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The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools
"Wear green on St. Patrick's Day or get pinched." That pretty much sums up the Irish American "curriculum" that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.
What is not often taught in schools or known by the many who routinely celebrate St. Patrick's Day, is that throughout the Irish 'Potato famine' there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
Sadly, today's high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.
Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O'Connor's haunting rendition of "Skibbereen," which includes the verse:
... Oh it's well I do remember, that bleak
December day,
The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive
Us all away
They set my roof on fire, with their cursed
English spleen
And that's another reason why I left old
Skibbereen.
By contrast, Holt McDougal's U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to "The Great Potato Famine." Prentice Hall's America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a "horrible disaster," as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin's The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the "ravages of famine" simply on "a blight," and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as "famished and ghastly skeletons." Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.
These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history -- they exemplify much of what is wrong with today's curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.
First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books' dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today's textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone's life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.
Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it's important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affected only the potato -- during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, "Ireland's was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly." But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?
Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy's Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry -- food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.
The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.
More than a century and a half after the "Great Famine," we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System: "Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight."
Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on -- reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th-century Ireland to 21st-century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland -- that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.
But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that "we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital." The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion -- that's nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.
As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, "Hunger on Trial," that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Ore. -- included at the Zinn Education Project website -- students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?
These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.
So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let's honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let's make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish -- and that are starving and uprooting people today.
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Show AllThe criticism of the publisher Pearson is naive. Pearson is a corporation and corporations are required to do everything possible to make money for their shareholders, not to worry about telling the truth about history, even if they happen to sometimes publish history books.
Pearson is not the problem: corporate structure is the problem, and that is caused by the way our economic system is structured.
Pesonally, I thought that was the point, overall.
Ireland under Britain. Palestine under Israel.
Not even close. First, most British people in the 18th-19th centuries were as exploited as the Irish (who were actually considered "British" at that time). It was a class struggle! There was no distinction made by the land-owners (land-grabbers?). Second, half of western Scotland and a vast swathe of north-western England is populated by the descendants of Irish peasants who fled their homes during the potato famine to find work on farms and in the textile factories of Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Can you imagine Palestinians today fleeing Gaza and the West Bank to gain refuge in Israel proper, as the Irish fled to safety in mainland Britain? It would be a different kind of struggle if they could! It was not a case then of the British oppressing the Irish, it was a case of the British rich oppressing the British poor, the British titled class oppressing the British commoner, from one corner of the realm to the other! Ireland included!
And don't think things were any different here in the good ol' USA! If anything they were worse. A systematised policy of immigrant exploitation (especially the abhorrent "racism" against Irish immigrants), and de facto slavery powered the United States to its own industrial development and creation of a new class of fabulously rich. Andrew Carnegie may have been a philanthropist in his dotage, but he first STOLE his lucre from the working man through 12 hour days and take-it-or-leave-it wages!
Israel, on the other hand is a true oppressor state. Most of the Israelis oppress ALL of the Palestinians. There is no shared citizenship. There is no pretense at commonality. There IS racism and apartheit. There is labor exploitation whereby the Palestinians are forced to help their oppressors build the infrastructure of their own oppression or be destitute. It is not CLASS against CLASS in Israel. It is JEWS against ALL OTHERS (including Christians!)
In these ways do the class struggles of the British Isles differ completely from the conquest, oppression and subjugation of Palestinians by Jewish usurpers.
England vs. Ireland was indeed much like Israel vs Palestine. The English never considered the Irish human. In fact under English law in Ireland the murder of any Irish man, woman, or child did not involve the law. The law existed to punish the Irish but never to defend them. The law defended persons and for nearly four centuries in Ireland under English law the Irish did not have legal personhood.
To learn which British reg't starved which part of Ireland see my web site. Go to www.irishholocaust.org and be sure to click on its map to make it of legible size. "Holocaust" because that what it was referred to in print at the time, and "genocide" wasn't coined until WW2 (by Raphael Lemkin).
Thank you for the website.
"To learn which British reg't starved which part of Ireland see my web site. Go to www.irishholocaust.org and be sure to click on its map to make it of legible size. "Holocaust" because that what it was referred to in print at the time, and "genocide" wasn't coined until WW2 (by Raphael Lemkin)."
Referred to in print? Don` t make things up. The Irish Famine was horrible enough without drawing completly false conclusions and jump to false assumptions.
The mass robbery and mass killing of Jews cannot be equated to this.
A lot of collected help was send to the Irish people, it was known throughout the world giving grounds to raise solidarity movements, a great emigration wave was possible - just to point to some grave differences to the holocaust of the Jews, committed by the Nazis.
Confusing such big historical events by misusing terms doesn`t help your case.
Thank You for giving this larger picture of the situation in UK. Without it again the history would be less well understood.
The United States under Wall Street Banksters.
Practically the whole world (or at least half of it) under Wall Street bankers.
More than anything, the omission of Irish(-American) history from student textbooks should serve to highlight the commonality of working peoples of all races and colours. Just as Irish American history is reduced to a soundbite (if at all), so too is African American history, Mexican/Chicano history, Native American history and the history of Asians in America (i.e. internment camps, railroad construction, etc).
All of our histories are neglected and ommitted, because the 1% view us all with the same contempt. They see our commonality (and potential for mass movement) far better than we do, to our detriment.
Bingo.
"...But today's corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants..."
That's the punch line. Inverted totalitarian corporate power dictates virtually all aspects of our society, both public and private. The .01% bankster/corporate oligarchy is on a rampage and must be stopped before our entire society collapses completely.
I don't find Wollin's concept of "inverted totalitarianism" very useful or accurate. What do you find attractive about it?
Wollin says that "inverted totalitarianism" differs from "classical totalitarianism" in these ways: the state does not control the corporations, rather it is the other way around; it does not rely on mass rallies; it does not rely on coercion; it calls itself democracy.
The fascist governments, and "classical totalitarian" regimes then and now, are dependent upon and controlled by corporations. The Nazis for example, could not have gotten into power without Krupp and I.G. Farben et al. They did not rely on mass rallies.
The power of the US government most definitely does rely on coercion.
I think it is a convoluted and illogical concept that has one enormous benefit - it allows people to equate socialism with fascism and so keep the primary myth about the US alive - the notion of some moderate "middle" between two extremes.
He never says coercion is not used by the US govt. Your portrayal is a bit black and white. I don't agree with your synopsis as it leaves out whole swathes of his thesis. But who cares what I think?
It makes no difference what we call it: Neo-Feudalism, Neo-Fascist Kleptocracy, this is a form of authoritarian totaliarianism.
You have to remember that Wolin works at an elite institution, and his crtitique (coming from an ivory tower academic) is scathing, no matter if you agree with his methodology or conceptual constructs. Very few of his peers have been so critical.
Now with the nitpicking out of the way, what did you actually think about the substance of my comment?
I may be missing something. That is why I asked what you found attractive about the idea.
I don't agree that we should judge the work of people in positions of power by a different and more generous and forgiving standard than we do the work of the rest of us. If anything, we should be more critical, not less.
As for the substance of your comment, I do not agree that "the .01% bankster/corporate oligarchy is on a rampage and must be stopped before our entire society collapses completely."
I don't believe so either, but context is important.
So is our society not collapsing? I may be too pessimistic, please give me some evidence otherwise.
RE: So is our society not collapsing?
No. It is simply that the most vile aspects of capitalism, which in the past (post WWII to ~1970) were exported to the Third World are now showing up in the First World too.
Neo-liberalism has come home. The only thing collapsing is our illusion that "capitalism is synonymous with democracy."
If by "our society" we mean the circle of educated white collar people, and all of their illusions, then I guess that is collapsing. A lot of people are running around with their hair on fire about that and desperately trying to keep the fantasy in place, or restore it. They claim that it is Republicans getting elected that is the worry, that is the threat to their house slave positions and the attendant perks and status they have been enjoying. When that claim becomes too absurd to promote with a straight face, they claim it is "the duopoly" or the "elite" or the "banksters" or some such.
It is not merely the .01% that it is problem for the working class, but the entire bourgeoisie at all levels of society. The idea that there is some cabal of evil doers at the top, and were it not for them all would be just fine is unsupportable.
The remarkable thing is how closely Capitalism is behaving exactly as predicted all along. There is nothing whatsoever to support the "OMG it is all going terribly and unexpectedly wrong!!" position that many are taking.
All of the fantasies and illusions about "our democracy" and "the middle class" and about the possibility of reforming or regulating things or restoring the "American dream" are collapsing now, yes. But it is a good thing that those are collapsing.
My definition of society and collapse are quite different. thanks for clarifying.
What do you mean then when you say our society is collapsing?
RE: Inverted totalitarian corporate power dictates virtually all aspects of our society, both public and private.
I read Wolin's book "Democracy Incorporated." Like Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" there are many useful ideas presented, but their intended audience is a liberal/progressive one.
I also don't find the "inverted totalitarian" theory very helpful. Wolin's analysis is one where he could not use a Marxist critique because he was coming out of a liberal tradition - albeit left liberal (that's why Hedges has been so attracted to it in my view).
When looking at the US or “communist” USSR from a classical Marxist point of view the following basic question would be asked: Who controls the means of production? It is obvious that in both the case of the US and USSR (or China) the means of production were/are controlled by a tiny minority. While the USSR did not have to compete internally, it had to compete internationally especially with respect to the arms race with the US. A bureaucratic class ran the Soviet economy in a capitalistic manner. Basically the USSR was a state capitalist economy and the US is a “free-market” capitalist economy (i.e. major economic decisions are decided by a revolving-door relationship between big corporations and the state).
Socialism, according to Marx is when the means of production are controlled by the working class themselves, that is, economic democracy. If Wolin were to have admitted this, then he would also have to abandon the liberal myth that “socialism was tried and failed.”
Capitalism has always concentrated wealth and power into a tiny minority. Capitalism is inherently "totalitarian." At the end of the day Wolin is just presenting us with a cutting-edge argument for reform - not revolution.
While I don't disagree with the substance of your rather nitpicking reply; don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The dude does make some valid observations, if you bother to read the book carefully. Other parts are superficial IMO. Despite your disdain for the man, I do think many of his distinctions between Nazi Germany and Imperial USA are valid. I am not so ideologically hidebound to see merits of work that I don't wholeheartedly agree with.
Besides, that was not the point of my comment.
RE: …your rather nitpicking reply…
The term “nitpicking” is usually used when someone criticizes aspects that are peripheral to the central thesis that one is attempting to make. I don’t buy the central thesis of Wolin’s book – “inverted totalitarianism.” And, I have good reasons for it.
RE: The dude does make some valid observations, if you bother to read the book carefully.
If you read “carefully” you’d notice this in my earlier post: “I read Wolin's book "Democracy Incorporated”… there are many useful ideas presented…”
RE: I am not so ideologically hidebound to see merits of work that I don't wholeheartedly agree with.
If I were so “ideologically hidebound” I wouldn’t have bothered to read his book in the first place.
Glad to hear it, then there's no problem
"The Irish famine sadly was just a part of the famines produced by British commercial interests around the world."
-Mike Davis from "Late Victorian Holocausts."
Great Britain was the dominant capitalist nation at the time. "Commercial interests" are responsible for similar "tragedies" today (like the food crisis in Haiti starting in 2008) but the center of global capitalism is now in the US.
England had its own dreadful famines at the time caused by the Corn Laws. This said that foreign grain could not be imported to England until the price of wheat had risen to 40 shillings a bushel (if I remember aright). The law was good for the owners of the land but disastrous for everybody else. Like the Irish potato famine the root cause was mercantilism.
There was no "potato famine;" it was genocide; one of three during English domination of Ireland. Half the indigenous population was wiped out three times. Once each under Elizabeth I, Cromwell, and Victoria.
Of Victoria's genocide, to learn which British regiment starved which Irish district, see my www.irishholocaust.org and be sure to click on its map to adequately enlarge it.
Wow, impressive site. Thanks.
So would it be fair to say that Ireland was the training ground for British imperial expansion (with its concomitant death and misery)? And who did the US learn from?
Well done.
It should be an example for other countries where history "generally" known requires a much needed revision for the average Joe to better understand the present.
"and corporations are required to do everything possible to make money for their shareholders"
That is incorrect. The corporation isn't required to do anything for anybody except for the CEO. And, if the CEO decides to sink the shareholders along with stock values and the corporation itself....he can do so.
There is no law that says he can't.
True --
However, corporations require government approval to be brought into existence.
The original idea was that govenrment would use corporations to perform temporary
services -- projects -- and be folded when completed.
And, they are subject to being folded if their performance or conduct is less than
satisfactory.
Our government also intends to prevent MONOPOLY --
but our anti-trust laws have been idle -- rusting on dusty shelves.
Let's also keep in mind that a people's government exists as long as
it responds to the will of the people.
We have inalienable rights which are not limited to what is written in
the Constitution -- and we have the inalienable right at any time to fold
this government and move on to a new form of government and a new
economic system. Democratic socialism being one option.
Unregulated capitalism is merely organized crime. It's an evil which
cannot be regulated -- as we see from this current overturning of
government regulations put in place 60 years ago. This is a crime spree
by corporatists/elites we are suffering. Time to stand up to it!
WAKE UP, AMERICA !!!
.
.
"There is no law that says he can't." <------ That is the KEY !!!!! The Law was written for the corporations by people of the corporation. Just look up "Magic Circle (law)" and think about it. In the US Adolf Berle did a lot of "setting up" for the interests on this side of the Atlantic. Wiki makes it easy to follow the steps of how this is all done. I found this out by following Dulles after reading how leniently the Japanese gov. was treated with regard to compensation of the victims of WW II. It is "ALL DONE BY THE BOOK".
What better tool could you have to help institute the corporate state, then teaching corporate history with corporate textbooks in corporate schools. While your at it have a school lunch loaded with corporate fructose and some of that tasty corporate pink slime. By the way St Pat was not able to run all the snakes out of Ireland he missed the brits.
St. Patrick was several centuries before the coming of what you call Brits but who were actually Normans (Scandinavians who had settled in northern France and adopted the French language). When William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, he gave his followers the manors belonging to the defeated Anglo/Saxon/Norse lords. When he ran out of English manors to divvy up he sent the rest of his lordly followers to Ireland to get themselves manors there. "The spoils of war," a universal tradition. The Norman-French, followers of William, married the daughters of the Anglo-Saxon-Norse and Irish people at all levels of society and out of that eventually came in England the English language and the English Common Law. There was no such thing as a "Brit" until the union of the Scottish and English parliaments under William of Orange, about 6 centuries later.
A bit Ironic that William and the Normans were themselves sons and grandsons of Vikings who settled in North-man-die. They adopted a dialect of the French spoken at the time (Old Norman French). The Normans were just uppity Vikings.
Didn't the Roman province of Britania exist 2 thousand years ago? Briton was also used to describe the pre-AngloSaxon Celtic tribes who inhabited the island.
I remember when the Holocaust Museum opened in Washington, DC (which I thought was odd, since it hadn't happened in the western hemisphere), I asked, "Where is the Potato Famine Museum?"
Of course we have boring textbooks. The 1% doesn't want kids to know squat except how to pull a trigger and hate Muslims.
It is amazing and mind-boggling that the very people who committed the utterly inhumane atrocities during the "Great Famine" went on to be considered as some kind of "defenders of freedom". More people must learn about this tragedy and crime and reflect on it. It has many lessons to teach. It can be argued that the Nazis learned much from those who came before them.
Bill Bigelow mentions Raj Patel's book, "Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System":
>>Patel's book sets out to account for "the rot at the core of the modern food system." This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on -- reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19th-century Ireland to 21st-century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland -- that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.<<
But neither Raj Patel, nor Bill Bigelow, nor any number of writers and activists (such as Naomi Klein) go far enough into some inconvenient territory and name one of the key factors: the unsustainable nature of producing and regularly consuming beef, and the consequent rapacious need for more land.
From Jeremy Rifkin's superb historical account, "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture",
>>The Celtic grazing lands of Ireland had been used to pasture cows for centuries. The British colonized the Irish, transforming much of their countryside into an extended grazing land to raise cattle for a hungry consumer market at home. The British taste for beef had a devastating impact on the impoverished and disenfranchised people of Ireland. Pushed off the best pasture land and forced to farm smaller plots of marginal land, the Irish turned to the potato, a crop that could be grown abundantly in less favorable soil. Eventually, cows took over much of Ireland, leaving the native population virtually dependent on the potato for survival.<<
So the real story begins from before the "19th-century". But it was only in the late 1700s and early 1800s that a large number of people in Britain were able to eat beef more regularly, and there was no way an island country was going to produce beef for regular consumption by its population from within its borders alone. When a large number of people in a society eat beef on a regular basis, they are going to need more and more land and water. Always more land and more water!
Yes, capitalism and the bankers make it all that much worse and that much more inhumane, but at the root of this particular tragedy and crime lies the British appetite for beef. Like with most environmentally destructive forms of consumption, this too first started with the upper class. (Hervé Kempf talks about this in his book, "How the Rich are Destroying the Earth", and one of the important points he mentions in it is how the destructive forms of consumption eventually find their way down to the classes lower down - by which time the rich would have moved on to even more exclusive types of consumption and indulgence, of course.) Many people mistakenly believe that corn-fed beef ("marbled beef") production originated in the USA due to surplus production of corn. Nope! It started with the aristocrats in Britain.
And then there is this ugliness behind the shine that unthinking people are likely to miss. From Wikipedia:
>>In 1845, Ottoman Sultan Abdülmecid declared his intention to send £10,000 to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1,000, because she herself had sent only £2,000. The Sultan sent the £1,000 sterling but also secretly sent three ships full of food. The English courts tried to block the ships, but the food arrived at Drogheda harbour and was left there by Ottoman sailors.<<
More from Jeremy Rifkin's "Beyond Beef":
>>The Irish food crisis only served to help the British. English bankers seized control of abandoned pockets of Irish land, turning agricultural fields to cow pastures and greatly increasing the flow of beef to English cities. Between 1846 and 1874 the number of cattle exported from Ireland to England more than doubled, from 202,000 to 558,000 head. By 1880, Ireland had been virtually transformed into a giant cattle pasture to accommodate the English palate. The statistics were staggering. Over '50.2 percent of the entire surface of the country and two-thirds of its wealth were devoted to the raising of cattle.' A decade later, over 65 percent of Ireland's meat production was being shipped to England. Irish meat accounted for 30 percent of the domestic consumption of meat in England.<<
I came across this article which goes into more detail on this Famine, and I would highly recommend it:
"English Capitalists Starved Millions of Irish to Death For Profit - George Bernard Shaw" -- by Jay Janson
www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/history/european/news.php?q=1237835786
Also at
http://www.opednews.com/articles/English-Capitalists-Starve-by-Jay-Janson-090319-896.html
Like I said, there is much to learn by digging just a little bit deeper into the so-called Potato Famine than what's found in text books. I suspect that people will likely focus on certain things based on their particular worldview. And there is something in this tragedy and crime for everyone!
While the inhumane and predatory nature of capitalism and empire are there for all to see, I would request to also expand this view to include the fundamentally unsustainable nature of beef consumption. It is simply inevitable that regular beef consumption by any society anywhere would lead to environmental destruction, stealing of other people's land, deforestation on an ongoing basis, violence and warmongering to ensure control over resources and supply and the maintenance of an economic system that has violence at its core.
RE: ...the fundamentally unsustainable nature of beef consumption.
You are missing the forest for the trees. What is unsustainable is capitalist agriculture whether it is mono-crops requiring nature killing pesticides or the industrial toxic waste dumps of meat production.
Animals used to be a critical component of sustainable farming, more animals meant more manure to go back into the soil to replenish the nutrients. With the (capitalist) industrialization of agriculture comes the rift in that natural metabolism. That's when fertilizers started to be used. Capitalist agriculture depleted the soil, it is a robbery system from nature and labor.
No, Tom Larsen. You are wrong on your historical analysis. Domestication of animals created two constant companions -- slavery and domination of women. When some people eat meat, others must starve.
Long before monocultures and modern farming, raising and eating cattle meant the poor had to starve and the rich had to wage wars. Plato talked about this in The Republic and called the vegetarian city the healthy city and the meat eating city the feverish city.
The real problem is domestication of animals. Just this week Harvard released a 20 year study of over 110,000 people and their eating habits and health:
For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat—picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards—to one’s daily diet was associated with a 13 percent greater chance of dying during the course of the study.
Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20 percent higher risk of death during the study.
“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of InternalMedicine.
RE: Domestication of animals created two constant companions -- slavery and domination of women. When some people eat meat, others must starve.
Having a milk cow and chickens created slavery and the domination of women?
You have some causality issues. The subjugation of women and slavery were the consequence of CLASS-DIVIDED SOCIETIES (a minority ruling class and a majority subjugated class). This occurred around the time of the development of agriculture.
The ability of the society to produce a surplus that is, more food than needed for sustenance, created the possibility for a certain minority of members of the society to be non productive, to become a parasitic class.
Who lorded over this surplus? Priests, warriors and kings. So, once you have a propertied class how do you pass on your wealth to your progeny? Well, then you need to know who your children are. Monogamy was instituted for women. Women's bodies needed to be controlled and therefore punished for intransigence. This, of course, had to be rationalized, hence the manifold ideology of sexism. You can figure out the rest.
RE: For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat...was associated with a 13 percent greater chance of dying...
Industrially produced meat is full of chemicals, pharmaceuticals and disease. This meat is toxic; it will give you cancer. Organically grown grass-fed beef is healthy. For over 100,000 years humans subsisted on a diet of fruit, tubers, nuts, forage-able vegetables and MEAT. Studies have shown that indigenous peoples whether primarily vegetarian or carnivorous are remarkably free from "modern" diseases like cancer.
"Domestication of animals created two constant companions -- slavery and domination of women. When some people eat meat, others must starve. "
For the last time, there are enough resources in the world. The problem is NOT lack of food being produced per se, but rather DISTRIBUTION, ACCESS to food.
"ust this week Harvard released a 20 year study of over 110,000 people and their eating habits and health:
For instance, adding just one 3-ounce serving of unprocessed red meat—picture a piece of steak no bigger than a deck of cards—to one’s daily diet was associated with a 13 percent greater chance of dying during the course of the study.
Even worse, adding an extra daily serving of processed red meat, such as a hot dog or two slices of bacon, was linked to a 20 percent higher risk of death during the study.
“Any red meat you eat contributes to the risk,” said An Pan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, published online Monday in the Archives of InternalMedicine."
The problem with using that study against meat eating and domestication of animals, is that the negative effects were associated with RED meat. NOT all meat. NOT all animal products.
Tom Larsen, I expected someone to come out with exactly this kind of an argument. If you get a chance, please check out Jeremy Rifkin's "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture". I am not quoting it as some kind of a bible, but it is the most fascinating account of the history of large-scale beef consumption that I have come across. There are various books that cover parts of this phenomenon, and with a more narrower focus in terms of geometry and time. Example:
"Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction Of The American West"
www.publiclandsranching.org/book.htm
It is strange that you picked that one statement which I consider to be indisputable, *** no matter what kind of an economic system or social arrangement is in place, or what kind of farming methods are followed ***:
>>"... the fundamentally unsustainable nature of beef consumption."<<
By "beef consumption", I mean regular beef consumption by a sizable majority of the population ** anywhere in the world **.
The following statement of yours is only partially right, and the other part misses something, and it misses it big time:
>>"Animals used to be a critical component of sustainable farming, more animals meant more manure to go back into the soil to replenish the nutrients."
Yes, animals have been part of farming, and under some conditions, the whole thing can be sustainable. But here is the catch:
Livestock raising, to be even anywhere close to being sustainable, has to be a totally secondary activity, and it cannot be a primary activity. The simple fact of moving up the food chain means that livestock can be fed only agricultural byproducts and they may graze around the periphery of the farm.
I imagine that many (not all, of course) Europeans and people of European descent living in North & South America, Australia and parts of Africa will have a great difficulty imagining why this is so. Their whole understanding is influenced (or corrupted) by the wide open spaces that they see in the settler countries, and also in some European countries where there has been a great deal of emigration to the "New World". The population in Asian countries, by contrast, has largely stayed put, and therefore farming in these countries is totally different. Even though people in these countries also eat meat, the level of consumption is much less, simply because of limitations of land and water. This is a physical fact, and it will NOT change based on any economic system.
Beef in particular, if consumed regularly by a majority of the population, is completely unsustainable, because it is the most wasteful means of producing "food".
The gestation period for a cow is 9 months (just like humans). And under "natural" conditions, cows cannot be impregnated before they are at least 2 years old, although with artificial insemination, it can be (and is being) done sooner. And when a cow yields a calf, they cannot be impregnated for the next 4 - 5 months, at least.
Cows retained for dairy alone can easily live up to 20 years, although milk production decreases and stops after yielding a certain number of calves. However, when there is a demand for beef, they are usually sent for slaughter when they are only 4 - 6 years old.
Cattle raised only for beef still need to be at least 3 years old, under "traditional" conditions, for them to put on sufficient weight. In factory farms, it is around 25 months.
When a fully grown cow is slaughtered, it yields only around 500 pounds of boneless meat, and this may be about the max. And herein lies the catch:
In order to obtain about 500 pounds of boneless meat, the input required in terms of cattle feed and water (primarily to grow the feed) is enormous, and this will NOT change no matter how the farming is done, and no matter if it is done under a "capitalist agriculture", and no matter whether the farming is organic or done using monocrops. This is a physical fact.
The manure from livestock will always be less than the feed it consumed - in terms weight and nutrients. ALWAYS! This is also a fact.
Pound for pound, although involving enormous cruelty, beef produced by factory farming is actually more efficient than grass-fed beef. "Efficiency" here is simply defined as the amount of output produced for a given amount of input. The reason is that during its lifetime, the animals lose much of the input consumed simply to stay alive: that is, to stay warm (burning calories), to breathe and to move about, with only a part of what it eats going to build meat. Cattle in feedlots and CAFO cannot move about as much, and so they "waste" that much less energy, and put on bulk that much faster. It is cruel and unnatural, but it is more "efficient".
The biggest fact you are missing here (and likely to miss unless you are really serious, genuinely curious and honest with the numbers) is that beef consumption cannot be sustainable if a considerable majority of the population eats beef on a regular basis - as in, several times a week.
The insatiable need for land was also a factor that drove colonization and conquests. And when that part was complete, then came massive, massive deforestation. And then came petroleum-based fertilizers to accelerate the growth of crops to feed to animals.
If society as a whole is to switch to organic farming, meat and dairy consumption has to decrease drastically. Otherwise it is not possible to replenish the soil nutrients fast enough. This is a physical limitation. And that is also how it has been in many countries where the people cannot import animal feed and where they do not have the wherewithal to go and colonize other lands. This is also the reason that people were on the move, adopting a nomadic lifestyle, in those cultures where cattle-raising ** for beef ** was an integral part.
The "rift in the natural metabolism" will occur any time something is extracted faster than it can be replenished. And this has little to do with the particular economic system, and everything to do with what and how much is consumed. You may argue that in a different system people may not consume so much. But that is a secondary point. The main requirement is to consume only what nature can provide on a sustainable basis, and that necessitates much, much less meat and dairy consumption, if all people are to enjoy more or less equal consumption, and if no artificial fertilizers are to be used, and deforestation is to be avoided altogether. And that would be so under any system.
You've covered a lot of ground but I will address these points:
RE: The "rift in the natural metabolism" will occur any time something is extracted faster than it can be replenished.
Of course. This would include meat production. It follows naturally that people would eat less meat.
RE: And this has little to do with the particular economic system, and everything to do with what and how much is consumed.
Whoa there! The economic system has everything to do with how and what is produced and therefore how much is consumed! Under capitalism the means of production are organized for commodity production - not subsistence. If agribusness uses up some land, exhaust the water supply etc., they just go somewhere else. Under the Feudal economic system for example, people were tied to a specific piece of land. Serfs produced for their own subsistence and for the manor/lord to which they be belonged. If they overproduced or contaminated their land they would starve.
In Feudal times grain was not grown and shipped to the other side of the planet and used as vehicle for commodity speculation. Since corn production is subsidized (in the US), it is massively overproduced and is injected to all kinds of processed food products - because it is profitable - not because it is necessary for sustenance.
Consumption is not simply the intake of so many calories. How food is produced has everything to do with it. What are the labor conditions of the food produced? Are workers treated fairly (i.e. sustainably)? Are there fertilizers used? If they use petrochemicals then you need to include the "food chain" of oil production (and that would include therefore the US military). Where is the food produced and where consumed? What are the transportation costs? What about advertising? How does the "consumer" obtain the foodstuffs? Do they have to drive to go buy it in a supermarket? Then we have have to include steel production and construction materials as well in our calculation of "consumption."
Or, do they walk out to the garden and dig up some carrots and spuds after which they stop by the chicken coop for some eggs? All these are very different under our previous economic system, feudalism. And they would be very different still in a non-growth, egalitarian society where production is based on use-value rather than exchange-value.
Tom Larsen, you seem stuck on a particular ideological argument, whereas I am arguing from a more basic stand point. How much a cow or a pig needs to eat before it can reach a certain weight will NOT change much under a capitalist or any other system. What may change is only how many cows or how many pigs are raised and slaughtered -- and that too, only if there is not enough petroleum or natural gas reserves in a country, and not enough forests to cut down.
This is what you had argued before:
>>RE: ...the fundamentally unsustainable nature of beef consumption.
You are missing the forest for the trees. What is unsustainable is capitalist agriculture whether it is mono-crops requiring nature killing pesticides or the industrial toxic waste dumps of meat production.<<
What I am saying, once again, is that beef consumption, if carried out by a majority of the population, on a regular basis (as in, several times a week), is fundamentally unsustainable. This will be so under any economic system. Do you still want to debate that point?
I did NOT miss any forest for the trees on this count, because I pointed out that beef consumption increased in Britain in the last few centuries. And the ONLY WAYS that a large majority of people in an island country like Britain can consume beef on a regular basis -- let me repeat, the ONLY WAYS -- is (1) by importing beef, (2) by importing animal feed from elsewhere, (3) by producing massive quantities of synthetic fertilizer, either using some hydrocarbon feedstock produced within or imported. Or some combination of the above. This will NOT change no matter what economic system is in place and no matter what social arrangement is in place. Because we are talking of physical limitations here.
>>RE: And this has little to do with the particular economic system, and everything to do with what and how much is consumed.
Whoa there! The economic system has everything to do with how and what is produced and therefore how much is consumed!"<<
Once again, this can be debated on technical grounds. Take an island country like Cuba that is also facing an economic embargo. So what it can produce and consume is limited, and that has forced Cuba to move to organic farming in a big way, and at least technically, some basic standard of living is maintained, as per numbers for Human Development Index (HDI) from a few years ago. Cuba was also assessed to be the only country meeting sustainability criteria in terms of its per capita ecological footrpint of close to 2 global hectares and an HDI of above 0.8.
Cuba still imports some beef, but I would imagine that beef consumption would be much less than in some other countries.
Let us assume that Cuba is the perfect socialist or any other ideal economic and social system you have in mind. And let us say, they discover a humongous petroleum reserve. This would naturally give them more freedom to set up some synthetic fertilizer plants if they choose to. And that would allow the people to eat more beef, if they want to. And by all indications, they will, because vegetarianism does not seem to be popular there. Like in many Asian countries, people eat less meat mostly out of ecological limitations. But oil will change all that, even if they are not capitalistic and even if they do not export much oil.
So, to go back to my statement that made you jump (judging by your "Whoa there!" :)
I had said, "And this has little to do with the particular economic system, and everything to do with what and how much is consumed."
Unless a society as a whole decides to consciously choose a truly ecologically sustainable system, a socialist system by itself need not lead to true ecological sustainability, especially if that country has petroleum reserves and if the people decide to use it for making synthetic fertilzers.
Of course you did not say "socialism". And I did not say before, either. I said, "no matter what system". If people want to eat beef everyday, or several times a week, it is still not sustainable. They can do so in the short term - while still calling themselves socialist or whatever, but the physical constraints will still remain.
That capitalism makes it all completely unsustainable is a given, and only a fool will debate that. But my argument is from a more basic point, from physical limitations, and they will apply to ANY system. Unless the population is very small and the resource base is very large.
You are saying capitalism makes it all unsustainable. And I am saying that a society can live unsustainably even without capitalism, and even while maintaining a fair level of equality, if they have certain types of resources that they choose to exploit, to maintain their "egalitarian" society. Unless, of course, the society as a whole chooses ecological sustainability consciously, and as a primary criterion.
RE: ...whereas I am arguing from a more basic stand point.
The economic system is more, not less "basic" than meat production. It is fundamental. I am well aware that more resources are needed to produce meat than vegetables. Global food production is a relatively new phenomena. Even just a 100 years ago most people had gardens to supplement their food intake. All grown "organically." People still alive today grew up canning their own fruits and vegetables. Think of all the transportation and packaging costs that DIDN'T occur because of that. They often had chickens, pigs and they might slaughter a cow once a year. Now I am not talking about farmers here. Just regular folks. Capitalism was the engine that drove people offthe land and into the cities. This would have to be substantially reversed.
RE: ...society can live unsustainably even without capitalism...
Ok, but so what? We currently have overwhelming evidence that capitalist production is not sustainable. In fact it's killing ecosystems everyday on a planetary scale. Capitalism is the system we have to deal with, not some hypothetical economic system.
RE: Let us assume that Cuba is the perfect socialist or any other ideal economic and social system you have in mind...
Cuba does not have a socialist economic system and never has. Socialism means that the means of production are controlled by the producers, i.e. the workers themselves. Because of the US embargo and collapse of the USSR, Cuba has been forced to change the way it produces food from an industrial agriculture to more hybrid industrial and pre-industrial one. The democratization of agriculture is a positive development, but it is not due to socialism. It is due to imperialist coercion.
RE: If people want to eat beef everyday, or several times a week, it is still not sustainable.
Where did I say or even imply this? Meat consumption would necessarily go down, but that doesn't mean everybody needs to go vegan.
RE: But my argument is from a more basic point, from physical limitations, and they will apply to ANY system.
Again how things are produced matters a lot. This affects your "physical limitations" too. "Physical limitations" are not static, they are dynamic. The resources used to produce a 10,000 mile Caesar salad versus one that was produced locally are drastically different. "Physical limitations", "carrying capacity" etc are not fixed, they are dependent on the particular mode of production in a particular context. Different economic systems drive different kinds of production. The spread of capitalism, the industrial revolution and imperialism all happened together FOR A REASON! That you would say "they will apply to ANY system" indicates to me that at some level, you buy into T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative - to capitalism). It is part of capitalist indoctrination to inculcate in us that capitalism is "natural" and how it does things (and how we interact with it) cannot be changed. So liberal writers like Rifkin focus on the branches (meat production) instead of the roots (capitalism); they promote lifestyle changes instead of systemic ones.
RE: You are saying capitalism makes it all unsustainable.
Yes, all production that is part of the capitalist system. Meat is only one of thousands commodities that are produced unsustainably. You are focusing on one commodity to the exclusion all of the others (scores of which are inextricably tied up in the production of meat as well). I became a vegetarian 25 years ago along with thousands of others with the go-veggie movement; it hasn't changed capitalist meat production one bit. You have to look at the whole (the capitalist system) not the part (one commodity in it).
RE: Unless, of course, the society as a whole chooses ecological sustainability consciously, and as a primary criterion.
Ecological sustainability and economic sustainability go hand in hand. The are inseparable. Economic sustainability is incompatible with unjust and unequal societies. If you look at Jared Diamond's description of societies that collapsed, they were all class-divided hierarchically organized societies.
Now it's my turn to say, "Whoa there!"
>>Tom Larsen wrote:
"That you would say "they will apply to ANY system" indicates to me that at some level, you buy into T.I.N.A. (There Is No Alternative - to capitalism). It is part of capitalist indoctrination to inculcate in us that capitalism is "natural" and how it does things (and how we interact with it) cannot be changed."<<
What??????? I mean, what????? Your ideological fervor clearly is affecting your reading comprehension and is clearly making you ass/u/me things, instead of responding to a statement at face value. So let me see if I can point to you what I see to be your problem here:
YOU want to say that it is capitalism alone that is responsible for all these problems. While I do NOT, and NEVER have, denied the unsustainability of the capitalist system (despite your totally silly TINA projection), I want to move the debate and the vision towards true sustainability. Whereas you seem to insist on remaining stuck on an economic ideology alone.
When I quote Jeremy Rifkin's "Beyond Beef", it is to refer people to a fascinating historical account. And this history touches on the nomadic tribes of Central Asia who treated cattle as "wealth" itself, the conquest of the "New World", the introduction of cattle ranching by the Spanish conquistadors, British aristocrats' taste for "marbled beef", the transportation of beef from the "New World" back to Europe, the various subsidies and policies that allowed the spread of cattle ranching and beef production in the US, and so on.
For a moment, I did not even know what the heck you even meant by "liberal writers like Rifkin" focusing "on the branches (meat production) instead of the roots (capitalism)". So you would rather have Jeremy Rifkin write this historical account, and close with a statement blaming all of it on what you see as "the roots"?
You seem to want to prove your ideology is the only way. While I do not object to your religion, since there is much I can agree on, without any problem, I want to move beyond, because I see certain inadequacies. And that seems to be the problem here.
You are stuck under the ideological assumption that there are not enough resources. An ideological assumption that is at least for now, not correct.
Good article! It's the same with US indigenous people, blacks, and hispanics and others not part of the dominant European culture and dropping the Irish and much of all in Eastern Europe. Sad but surely true!