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F.G. Whitfurrows 16-01-2004 03:45 PM

Why Vegans Were Right All Along
 
from http://www.guardian.co.uk/famine/sto...865087,00.html

Why Vegans Were Right All Along

Famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy.

George Monbiot
Tuesday December 24, 2002
The Guardian

The Christians stole the winter solstice from the pagans, and
capitalism stole it from the Christians. But one feature of the
celebrations has remained unchanged: the consumption of vast
quantities of meat. The practice used to make sense. Livestock
slaughtered in the autumn, before the grass ran out, would be about to
decay, and fat-starved people would have to survive a further three
months. Today we face the opposite problem: we spend the next three
months trying to work it off.

Our seasonal excesses would be perfectly sustainable, if we weren't
doing the same thing every other week of the year. But, because of the
rich world's disproportionate purchasing power, many of us can feast
every day. And this would also be fine, if we did not live in a finite
world.

By comparison to most of the animals we eat, turkeys are relatively
efficient converters: they produce about three times as much meat per
pound of grain as feedlot cattle. But there are still plenty of
reasons to feel uncomfortable about eating them. Most are reared in
darkness, so tightly packed that they can scarcely move. Their beaks
are removed with a hot knife to prevent them from hurting each other.
As Christmas approaches, they become so heavy that their hips buckle.
When you see the inside of a turkey broilerhouse, you begin to
entertain grave doubts about European civilisation.

This is one of the reasons why many people have returned to eating red
meat at Christmas. Beef cattle appear to be happier animals. But the
improvement in animal welfare is offset by the loss in human welfare.
The world produces enough food for its people and its livestock,
though (largely because they are so poor) some 800 million are
malnourished. But as the population rises, structural global famine
will be avoided only if the rich start to eat less meat. The number of
farm animals on earth has risen fivefold since 1950: humans are now
outnumbered three to one. Livestock already consume half the world's
grain, and their numbers are still growing almost exponentially.

This is why biotechnology - whose promoters claim that it will feed
the world - has been deployed to produce not food but feed: it allows
farmers to switch from grains which keep people alive to the
production of more lucrative crops for livestock. Within as little as
10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either
continues to feed the world's animals or it continues to feed the
world's people. It cannot do both.

The impending crisis will be accelerated by the depletion of both
phosphate fertiliser and the water used to grow crops. Every kilogram
of beef we consume, according to research by the agronomists David
Pimental and Robert Goodland, requires around 100,000 litres of water.
Aquifers are beginning the run dry all over the world, largely because
of abstraction by farmers.

Many of those who have begun to understand the finity of global grain
production have responded by becoming vegetarians. But vegetarians who
continue to consume milk and eggs scarcely reduce their impact on the
ecosystem. The conversion efficiency of dairy and egg production is
generally better than meat rearing, but even if everyone who now eats
beef were to eat cheese instead, this would merely delay the global
famine. As both dairy cattle and poultry are often fed with fishmeal
(which means that no one can claim to eat cheese but not fish), it
might, in one respect, even accelerate it. The shift would be
accompanied too by a massive deterioration in animal welfa with the
possible exception of intensively reared broilers and pigs, battery
chickens and dairy cows are the farm animals which appear to suffer
most.

We could eat pheasants, many of which are dumped in landfill after
they've been shot, and whose price, at this time of the year, falls to
around £2 a bird, but most people would feel uncomfortable about
subsidising the bloodlust of brandy-soaked hoorays. Eating pheasants,
which are also fed on grain, is sustainable only up to the point at
which demand meets supply. We can eat fish, but only if we are
prepared to contribute to the collapse of marine ecosystems and - as
the European fleet plunders the seas off West Africa - the starvation
of some of the hungriest people on earth. It's impossible to avoid the
conclusion that the only sustainable and socially just option is for
the inhabitants of the rich world to become, like most of the earth's
people, broadly vegan, eating meat only on special occasions like
Christmas.

As a meat-eater, I've long found it convenient to categorise veganism
as a response to animal suffering or a health fad. But, faced with
these figures, it now seems plain that it's the only ethical response
to what is arguably the world's most urgent social justice issue. We
stuff ourselves, and the poor get stuffed.

##############################

"One time good deal, kid: You disappear - *now* - and the dogs stay
tied up. Show your face again, and the fireworks begin. Savvy?" ~~
Condor Chef

Default User 16-01-2004 08:43 PM

Why Vegans Were Right All Along
 
Not really replying to the obvious troll, but listing the steps I take
in response, in case it's of some use to other posters. Naturally, most
veterans need no instruction from me :)


added to killfile.

This thread set to "ignore".

The word "vegan" is subject added to message filters.



Brian Rodenborn

Mark Preston 17-01-2004 02:10 AM

Why Vegans Were Right All Along
 
A Book of Food
by Morton P. Shand
(NY : Knopf, 1928)

Sentimental Vegetarianism (page 160)

The Sentimental Vegetarians are the most numerous and illogical of the
different sects of dietetic vegetarians, quasi-vegetarians,
frutarians, nutarians and the raw vegetable nourishment stalwarts. If
the pretensions of the sentimental vegetarians are to be taken seriously,
not only must humanity forgo all animal foods, including milk and
eggs, from ethical motives, but true to the essentially democratic principal
of "sois mon frere, ou je te tu," every single race of mankind should be
constrained -- by force of arms failing peaceful persuasion, since the
offence is greater in the eating than in the killing -- to abstain
from meat nourishment for all eternity.

After making the world safe for vegetarianism, the next step would be
the organization of armed, vegetarianized, humanity (or vegetarianized
armed humanity - it does not matter which, but propagandists would
declare there was a world of difference) to prevent non-carnivorous animals
being devoured by carnivorous, and to put a stop to the outrage of
carnivorous animals preying on each other.


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