Ok, I haven't been updating this shit. Facebook sort of sucks out most of my blogging impulses. However, I am at risk of offending a lot of my close friends with the following statements about bread, vegetarianism, and food ethics, so I'll post my brain here where people don't have to read it if they don't want to.
People think bread is simple. It's not. It has been with us for at most 10% of our existence as a species. It cannot grow in the wild and requires a lot of technology and intense agriculture. It enabled civilization - it provided maximum calories per acre of land, allowing people to live long enough to be slaves and breed more slaves without allowing them to be healthy enough to live up to their evolutionary potential. Grain enabled overpopulation. Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel) wrote an essay about how agriculture was man's worst mistake which addresses this. Also, the cultivation of grain (not to mention all other commodity crops) absolutely ravages ecosystems and destroys habitats for countless species.
Vegetarianism is a response to an intensely industrialized food chain. I understand why people choose to become vegetarian, and I respect their personal choices. However, I'm not convinced that eating meat in general is more cruel than eating industrial wheat, corn, or soy. To me, whether or not you eat a pork chop, a slice of bread, or tofu, you're usually partaking of the same industrialized agricultural system. Don't think you're off the hook because you eat Earth Balance - one of the main ingredients is palm oil, the cultivation of which is devastating rainforests in Borneo and around the world. Someone told me Boeing has come out with a line of soy milk, and while I can't verify that, it would make sense since they are part of the military-industrial complex from whence industrial fertilizers and pesticides come. Agribusiness doesn't care if you eat meat or not, it just wants you to consume as much commodity crop as possible. Whether you get it in the form of a steak, breakfast cereal, ketchup, or a seitan patty, whether it's whole wheat, corn syrup, soy protein, or beer doesn't matter to them, as long as you consume it in some form. According to one recent poll, half of people in the UK are trying to avoid meat. The food industry isn't stupid and it's listening - it's just going to get us to eat their products in other ways. I guarantee you if half of us stop eating meat, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes rates will not change, nor will overall health.
Given that Morningstar veggie burgers are as eco-friendly as a chicken leg, why not eat the thing that's closer to what we have evolved to eat, or at least closer to what we might imagine we could hunt or gather in the woods? What if eating a shit-ton of soy and wheat is the very cause of many of the "diseases of affluence" - diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc? What if it is simply just not good for you? When you hit middle age and you start developing those diseases, you'll tax the healthcare system and drain a fuckload of resources, natural and otherwise. Indeed, according to Gary Taubes' book,
Good Calories, Bad Calories, as the percentage of meat and saturated fat in our diet has decreased in the US, heart disease and obesity rates have gone up.
Conventional nutritional advice is bogus and designed to benefit the corporate farmers and the pharmaceutical industry. They have made us terrified of fat, carbs, calories, and pretty much every natural component of food to sell us statins and factory foods. We take lipitor as a matter of course and we eat fake butter and low-carb cookies. We've forgotten what real food is and we're scared, and that's exactly where the food industry wants us. Just as fear of terrorism keeps us docile and impressionable, so does fear and confusion over what we eat.
As we're relearning slowly, fat is necessary for good health - many nutrients are only fat soluble. Cholesterol and saturated fat are natural components of meat and dairy. Coconuts, nuts, and avocado are also high in saturated fat. Why then did societies that ate large amounts of such food not become morbidly obese? Lard and butter were the primary fats used for cooking for centuries, yet it didn't make everyone fat. Furthermore, there has never been any proven connection between blood cholesterol and heart disease, let alone dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. Your body manufactures cholesterol whether or not you eat it.
Many still would argue that the higher in the food chain an organism is, the higher the concentration of pollutants in its tissue. But chard, spinach, strawberries, and many other plants absorb high levels of lead and other contaminants from the soil without filtering it in any way. If you eat these vegetables from contaminated land, you are directly ingesting the contaminants. As for bacteria, we've seen that spinach and peanut butter and green onions are as likely to be contaminated with salmonella as chicken.
Vegetarianism also doesn't make evolutionary sense. Even other great apes eat small birds, rodents, and insects, and they HAVE functional appendixes and large, muscular mandibles to chew and digest tough, raw vegetable matter. It's no accident that we had to invent cooking to be able to access most nutrients in plants (did you know that the oxalic acid in raw greens like spinach, chard, and beet greens is mildly toxic and prevents you from absorbing nutrients from other food? Did you know that nightshades like potatoes are also mildly toxic before cooking?). The most commonly accepted theory of our evolution now suggests that we became bipedal because our jungle habitats gave way to open savanna, where I can't imagine it was easy to find enough vegetation or fruits to sustain us without supplementing with meat. It's no accident that India is the only civilization that has an old vegetarian tradition, and they compensate with a lot of dairy, legumes, and saturated fat from coconut and ghee.
Additionally, plants have been shown to be capable of fear, pain, and even empathy, so why do we think killing them is more ethical than killing animals? Do predators consider their prey's comfort level before the kill? Also, why do some vegetarians occasionally eat fish? Do fish suffer less than chickens, which suffer less than cows? How is mercury-laden fish from polluted waters healthier than a well-raised pork chop? Are we really judging the moral purity of meat based on how white it is? If you're a vegetarian for environmental reasons but you occasionally need some animal protein besides eggs, wouldn't it make more sense to have some lamb or goat or rabbit or even *gasp* cow from a local farm? After all, fishing is one of the most environmentally devastating industries, and unless you're fishing your own fish or buying it from someone you know is harvesting it sustainably, you're inflicting as much damage as you would eating any other meat, perhaps even more considering how far many of us are from the ocean.
People often have the misconception that a proponents of meat like me only see animals as commodities to be exploited. They think that, like in the cartoons, I look at a cow and see a steak. They think that I don't care about the welfare of the animal and they think I'm just a libertarian hedonist only concerned with my own selfish right to consume whatever I want at the expense of those around me. Nothing can be further from the truth. I just think that a truly biodynamic and sustainable farming culture must include animals. Animals keep invasive species at bay, fertilize fields, and even help with labor, not to mention the fact that they provide companionship. Farms without animals are sad places. Keeping animals as part of our food system ensures biodiversity and healthy albeit human-managed ecosystems. If we keep animals around, we are going to have to manage their numbers and breeding, which in turn will necessitate the culling of their herds. If we are willing to do that, why not use their bodies for food so that they don't go to waste? Interest in bison meat has brought the animal back from extinction. Interest in heritage breeds of cows and pigs have also brought them back from extinction. I think it makes sense to have an economic incentive to keeping animals around i.e. if we raise them, we should sell their meat in order to keep it economically viable. I'm not a radical anarchist crust punk who thinks that we should all go off the grid and destroy capitalism. But even if I were, I would still insist that we have animals on our commune, and I would for sure use them for food be it eggs, milk, or meat. I owe it to nature to respect my own evolution.
