Great article in the latest Harpers about raw milk and health.  It's amazing how hard the feds will come down on someone who dares to sell raw milk to willing buyers, while simultaneously ignoring the catastrophic health risks of industrial meat.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Tom,
this is all fascinating.  And rather overwhelming: you should have made three separate posts.

I am delighted to be reminded that Michael Pollan and I are on the same page, regarding our shared mistrust of "sustainability."

As for "webinar": Do we really need that word?  Presumably it means "a seminar conducted online."  So would it kill anybody to retain the genus name, even if that means a few more syllables, and say, simply, "online seminar"?

As for the chickens: Well, I for one always knew that they are precious.  But, is this business about "shuttering plants and buying fewer chickens" going to be good for them in the long run?

As for the Averys: Their use of "production" and "beneficial" is an excellent piece of evidence for why economists get a bad name.  The former word has a moral connotation, and the latter by definition is a moral term.  And yet, the Averys' comprehension of ethics, with regard to both human beings and non-human animals, is plainly deficient.  "Is the entire discipline of economics so outrageous?," we non-economists cannot help asking.

As for grass, then manure, then more grass, being a "closed system": Well, maybe; as good as it gets, maybe; but some may quibble.  Erecting a force-field might help, though.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Pollan fears the debasement of the word, as should we all. He appears to recognize however that sustainability is a test we must apply to agricultural practice and public policy alike: if it fails we will need to look elsewhere for a reliable future. Even though sustainability may only be defined by the absence of its opposite, it is still the one essential criterion for sound environmental practice.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Cattle can also graze on land that is too hilly, that has too many rocks, or is otherwise unsuitable for growing corn or other crops (besides grass).

Keep careful records, dear SpaSh.

Or rather, dump the records; but make sure some oral poets glance over them first; and then get some heroes and heroines lined up, activist-types like many Gristmillers, only big and strong and cute and sexy  : ) ; and then perhaps we will be ready for an epic tradition on the tragic lost
Wars of Sustainability.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

CC, your penultimate post flew completely by me, I understand it not at all. An expanded version is available perhaps, with footnotes?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Mother nature is fighting back.  Either enough of us get on her side and call a truce or....

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Do not worry, SpaceShaper, it was not important, just a dream-vision of a dystopic, post-civilized, neo-archaic future, once our sustainability games collapse for good.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

That video is very hard to watch, I had to stop it.  Like the video of the marine throwing the puppy off a cliff, but so much worse.

Still it must be faced up to.  I think a boycott of all chinese products is warranted.  Not just fur.

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The raw milk scheme is a prime example of how industry/government revolving door regulators act to support monopoly gaming.

It's the same story with auto safety regulation.

Regulation, like the prohibition on raw milk sales, initially meant to protect public health, is turned into an excuse to target competitors to monopoly industries.

As in "Scarface", when the cop tells Tony that all he has to do is give them a competitor to bust once in awhile so they can appear to do their job in the drug war.

Arrangments that allow consumers to own the cow, then have the farmer do the dairying, seem to be able to skirt these regulations, but for how long?

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Animals are also often sprayed with arcsine, to ward off and kill any micro bacteria's.  Then:
a) is it right to spray an animal with arcsine, - which can go in to the animals eyes?
b) is it ethically right to eat these animals, after all the suffering they have endured?
c) is it healthy to eat these antibiotic/ arcsine / hormone pumped animals?

If we are willing to do such damage to animals, just to for the taste of meat.  (Because there are other healthier options), than game on! Stop whining about this medical condition and that medical suffering.

Learn to eat lower on the food chain, or shut up and live with the disease. But please do not whine about how someone is now "SICK" because they ate a "SICK" animal!

Javaearth. aka The Happy and Healthy Vegan!

I agree about improved "hygiene" improving human conditions, and limit the number of diseases.

However factory farming and intensive farming causes much more damage then we can even understand.

Let me give you a very simple explanation. If you put 1000 pounds of lentils/beans in a small tight space, nothing happens. You can continue to eat them after a long time. (grain reserves).

However if you put 1000 animals in a very small space, and if even one animal is sick, that disease spreads, and it goes into your food system. - If this were not the case, why is there so much use to antibiotics given to animals?

I find your explanation of eating meat "oh because other animals do it", to be insulting and rather silly. Lions do not factory farm, nor do they pump their prey with hormones, nor spray their prey with arcsine.

Plus we as humans have a choice to eat better. -

I hope you can understand this crucial point. We can get protein plus any other healthy survival foods without "constant" killing.

JavaEarth. The happy and heathy vegan.

Everything you have shown as problems with growing grains/lentils is doubled, because that resource is going to animals and those animals use up more resources, to make food for limited people.

Plus, why are we feeding animals grains that should be feed to starving people?

Surely, you don't believe that the current American Standard Diet, is good for this country. Do you not see the fat and obese kids in this country? - I tell ya, if they ate more vegetarian meals, and less fatty meats maybe diabetics would not be at an all time high. Nor would blood pressure, or cholesterol. Have you seen the expanding waist size of people in this country?

I agree a vegetarian/vegan diet maybe not the answer to everything, but is great start.  

As long as there are people defending the notions that is killing this country, the tax payer is going to continue paying for more drugs and suck up more resources.

Congratulations, you have succeeded in eating your sick dead animals.  

Its okay,  people like you will never get it!

Surely, you don't believe that the current American Standard Diet, is not good for this country. Do you not see the fat and obses kids in this country? -

Dried veggie protien is just as good and just as concentrated as dried meat.  You can even grow brewers yeast, a super protien supplement.

You can get all the amino acids with veggies.  with the proper cooking techniques it tastes just as good, if not better.

Quantity of food value and appetite are not the problem.  Quality is.  We are omniverous and our sense of taste and smell is tuned to eating meat.

So why not reserve meat eating for quality, free range, organic, grass fed,local,  happy, humanely killed animals only.

Eat it only once ot twice a week or only on special ocasions.  If it is more expensive than agripoisonous commodity meat it won't matter.

Eating mainly veggies saves money and energy.  Why not go for quality of life and pass up the whole rat racing consumptive mess?  Save your earnings to establish real financial security and prosperity.  

Invest it in a no gas, no power bill, no heating bill future with your own renewable energy and conservation systems.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Eating meat is not a option for me. However, I  know that your solution is probably a more realistic one right now. "Eat it only once or twice a week or only on special occasions".

However, I feel that your solution was used about 100 years ago, when people did eat less meat. But with so much advancement in industrialization will society go back to the way things were 100 years ago? I highly doubt that. -We have come to a stage where our demands for over consumption's are greater than our sensibilities.

Also, with the growing demand for western "lifestyle", countries such as China and India, are also consuming much more meat than ever before.

I hope in my life time there is a good and workable solution to increase human health and end animal suffering. -

Javaearth - The Happy Vegan

Pangolin, it's good to see you writing with a little less anger than your usual anti-vegangelical rants, and you indeed make several decent points. One of course is (if I may radically paraphrase) that we should consider ourselves very lucky to be able to make choices about what food we eat. Most of the world's people can't. As an extension of that thought, it seems clear enough that as a society we are wealthy enough to make better choices about our national diet and that one of those choices should be severe restrictions on the abuse wrought by CAFO operations on our public health and on our common environment. I hope you would agree.

On the use of range lands: indeed they are unsuitable for agriculture. From another perspective of course this does not necessarily mean we should therefore use them for other kinds of human food production. The world is not just about us. Furthermore, your point is well made that there is already enough food in the world and that the problems lie with the politics of distribution, not production, and that we could perhaps afford to leave the dry, steep, untillable land alone - just a little bit? Thoughtful agronomists like Philpott have made the excellent point that sustainable agricultures have typically rotated gazing with tillage on the same land in order to build soil fertility.

On the nomadic herders: I am not aware of studies that show a causal relationship between their diet and their height. Indeed it may well be the reverse. Short-legged folks like me would be crazy to get into the chasing-after-animals-all-day business. And if I were born into such a culture I'd have a hard time keeping up, which would put me at a distinct evolutionary  disadvantage.

And what's with the heightist assumption that tall and skinny = better health anyway?

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I should add that there is indeed a very important distinction between current American ranching habits and traditional rangeland pastoralism as has been practiced for many generations in Mongolia, Tibet, Africa, and in earlier times much of Europe.

Graziers and pastoralists who make us of difficult soils and climates have traditionally acknowledged the limitations of that land and moved with their animals as the resources were locally depleted (nomadism) or oscillated seasonally between different terrains (transhumance). These habits have sometimes put the graziers in conflict with settled agriculturalists, or with each other (as in the Range wars of C19 American West), but they have generally managed to subsist over time and develop and maintain a culture that was for eons and sometimes still is, in the fullest sense of the word, sustainable - sorry Canis, there's no other word for it.

Some Western ranchers still maintain vestiges of these practices but increasingly many have tried to have their cake and eat it too, living the lives of settled farmers while keeping too many animals on too little land that is never allowed to recover from over-use, and relying on external inputs such as aquifer-robbing deep wells, federal subsidies and grain and hay imports from over-fertilized fields elsewhere to artificially sustain the intrinsically unsustainable. Not to mention the CAFO "finishing" lots where many of these open-range cattle end up. So yes, there is some justifiable hostility which is extended by environmentalists towards american ranchers and others who follow this path throughout the world, but from which they quite reasonably hold traditional self-sustaining herding cultures exempt.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

Many neuro-scientists would say that religion is "pretty hard wired."  And yet there seems to be no shortage of Gristmill commenters, quite convinced of the virtues of science, who think that burying religion once and for all is both desirable and possible.

So why is there a problem with suggesting that some of us should consider abandoning carnivory?  It is not as though anyone would be condemned to starve to death, after all.

SpaceShaper,
thanks for your most informative posts.  You are one of few who use "sustainability" with an appropriate sense of modesty, so you certainly do not need to apologize to me.

JavaEarth,
I appreciate all you do in standing up for the ideal of replacing our society's carnivorous dietary traditions with a better way, in which cruelty to animals is put far behind us.

AmazingDrX,
your pragmatic compromise is brilliant.  From your mouth to God's ear!

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

I need to make a video of how to make beans satisfy the meat hunger.  It works, just a few extra cooking details and ingredients.  I CAN prove it.  It's a reapeatable experiment, thus scientific, hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog