Hulk get angry

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

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

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

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

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

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!!