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points to ponder - an easy and cheap way to avoid supporting animal cruelty and increasing global warming

submitted by robertkamper on mon, 2007-03-19 18:39.

Just read
You Call Yourself a Progressive -- But You Still Eat Meat?
By Kathy Freston, AlterNet

Beginning with a recent report on climate change and a UN report that identifies the livestock sector as one of the top contributors to the most serious problems facing the environment, Ms. Freeson discusses six responses or concerns that non-vegetarians have expressed to the author, followed by the five most common arguments for eating meat. She addresses each one with solid arguments.

Eating a plant-based diet is an easy, cheap way to end animal cruelty and clean up the environment. Why, then, are so many progressives still clinging to their chicken nuggets?

Perhaps they haven't seen this video at MEAT.org

No. 3: "There have been many brilliant meat eaters, like Picasso and Mozart, so they could not have been wrong."

I highly doubt that anyone is going to suggest that vegetarians Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Pythagoras, Albert Einstein, Leo Tolstoy or Mohandas Gandhi were especially brilliant because they were vegetarians, and I also don't think one can make the argument that meat eaters attained their great heights as a result of their diet. Interestingly, studies show that vegetarians are smarter than meat eaters, but there is probably not causality there -- it's probably just that thoughtful people tend to question things more deeply, hence the decision to become vegetarian. Here's a 2006 study from the British Medical Journal about vegetarians being smarter than meat eaters

Read. Think. Act.

tags: diet health globalwarming vegetarian intelligence

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wonderful article
submitted by susanjillian on sun, 2007-03-25 11:58.

Thank you for sharing this. It's an eye opener for sure.

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progressive meat consumption
submitted by davidp on sun, 2007-03-25 12:01.

I totally agree that if would be good for the environment and health if North Americans ate far less meat. However, there is another option besides going completely vegetarian: limit meat choices to that from organically grown animals. Besides tasting far better and being much more humane, it helps production of vegetarian food. I've known a number of back-to-the land organic farmers who started out as strict vegetarians but later adopted livestock and an omnivorous diet because they realized that livestock were essential to 'making the farm work'. Amongst the benefits:
1. Ruminants (cattle, sheep, goats) can use "inedible" food (leaves of grass, trees) grown using perennial plants that are much more protective of land and soil than are annually cultivated food crops.
2. Ruminants and monogastrics (pigs, fowl) can consume culls, & other food-processing by-products (using otherwise "inedible" food, producing fertilizer); livestock raised on wastes are essentially "foodchain and CO2 freebies".
3. Livestock accelerate cycling of nutrients via production of manure & compost, use of fibrous materials for bedding, distribution of nutrients via foraging activities.
4. More diversified cropping options are possible, notably through rotations of soil building sod crops (hay, pasture) with soil degrading food crops.
5. Land kept in sod for hay & pasture increases soil-building, nitrogen fixation, erosion control, carbon storage.
6. Livestock can be used for weed & pest control.
7. Livestock can do mechanical work, (including rotovation by pigs).

There is at least one more reason that it is good for some of us to eat some meat: conservation of biodiversity of large herbivores. It's pretty unlikely humans would keep any livestock if we didn't consume them!

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survival of the omnivorous
submitted by robertkamper on sun, 2007-03-25 16:20.

yeah, but how likely is it that people will take the effort to think for themselves? And how likely that most people would eat meat if they had to be responsible for raising and killing it? I'm pretty sure that the person that wrote the article was thinking of urban progressives who purchase all of their food or purchase food prepared for them as the end of a long corporate cycle of production of meat. Part of the industry, and not individually raised in humane surroundings where the cycle of life and death is a natural thing.

We used to have a small flock of chickens when we lived in Tallahassee Florida, which, after being slaughtered by a neighbor's dog that got out of its enclosure, were replaced by a couple of rabbits that became a small hutch of rabbits. We ate eggs from the chickens, but the rabbits had to be killed and skinned. It didn't take long for the only butcher to be me, as no one else in the household had the stomach for doing the dirty work. It didn't take me long to decide that I didn't particularly care for splitting hares and we got rid of the remaining rabbits. I did have a beehive for a while, and sold it to some colleagues at work who had a trailer out in the woods somewhere. We also had some ducks that a biology professor gave us, and we ate some of their eggs as well. I don't remember if we ever ate any of them. Eventually we moved away and donated the flock to the local Junior Museum, where they either lived happily ever after or they flew away to live in the wilds.

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