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Our Diet of Destruction
Adapted from Eat Your Heart Out: Why the Food Business Is Bad for the Planet and Your Health, by Felicity Lawrence, to be published by Penguin on June 26.
* * *
Look at a few packets in a typical kitchen cupboard, and you will notice a disconcerting overlap between the labels of apparently completely different foods. A handful of ingredients, some of them barely used as food in the west before the second world war, crop up in everything from baby food to cat food to processed meals. The same half-dozen heavily subsidised commodities -- soya, rapeseed, palm oil, corn, sugar and rice -- are broken down into their individual parts and endlessly reconstituted. They are sold back to us as processed food or turned into animal feed to produce the factory meats that have conquered our diets in the past half-century. How did such a transformation come about?
When you look back at the origins of much of today's industrialised food system, what you see is the ebb and flow of empire. First there were the British imperial ambitions that turned slave-produced sugar from the colonies into the engine of emerging capitalism during the industrial revolution. Later the prewar European powers developed and controlled new fats such as margarines. Today we are living with the postwar American model, a privatised form of empire that reached into every corner of world food supply in the second half of the 20th century.
The result has been a kind of food Fordism. We are fed a production-line diet that is homogenised and bolted together from standard commodity parts. The parts, many of them created out of American agricultural surpluses, are largely controlled by an oligopoly of US-based trading and processing companies -- Cargill, ADM, Bunge -- that are little known in the UK. All three companies are now expanding in China and heavily involved in spreading the western industrialised diet, with its unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and extravagant use of grains. As the Chinese move up this processed-food chain, the diet-related diseases that have afflicted us in the west are growing there too.
It took a journey of more than 7,000km to the heart of the Brazilian rainforest for me to understand some of the power structures in this food chain. It was the rise of the humble soya bean that opened a window on the mechanics of today's structure, and the environmental and social toll it exacts.
It is only from the air that you can absorb the vastness of the Amazon. What happens to the rainforest that surrounds the world's largest river system will affect every single one of us, as experts in climate change constantly point out. A fifth of the planet's fresh water is contained here, and the trees recycle it back into the atmosphere, from where it drives the world's weather.
But Brazil is the new agricultural frontier, and forest clearance, much of it for soya production, has been taking place on a scale from which campaigners fear the forest may not recover. Greenpeace has been tracking deforestation and agreed to take me up in its spotter plane in 2006 as it was launching its fight to stop the food industry destroying the Amazon.
From the window of the plane on one side I could see mile after mile of the velvet folds of virgin forest. Where man had not ventured with chainsaw and bulldozer, the trees were giving off water vapour like a thousand puffs from a life-giving inhaler. But on the other side was an enormous area recently planted with soya. It looked as though a giant industrial lawnmower had cut a swath through the jungle, and the luminous green trail it had created shone through a dry heat haze. "So who is buying all that soya, and how on earth do they get it out?" I shouted over the roar of the engine. The answer had to wait. A storm was blowing in and we quickly turned back through the flashes of lightning for Santarém, the frontier port built deep in the Amazon basin.
That night I watched from the roof of my hotel as a new storm blew great squalls hundreds of miles up the Amazon from the Atlantic. On the waterfront below, the baroque blue cathedral, built by the original colonisers, the Portuguese, came and went from view in the enveloping rain. Its twin towers and pediment still present a proud facade to anyone coming up the river's main navigation channel, but the paint was peeling now, the legacy of the sugar plantations and slavery fading. The centre of gravity had shifted. A few hundred metres up the river, Cargill has built its own monument to power, an enormous, gleaming loading and storage facility for soya. The elevator towers of this $20m (£10.2m) grain terminal are testaments to the new gods of transnational trading efficiency and global economic domination. The digging of the port here has brought Brazil's soya closer to its main European markets.
Just as the new railroads had been vital to opening up the prairies of North America, this newly constructed infrastructure was driving the transformation of the Amazon and helping Brazil meet the apparently insatiable global demand for soya. Cargill, together with ADM and Bunge, is responsible for about two-thirds of the total financing of soya production in Brazil. They provide the seed, fertiliser and agrochemicals to the ranchers, and buy and store and ship the crops to Europe. But how was the demand for all those beans created?
Bake a soya bean and -- provided you have first soaked and boiled it long enough to neutralise its toxins -- you can make a dish that is cheap and cheerful. It may be slightly indigestible still and make you fart, but it is nevertheless useful for providing complete protein in inexpensive vegetable form.
As a whole raw bean, soya has its commercial limitations. Crush it, however, and the possibilities become infinite as it is separated into its more lucrative parts. The oil can be extracted with solvents and degummed. The lecithin can be removed from the resulting sludge to be sold for a thousand and more food-processing purposes. Then, deodorised and hydrogenated, the oil can be used to make, or fry, any number of fast foods, snacks and convenience meals. The vitamin E, which has the irritating habit of reducing shelf-life, can be stripped out and turned to money elsewhere. So too can the soya sterols that can command a premium as technofoods -- cholesterol-lowering ingredients for margarines, yoghurts and drinks.
Once the oil has been removed, the defatted soya bean meal, which is full of protein, can be fed to intensively farmed chicken, cattle and pigs to turn them into highly productive factory units -- intensive dairy cows that can deliver ever greater yields of milk, chickens that grow to shop weight in just a few weeks, pigs and cattle that fatten faster than they ever could on grass or forage.
The vast majority of soya is used to feed factory-farmed animals. Chicken has a particular attraction for the livestock industry, which refers to the birds not as flocks but as "crops", for the good reason that they grow fast enough to produce a return in little more than a month. For the commodity traders and processors, the livestock revolution has represented the best way to move up what they call the value chain. You can make a good margin on trading grain and soya, especially if you are a powerful enough presence in the global markets. But feed your surplus to animals -- it takes about 3kg of protein feed to produce half a kilo of chicken protein -- and you concentrate your resources. Persuade the world to eat vast quantities of this cheap meat, consumed preferably in a highly processed way that divides the parts and separates out the "high value" lean meat and treats much of the rest as waste - and you make far greater margins.
It required technological breakthroughs and government protection to create this market, though. Soya meal was used experimentally in animal feed in the 30s but farmers were reluctant to use it because with its oil still in it was regarded as indigestible to chickens and pigs. Then researchers at ADM worked out how to heat-treat it to overcome the problem. The oil was similarly regarded as barely fit for consumption because it smelled so bad, until the Americans, following the tanks advancing through Germany, acquired the technology from the defeated enemy to get rid of the "off" flavours.
That left the way open for the US to promote the soya that suited its agricultural conditions as part of the reconstruction of Europe in the 50s.
The US came out of the second world war with its agricultural base intact, but the farming lands of its European allies and of Germany had been devastated. With millions desperately hungry, the US announced its Marshall plan to help rebuild western Europe with financial aid. But it had another crucial role: the removal of tariff barriers that might hinder US access to foreign markets was made part of the new terms of trade with the non-communist world. Of the $13bn in financial aid paid under the Marshall plan between 1947 and 1952, more than $3bn was spent by European countries on imports of US food, animal feed and fertiliser.
As Europe recovered, soya exports to other countries were supported by other US food aid programmes. In 1967, 86% of all US soya oil exports were subsidised under its food aid law. Meanwhile, in the Kennedy round of talks for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in the mid-60s, the US insisted that if Europe wanted to keep its agricultural protections, it must open up its markets to more US soya exports.
The raw ingredients for today's food system have, in other words, been kept cheap for transnational corporations by government policy. And where US subsidies go, western diets have a habit of following. American exports have created whole new patterns of consumption. Demand has been a function of price, availability and production, just as it was with the rise of sugar consumption in the 18th century.
Between 1995 and 2005, $165bn of American taxpayers' money was used to support US agricultural commodities. Soya, corn, rice, wheat and cotton accounted for 90% of that money. Sugar was also heavily subsidised. The real beneficiaries of this system of government support have not been US farmers, who have gone out of business in their thousands, but the mainly US-based trading giants. For subsidies have allowed them to export grains at less than the cost of production, making it impossible for other countries to compete, while bringing the money from added-value markets back home. In this they mirror the patterns of trade established between previous empires and their colonies.
These trading giants have remained shadowy in European perception, despite their colossal footprint. Cargill, the largest privately owned corporation in the world in most years, was said in testimony to the US senate in 1999 to control 45% of global grain trade, including 42% of US corn exports, a third of all soya bean exports and about 20% of wheat exports. It is also the world's largest crusher of oilseeds such as soya and rapeseed. Since it is a private company and not obliged to publish detailed accounts, more recent and accurate share figures are hard to come by. It declines to comment on its market shares, but it has, if anything, consolidated its position since then, although its areas of concentration shift. Its revenues in 2007 were $88bn. Most of us eat its products in some form every day, yet many of us have never heard of it. Nor had I before I started writing about the politics of food, but since then it has been hard not to stumble across its operations in every country whenever I visit a food factory, industrial farm or fast food or supermarket supplier.
ADM (Archer Daniels Midland), another US-based grain trading corporation, is one of the world's largest processors of soya beans, corn, wheat and cocoa, and also has a huge portfolio of interests, from making sweeteners and food processing ingredients to energy and animal feed production. Its global sales in 2006/7 were $44bn. Almost half of them came from making animal feed, vegetable oils and emulsifiers from oilseeds such as soya.
Two other grain and oilseed giants are part of this trading nexus that dominates food supply. Bunge, which expanded through the late 19th century as a grain trader in South America, is now a transnational with headquarters in the US. It is the world's largest exporter of soya beans and a major corn and oil processor. The Louis Dreyfus group, a French family-owned private company, has vast grain, sugar, and energy trading interests around the world and now focuses on financial aspects of commodity trading. In the US it has joint grain ventures with ADM and Cargill. (EU subsidies have achieved a similar position for a handful of its corporations, mainly those processors whose power was established before the war.)
As well as buying and selling agricultural commodities, these four global companies control refining and crushing plants and turn those cheap, subsidised commodities into a myriad other ingredients, from starches to syrups to fats to animal feed. They also play the markets, and have vastly complicated corporate structures that enable them to shift transactions and profits from subsidiary to subsidiary.
Cargill, the behemoth, is "the undisputed ruler in the global grain trade and extends its tentacles into every aspect of the global food system", according to Brewster Kneen, the company's unauthorised biographer. Cargill initially built up its power in the 1870s, in the speculative era of the American agricultural frontier when US grain, along with sugar, began providing the fuel for workers in an industrialising, urbanising Britain. It began with a family of grain traders who bought up storage facilities in the US on strategically placed transport routes, the new railroads and the waterways of the Great Lakes and Mississippi. There has perhaps been nothing quite like it in terms of reach since the days of the East India Company.
Cargill rarely gives interviews, but in the words of its company brochures: "We buy, trade, transport, blend, mill, crush, process, refine, season, distribute around the clock around the globe." And: "We are the flour in your bread, the wheat in your noodles, the salt on your fries. We are the corn in your tortillas, the chocolate in your dessert, the sweetener in your soft drink. We are the oil in your salad dressing and the beef, pork or chicken you eat for dinner. We are the cotton in your clothing, the backing on your carpet and the fertiliser in your field."
Cargill owns two-thirds of the company that is the world's largest producer of fertiliser ingredients, with major factories in North America, South America and China. Cargill's subsidiary Sun Valley produces half of all the chicken products used by McDonald's across Europe and is a leading supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets. Cargill accounts for nearly half of UK and more than a third of all European production of glucose syrups. And, as I have found on my own journeys around today's globalised food system, it has as often as not been the feed for your cow's milk, the emulsifier and fat in your ready meal, the oil that fried your crisps, the soya proteins in your veggieburger ...
History shows that empires rise and fall, however, and that the fall when it comes tends to be fast. Food empires are likely to be no different. We are now entering a period of rapid transition. The postwar food system, dependent on prodigious quantities of crude oil for its production, has not only pushed us to our biological limits but is hitting the environmental buffers. After half a century in which they shaped the nature of global diets with the disposal of their agricultural surplus, the Americans have done a sudden about-turn. With the price of oil constantly breaking new records, they want their surplus back to keep their cars on the road. The US government has started pouring subsidies into the production of ethanol from corn. Grain prices have been soaring. The standard commodity parts are no longer cheap, but we are left with the legacy of the old economic order, with diets that were created out of excess.
Felicity Lawrence is the Guardian's consumer affairs correspondent. Her bestselling exposé of the food industry, Not on the Label, was published by Penguin in 2004. She spent two years working with Afghan refugees on the Afghan/Pakistan border in the early 90s and has won numerous awards for her editing and writing.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
22 Comments so far
Show AllMeat eating by humans is a sin. Its a sin against Nature, a sin against other species and a sin against our own.
All the arguments to suggest otherwise are erroneous.
Its just excuses. All debunked here:
http://animalvegfaq.tripod.com
Humans are herbivores with absolutely NO business eating 'meat'.
http://allinharmony.org
We are ALL animals and there is really no difference between animals in the ability to feel or innate intelligence.
The only difference is that we humans are conditioned to behave unnaturally (and believe in our superiority) and to violate the requirements of nature for our own health and the health of other creatures and the ecospheres that support us.
What happens if someday it is learned that plants can feel pain and are sentient beings as well? Eating meat or not eating meat, all organisms must consume other liveing things to survive. As beings that seem to be able to make certain choices based upon knowlege, to me, I think making sane, humane, moral choices is what matters. Trying to break the cycle of industrialized meat production I can agree with, but to claim that we should all become vegetarians because you or some website say so it patently ludicrous.
How can you say what is unnatural? Why do people always think that we are the only beings on the planet capable of actions which are "unnatural"? We should accept our smallness and know that we are the same as all other inhabitants on this planet, bound by the same rules, and no more in total control of "nature" than any other species. Just because some of our actions seem counter-productive or destructive does not mean that those actions are necessarily unnatural. The Grand Plan is probably unfolding exactly as intended, but we can not accept our "sameness", we feel we must be different. Perhaps the whole reason that humans ever evolved was to insure that enough greenhouse gases were produced to bring about the evolution of the next phase of life on the planet.
Stop thinking so small... try to have a positive impact... and don't force your choices on others.
"What happens if someday it is learned that plants can feel pain and are sentient beings as well? "
This has already been done. There is a book called "The Secret Life of Plants". All life is sentient!
"Eating meat or not eating meat, all organisms must consume other liveing things to survive."
Nature is actually a system of cooperative interaction. If squirrels decided to bury bird eggs instead of nuts, how well would that work and how many forests would ever have existed? let alone squirrels and birds.
This is not about how conscious Nature is, nor about phase changes (including death) that exist as part of the natural living process; it is about what interactions contribute to the perpetuation of life as opposed to what processes insure its destruction.
Diet is a very key feature of every creature's necessary niche behaviors... necessary to the health of that creature and to the ecospheres that support him.
Furthermore, as frugivores, we know when to pick a fruit. But, as frugivores, we do NOT know how to 'pick' an animal. Natural omnivores and carnivores actually 'pick' animals in ways that contribute to the health of that species. Think about it.
"As beings that seem to be able to make certain choices based upon knowlege, "
I think this is entirely debatable given the ignorance that is guiding most human affairs. Few humans today are making knowledge based decisions, most act out of cultural scripts actually designed to be completely free of fact.
"...to me, I think making sane, humane, moral choices is what matters."
There is no question you are right. But, such can not occur inside a cultural box that dictates the dominance of elite cultural interests over the rest of nature including human nature.
"Trying to break the cycle of industrialized meat production I can agree with, "
Good. It is the greatest tragedy imaginable.
"but to claim that we should all become vegetarians "
I simply point out that we are anatomically and physiologically herbivores. Which means that the only diet supported in nature for humans is a plant based one. This is not opinion, it is scientific fact.
"...because you or some website say so it patently ludicrous."
Because I say something it is "patently ridiculous"?
That's nonsensical. I am not ridiculous. And I do not say ridiculous things. Actually, I am quite careful to act with the utmost clarity and responsibility.
Soy is an endocrine disrupter and causes weight gain and other hormonal problems. It contains the same hormones as estrogen. I gained weight when I went on a soy diet to replace dairy. Its bad stuff, a cheap product sold to rich yuppies as a health food.
Corn is equally bad read the "Omnivores Dilemma". Its in everything from your ketchup to your chicken mcnugget coating to your high fructose corn syrup milkshake. Corn keeps this country sick and obese. I hate McDonald's but this is a good example.There's a great documentry on this issue called "King Corn".
We need to demand natural food, eat locally whenever possible and then eat organic if that doesn't work. Boycott soy and food containing high fructose corn syrup and other unnatural ingrediants. No wonder whenever I travel overseas I am in love with how delicious natural food tastes.
"Why do people always think that we are the only beings on the planet capable of actions which are "unnatural"?"
I am certainly NOT one of those.
MANY creatures can be CULTURALLY SCRIPTED to act other than their nature. Even cows can be made to cannibalize each other... bears can ride bikes, seals can do tricks, monkeys can play organs... birds can even break locks faster than people! And, birds can be taught NOT to fly!
What is important is to address culture. Life is what we have, what we want, what we are all in together. And nature has designed certain 'boundaries of operation' for all creatures including humans.
As long as those boundaries are respected... life continues. (Inside these boundaries are the regions of play, expression, etc. for each creature and the human 'field of play' is certainly MUCH GRANDER and MUCH WIDER than is currently enjoyed by any.)
Once boundaries are destroyed, life starts to ebb and we arrive here...
So, the decision is ours. Will we continue to lay waste to the mechanisms and structures that support life, or will we recover natural sanity and rejoin those still trying to live within the boundaries and under the laws designed to make it all possible?
Animals are for petting, and food is only made of 3 ingredients: dirt, sunshine, and water!
Kelmer---Where do you come up with the crazy idea that eating meat is a sin? God himself gave instructions in the Bible as to which animals were to be used for food. That is why we do eat cattle, sheep, goats, and swine, but do not eat horses, dogs, cats, and many other animals.
I believe when you write about what is sin or not, you better consult the word of God as he is the judge of that, and not you.
"God himself gave instructions in the Bible as to which animals were to be used for food."
God DID NOT write the Bible. Temple Priests did... and then they rewrote it, and then rewrote it again!
But, 'He' DID WRITE the laws for all of creation... and scripted for each creature a specific place... and designed 'His' script right into each creature's anatomy so that there would be no mistaking 'His' intent for each and every one of us.
Humans are herbivores by anatomical and physiological design.
Obey the laws of creation (including the one written for humans) or continue to subject all life to a manmade (and completely ILLEGAL) Hell!
God created a living miracle, heaven. Temple priests decided to violate divine law and have created a near perfect hell... of death, fear and destruction of the miracle in its place…
Nazi World Order___ I suppose you do not take much stock in the Ten Commandments being given by God to Moses either, so that means anyone can do whatever they want to, which makes it convenient for people.
The instructions for eating certain animals were given in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and were changed in Acts to include all animals, so it is very difficult to maintain that it is a sin to eat meat.
Since humans are omnivores (not herbivores) they have been eating animal and vegetable food since their time began. There would be little purpose for many animals if not used for food, and they would soon overpopulate and would have to be killed for that reason. That is already happening with some species of wild animals and birds at the present time.
"Since humans are omnivores (not herbivores) they have been eating animal and vegetable food since their time began."
No they have not.
Few humans ate meat at all until the advent of refrigeration. Those who did were primarily members of hunting societies (not all primitive societies ate meat contrary to popular understanding) or affluent members of larger societies.
You might like to read "Beyond Beef" for a history of the spread of meat-eating including its spread into Europe.
And, humans are herbivores. http://allinharmony.org
"The instructions for eating certain animals were given in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and were changed in Acts to include all animals, so it is very difficult to maintain that it is a sin to eat meat."
I discovered this sin directly from a cow.
She said, "I am you."
I understood her.
And what that means is that what we do to her, we do to ourselves. I furthermore understood that if what she had shown me was true (which it had to be), then the fact of this revelation would be shown in every facet of human endeavor.
I stated these at the time (1985):
Economics (extensively proven by many people)
Human Biology (we are both herbivores)
Ecology (extensively proven by many people)
Health (extensively proven by many people)
And also stated that day (though I had not yet read the same from Tolstoy), until we stop eating cows we will have war for our violence to them is a direct act of violence to ourselves.
"As long as there are slaughter houses
there will be battle fields."
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy
I get my idea of sin from the creatures here who can inform me of the value (or lack there of) of my actions... this is honest feedback from other sentient creatures who are just as much a part of this divine creation as you or me.
All error began with man being reared to think that he should listen to a priest over the creator (and those this Creator selected to inform humankind of 'His' * laws).
Today, many can hear nothing but the disconnected and unnatural insanity this culture has wrought for them.
Bible Indeed!
* 'His' is probably best interpreted as a 'We' for truly this life is all about 'We-ness'. And in that 'We' we find our 'Oneness'.
Kernel - irony, right? Or did you not know that swine, especially swine, are off the Biblical list? Maybe you need a refresher course.
Actually, for humans, no animal is off the list. We can thrive on any matter, animal or vegetable. Ideally, these items will have been left in their natural state - untampered with by GM, hybridization, fertilizer, insecticides, etc. That means that real apples look and taste more like crabapples and food animals are wilder, smaller, tougher and tastier.
Mother Nature has seen fit to create this variation in her human children, in that some will thrive on vegetables/grains, some on meat, and some on a combination. That doesn't mean that we need to impose an OSFA diet and it certainly doesn't entitle specialized eaters to feel morally superior or to impose their habits on others.
If you want to talk about the cruelty involved in meat and dairy production, That's a moral issue and desperately needs to be addressed. But a snooty-nose refusal to eat meat is not your answer. Realize that, hungry enough, you, too, will dine on your fellow passengers after the air crash in the Andes. [no - don't give me that "but-that's-different!" crap.]
Bon appetit!
Interesting comments about 'sin'. What is sin exactly?
To not obey god....so if god is nature-or the earth god created is sacred-then to eat what is bad for you-and the earth- is to sin.
To choose evil. What is evil? To choose to hurt others, when it is not necessary, for our own profit.
We have got so lost in this capitalist-industrial world. We no longer know what is good or evil..what is right or wrong.
I would say if it hurts the environment-it is wrong.
Capitalism is the problem. What is the question?
>> will dine on your fellow passengers after the air
>> crash in the Andes. [no - don't give me that
>>"but-that's-different!" crap.]
Medusa - proctology aside, how often were you stranded after an air crash in Andes, ...? Unless you were born as an intuit or an icelandic aborigine, your justification for eating meat has erodeded completely in more than one way - diet fiber, superior nutrition, efficiency of soil-to-food conversion, staying away from heart attacks/colon cancers/ hypertensions & obesity, habitat preservation, abundance of vegan food on the planet, not eating salmonella, not contracting mad cow or SARS, antioxidants & bioflavonoids, not having to subsidize meat industry for tax payer's money, not eating animal feces in your food, not polluting with water washed from meat farms, ....the list goes on & on - morality & compassion to animals do not have to be the only ones (though I would consider them to be my biggest reasons. By agreeing to kill an animal with the same faculties, sensibilities & compassions as you, you also approve of a similar slaughter of your fellow humans. Tolstoy's quotation makes perfect sense in this way).
The author warns, ever so softly, ' .... provided you have first soaked and boiled it long enough to neutralise its toxins...'
Soaking and boiling is helpful in minimizing some of the toxins in soy. But other toxins can remain active, including estrogenic compounds which we men (and some women) do not need, and some others that are injurious to the thyroid gland. Asians traditionally ferment soy to lower the toxic effects of soy. For a detailed discussion of this near-ubiquitous ingredient in our American diet, see www.westonaprice.org.
"the earth god created is sacred-then to eat what is bad for you-and the earth- is to sin."
Precisely!
"We can thrive on any matter, animal or vegetable."
This is only true if you consider cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, kidney diseases, autism, etc. as natural adjutants to a 'thriving' life experience.
"We are basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant food and minimizing our intake of animal foods.... "Once people start introducing animal products into their diet, that's when the mischief starts." "
--T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., of Cornell University, director of a study of 6,500 Chinese that found a close correlation between meat consumption and the incidence of heart disease and cancer.
"I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol-lowering drugs for the rest of their lives."
--Dean Ornish, MD
"...certainly doesn't entitle specialized eaters to feel morally superior or to impose their habits on others"
ALL animals are 'specialized eaters'!
This happens to be a feature of ecology! Even natural omnivores must be (and are) specialized to be able to consume both animal and plants without ill affect.
Those who come to understand their particular specialization and seek to eat in accordance with it are certainly ecologically more responsible than those who refuse to do so.
(There is NO judgment, of course, of those who do what they do (meat-eating) due to cultural conditioning and have not had a chance to awaken from this indoctrination)
The idea of moral judgment only comes into play when we compare those who know better and thus do better with those who also know better but refuse to do better… and then there are some who would say this is not a moral issue, but an issue of sanity…
I believe that maybe it is more about sane behaving individuals and those who are incapable of sane behavior… again, probably due to cultural conditioning.
________
It is not practicing human herbivores who have imposed anything... they have simply reverted to what has been scripted for them in nature. The impositions (and NAZI controls) are ALL coming from the meat-eating dependent medical and agribusiness concerns... with healthy supports from their servants in academia and government!
Try launching ANY independent vegan business!
If it isn't a fake operation… it will NOT be allowed! WholeFoods took over the healthy food industry and quietly shut down MANY excellent independents. Their first act when they bought Bread of Life locally was to FIRE the vegan baker! Why? Because her cakes, pies, breads and pastries were not dry and disgusting… and so they did not represent the point of view that the WholeFoods investors wanted to present of vegan possibilities… and she did not bake exclusively vegan goods.. so that can not be cited as the reason either!
…and I have been around long enough to watch many excellent products be degraded or the companies that make them lose their possibility of making a livelihood by losing shelf space.
My own story on the issue of attempting to launch several healthy food businesses (that provided REAL alternatives) and non-profit educational endeavors is quite telling… both of the decided anti-vegan controls exercised by private and public agencies working together and also of the phony groups (PETA, VegNews, Vegan Outreach, In Defense of Animals. Etc… remember COINTELPRO… well it is fully launched throughout the vegan movement!) sponsored by our ever-insane 'intelligence' services to present a completely non-effective but 'freedom of speech' showy display.
I have an organic vegetable garden.
I have chickens.
I have a goat.
Milk, cheese and eggs provide all the protein anyone needs.
My chickens are fee-run. They run around and eat bugs and poo---manure for my garden.Very important for a vegetable garden. I don't know how anyone can have an organic garden without chickens!
I need them for manure and bug control.The young hens hatch out a family each spring. I eat the other eggs.
Old chickens are just as good for bug eating and manure poo as young ones. No need to kill them.
Roosters can be a problem. They fight with each other and can be mean...but not all of them are like this...interesting...
Usually the coyotes and hawks eat my cranky roosters.
The nice roosters seem to stay closer to home.
My goats main job is to eat weeds. But goats can also provide milk and cheese. Also wonderful goat milk soap.
Again the problem is what to do with the extra males?
Well eveyone needs weedeaters and lawnmowers so instead of
gas ones people can have goat ones! They are using goats in the woods now to eat weeds to prevent wildfires. Also goat manure is good.
And not all goats need to be bred evey single year to make milk. Also male goats are strong and can pull carts...or...?
If every family had a milk goat,a few laying hens,and an organic vegetable garden, that would go a long way towards changing the world.
All cities should have a greenbelt of organic farms around them...that are protected from development. And city homes should be designed to have neighborhood farms and yards with goats and chickens and food gardens.
How to do all this? Shorter work days!
We have no need for 8 hour -5 day work weeks!
Just makes the rich richer.
To change the world-we need to change the way we live.
hktadepa,itsanaziworldorder - you'll get those anyway, partly because you live so much longer than your ancestors.
Ther are lots of really valid reasons to improve our diets, turn to organic, eat more veggies, or all veggies, whatever works for you. It may interest you to know that even totally vegetarian animals are not totally vegetarian/vegan. Cows do not take the time to pick ants and worms and whatever off their grass as they weat it.
Stop being so frikkin hysterical - maybe a change in diet will stabilize your mood. Hitler was a vegetarian. Happy now?
I want to correct a prior post ... soy contains phytoestrogens, which are chemically different from human estrogens (the most important of which are estradiol, estrone, and estriol). However, phytoestrogens have been found to have both beneficial and detrimental effects on humans. One detrimental effect: soy phytoestrogens have been observed to cause a decrease in testosterone production.