Let the good times roll, except for dairy cows

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

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

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.

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

naked chicks + media = vegans!

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

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.
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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."
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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?!

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

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.