Can't we all just ... be vegans?
Veganism: All or nothing? 30
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Posted 12:33 PM on 17 Sep 2007
by Biodiversivist -
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My real name is Russ Finley. I live in Seattle, married with children. Suffice it to say that although I am trained and educated as an engineer, my passion is nature. I very much want my grandchildren to live on a planet where lions, tigers, and bears have not joined the long and growing list of creatures that used to be. In an attempt to minimize the workload on Grist editors responsible for turning my submissions into intelligible articles, I will also be posting on a seperate blog called Biodiversivist, which will contain articles in addition to those submitted to Grist.
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TwinsFanatic Posted 5:16 am
17 Sep 2007
The U.N. report concluded that the meat industry is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."
It specifically addressed the contribution of eating meat to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."
The U.S. chart doesn't figure in all the extra stages of production that are required for meat production (i.e., you don't just grow the crops, but you also have to ship them, ship the feed, ship the animals, operate slaughterhouses and feed mills and factory farms, and so on). Once you add in all that stuff, the average American's carbon footprint from eating meat is much larger than their transport footprint (unless they fly often--but that's a different discussion).
The U.N. report doesn't discuss vegetarianism b/c it's written from a global vantage. For people in the developed world, the best thing we can do to decrease our carbon footprint is to go vegan. If we all gave up our cars, we'd also make less than a 2 percent overall global warming dent (since we're just 5 percent of the global population), but by that standard, no one should do anything to address the issue!
Partial vegan is better than nothing, but it's still an unnecessary half measure. The best thing any of us can do to walk more lightly on the earth is to adopt a vegan diet, and it's remarkably easy, as well.
Check out http://www.Meat.org & http://www.GoVeg.com.
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Biodiversivist Posted 5:39 am
17 Sep 2007
The report makes it clear that as far as global warming is concerned, land use change is the biggest problem with beef, not the fossil fuel used. We don't clear forests anymore to raise beef here, so our beef GHG footprint per pound is pretty small compared to say, Brazil.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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wiscidea Posted 5:55 am
17 Sep 2007
Sorry... but I suspect most vegans are vegans for ethical reasons vs. worrying about their carbon footprint.
Another victim of Jean-Paul Marat's ghost and his virtual guillotine?
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wiscidea Posted 6:02 am
17 Sep 2007
Don't they have as much of a right to exist as humans? This is especially true of dogs, who evolved along side of us and are adapted to co-exist with humans -- we understand one another like no other pair of species. Seems to me that it is very natural for them to continue to exist along side of us. Or are you suggesting that domestic dogs and cats should be permitted, or even encouraged, to go extinct? This dimension of PETA, suggesting dogs and cats are slaves, bothers me more than the vegetarian kerfuffle.
Another victim of Jean-Paul Marat's ghost and his virtual guillotine?
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wiscidea Posted 7:05 am
17 Sep 2007
You've got me thinking about carbon footprints and how to assess just how much damage our chosen lifestyles inflict on the environment and you triggered a couple thoughts remotely related to what you posted above.
(1) I'm not sure it helps to assess one's carbon footprint by comparing it to a vegan. In my opinion, most of the people you are trying to reach think vegans are insane and will immediately assume trying to compete with them for top environmentalist is a losing battle. Perhaps replace "vegan" with "typical Ethiopian" or "typical Indian", or "typical Italian". Should show just how wasteful we all are and even give American vegans something to strive for.
(2) I'll post my other comment under the most recent carbon offset kerfuffle, rather than distract from your chosen topic.
Another victim of Jean-Paul Marat's ghost and his virtual guillotine?
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VegSwimr Posted 7:54 am
17 Sep 2007
Regardless of why one is vegan (there are many terrific reasons: health, respect for animals, the environment, combat poverty, and more) the fact remains that a vegans' impact on the world is a more benign, positive, and humane one than a meat-eaters'.
As a former meat-eater and athlete who loves to eat, I have never eaten a diet that is more full of variety, nutrition, and delicious options than I have since adopting a vegan diet. Meat eaters have no idea what they're missing out on.
Check out the benefits of a veg diet at http://www.GoVeg.com.
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noammohr Posted 7:56 am
17 Sep 2007
"According to this chart, livestock activity is behind power stations and about tied with transportation and industrial processes from a global perspective." Charts like those are a shell game, because they divide the effect of livestock into a number of categories, including "agricultural by-products", "land use and biomass burning", "waste disposal and treatment", "power stations", and "transportation". Livestock are a major contributor in all of these categories. The UN report teased out all of the effects and found that livestock are nearly 1/5 of the entire global warming problem.
"It says livestock activity contributes an "estimated" 18 percent, which is bigger than transport, but not by much." In fact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, transportation accounts for 13% of global warming, which is a lot lower.
Note that none of these numbers take into account the effect of aerosols, which mask the warming of CO2 sources but not of methane or nitrous oxide sources. That means methane and nitrous oxide sources are causing more warming than these numbers show -- and livestock are the #1 source of both.
Saying power plants emit more than the livestock industry makes little sense. Part of power plant emissions are a result of fueling the livestock industry, which is very energy intensive. If you compare livestock to another industry -- like the chemical industry or the mining industy -- livestock produces more greenhouse gas.
Even more annoying to me are the blatantly anti-environmental arguments made, for example:
Claiming that since America is a small part of the world, so going veg (or anything else we do as individuals, for that matter) is not going to make a significant dent. I've been hearing these arguments against the US taking action on global warming for years... from the oil industry.
You say that the livestock industry -- and the destruction of the Amazon -- employs a lot of poor people. Every environmentally harmful industry employs people, both poor and rich. This is not an excuse the continue global warming, which will have devastating effects on the poor, any more than it is a reason to keep clearcutting the rainforest.
You noted that meat consumption was on track to double by 2050 and that conversions to veganism weren't keeping pace, but instead of logically concluding that we need to start urgently pushing reductions in meat consumption, you throw up your hands and say going vegan won't make a dent. Of course it will, as much as anything an individual can do. The underlining outlook, that you're only one person and nothing you do makes a difference in this global problem, is insidious.
The UN report doesn't talk about veganism because they think it's a hard sell. Our job should be to educate the public and make it more mainstream, so that it is no longer off the table, just as we have for renewable energy and organic farming. For the average person, short of giving up having children, reducing and ideally eliminating animal products from their plate is probably the most powerful thing they can do to reduce their carbon footprint, and probably the most convenient too. But most people don't know this. We need to spread the word.
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grussell Posted 5:19 pm
17 Sep 2007
has a nice chart which shows 20-year impacts of
various forcings. Methane drives ozone
formation in the troposphere --- which kills
people, and water vapour in the stratosphere,
which has all sorts of nasty impacts (read
the report). In the short term (20yrs), methane
and side effects has a bigger warming effect than
CO2. So to have any chance of stabilising climate
we need to control CO2 for the long run (if you don't do that, then
it won't matter what you do with methane), and
methane to reduce temperature in the short
term. For countries like, Australia, Brazil,
China, and some others, methane is huge. Australia
has 1.2 cattle for each person (the US has 1 head
for every 3 people).
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amc89 Posted 2:26 am
18 Sep 2007
Our main focus should be on encouraging as many people as possible to make a serious effort to significantly reduce their personal meat (incuding poultry and fish) consumption. This can have a huge impact. Let's not forget that we import beef and other livestock from other countries, biodiversist seems to be assuming we eat only meat grown in this country.
Eating as close to vegan as possible should be the goal. I think animal groups realize that if they ask people to go vegan or vegetarian, a certain number will do that, and even more will understand the message and make an effort to reduce meat consumption. You always ask for more than you think you can get when negotiating, right? So I think their strategy will have an impact. If somebody can't committ to veganism, they should still feel they can make a difference by eating less and eating wiser choices, but a near-vegan diet should be what we should be striving for and what our politicians should promote with education campaigns and by stopping subsidies to the meat industry.
Also, biodiversivist seems to suggest that we should replace beef consumption with poultry consumption because its more efficient, but there any many humane, environmental and health problems with poultry as well. Over 95% of poultry products consumed in this country come from factory farms, which cause large amounts of water and air pollution. Chickens and turkeys are crammed in huge shed and never see the light of day until they are shipped long distances to slaughter houses. The intensification of the poultry industry has also been implicated in the spread of bird flu. So environmentalists should be making as much of an effort to stay away from poultry as from beef.
In regards to the eco-footprint of your pets, biodiversivist makes the assumption that we are all feeding animal products to our pets. Dogs can be perfectly healthy on vegetarian diets. Conventional dog food often has strange animal byproducts in it that may not be the best for your animal's health. I feed my dog, who I adopted from the shelter, Natural Balance vegetarian dog food and she loves it and is one of most healthiest dogs I know. I understand the concern about the impact pets have on the environment, but I think the best way to deal with this is to promote spay/neuter efforts and campaigns against puppy mills and breeders.
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:00 am
18 Sep 2007
1) PETA is wrong about livestock being the no.1 GHG emitter. The FAO report does not make that claim, and GHG charts do not support it.
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/Graphics/greenhouseUS.jpg
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/Graphics/globalghg.jpg
I doubt that this was a deliberate deception. It was just a dumb mistake, like Bush's WMDs and Bjorn's assumption that polar bears will de-evolve. They didn't even evaluate the report before launching their campaign. Who needs the truth when you have a righteous cause?
2) The report covers intensive and extensive livestock. Here in the US where 90% of our beef is domestic, and only 1% of our imports comes from Brazil, our livestock is mostly intensively produced (meaning our cows don't roam through freshly cleared rainforests and the like). So, when an American cuts back on fossil fuel use, it is actually much more effective than giving up meat (chart 3.12 shows that only 2-3% comes from fossil fuels but 32% comes from deforestation) because we use so much fossil fuels.
You can see how a poor farmer in Brazil who decides to go vegan and let his 50 acres of rainforest remain intact will have a much bigger effect than giving up his car. But, while keeping a straight face, tell me how much impact PETA's chicken suit have on poor farmers around the world? "Niños, look at this Ameican in a chicken suit! We are going Vegan to reduce green house gases!"
My spreadsheet version of that chart says that it is 17.48%, not 18, which is also irrelevant because none of the numbers in these charts are precise. The FAO "estimate" of 18% is based on "relatively imprecise estimates." See the disclaimer at the bottom of chart 3.12.
noammohr,
Your post was a rant without a single calculation or even a link to back up anything you said.
grussell,
The FAO report accounted for methane. You can't cherry pick the report to say it underestimates unless you also cherry pick to show where it overestimates.
amc89,
"...it's time we stop viewing diet discussions as "taboo".
Diet discussions have never been taboo. The devisive, self-aggrandizing Vegan and Vegetarian groups insist on attacking anyone who does not join their group. It isn't enough to eat less meat. That isn't what this is about. Eveyone knows the impact of meat on health and environment.
biodiversist seems to be assuming we eat only meat grown in this country.
According to the 2002 data I dug up, 90% of our beef is from this country. The rest is from Canada, Austalia, but only 1% came from Brazil.
So environmentalists should be making as much of an effort to stay away from poultry as from beef.
I disagree because beef is more environmentally destructive. I have no qualms about cleaning up the chicken process and making it more humane.
biodiversivist makes the assumption that we are all feeding animal products to our pets. Dogs can be perfectly healthy on vegetarian diets.
No, I assumed all pets are on a Vegan diet. That is why my spreadsheet shows 170 lbs of pets consumes as much as a person on a vegan diet, which explains why a vegan with 170 pounds of pets nullifys the benefits of his vegan diet.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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DukeJ Posted 4:01 am
18 Sep 2007
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mihan Posted 4:27 am
18 Sep 2007
We all agree. [Except noone agrees on what "excessively" means; to most people (myself included in with all the vegans), "excessively resource-intensive" means "more resource-intensive than my choices."]
eating animal products is hugely resource intensive and polluting.
We all agree. The same goes for driving, having big houses, owning lots of stuff in general, and flying in airplanes. Right? So we all try to do less of these things. That's why/because we're environmentalists. Pretty much everyone (certainly all of us, typing away on our computers) do some of them.
What if that was rewritten as:
airline travel is hugely resource intensive and polluting.
Now, following PETA's logic, we would conclude that you cannot fly in airplanes and call yourself an environmentalist.
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SusanElizabeth Posted 4:50 am
18 Sep 2007
Novelist John Galsworthy said that when it comes to changing public attitudes and habits regarding other species, "at the expense of a definite class of men or women, the reformer is right up against it. The only chance of real progress is gradual educational infection." Plato's appetitives want their meat, and can produce reams of talking points -- despite the cumulative conclusions of a major report -- to rationalize the habit.
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Biodiversivist Posted 4:58 am
18 Sep 2007
It might be saying that I'm not green because I'm not Vegan ...yawn. If so, my numbers trump your words. My carbon footprint probably trumps yours. I live in a small house with four other people, put 60% of my miles on a hybrid electric bike of my own design, 20% in a Prius, and 20% in an SUV. I eat about 30% of the American average for meat and own 11 acres of forest that is rapidly soaking up tons of CO2 annually while providing wildlife habitat adjacent to state forest and conservation lands.
"It was really an excellent idea, BioDi, but as you can see it doesn't matter if you're even 99% vegan, "Carbon is irrelevant" as long as Bambi and Thumper make it through another (unusually warm) Winter..."
This is sarcasm, that much is for sure. You might be saying that I think global warming is a farce and that I just want to protect biodiversity, which would be contradictory and circular or, that by pointing out with a butt simple spreadsheet the fact that if 300 million Americans went vegan tomorrow, it would only reduce world GHG by 1-2%, I am saying it is irrelevant for an American to go Vegan. I never said that. I simply published the numbers. Draw your own conclusions. I did say that it isn't worth the vitriol.
Or maybe it is just a lazy, short, indecipherable piece of gibberish filled with aggression, devoid of meaningful content.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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gmunger Posted 6:09 am
18 Sep 2007
I eat mostly game meat that I kill and butcher myself. Most of the rest of my meat consumption comes from small, local farms and is processed and sold locally. I have a small flock of hens for eggs, and plan to expand the flock next year to include some birds for meat. All of this is done with humility. I don't preach to others, but I gladly share my sustenence and what knowledge I have gained with any and all who express interest. I also grow a great deal of the rest of my food, am working to increase my production, and buy the rest as locally and sustainably as is reasonably possible.
Although I constantly consider how I can live in a more thoughtful, sustainable manner, I am relatively content with my lifestyle. I don't need self-righteous vitriol from PETA and their followers to set me on a "truer" path. Perhaps you would do well to put away your broad brushes and paint a more realistic picture. Can you not see that by separating strictly vegan from everything else, you are simply isolating yourselves? I am finished acknowledging your insults now.
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wiscidea Posted 6:35 am
18 Sep 2007
(1) I agree it is morally or ethically questionable practice. This warrants discussion, but not on the Grist website, in my opinion.
(2) There is also a dispute regarding whether it is environmentally acceptable. Industrial farming... bad. Sustainable harvest of wild game or free-range beef... good. Michael Pollan recently pointed out on a WPR program that consuming limited amounts of beef raised on grass can be good for one's health, good for the farmers, and good for the environment.
#1 should be discussed elsewhere,
#2 should be discussed here... can it be done sustainably and to what extent? Whether there is enough for everyone on the planet to consume several pounds per week is another matter.
Another victim of Jean-Paul Marat's ghost and his virtual guillotine?
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jshawvan Posted 7:11 am
18 Sep 2007
http://www.jshawvan.homestead.com & http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheWayThingsWork
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lesspopmorefizz Posted 8:23 am
18 Sep 2007
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Steve Erickson Posted 11:04 am
18 Sep 2007
*So, you only eat vegetative matter from wind pollinated plants grown in moncultures?
"eating animal products is hugely resource intensive and polluting."
* Factory farming is not the only farming system possible. I think I'll get one of the chickens out of the freezer. A friend of ours decided it was time to go for some of the older hens. We caught 'em, killed 'em, butchered 'em, put them in the freezer, and now we're eating them. We did drive 10 miles to his place and used plastic bags to put the carcasses in for freezing. This is still probably less resource intensive than buying a factory chicken to eat and probably less than eating food of any sort trucked several thousand miles.
Biodiverse:
I'm very curious what the impact on carbon footprints would be if first world suburban households on their lawns raised smaller livestock (poultry, rabbits, sheep, pigs, goats, etc.), without external inputs. Those suburban lawns are a lot of potential pasture and if they're in the first world there is lots of additional food around for the scarfing to feeds the animals. Consider a few free range chickens. Figure one egg every other day per bird during the warm season. Plus the carcasses. No trucking. I've known people in the city who have done this and its really not very difficult. The individual impact would probably be minor, but in the aggregate it would be large. Especially if the critters replace weed-and-feed and lawnmowers.
I'll repeat what I've been saying in previous posts. Factory farming of animals is quite a recent development and is hardly the only agricultural model. I'm not talking about factory farming. I don't believe its possible to have a sustainable farming system without animals.
Steve E.
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spaceshaper Posted 11:05 am
18 Sep 2007
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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escr1t0ra Posted 12:30 am
19 Sep 2007
That's an interesting way to change the direction of the conversation, but I think you know very well that no one is implying that being vegan seperates our food from animals completely. No part of agriculture is completely seperate from any other part. Vegans like myself are concerned with participating in the least amount of animal cruelty possible. By overcritizing our efforts I think you are very obviously splitting hairs and not making much of an argument.
Factory farming is not the only farming system possible. I think I'll get one of the chickens out of the freezer. A friend of ours decided it was time to go for some of the older hens. We caught 'em, killed 'em, butchered 'em, put them in the freezer, and now we're eating them. We did drive 10 miles to his place and used plastic bags to put the carcasses in for freezing. This is still probably less resource intensive than buying a factory chicken to eat and probably less than eating food of any sort trucked several thousand miles.
The percentage of our nation's food derived from small farms like the ones you are describing is around 27% according to the USDA's website. Even the biggest cockeyed optimist is going to be able to see that this number is incredibly low, thus it is unrealistic to defend your eating habits by saying that most food in the US is from good old-fashioned folks who farm and butcher the same way they've been doing for hundreds of years. As for free-range, organic... do your research on where your meat is coming from. The standards put on the meat industry to give standards for what is considered "free-range" or "organic" are not as strict as the public would like to think.
You say at the end of your post that factory-farming is a recent development. You're right, but look at the way our factory-farming has progressed over the past 70 or so years. What kind of direction is factory-farming taking us in, and how long before these small farms you applaud are extinct?
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gmunger Posted 12:45 am
19 Sep 2007
Huh? Why not? It sure is starting to catch on in my neighborhood. And why should I, who abhors the feedlot industry, need to be coerced into veganism just because feedlots exist? Why dismiss practioners of a perfectly good model of agriculture, simply because it's not the current dominant paradigm? Unless you are also foisting OTHER values upon us.
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SusanElizabeth Posted 10:15 am
19 Sep 2007
It's the meat -- and the fact that the disdained PETA publicly and credibly hit a nerve --that appears to rankle some, not all, environmentalists. Caring for the planet would appear to be stepping lightly in every way one can -- from a bee garden in the middle of the suburbs, to refraining from use of insecticides and pesticides, to providing cover for wildlife around our homes, to what we drive. It's all of a piece. How each of us eats seems pivotal.
Oh, as for the Huhs? and yawns, see Atlantic Monthly essay below.
Books: The Atlantic Monthly | September 2007
Hard to Swallow: The gourmet's ongoing failure to think in moral terms by B. R. Myers
For centuries civilized society took a dim view of food lovers, calling them "gourmands" and "gluttons" and placing them on a moral par with lechers. They were even assigned their own place in hell, and I don't mean a table near the kitchen: They were to be force-fed for eternity. Not until halfway through the Industrial Revolution did the word gourmet come into use. Those who have since applied it to themselves have done a fine job of converting the world's scorn to respect. The pleasures of the oral cavity (though we must say "palate" instead) are now widely regarded as more important, more intrinsically moral, and a more vital part of civilized tradition than any other pleasures. People who think nothing of saying "I'm not much of a reader" will grow shamefaced when admitting an ignorance of wine or haute cuisine. Some recent movies have even tried to turn banquets into heroic affairs. Advertising has abetted the trend, while political correctness, with its horror of judging anyone's "lifestyle choices," has done its bit to muffle dissent.
The sexual revolution went faster than this but not as far, which is why we can still call someone a lecher. Our common language no longer has a pejorative for those who live to eat. Gourmand has taken on an even fancier ring than gourmet, while the word glutton can be applied only to someone who eats an enormous amount of food at one sitting the standard of what constitutes "enormous" revised upward each year for obvious reasons. When discussing Kim Jong Il, who dines on imported delicacies while his countrymen starve, even our own journalists must describe his fixation in terms of connoisseurship. The last holdover of the old way of thinking is the Catholic catechism, which keeps gluttony on its list of sins and indicates version, and by defining sin in part as "a perverse attachment to certain goods" this too will change. A French committee wants to convince Rome that God condones expensive multicourse meals; He just doesn't like us getting extra helpings.
But the idolatry of food cuts across class lines. This can be seen in the public's toleration of a level of cruelty in meat production that it would tolerate nowhere else. If someone inflicts painon an animal for visual, aural, or sexual gratification, we consider him a monster, and the law makes at least a token effort at punishment. If someone's goal is to put the "product" in his mouth? Chacun à son goût.
Still, people are more concerned about animal welfare than they used to be. They also know that the more humanely the average animal is treated, the better it will taste. Thus it is that Gourmet magazine recently ran an unflinching exposé of the conditions in chicken slaughterhouses. But some things cannot be produced humanely; to taste the way it should, the foie-gras duck must be force-fed, the lobster must be boiled alive, and so on.
Literate opinion therefore suggests that a few dishes should simply be done without. This is where the serious food lover draws the line. "I detect a backlash among fed up gourmands," the editor of Best Food Writing 2006 notes with approval, "who refuse to renounce foie gras and caviar just because they are produced by less-than-noble methods." (That just because says it all.) The backlash takes the form of pieces like Julie Powell's essay "Lobster Killer," which the anthology's editor found "hilarious":
Over a period of two weeks I went on a murderous rampage. I committed gruesome, atrocious acts. If news of the carnage was not widely remarked upon in the local press, it was only because my victims were not Catholic schoolgirls or Filipino nurses, but crustaceans. This distinction means that I am not a murderer in the legal sense. But I have blood on my hands, even if it is the clear blood of lobsters.
This is a prime example of food writers' hostility to the very language of moral values. In mocking and debasing it, they exert, with Madison Avenue's help, a baleful influence on American English as a whole. If words like sinful and decadent are now just a cutesy way of saying "delicious but fattening," so that any serious use of them marks the speaker as a crank, and if it is more acceptable to talk of the "evils of gluten" than of the "evils of gluttony," much of the blame must be laid at their doorstep.
Another sampling from Powell's piece:
People say lobsters make a terrible racket in the pot, trying enough twenty minutes watching a golf game on the TV with the volume turned up. When I ventured back into the kitchen, the lobsters were very red, and not making any racket at all. Poor little beasties.
Zoologists have recently discounted the notion that lobsters feel no pain when boiled alive. The gourmets' response is to giggle at the plight of the "beasties" in the hope that others will follow suit. (With comparable tastelessness, a piece on foie gras in the anthology is titled "Stuffed Animals.") But when asked to laugh at the suffering of a living thing, or to drown out a moral compunction by turning up the TV, the American meat eater begins to sense that his values are not so far from the vegetarian's after all. If food writers want to show what "a perverse attachment to certain goods" looks like, they are going about it in just the right way.
This brings me to a would-be exception: Michael Pollan, the New York Times Magazine writer whose best-seller The Omnivore's Dilemma has just been published in paperback. In the first seven chapters, Pollan writes of the role of corn in American life in such an improbably thrilling manner that I have to recommend the book despite my reservations about the rest of it.
About a McDonald's meal Pollan shared with his family in a moving car, for instance, we learn that if you include the corn in the gas tank, the amount of corn that went into producing our movable fast-food feast would easily have overflowed the car's trunk, spilling a trail of golden kernels on the blacktop. What a startling and memorable image; a lesser writer would have said "road" instead, and wondered why it didn't quite work.
After this, though, Pollan moves on to explore what he calls the "moral and psychological implications" of killing and eating animals. The phrase shows at once where he is headed; the reason those adjectives are so often yoked in contemporary American English is that the second swallows up the first. A moral opposition to the majority's way of doing things can thus be more easily treated, as it was in the Soviet Union, as a mental- health problem.
But before going any further, I should allow Pollan to explain the book's title. "In the fall of 2002," he tells us, one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I'm talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals.
So violent a change in a culture's eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating.
The feverish tone makes clear that Pollan is writing for his fellow gourmets, the sort of people who can read the line "ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals" with a straight face. I can't help thinking, though, that with hamburgers and milk shakes conquering deeply rooted diets from Mexico to Micronesia, America's eating habits may well be the most stable in the world. Even the Atkins-diet craze reduced national bread sales by no more than 3 or 4 percentage points. Pollan nonetheless asserts that our dietary upheavals have returned us, with "atavistic vengeance," to a bewilderment last experienced millennia ago:
When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety, especially when some of the potential foods on offer are liable to sicken or kill you. This is The Omnivore's Dilemma, first given that name thirty years ago by a University of Pennsylvania research psychologist named Paul Rozin. Then Rozin's dictionary must be the one that Alanis Morissette used to look up the word ironic, but let that pass. Is our national eating disorder really a matter of people pacing supermarket aisles in an agony of indecision? Or do we perhaps feel too little anxiety about what we eat? Despite his choice of title, the subject does not hold Pollan's interest for long, so readers will have to make up their own minds.
Pivotal to the book is Pollan's claim that our omnivorousness has done much to shape our nature, both body (we possess the omnicompetent teeth and jaws of the omnivore, equally well suited to tearing meat and grinding seeds) and soul.
One might as well describe man the way the anthropologist Ernest Becker did, as a digestive tract with teeth at one end and an anus at the other, and claim that the soul is shaped out of that. In which case, I don't want one. But most of us use soul to mean the part of humanness that is not shaped out of that. In contrast to the fearless Becker, Pollan thinks that taking a hard look at human nature is more a matter of leaning over the museum rail at the caveman exhibit. Seeing only the painted mammoth on the horizon, so to speak, he derives the rightness of meat eating from the fact that humans are physically suited to it, they enjoy it, and they have engaged in it until modern times without feeling much "ethical heartburn." (Only a food writer would use such an appalling phrase.) According to Pollan, this "reality" demands our respect. The same reasoning could be used to defend our mistreatment of children: In body and instinct, we are marvelously well-equipped for making their lives hell. If many cultures now object to abusing them, it is thanks to new values, to people who refused to respect the time-honored "reality."
But by reducing man's moral nature to an extension of our instincts, Pollan is free to present his appetite as a sort of moral-o-meter, the final authority for judging the rightness of all things culinary. He shoots a wild pig, for example, hugely enjoying the experience. We even get a spiel about how hunting makes people face the inevitability of their own death. (Psychologists have long asserted the opposite: As Otto Rank put it, and in words relevant to meat eating in general, "the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other.") Ah, but then Pollan sees a photo of himself leering over the corpse and feels bad. So is killing pigs right or wrong? Or as he puts it, "What if it turned out I couldn't eat this meat?"
Spoiler alert: He could. He even congratulates himself on "doing well by the animal" by cooking and chewing it with the proper reverence. As reluctant as he is to attribute fear and pain to a live animal one mustn't anthropomorphize decorum to a dead one. He apparently believes that we cannot fully relate to animals until they become food. In the introduction, we are told that eating something "transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds" profound engagement" of all. (German police had to listen to similar reasoning in 2002 after arresting one Armin Meiwes, who had just put his omnicompetent jaws to work on a Siemens engineer.) Now, Epicurus, who strikes me as a vegetarian Pollan might listen to, made the rather obvious point that no living thing experiences death. As soon as life ceases, the body ceases to deserve the attribute human or animal, as the root of the latter word makes especially clear. The pig thus takes its farewell from Pollan almost as soon as he pulls his trigger in greeting. The mere flesh left behind tastes remarkably like that of us "long pigs notorious cannibal term all. There is less "transformation" going on here than Pollan would like to think.
The moral-o-meter is applied to other meats as well (the book is subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals"). Pollan buys a steer from a pasture in South Dakota, whereupon it is loaded onto a truck. When he catches up to it in a factory farm in Kansas, it is hock-deep in excrement. Pollan is far too talented not to convey the ghastliness of the "manure lagoon." (This is a writer, to mention again his tour de force section on corn, who can make even biochemistry vivid.) But does he sense the poignancy in the reunion?
There stood 534 and I, staring dumbly at one another. Glint of recognition? None, none whatsoever. I told myself not to take it personally; 534 and his pen mates have been bred for their marbling, after all, not their ability to form attachments. If I stared at my steer hard enough, I could imagine the white lines of the butcher's chart dissecting his black hide. It is all too obvious which of the two has a harder time forming attachments. Then again, Pollan does not like what he sees; he senses that cows raised in such unnatural conditions cannot possibly taste good. Though he doesn't get to eat "his" steer, he later finishes a fast-food cheeseburger that leaves him "simply, regrettably full."
The wrongness of factory farming thus established, Pollan heads off to an idyllic farm in Virginia, "a scene of almost classic pastoral beauty." For all its relevance to the big picture of American meat production, it might as well have been a place where animals get to die of old age. But gourmets love to preach the benefits of organic fare to the country at large, feigning a child's ignorance of economics all the while; it is the only way they can pass off their pursuit of pleasure as a social conscience.
On the farm, Pollan gets to try his hand at a little throat cutting:
Daniel explained that you wanted to sever only the artery, not the head, so that the heart would continue to beat and pump out the blood. I told myself that their suffering, once their throats were slit, was brief. Yet it took several long minutes for the spasms to subside, but the waiting birds did not seem panicked, and I took solace in their seeming obliviousness. Yet, honestly, there wasn't much time for these reflections, because you're working on an assembly (or, really, disassembly) line. There is, however, time for the reflection, "Was I going to be able to enjoy eating chicken so soon after my stint in the processing shed and gut-composting pile?" The paramount question of enjoyment has ramifications for organic food in general; a gourmet is not going to stint on his pleasure just to save the Earth. When Pollan finally cooks a chicken for a few friends, the moral-o-meter's reading is conclusive: The meal is "out of this world." The only complication is the presence of his friends' son Matthew, "fifteen and currently a vegetarian," who "had many more questions about killing chickens than I thought wise to answer at the dinner table." Of course! But doesn't Pollan say in his introduction that the pleasures of eating are "only deepened by knowing"? And if it is so natural to kill and eat animals, and so sentimental to think otherwise, why is the vegetarian the only one who can stomach the details? Pollan can't be bothered telling us why Matthew became a vegetarian. We are clearly meant to take it for a mere teenage phase, nothing a restriction of his options won't cure: "He confined himself to the corn."
Our investigative journalist interviews none of America's other vegetarians, either, relying instead on poultry farmers who claim to have sighted one or two. (We're to believe an anecdote, which shines with all the coherence and credibility of a letter to Penthouse, that a PETA member turned up at the "processing shed" one day, asking to kill chickens to overcome an aversion to meat.) This is not to say that Pollan brooks no contradiction. An entire Chapter of The Omnivore's Dilemma is devoted to a scrupulously fair debate with the text of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, and Pollan summarizes the Australian ethicist's views in the same lively style as his own. But he prefaces it all by smirking that he read the book in a fancy restaurant while eating "a rib-eye steak cooked medium rare," thereby putting all this morality business into the proper perspective.
Though Singer's reasoning may be inexorable, Pollan's appetite is unimpressed: I put down my fork. If I believe in equality, and equality is based on interests rather than characteristics, then either I have to take the steer's interest into account or accept that I'm a speciesist.
For the time being, I decided, I'll plead guilty as charged. I finished my steak.
This spurious show of open-mindedness recalls Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian who uses a comparable technique when defending Christianity against secular critics. The similarity is not surprising, considering that our dietary and religious habits are both acquired in early childhood, which makes them hard to break no matter what we learn in later life. The Pollan-Küng Technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one's belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties. As Pollan writes:
I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.
How arrogant, in other words, how pitifully close to mental illness, to want to be a better person! But this is where the Christian and the gourmet part ways.
All the same, Pollan decides to in-dulge his inner George Plimpton again, becoming "a reluctant, and, I fervently hoped, temporary vegetarian." How seriously he took his meat-free diet can be guessed at. Though he claims to have stuck to it for at least a month, this most voluble of food writers does not name a single thing he ate. Nor, it seems, did he dine with any vegetarians.
"What troubles me most about my vegetarianism," Pollan nonetheless has the fatuity to write, is the subtle way it alienates me from other people. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don't eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she'll make something special for me, in which case I'll feel bad. On this matter I'm inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners. I also feel alienated from family traditions like my mother's beef brisket at Passover. It is common these days to see moral arguments veer off into appeals to self-interest. We have reached a pretty pass when they start veering off into the realm of etiquette. The bit about Passover surprised me a little, Pollan having just tacitly admitted what he thinks of Orthodox Jews, but perhaps for him it's all about the brisket. A record of the gourmet's ongoing failure to think in moral terms, The Omnivore's Dilemma helps one to understand why no reformer ever gave a damn about fine dining dinner table either. When Jesus vowed to turn children against their parents, he knew he'd be ruining an untold number of perfectly good meals.
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invaliduser Posted 4:04 am
05 Oct 2007
Watch this movie called Earthlings and evaluate what matters. Is eating a hamburger or drinking a glass of milk THAT important?
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1282796533661048 ...
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noammohr Posted 3:21 am
10 Oct 2007
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ecosquirrel Posted 1:26 am
12 Oct 2007
Now, i have found myself between a rock and a hard place. I know the farmers that grow all of the produce that I eat and the farms are within 30 miles from my house. And then I have the carton of soy milk and the tub of soy margarine that I purchased from the local health food store which are shipped from who knows exactly where, made by faceless people and with ingredients grown and made by faceless people. How environmentally conscious is this especially when i could go to the farmers market I could buy local organic milk and butter-i would know who made them and if i wanted i could go and see the cows. These are small scale farms that are not factory farms that are actually helping the land.
I believe in vegan, in not using animals for my personal benefit. I believe in living an environmentally mindful life and that includes eating local, sustainablly produced food.
I'm curious what others who are thinking about similar topics think.
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Biodiversivist Posted 3:04 pm
14 Oct 2007
I noticed you stopped short of saying that PETA was right, livestock is the biggest emitter.
Take a crack at showing how livestock would account for 18% of US emissions. You haves access to the report.
15% of the world's electrical power would have to go to livestock to get that slice of pie down to 18%.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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amazingdrx Posted 9:15 pm
14 Oct 2007
Now organically grown, locally processed soy products? That would beat eggs and dairy products organically and locally produced.
Which large soy product outfits can be trusted? Who could be trusted to certify soy products as organic and produced in a manner that is fair to farmers?
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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C4nier Posted 12:37 am
19 Oct 2007
Reposted from a previous thread: On page 112, the first part of section 3.4, the FAO is speaking in the present tense when they state, "Overall, livestock activities contribute an estimated 18 percent to total anthropogenic green house gas emissions from the five major sectors for greenhouse gas reporting: energy, industry, waste, land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) and agriculture."
It goes on to say in the next paragraph, "Considering the last two sectors alone, livestock's share is over 50 percent. For the agriculture sector alone, livestock constitute nearly 80% of all emissions."
The second pie chart supposedly refuting that is not sourced, so I can't argue whether it corroborates the report or not. But if you look at the wording in the actual report I think they are very clear.
Why you go to all the effort in the world to attempt to discredit them over and over is beyond me. You need to pull your head out of your confirmation bias. Also, avoiding cherry picking facts and citing your sources would be a huge improvement, too.
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Biodiversivist Posted 7:33 am
19 Oct 2007
No, it isn't. They say that livestock may account for an estimated 18%. That pie chart shows that energy generation (mostly from coal) is clearly the largest contributor at around 21.3%. You are suggesting without any evidence that 15% of global electrical power generation is dedicated to livestock (15% of 21.3 = 3.2 and 21.3-3.2 = 18%). I can find no evidence of such a dramatic statement.
"...But if you look at the wording in the actual report I think they are very clear."
I have looked and they are very clear--"an estimated 18%, which is more than transport."
Note that transport is not the biggest emitter. If "livestock IS (present tense) the single largest contributor to climate change" they would have clearly said "Livestock is clearly the largest contributor to climate change." They didn't because it isn't.
"Considering the last two sectors alone, livestock's share is over 50 percent. For the agriculture sector alone, livestock constitute nearly 80% of all emissions."
energy
industry
waste
land use
LULUCF and agriculture
You have badly misconstrued that rather vague statement. They are merely saying that the 18% comes mostly from sectors 4 and 5, which should not surprise anyone.
Why you go to all the effort in the world to attempt to discredit them over and over is beyond me.
I'm not "attempting" to discredit anyone. I merely pointed out that their entire ad campaign was based on a false statement. Credibility is in the eye of the beholder. Like I said earlier, I think it was a dumb mistake rather than a deliberate deceit, but either way it casts a rather dim light.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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