Of fish and alaskan governors

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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."

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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.