Meatlessness hitting the mainstream

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

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

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

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.