On May 25, 7:50 pm, Rudy Canoza > wrote:
> Some "vegans", in a desperate attempt to find some club
> with which to beat on meat eaters, given that the limp

'Bullies project their inadequacies, shortcomings, behaviours
etc on to other people to avoid facing up to their inadequacy
and doing something about it (learning about oneself can be
painful), and to distract and divert attention away from
themselves and their inadequacies. Projection is achieved
through blame, criticism and allegation; once you realise this,
every criticism, allegation etc that the bully makes about their
target is actually an admission or revelation about themselves.'

The Socialised Psychopath or Sociopath
http://www.bullyonline.org/workbully/serial.htm

> reed of so-called "ethical" vegetarianism is entirely
> ineffectual, have seized on the supposed "inefficiency"
> of producing meat as a reason to decry meat
> *consumption*.
>
> The "vegan" pseudo-argument on "inefficiency" is that
> the resources used to produce a given amount of meat
> could produce a much greater amount of vegetable food
> for direct human consumption, due to the loss of energy
> that results from feeding grain and other feeds to
> livestock.

"Right now, in addition to producing grains, vegetable
and fruits for direct human consumption, farmers also
raise livestock, and millions of acres are planted in
feed crops for livestock. The theoretical question at
hand is, what if Americans suddenly stopped raising any
livestock at all - how would we feed ourselves?

The answer is trivially simple. All of the resources
going into raising livestock, PLUS all of the resources
going into raising crops as livestock feed, would no
longer be needed for that purpose. To make up the food
deficit for humans, a fraction of those resources would
be needed to grow additional human-edible crops. That
fraction would be quite small, due to the fact that
livestock consume more calories and protein than we get
back out of them: the feed-conversion ratio for all of
them is substantially above 1:1." - "Rudy Canoza" 1/Apr/05

> In order to examine the efficiency of some process,
> there must be agreement on what the end product is
> whose efficiency of production you are examining. If
> you're looking at the production of consumer
> electronics, for example, then the output is
> televisions, stereo receivers, DVD players, etc.
> Rather obviously, you need to get specific. No
> sensible person is going to suggest that we ought to
> discontinue the production of television sets, because
> they require more resources to produce (which they do),
> and produce more DVD players instead. (For the
> cave-dwellers, an extremely high quality DVD player may
> be bought for under US$100, while a comparable quality
> television set is going to cost several hundred
> dollars. $500 for a DVD player is astronomical - I'm
> not even sure there are any that expensive - while you
> can easily pay $8000 or more for large plasma TV
> monitor, which will require a separate TV receiver.)

'Livestock a major threat to environment
...
.... a steep environmental price, according to the FAO report,
Livestock's Long Shadow -Environmental Issues and Options.
"The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must
be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening
beyond its present level," it warns.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included,
the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from
human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even
more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-
related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming
Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced
methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced
by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia,
which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's entire land surface,
mostly
permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable
land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As
forests
are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of
deforestation,
especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of
former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

Land and water

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about
20 percent of pastures considered as degraded through overgrazing,
compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands
where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management
contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the
earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other
things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of
coral
reefs. The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and
hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides
used
to spray feed crops. Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles,
reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources.
Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Livestock are estimated to be the main inland source of phosphorous
and nitrogen contamination of the South China Sea, contributing to
biodiversity loss in marine ecosystems.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all
terrestrial animal biomass. Livestock's presence in vast tracts of
land
and its demand for feed crops also contribute to biodiversity loss;
15 out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed as in decline,
with livestock identified as a culprit.
....'
http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/...448/index.html

> What are the "vegans" doing with their misuse of
> "inefficiency"? They're clearly saying that the end
> product whose efficiency of production we want to
> consider is "food", i.e., undifferentiated food
> calories. Just as clearly, they are wrong. Humans
> don't consider all foods equal, and hence equally
> substitutable.

'Dietary Risk Factors for Colon Cancer in a Low-risk Population
...
A high intake of legumes (beans, lentils, and split peas) showed
the strongest protective associations among the foods shown in
table 3, ..
...
Strong positive trends were shown for red meat intake among
subjects who consumed low levels (0-<1 time/week) of white meat
and for white meat intake among subjects who consumed low levels
of (0-<1 time/week) of red meat. The associations remained evident
after further categorization of the red meat (relative to no red meat
intake: relative risk (RR) for >0-<1 time/week = 1.38, 95 percent CI
0.86-2.20; RR for 1-4 times/week = 1.77, 95 percent CI 1.05-2.99;
and RR for >4 times/week = 1.98, 95 percent CI 1.0-3.89
and white meat (relative to no white meat intake: RR for >0-<1
time/week = 1.55, 95 percent CI 0.97-2.50; RR for 1-4 times/week
= 3.37, 95 percent CI 1.60-7.11; and RR for >4 times/week = 2.74,
95 percent CI 0.37-20.19 variables to higher intake levels.
...'
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/148/8/761.pdf

> As in debunking so much of "veganism",
> we can see this easily - laughably easily - by
> restricting our view to a strictly vegetarian diet,
> without introducing meat into the discussion at all.
> If "vegans" REALLY were interested in food production
> efficiency, they would be advocating the production of
> only a very small number of vegetable crops, as it is
> obvious that some crops are more efficient to produce -
> use less resources per nutritional unit of output -
> than others.

'Cornell Ph.D. student works the land by hand at Bison Ridge
Farming in harmony with nature

By Lauren Cahoon
Special to The Journal
August 4, 2006

VAN ETTEN - What if every farmer decided to turn off his machinery and
go without fossil fuels once and for all? And along with that, what if
they
all stopped putting pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers on
their fields?

What if every gardener stopped pulling out their weeds and tilling
their
soil? Chaos, you say? Mass shortages in crops and foods, gardens
choked
with weeds? Perhaps so. But Rob Young, a Ph.D. student and lecturer at
Cornell University, has done all of the above with his small farm -
and
the business, like the crops, is growing.

"We just got a new client who's running a restaurant in one of the
local
towns - we brought them some of our lettuce and they went crazy over
it
..... our lettuce just knocked them over, it's so good."

Young's Bison Ridge farm, located in Van Etten, runs almost completely
without the use of fossil fuels, fossil fuel-derived fertilizers, or
pesticides.

The land has been farmed since the 1850s. Young and his wife,
Katharine,
purchased the farm in 1989. Before that, Young worked as the
Sustainable
Business Director for New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman.
When he discovered Bison Ridge, Young started working the land even
while he was still living in New Jersey. Eventually, Young and his
wife
moved to the Ithaca area so they could start their graduate program at
Cornell.

"We started doing a little gardening... then added more and more
fields
..... at first, we just wanted it to be an organic farm" Rob explained.
Running an organic farm is admirable enough, but at some point, Young
took it a step farther.

"I had an epiphany," he said. "I was transplanting beets after a
spring
rain, and I noticed how the land felt all hot and sticky - almost like
when you wipe out on your bike and you get a brush burn. I know it
sounds
cheesy, but I could feel how that (farmed) land had gotten a 'brush
burn'
when it was cleared and plowed.

"That's when I decided, I want to work with this land rather than
against it."

After that, Young started throwing common farming practices out the
window. He reduced weeding, adding copious amounts of composted
mulch instead and, because of the life teeming in the healthy soils
and fields
around the farm, Young lets natural predators get rid of any insect
pests.

No mechanized machinery is used except for the primary plowing of new
fields. In fact, except for driving to and from the farm (in a hybrid
car,
no less), no fossil fuels are used in any part of production.
Irrigation
of crops is either gravity-fed from an old stone well dug in the 1800s
or
through pumps driven by solar energy. Super-rich compost is used on
all of the crops along with clover, which fixes nitrogen and adds
organic
matter to the soil. Crops are grown in multi-species patches, to mimic
natural communities (insect pests wreak less havoc when they're faced
with diverse types of vegetation).

In addition, the farm has a large greenhouse where most of the crops
are
grown as seedlings during the late winter/early spring to get a head
start. The entire structure is heated by a huge bank of compost, whose
microbial activity keeps the growing beds at a toasty 70 degrees.
During
the spring and summer, most of the plants are grown in outdoor raised
beds - which yield about three times as much per square meter as a
regular
field.

"When people visit the farm, they comment on how we're not using a lot
of the land - they don't realize we're producing triple the amount of
crops
from less land," Young said. "It is labor intensive, but you can
target
your fertility management, and the produce is so good."

Young's passion for earth-friendly farming has proved to be
infectious.
As a student, teaching assistant and teacher at Cornell, Young has had
the
chance to tell many people in the community about Bison Ridge, which
is how Marion Dixon, a graduate student in developmental sociology,
got
involved with the whole endeavor.

"I had wanted to farm forever - and was always telling myself, 'I'll
do it
when I'm not in school,'" she said. But when she heard Young give a
speech about recycling and sustainable living at her dining hall, she
knew
she had found her chance to actually get involved.

Dixon and Young now work the farm cooperatively, each contributing
their time and effort into the land.

"I've had a lot of ideas," Young said, "but the work has been done by
a
lot of people - it's a community of people who have made his happen."

He said that because of Dixon's input, they now have a new way of
planting lettuce that has doubled production.

Although Young and Dixon are the only ones currently running the farm,
during the summer there are always several people who contribute, from
undergrads to graduate students to local people in the community - all
united by a common desire to work with the land.

"There's personal satisfaction in working the soil, being on the land
and
outdoors," Dixon said. "You get to work out, and get that sense of
community - plus there's the quality, healthy food. ... It's about
believing
in a localized economy, believing in production that's ecologically
and
community-based."

The combination of working with the earth's natural systems and
community involvement has paid off. Over the course of several
seasons,
Bison Ridge has grown a variety of vegetables, maple syrup, wheat as
well
as eggs from free-range chickens. They have a range of clients,
including a
supermarket and several restaurants, and have delivered produce to
many
families in CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) programs.

Although small, Bison Ridge Farm has prospered due to its independence
from increasingly expensive fossil fuel. Young said that, since little
if any
of their revenue is spent on gas, advertising or transportation, it
makes
the food affordable to low-income people, another goal that Young and
Dixon are shooting for with their farming.

Although Young and Dixon are happy about the monetary gains the farm
is
producing, they have the most passion and enthusiasm for the less
tangible
goods the farm provides.

"It's such a delight to work with," Dixon said. "You feel alive when
you're
there."

http://www.theithacajournal.com/apps...608040306/1002

> But how do "vegans" actually behave? Why, they buy
> some fruits and vegetables that are resource-efficient,
> and they buy some fruits and vegetables that are
> relatively resource-INefficient. You know this by
> looking at retail prices: higher priced goods ARE
> higher priced because they use more resources to
> produce.

Is horticultural produce subsidized like feed-grain, flesh, etc.?

> If "vegans" REALLY were interested in food
> production efficiency, they would only be buying the
> absolutely cheapest fruit or vegetable for any given
> nutritional requirement. This would necessarily mean
> there would be ONLY one kind of leafy green vegetable,
> one kind of grain, one variety of fruit, and so on.

'Analyses of data from the China studies by his collaborators and
others,
Campbell told the epidemiology symposium, is leading to policy
recommendations. He mentioned three:

* The greater the variety of plant-based foods in the diet, the
greater the benefit.
Variety insures broader coverage of known and unknown nutrient needs.

* Provided there is plant food variety, quality and quantity, a
healthful and
nutritionally complete diet can be attained without animal-based food.

* The closer the food is to its native state - with minimal heating,
salting and
processing - the greater will be the benefit.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicl..._Study_II.html

> If "vegans" were to extend this misuse of "efficiency"
> into other consumer goods, say clothing, then there
> would be only one kind of shoe produced (and thus only
> one brand). The same would hold for every conceivable
> garment. A button-front shirt with collars costs more
> to produce - uses more resources - than does a T-shirt,
> so everyone "ought" to wear only T-shirts, if we're
> going to focus on the efficiency of shirt production.
> You don't "need" any button front shirts, just as you
> don't "need" meat. But look in any "vegan's" wardrobe,
> and you'll see a variety of different kinds of clothing
> (all natural fiber, of course.) "vegans" aren't
> advocating that only the most "efficient" clothing be
> produced, as their own behavior clearly indicates.
>
> The correct way to analyze efficiency of production is
> to focus as narrowly as possible on the end product,
> then see if that product can be produced using fewer
> resources. It is important to note that the consumer's
> view of products as distinct things is crucial. A
> radio can be produced far more "efficiently", in terms
> of resource use, than a television; but consumers don't
> view radios and televisions as generic entertainment
> devices.
>
> The critical mistake, the UNBELIEVABLY stupid mistake,
> that "vegans" who misconceive of "inefficiency" are
> making, is to see "food" as some undifferentiated lump
> of calories and other nutritional requirements. Once
> one realizes that this is not how ANYONE, including the
> "vegans" themselves, views food, then the
> "inefficiency" argument against using resources for
> meat production falls to the ground.
>
> I hope this helps.

"Isn't man an amazing animal? He kills wildlife by the millions to
protect
his domestic animals and their feed. Then he kills domestic animals
by the
billions and eats them. This in turn kills man by the millions,
because
eating all those animals leads to degenerative - and fatal - health
conditions like heart disease, kidney disease, and cancer. So then
man
tortures and kills millions more animals to look for cures for these
diseases. Elsewhere, millions of other human beings are being killed
by
hunger and malnutrition because food they could eat is being used to
fatten
domestic animals. Meanwhile, some people are dying of sad laughter
at the
absurdity of man, who kills so easily and so violently, and once a
year
sends out cards praying for "Peace on Earth." -- C. David Coates