author of the fairly new Omnivore's Dilemma which I have sitting on my desk, but haven't started reading yet.

anyway, this is a excerpt from the New York Times article. This is the kind of "big business sucker punching consumers so that they can make more money" crap that drives me batty. It's like the tire, oil and car companies in the 1920's buying up light rail public transit systems so that they could tear them down and make everyone pay for tires, gas and cars to get to work.

Unhappy Meals
Michael Pollan 28 January 2007 New York times
10382 words

No single event marked the shift from eating food to eating nutrients, though in retrospect a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet -- including heart disease, cancer and diabetes -- a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ''Dietary Goals for the United States.'' The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naively putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee's recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food -- the committee had advised Americans to actually ''reduce consumption of meat'' -- was replaced by artful compromise: ''Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.''

A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to ''eat less'' of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don't look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless -- and politically unconnected -- substance that may or may not lurk in them called ''saturated fat.''

The linguistic capitulation did nothing to rescue McGovern from his blunder; the very next election, in 1980, the beef lobby helped rusticate the three-term senator, sending an unmistakable warning to anyone who would challenge the American diet, and in particular the big chunk of animal protein sitting in the middle of its plate. Henceforth, government dietary guidelines would shun plain talk about whole foods, each of which has its trade association on Capitol Hill, and would instead arrive clothed in scientific euphemism and speaking of nutrients, entities that few Americans really understood but that lack powerful lobbies in Washington. This was precisely the tack taken by the National Academy of Sciences when it issued its landmark report on diet and cancer in 1982. Organized nutrient by nutrient in a way guaranteed to offend no food group, it codified the official new dietary language. Industry and media followed suit, and terms like polyunsaturated, cholesterol, monounsaturated, carbohydrate, fiber, polyphenols, amino acids and carotenes soon colonized much of the cultural space previously occupied by the tangible substance formerly known as food. The Age of Nutritionism had arrived.

Frankensteer

2007-03-26T14:13:00.000-05:00

Wow, seek and ye shall find. God, everything is on the internet somewhere these days. I missed this documentary when it was on CBC a little while back, and lo and behold it's on Google Video.

Frankensteer depicts how supermarket meat is overloaded with drugs.

THE PASSIONATE EYE presents Frankensteer , a disturbing documentary that reveals how the ordinary cow has been turned into an antibiotic-dependent, hormone-laced potential carrier of toxic bacteria, all in the name of cheaper food. Frankensteer exposes the harsh and sometimes frightening realities of how our beef gets to our tables.

According to this compelling documentary, the beef industry, supported by North American government agencies and pharmaceutical companies, has engaged in an on-going experiment to create the perfect food machine. Their goal is to increase speed of production and reduce the cost of manufacture. But there is a price in producing a cheap industrial product. This benign, grazing herbivore has undergone a transformation in how it’s raised, fed and slaughtered. And consumers, by and large, are totally unaware of the dangers lurking in their beloved steaks, ribs and, most especially, hamburgers.

According to Mike McBane of the Canadian Health Coalition, “When you bring a package of hamburger home from a supermarket, you have to treat it as toxic material…”

Frankensteer reveals some startling facts: Every year, 50 per cent of the total tonnage of antibiotics used in Canada ends up in livestock. And every year cattle raised in massive feedlots are routinely dosed with antibiotics even if they are not sick; for public health safety reasons during the current BSE (Mad Cow) crisis, North American health officials have labeled certain parts of the cow as bio-hazardous products and have ordered that they be handled accordingly; and, recent changes in inspection rules have shifted the responsibility for food safety from government inspectors to the people on the floor who do the slaughtering and packing.

harm of industrial agriculture

2007-03-21T11:08:00.000-05:00

I love it when I'm poking around for articles and one comes up where I read the abstract and I react like one of the converted at a faith meeting.
For example, this one below comes up and I'm going "yeah... fossil fuel, water and topsoil used at unsustainable rates - RIGHT ON BROTHER!" and then "yeah... meat production contributes disproportionately to these problems... large energy loss - SPREAD THE WORD DUDE! YEAH!"

anyway, this is obviously devoted to the environmental and health problems associated with factory farming, without touching the animal welfare side of things.

It boggles me that an industry which is so wrong on so many levels can fly so far below our radar.

How Sustainable Agriculture Can Address the Environment and Human Health Harms of Industrial Agriculture by Leo Horrigan, Robert S. Lawrence and Polly Walker.
Source: Environmental Health Perspectives; May2002, Vol. 110 Issue 5, p445,

This is the article's abstract:

The industrial agriculture system consumes fossil fuel, water, and topsoil at unsustainable rates. It contributes to numerous forms of environmental degradation, including air and water pollution, soil depletion, diminishing biodiversity, and fish die-offs. Meat production contributes disproportionately to these problems, in part because feeding grain to livestock to produce meat—instead of feeding it directly to humans—involves a large energy loss, making animal agriculture more resource intensive than other forms of food production. The proliferation of factory-style animal agriculture creates environmental and public health concerns, including pollution from the high concentration of animal wastes and the extensive use of antibiotics, which may compromise their effectiveness in medical use. At the consumption end, animal fat is implicated in many of the chronic degenerative diseases that afflict industrial and newly industrializing societies, particularly cardiovascular disease and some cancers. In terms of human health, both affluent and poor countries could benefit from policies that more equitably distribute high-protein foods. The pesticides used heavily in industrial agriculture are associated with elevated cancer risks for workers and consumers and are coming under greater scrutiny for their links to endocrine disruption and reproductive dysfunction. In this article we outline the environmental and human health problems associated with current food production practices and discuss how these systems could be made more sustainable. Key word: diet, environment, health, industrial agriculture, sustainability, sustainable agriculture.

Evolution of animal cruelty laws

2007-03-15T15:01:00.000-05:00

I just found a phd thesis by a Daniel L. Moorehead from Central Missouri State University. It's a 2004 thesis titled:

The evolution of animal cruelty laws: A comparative analysis of animal cruelty laws in the United States and Europe

Here's the abstract:

This study examines animal cruelty laws in both the United States and Europe. It provides a thorough comparative analysis of existing laws regarding companion animals, farm animals, and animals raised for food. Documented evidence shows that continued violations of the Animal Welfare Act, the Animal Transportation Act and the Humane Slaughter Act persist in the United States and Europe. Unfortunately, the United States is by far the greatest violator of these laws due in large part to greed and the animal's status as mere property. Unlike the Europeans, who consider animals as sentient beings, the United States places little value on an animal's life other than its immediate profitable value to humans. The very government that has enacted laws to protect animals from maltreatment is the very one who sanctions the atrocities inflicted on innocent animals.

Vegan punk bands

2007-03-14T14:26:00.000-05:00

I'm not a member of a vegan punk band, that's Propagandhi's turf. I've never really liked punk either, but maybe punk is good because you can "rage" vicariously through someone else's rage. In this case, rage over factory farming.

These songs are off the 1996 Less talk, more rock album.

APPARENTLY, I'M A "P.C. FASCIST" (BECAUSE I CARE ABOUT BOTH HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN ANIMALS)

Some of my otherwise brilliant and productive friends (like scoundrels and their flags) take final refuge in character assainations; they ignore the issue and deny the relation between our consumption and brutality. So you can go ahead and roll your eyes and marginalize me/socially penalize me: play on my insecurities. And you can feign ignorance, but you're not stupid, you're just selfish. And you're a slave to your impulse. And I kinda thought we all shared common threads in that we gravitated here to challenge the conventions we've been fed by a culture that treats (living, breathing, feeling) creatures like (biological) machines. And if you buy that shit then how long 'till it's me who serves as your commodity? Through (for example), institutionalized violence and opression of workers and women raped by sexism (and how about native americans?). Do you still insist on feigning indignance (aka: indignation) to reason? To collective self-interest? Tell you what- I'll call you on your shit, PLEASE CALL ME ON MINE. Then we can grow together and make this shit-hole planet better in time. So why not consider someone else: STOP CONSUMING ANIMALS.

NAILING DESCARTES TO THE WALL / (LIQUID) MEAT IS STILL MURDER
I speak outside what is recognized as the border between "reason" and "insanity". But I consider it a measure of my humanity to be written off by the living graves of a billion murdered lives. And I'm not ashamed of my recurring dreams about me and a gun and a different species (hint: starts with "h" and rhymes with "Neuman's") of carnage strewn about the stockyards, the factories and farms. Still I know as well as anyone that it does less good than harm to be this honest with a conscience eased by lies. But you cannot deny that meat is still murder. Dairy is still rape. And I'm still as stupid as anyone, but I know my mistakes. I have recognized one form of oppression, now I recognize the rest. And life's too short to make another's shorter-(animal liberation now!).

Tyson

2007-03-10T15:47:00.000-05:00

One more thing I guess - this about Tyson Foods, who North Americans give most of their money to when buying chicken and other animal products.

This is from "What's for Dinner?" Canada and the World Backgrounder. Waterloo: Oct 2006.Vol.72, Iss. 2; pg. 26.

Chickens raised for their meat are killed within six to seven weeks of hatching. They are kept in tiny cages and are fed a diet of concentrated nutrients laced with antibiotics and other drugs. The animals fatten up so fast that sometimes their legs can't support them; some become crippled under their own weight and die within inches of water and food.

The biggest player in this business is Tyson Foods, which is also a huge beef and pork processing company. Based in Arkansas, Tyson has annual revenue of more than $26 billion, and it plays hardball with its workers.

In the fall of 2005, there was a bitter, and sometimes violent, strike at Lakeside Packers (owned by Tyson) in Brooks, Alberta. The company fought long and hard to keep the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union out of the plant that processes 40 percent of Canada's beef. Eventually, the UFCW won a first contract with the company. The Brooks experience is not unusual. Tyson Foods has a history of slashing the wages and benefits of its workers and opposing union attempts to organize its plants.

In 2003, Tyson was found guilty of pumping untreated wastewater from a poultry plant into a tributary that empties into the Lamine River in Missouri.

In 2001, the company was indicted for conspiracy to smuggle illegal aliens from Mexico and Central America to work in 15 of its U.S. poultry processing plants; three employees pled guilty and were fired.

Tyson has also been found guilty of discrimination against minorities in hiring, of serious safety and health violations, and of bribing government officials.

In 2000, Multinational Monitor named Tyson one of the "Ten Worst Corporations of 1999" citing seven worker deaths at its facilities in just seven months. Tyson also made the Corporate Crime Reporter's list of the ten worst corporations in 1999 in the U.S. In 2002 Tyson Foods earned a place on one of the Sierra Club's "Ten Least Wanted" lists.

Tyson makes annual profits in the range of $400 million, a fact noted by other corporations in the food business.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson writes in his 2003 book The Pig Who Sang to the Moon "The suffering of almost all farm animals is unique... beyond... our language to describe or explain. If we give it no thought, and yet eat them for our meals, are we not morally blind, ethically dumb, and humanly remiss?"

European vs. American animal cruelty legislation

2007-03-10T10:31:00.000-05:00

What follows are two blurbs from book reviews by Peter Wenz.

The two books he's talking about are the Peter Singer edited In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave and Sunstein and Nussbaum edited Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions.
The citation for Wenz's review is:
Wenz, P.S. (2007). Against cruelty to animals. Social Theory and Practice, 33(1).

What follows is a contrast of American legislation against animal cruelty, and European legislation about animal cruelty.

Inadequacies of American laws and suggested reforms

David Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan detail the exclusion of most animals from current anticruelty legislation in the U.S. They note that "approximately 9.5 billion animals die annually in food production in the United States" (Sunstein, 206). But the only federal legislation applicable to the killing of these animals, the Humane Slaughter Act, is administered through regulations that "exempt poultry, the result of which is that over 95 percent of all farmed animals ... have no federal legal protection from inhumane slaughter." What is more, "there are no fines available for violation of the statute and significant penalties are never imposed" (208). This is symptomatic. Anticruelty legislation generally allows people to do what they want under a façade of animal protection. For example, legislation enacted in 1877 regulates the rail transport of livestock to reduce cruelty, but it does not apply to transport by truck, and therefore does not apply to the overwhelming majority of livestock transportation. Just as bad, the maximum penalty for illegal animal transport by rail is $500.

Most state laws against cruelty to animals either exempt agriculture altogether-34 of 41 recently enacted statutes-or they exempt common, customary, or normal farming practices. Commonly practiced cruelty thus becomes legal in spite of an anticruelty statute that applies to agriculture. Wolfson and Sullivan provide vivid descriptions of common practices regarding laying hens, breeding pigs, and veal calves. Jim Mason and Mary Finelli, writing in the Singer collection, provide an even more vivid and complete picture of cruel treatment on factory farms in the United States.

European Union Legislation

Much of what is currently legal in the United States is illegal, or soon will be illegal, in the European Union. For example, Wolfson and Sullivan tell us in the Sunstein volume that current American methods of raising veal calves include feeding them an iron-deficient diet to keep the meat pink and tender. The Swiss outlawed such iron-deficient diets in 1981. They banned all battery cages in 1991. "In 1999, the European Union prohibited all battery egg production from 2012. The system will be replaced by free-range farming, or by 'enriched cages'" that provide each bird a minimum of two-and-a-half times the space commonly allotted in the United States (Sunstein, 222).

In another legal development, the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of the European Community, was recently amended to recognize that animals, including farmed animals, are sentient beings ..., and that all European Union legislation and member states must pay full regard to the welfare requirements of animals in the formulation and implementation of the community's policies on agriculture, research, and transport. (223)

The Singer collection includes more information. Martin Balluch reports that battery farming is banned in Austria starting in 2009.

In addition ..., it is now illegal to trade living cats and dogs in shops, or to display cats and dogs publicly in order to sell them. It is illegal to kill any animal for no good reason, even painlessly. Because inability to find a home for healthy animals is not considered a good reason to kill them, kill-shelters are also now outlawed.

A ban on fir farming, which had come into effect in 1998 in six of Austria's nine provinces, is now established on the federal level without any exceptions for free-range farming or the like. (Singer, 161-62). In 2005, it became illegal to use any wild animals in circuses. Only domestic or farm animals may be used.
*************************

And again from the States, Senator Chuck Hagel and Congressman Adrian Smith (both from Nebraska) have introduced bills in the Senate and the House for a proposed "CAFO TAX Credit Act."

* S285: CAFO Tax Credit Act * * Sponsor: Hagel (R-Neb.) * * Official Title: A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide a credit to certain concentrated animal feeding operations for the cost of complying with environmental protection regulations. * CAFO Tax Credit Act - Amends the Internal Revenue Code to allow owners
or operators of a concentrated animal feeding operation a business-related tax credit, up to $500,000 in a taxable year, for the cost of compliance with a national pollutant discharge elimination system permit issued under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act. Terminates such credit after 2010. (from Congressional Bill Digest).

Hmm. I don't know. My knee-jerk reaction is that far from giving money to CAFO's they should just be shutting the damn things down. But.... if the tax credit (and legitimate enforcement of environmental laws) stops crap like this, then maybe that is a good thing.

Funnily enough - no news service in the U.S. mentioned this bill at all. I could only find the above blurb from the Congressional Bill Digest. But... the Hindustan Times is ALL over this story! : )

Plea from a cat named virtue

2007-03-09T16:13:00.000-05:00

So I agree. This blog will be incredibly depressing if I just post tons of PETA style news articles here. The problem is that there are SO MANY stories like the one below from the Washington Post. But I'll restrain myself.

I'm hoping to do a three part "Why Veganism?" piece soon, focusing on the personal health benefits of veganism, the environmental benefits of veganism (it's often written that you can do more to fight global warming by going vegan than giving up your car), and the animal rights issues associated with factory farming. I'll start this soon.

And though other vegan blogs concentrate on vegan cooking - I'm not much of a cook. Maybe my girlfriend will let me take pictures of her cooking up curries and stir fries etc from the various veggie cookbooks we've been buying. Then she can take pictures of me washing dishes. : )

Image from Brad Carlile Photography.

Subject line from the Weakerthans

From the Washington Post in 2001

2007-03-08T15:53:00.000-05:00

'They Die Piece by Piece'; In Overtaxed Plants, Humane Treatment of Cattle Is Often a Battle Lost
Joby Warrick - Washington Post Staff Writer

10 April 2001
The Washington Post

It takes 25 minutes to turn a live steer into steak at the modern slaughterhouse where Ramon Moreno works. For 20 years, his post was "second-legger," a job that entails cutting hocks off carcasses as they whirl past at a rate of 309 an hour.
The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren't.
"They blink. They make noises," he said softly. "The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around."
Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. "They die," said Moreno, "piece by piece."
Under a 23-year-old federal law, slaughtered cattle and hogs first must be "stunned" -- rendered insensible to pain -- with a blow to the head or an electric shock. But some plants don't always stun properly, with cruel consequences for animals as well as workers. Enforcement records, interviews, videos and worker affidavits describe repeated violations of the Humane Slaughter Act at dozens of slaughterhouses, ranging from the smallest, custom butcheries to modern, automated establishments such as the sprawling IBP Inc. plant here where Moreno works.
"In plants all over the United States, this happens on a daily basis," said Lester Friedlander, a veterinarian and formerly chief government inspector at a Pennsylvania hamburger plant. "I've seen it happen. And I've talked to other veterinarians. They feel it's out of control."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees the treatment of animals in meat plants, but enforcement of the law varies dramatically. While a few plants have been forced to halt production for a few hours because of alleged animal cruelty, such sanctions are rare.
For example, the government took no action against a Texas beef company that was cited 22 times in 1998 for violations that included chopping hooves off live cattle. In another case, agency supervisors failed to take action on multiple complaints of animal cruelty at a Florida beef plant and fired an animal health technician for reporting the problems to the Humane Society. The dismissal letter sent to the technician, Tim Walker, said his dislosure had "irreparably damaged" the agency's relations with the packing plant .
"I complained to everyone -- I said, 'Lookit, they're skinning live cows in there,' " Walker said. "Always it was the same answer: 'We know it's true. But there's nothing we can do about it.' "
In the past three years, a new meat inspection system that shifted responsibility to industry has made it harder to catch and report cruelty problems, some federal inspectors say. Under the new system, implemented in 1998, the agency no longer tracks the number of humane-slaughter violations its inspectors find each year.
Some inspectors are so frustrated they're asking outsiders for help: The inspectors' union last spring urged Washington state authorities to crack down on alleged animal abuse at the IBP plant in Pasco. In a statement, IBP said problems described by workers in its Washington state plant "do not accurately represent the way we operate our plants. We take the issue of proper livestock handling very seriously."
But the union complained that new government policies and faster production speeds at the plant had "significantly hampered our ability to ensure compliance." Several animal welfare groups joined in the petition.
"Privatization of meat inspection has meant a quiet death to the already meager enforcement of the Humane Slaughter Act," said Gail Eisnitz of the Humane Farming Association, a group that advocates better treatment of farm animals. "USDA isn't simply relinquishing its humane-slaughter oversight to the meat industry, but is -- without the knowledge and consent of Congress -- abandoning this function altogether."
The USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service, which is responsible for meat inspection, says it has not relaxed its oversight. In January, the agency ordered a review of 100 slaughterhouses. An FSIS memo reminded its 7,600 inspectors they had an "obligation to ensure compliance" with humane-handling laws.
The review comes as pressure grows on both industry and regulators to improve conditions for the 155 million cattle, hogs, horses and sheep slaughtered each year. McDonald's and Burger King have been subject to boycotts by animal rights groups protesting mistreatment of livestock.
As a result, two years ago McDonald's began requiring suppliers to abide by the American Meat Institute's Good Management Practices for Animal Handling and Stunning. The company also began conducting annual audits of meat plants. Last week, Burger King announced it would require suppliers to follow the meat institute's standards.
"Burger King Corp. takes the issues of food safety and animal welfare very seriously, and we expect our suppliers to comply," the company said in a statement.
Industry groups acknowledge that sloppy killing has tangible consequences for consumers as well as company profits. Fear and pain cause animals to produce hormones that damage meat and cost companies tens of millions of dollars a year in discarded product, according to industry estimates.
Industry officials say they also recognize an ethical imperative to treat animals with compassion. Science is blurring the distinction between the mental processes of humans and lower animals -- discovering, for example, that even the lowly rat may dream. Americans thus are becoming more sensitive to the suffering of food animals, even as they consume increasing numbers of them.
"Handling animals humanely," said American Meat Institute President J. Patrick Boyle, "is just the right thing to do.
Clearly, not all plants have gotten the message.
A Post computer analysis of government enforcement records found 527 violations of humane-handling regulations from 1996 to 1997, the last years for which complete records were available. The offenses range from overcrowded stockyards to incidents in which live animals were cut, skinned or scalded.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, the Post obtained enforcement documents from 28 plants that had high numbers of offenses or had drawn penalties for violating humane-handling laws. The Post also interviewed dozens of current and former federal meat inspectors and slaughterhouse workers. A reporter reviewed affidavits and secret video recordings made inside two plants.
Among the findings:
* One Texas plant, Supreme Beef Packers in Ladonia, had 22 violations in six months. During one inspection, federal officials found nine live cattle dangling from an overhead chain. But managers at the plant, which announced last fall it was ceasing operations, resisted USDA warnings, saying its practices were no different than others in the industry. "Other plants are not subject to such extensive scrutiny of their stunning activities," the plant complained in a 1997 letter to the USDA.
* Government inspectors halted production for a day at the Calhoun Packing Co. beef plant in Palestine, Tex., after inspectors saw cattle being improperly stunned. "They were still conscious and had good reflexes," B.V. Swamy, a veterinarian and senior USDA official at the plant, wrote. The shift supervisor "allowed the cattle to be hung anyway." IBP, which owned the plant at the time, contested the findings but "took steps to resolve the situation," including installing video equipment and increasing training, a spokesman said. IBP has since sold the plant.
* At the Farmers Livestock Cooperative processing plant in Hawaii, inspectors documented 14 humane slaughter violations in as many months. Records from 1997 and 1998 describe hogs that were walking and squealing after being stunned as many as four times. In a memo to USDA, the company said it fired the stunner and increased its monitoring of the slaughter process.
* At an Excel Corp. beef plant in Fort Morgan, Colo., production was halted for a day in 1998 after workers allegedly cut off the leg of a live cow whose limbs had become wedged in a piece of machinery. In imposing the sanction, U.S. inspectors cited a string of violations in the previous two years, including the cutting and skinning of live cattle. The company, responding to one such charge, contended that it was normal for animals to blink and arch their backs after being stunned, and such "muscular reaction" can occur up to six hours after death. "None of these reactions indicate the animal is still alive," the company wrote to USDA.
* Hogs, unlike cattle, are dunked in tanks of hot water after they are stunned to soften the hides for skinning. As a result, a botched slaughter condemns some hogs to being scalded and drowned. Secret videotape from an Iowa pork plant shows hogs squealing and kicking as they are being lowered into the water.
USDA documents and interviews with inspectors and plant workers attributed many of the problems to poor training, faulty or poorly maintained equipment or excessive production speeds. Those problems were identified five years ago in an industry-wide audit by Temple Grandin, an assistant professor with Colorado State University's animal sciences department and one of the nation's leading experts on slaughter practices.
In the early 1990s, Grandin developed the first objective standards for treatment of animals in slaughterhouses, which were adopted by the American Meat Institute, the industry's largest trade group. Her initial, USDA-funded survey in 1996 was one of the first attempts to grade slaughter plants.
One finding was a high failure rate among beef plants that use stunning devices known as "captive-bolt" guns. Of the plants surveyed, only 36 percent earned a rating of "acceptable" or better, meaning cattle were knocked unconscious with a single blow at least 95 percent of the time.
Grandin now conducts annual surveys as a consultant for the American Meat Institute and the McDonald's Corp. She maintains that the past four years have brought dramatic improvements -- mostly because of pressure from McDonald's, which sends a team of meat industry auditors into dozens of plants each year to observe slaughter practices.
Based on the data collected by McDonald's auditors, the portion of beef plants scoring "acceptable" or better climbed to 90 percent in 1999. Some workers and inspectors are skeptical of the McDonald's numbers, and Grandin said the industry's performance dropped slightly last year after auditors stopped giving notice of some inspections.
Grandin said high production speeds can trigger problems when people and equipment are pushed beyond their capacity. From a typical kill rate of 50 cattle an hour in the early 1900s, production speeds rose dramatically in the 1980s. They now approach 400 per hour in the newest plants.
"It's like the 'I Love Lucy' episode in the chocolate factory," she said. "You can speed up a job and speed up a job, and after a while you get to a point where performance doesn't simply decline -- it crashes."
When that happens, it's not only animals that suffer. Industry trade groups acknowledge that improperly stunned animals contribute to worker injuries in an industry that already claims the nation's highest rate of job-related injuries and illnesses -- about 27 percent a year. At some plants, "dead" animals have inflicted so many broken limbs and teeth that workers wear chest pads and hockey masks.
"The live cows cause a lot of injuries," said Martin Fuentes, an IBP worker whose arm was kicked and shattered by a dying cow. "The line is never stopped simply because an animal is alive."
A 'Brutal' Harvest
At IBP's Pasco complex, the making of the American hamburger starts in a noisy, blood-spattered chamber shielded from view by a stainless steel wall. Here, live cattle emerge from a narrow chute to be dispatched in a process known as "knocking" or "stunning." On most days the chamber is manned by a pair of Mexican immigrants who speak little English and earn about $9 an hour for killing up to 2,050 head per shift.
The tool of choice is the captive-bolt gun, which fires a retractable metal rod into the steer's forehead. An effective stunning requires a precision shot, which workers must deliver hundreds of times daily to balky, frightened animals that frequently weigh 1,000 pounds or more. Within 12 seconds of entering the chamber, the fallen steer is shackled to a moving chain to be bled and butchered by other workers in a fast-moving production line.
The hitch, IBP workers say, is that some "stunned" cattle wake up.
"If you put a knife into the cow, it's going to make a noise: It says, 'Moo!' " said Ramon Moreno, the former second-legger, who began working in the stockyard last year. "They move the head and the eyes and the leg like the cow wants to walk."
After a blow to the head, an unconscious animal may kick or twitch by reflex. But a videotape, made secretly by IBP workers and reviewed by veterinarians for the Post, depicts cattle that clearly are alive and conscious after being stunned.
Some cattle, dangling by a leg from the plant's overhead chain, twist and arch their backs as though trying to right themselves. Close-ups show blinking reflexes, an unmistakable sign of a conscious brain, according to guidelines approved by the American Meat Institute.
The video, parts of which were aired by Seattle television station KING last spring, shows injured cattle being trampled. In one graphic scene, workers give a steer electric shocks by jamming a battery-powered prod into its mouth.
More than 20 workers signed affidavits alleging that the violations shown on tape are commonplace and that supervisors are aware of them. The sworn statements and videos were prepared with help from the Humane Farming Association. Some workers had taken part in a 1999 strike over what they said were excessive plant production speeds.
"I've seen thousands and thousands of cows go through the slaughter process alive," IBP veteran Fuentes, the worker who was injured while working on live cattle, said in an affidavit. "The cows can get seven minutes down the line and still be alive. I've been in the side-puller where they're still alive. All the hide is stripped out down the neck there."
IBP, the nation's top beef processor, denounced as an "appalling aberration" the problems captured on the tape. It suggested the events may have been staged by "activists trying to raise money and promote their agenda. . . .
"Like many other people, we were very upset over the hidden camera video," the company said. "We do not in any way condone some of the livestock handling that was shown."
After the video surfaced, IBP increased worker training and installed cameras in the slaughter area. The company also questioned workers and offered a reward for information leading to identification of those responsible for the video. One worker said IBP pressured him to sign a statement denying that he had seen live cattle on the line.
"I knew that what I wrote wasn't true," said the worker, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing his job. "Cows still go alive every day. When cows go alive, it's because they don't give me time to kill them."
Independent assessments of the workers' claims have been inconclusive. Washington state officials launched a probe in May that included an unannounced plant inspection. The investigators say they were detained outside the facility for an hour while their identities were checked. They saw no acts of animal cruelty once permitted inside.
Grandin, the Colorado State professor, also inspected IBP's plant, at the company's request; that inspection was announced. Although she observed no live cattle being butchered, she concluded that the plant's older-style equipment was "overloaded." Grandin reviewed parts of the workers' videotape and said there was no mistaking what she saw.
"There were fully alive beef on that rail," Grandin said.
Inconsistent Enforcement
Preventing this kind of suffering is officially a top priority for the USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service. By law, a humane-slaughter violation is among a handful of offenses that can result in an immediate halt in production -- and cost a meatpacker hundreds or even thousands of dollars per idle minute.
In reality, many inspectors describe humane slaughter as a blind spot: Inspectors' regular duties rarely take them to the chambers where stunning occurs. Inconsistencies in enforcement, training and record-keeping hamper the agency's ability to identify problems.
The meat inspectors' union, in its petition last spring to Washington state's attorney general, contended that federal agents are "often prevented from carrying out" the mandate against animal cruelty. Among the obstacles inspectors face are "dramatic increases in production speeds, lack of support from supervisors in plants and district offices, . . . new inspection policies which significantly reduce our enforcement authority, and little to no access to the areas of the plants where animals are killed," stated the petition by the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals.
Barbara Masters, the agency's director of slaughter operations, told meat industry executives in February she didn't know if the number of violations was up or down, though she believed most plants were complying with the law. "We encourage the district offices to monitor trends," she said. "The fact that we haven't heard anything suggests there are no trends."
But some inspectors see little evidence the agency is interested in hearing about problems. Under the new inspection system, the USDA stopped tracking the number of violations and dropped all mentions of humane slaughter from its list of rotating tasks for inspectors.
The agency says it expects its watchdogs to enforce the law anyway. Many inspectors still do, though some occasionally wonder if it's worth the trouble.
"It always ends up in argument: Instead of re-stunning the animal, you spend 20 minutes just talking about it," said Colorado meat inspector Gary Dahl, sharing his private views. "Yes, the animal will be dead in a few minutes anyway. But why not let him die with dignity?"