I made a decision this weekend after:
a. Reading Matthew Scully’s excellent, mind-opening, heartbreaking book, Dominion, and
b. Seeing this video
that I will never again eat meat. Not fish. Not pork. Not chicken. Not beef. Nothing that ever breathed will ever go into my body again. I’m just sick of seeing abuses like this, and I should have made the decision a long time ago. Today, we live in the era of factory farms – places where pigs, chickens, cows, and other animals are penned up in conditions so deplorable that they have zero – ZERO – quality of life, places where the lucky animals die shortly after birth or are stillborn. The ones that make it never see the light of day. And because we never get to see them, it’s easy to buy a package of chicken or beef and not know what had to suffer horribly for it – and every, single one of them suffers.
I’m done. If humanity can be judged by how we treat our most vulnerable, then we’ve failed miserably. It’s sickening.
And what pisses me off equally is this statement from Dick Durbin:
“The treatment of animals in this video is appalling, but more than that, it raises significant concerns about the safety of the food being served to our nation’s children,” Durbin said. “The apparent slaughter of sick and weak animals not only appears to violate USDA regulations, but could be a danger to our nation’s food supply.”
I’m sorry, but I think the needless, hideous suffering of a cow walking on broken legs and being rammed with a forklift is what’s most important. I think dipping live chickens and turkeys in scalding water to de-feather them is what’s most important. I think sending a sow to a rendering plant because she doesn’t produce enough offspring while penned in a cage she can’t even move in is what’s most important.
I can’t recommend Scully’s book highly enough. You can read the reviews here. He’s not a person that many Republicans and conservatives would deride as a “bleeding heart liberal”, either – he was a speech writer and senior advisor to Bush and an editor at National Review. He makes an excellent case for showing compassion and mercy that’s so self-evident that you wonder why you had to read the damned book in the first place.
(I updated the last paragraph to clarify the whole “bleeding heart” comment. See 1st and 2nd comment.)
jonst
Perhaps, asshole, it would be better if more of us were “bleeding hearts”? I was on board with you until you got to the standard MSM/GOP talking point.
Michael D.
Perhaps I should have put that better. My point is that conservatives would refer to someone who defended animals as a “bleeding heart librul.” I agree with you that more of us should be.
My point, which I made horribly, was that Scully is not what a conservative would term a “bleeding heart.” Sorry that I didn’t make that point. I am going to update the post.
IanY77
Wow….I mean…damn.
That video was something.
Punchy
Cant watch vids at werk. Whatz in the vid that’s so bad that Mikey just went all-corn-poop, all-the-time on us?
ThymeZone
Well look, the world is not going vegetarian. The meat and pultry industries are not going away. Therefore quitting meat for reasons related to animal treatment is not going to do any good or save animals from suffering.
What will save them is adequate and appropriate regulation, inspection and enforcement. It is possible to have a clean, safe and humane industry, it’s just that we haven’t bothered to have one. It doesn’t mean we can’t have one.
People need to decide what kind of food chain they want, and then create a government that oversees that kind of food chain. There are so many things wrong with the food chain today, you couldn’t cover them all if you devoted the entire blog to the subject for a month.
Why has this happened: In my opinion, mostly because government officials have treated government as “the problem” in the spirit of Ronald Reagan. When you elect people to government who think that government is the problem, you end up with a shitty government. It ain’t rocket science.
Strengthen and empower government to govern the food industry properly …. before it’s too late.
Michael D.
What’s worse is that it’s commonplace.
Capt. Jean-Luc Pikachu
Look at the way Argentina obtains their steaks; all of their cows roam free! If they can do it, then by Xenu, the greatest nation in the world goddamn better be able to match that.
ThymeZone
Indeed, but let’s put it in perspective. If you really want to get into mistreatment of animals, look no further than mistreatment of house pets. Or animals used for medical research. The food industry in my opinion is not even close to the leader in the area of animal mistreatment.
db
Well, you can rest assured that the Public Health Vets for USDA are on top of this… see the following Q&A
What it is not noted in this press release is that all Questions were asked by USDA employees sitting in the press room.
J sub D
Thanks. That will help keep the prices down for us unredeemed carnivores.
Davebo
Sure, but do you like Argentine beef? I have never liked it as much as domestically produced.
Michael D.
The job of a public health vet is to find ways to keep these animals penned up in tiny metal cages without ever seeing the light of day – but a bit more comfortably.
They are part of the problem.
ThymeZone
We have things that can help with this problem.
They are called laws.
Change them.
Birdzilla
Have these animal rights jerks like scully ever thought of what happens with the veggies they stuff their faces with THEY RIP THEM OUT OF THE GROUND CHOP THEM TO PEICES AND BOIL THEIR ALIVE and as for MEET YOUR MEAT go tell PETA to GO TAKE A HIKE
GSD
Clearly we need to let the market decide and deal with these thorny problems. They always have the best interests of the American people and children in mind.
Now relax and ask your kids how they enjoyed their Funny Bone, Coke and mad-cow sloppy Joe lunch at school today.
-GSD
Graeme
I have a feeling that there will be a lot of vegetarians spawned by the internets.
I know a couple people who stopped eating meat when they had to read The Jungle in high school. If that boring socialist polemic can do it, I imagine a few viral videos will be dynamite at forcing a re-think of the meat packing industry.
I’m trying to eat less meat, but I won’t give it up. I do want to switch to grass fed beef when I’m making more money, though.
ThymeZone
The BJ governing committee will meet for lunch. The entree today is Birdzilla a L’orange.
Zifnab
Like any of this is even legal to begin with. We’ve got animal cruelty laws on the books. We’ve got regulations for how one can treat animals being raised for slaughter. No one follows them. No one enforces them. Might as well pass a law against eating meat entirely. No one is going to follow that law either.
Wanker. Seriously, you are scum.
Evinfuilt
I hope you’re big on not liking animal research. So much so that when you get sick you tell the doctor to have nothing performed on you that was possible due to animal research.
Then at your funeral, your family can be so proud of your sacrifice.
Or, instead you can learn some real knowledge about what goes into animal research and not believe all the horse-shit put out by PETA.
Justin
Do you have to like animals to be affected? Because I don’t particularly care for animals. And while I don’t want to see them tortured, I’m alright with killing them. And they do taste delicious.
bootlegger
There are many organic producers who are raising free range animals free of dangerous chemicals. Kill two birds with one stone (pardon the bad pun) and buy from these producers. You’ll encourage more humane animal treatment AND support small producers in their war against Big Agra.
The Other Steve
This post is a wonderful example of how to piss off people who would otherwise support the argument you are making.
They’re already dead when you scald them, you fucking imbecile.
Farrowing pens are only used for a few weeks.
You ignorant fucking jackass.
Zifnab
On a completely O/T note, the right-hand Digby link points to http://www.freecookingrecipes.net and I was wondering if that was a joke or something.
Haltelcere
No need to jump off the meat-eating wagon unless you were looking for that final push, or you don’t mind spending a little more money for quality meat from humanely raised and slaughtered animals:
http://www.uswellnessmeats.com/index.html
I am sure there are other small, rural farms and small-time meat-packing plants that will ship free-range cuts of meat anywhere in the US.
Going vegetarian won’t change how the meat industry operates unless a very significant number of people also go vegetarian (which I doubt will happen – too many people like a good steak, chicken enchilada, grilled pork chop, etc). But purchasing meet from a small, rural specialty operation will A) not reward the huge meatpacking industry with your dollars and B) will help sustain an alternative, desirable market niche.
Hey, that’s something that even conservatives would love (free market solution and helping out the small farmers)!
ThymeZone
Um, that sounds a little defeatist. Laws don’t work? Okay, let’s storm the feedlots and shoot all the workers. Or something.
Laws work, when you have government that treats them with respect.
As for food chains, I never heard anyone saying that they’d stop eating fruit because the fruit pickers are treated like crap. The leaf vegetable industry flourishes despite campaigns to make people aware of picking and packing operations that are abusive to workers. And since no Americans in their right minds want to do these jobs, we have a crusade against the illegal immigrants who are kind enough to break into the country and do that work for us so that we can get cheap vegetables.
And then there is food and food products from China ….
Eat up, everybody. Just be sure you “feel good” about whatever you are eating today, that’s what counts.
Michael D.
They’re supposed to be. A lot of them are not, yfi.
The Other Steve
As well as farming.
This video, and this situation out in California pissed me off as it would my entire family who has raised hogs and cattle since time began.
But you have to make informed decisions, and you cannot do that if you have groups like PETA distorting what really happens.
Dervin
If you want to really feel helpless, I suggest the omnivore’s dilemma.
Well, there are ways around this, for example you can join a local CSA. Friends of mine who live two hours outside of NYC go to a local farm where semi-organic, really free range chickens go for 2.99 a pound. So I’m getting a few friend to chip in and go on a chicken run when the spring kills comes around.
Michael D.
Also, according to Scully’s book, the turnover rate at meat packing plants is about 100%. Why? Because workers are basically traumatized by the abuses they’re forced to inflict on animals.
Joan
I’ve never seen this site before, so I don’t know its culture. However, I’ve been a registered Republican for 36 years & am still proud of being one [inspite of the current crop].
I have also devoted the better part of my life to fighting animal cruelty, educating inner-city kids, advocating for self-determination, & calling for more personal responsibility than for governmental intrusion.
My main question is: Since when did animal cruelty & disregard for suffering become part of a Conservative’s profile?
A second question: Why is “caring” considered “bleeding heart”?
Are we more determined to be polar opposites than we are to be decent, true Americans?
I come from a long line of Citizen Soldiers, dating back to the Civil War [or The War Between The States], & I’m quite proud of having worked for Barry Goldwater, the real Father of the modern Conservative movement.
I also haven’t eaten animals for almost 20 years because of the inherent cruelty.
So, “Bravo!” to Michael, for having the courage to think & to respond like an honest Republican — That is: As someone who thinks for himself & relies on himself to do what he thinks is right, because it’s the right thing to do.
[Michael: I can send you some incredible recipes :>) ]
Doug
“I’m not a vegetarian because I love animals; I’m a vegetarian because I love plants.” — A. Whitney Brown.
I think we have to be a little careful about anthropomorphizing what animals may or may not think constitutes intolerable living conditions. There is a tendency to project our own sensibilities, based in no small part on our own knowledge of alternatives, onto the animal. I don’t think there can be much doubt that being forced to walk on a broken leg or being thrown live into scalding water constitutes conditions of living that even the most naive animal finds intolerable. However, I don’t know if we can necessarily jump to that conclusion about cramped quarters if the animal has never known anything different. (I presume that’s a matter of degrees — a veal cow that can never get enough room to stretch its cramped muscles is perhaps different than a pig in a confined feeding operation that has only limited space to walk around.)
Zifnab
See, that’s the way it is ideally. The machinery is supposed to stun the chicken with a high voltage current to knock the animal out, then a blade is supposed to chop off its head, then the animal is boiled.
~link
The animal food industries don’t have much higher ethical standards than your Enrons and your Halliburtons and your Utah Coal Mining Companies, so I don’t see how this is so completely unfathomable.
When human life is so casually and routinely disrespected in a country like Iraq, who gives a shit about livestock in Kansas, right?
The Other Steve
Then they must be zombies, as it’d be hard for a chicken with no blood to still be alive.
Tell me Michael, how much time have you actually spent on a farm?
Have you ever helped load hogs into a trailer to take to market?
Have you ever vaccinated baby pigs?
Have you ever helped grind feed?
Have you ever helped bail hay or straw?
Have you ever walked beans?
Driven a tractor?
Anything?
People need to be more aware of farms, how animals are raised and slaughtered. So we can make informed opinions about these practices.
Ned R.
I see where Michael is coming from but think there are less combative ways to make the point (I consider myself omnivorous but not one to regularly eat meat — this post explains my general thoughts while this suggests some good vegetarian cookbooks to use as a basis). When it comes to videos…look, I won’t watch nearly any fictional films that dwell on murder and torture (Saw, for instance), so the real thing isn’t going to thrill me much either.
William Burroughs once said that the title Naked Lunch referred to “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork,” and that ultimately says more to me than any video could.
Zifnab
Sorry, I’m suggesting that “more laws” will not solve the problem. More enforcement is what is necessary, and that takes place in the executive branch. Basically, you require an animal-friendly DA / police force / governor’s office / White House, if you expect to see any actual progress.
The laws already exist, they just need to be implemented. Passing more laws just gives people more opportunity to stall while insisting they’re doing something about it.
Andrew
The food industry is BY FAR the leader in animal mistreatment. The stuff they do is basically Michael Vick writ large. The reason that the other areas are not as bad is exactly what you propose for the food industry: better laws and regulations, better enforcement. It took a while but research animals are now treated much better than they were a few decades ago because of public outcry and political response.
ThymeZone
Using the BJ-approved DarrellSenatorCornyn terminology, “from everything I’ve read” about 2-3% of Americans are classified as “vegetarian” which includes “vegan” food preferences.
I also read that the percentage is just about twice as high in Europe and Great Britain …. the effect of mad cow disease? Or ….?
Zifnab
I actually just got back from an Alpaca Ranch this weekend. The beasts were treated humanely and well, the chickens were free range, and the herding dogs were all healthy and well-behaved, even if they did need a bath.
You can run an ethical farm, and even turn a profit doing it. The slovenly and brutal conditions on these videos don’t have to happen if managers are willing to put in the effort to have good employees and sane working conditions. But good working conditions require time, money, and effort, so nuts to that. I’ve got my buck, so you can all blow me, right?
Mr. Moderate
What bootlegger said,
You don’t have to swear off meat. If you buy locally raised organic free range animal meat you not only take care of this sort of problem but you also get healthier meat in the process. Since it isn’t mass slaughtered you also won’t have that whole annoying fecal matter problem that plagues 80% of the meat we consume.
ThymeZone
I doubt that. Really, I think pet mistreatment and neglect is probably a much more common thing. Talk to your local humane society and animal control officials and see what they think. They see it every day.
The Other Steve
it’s interesting that the link you provided is high on emotion, and low on evidence to support the claims.
It’s interesting how there are all kinds of “an article in blah says”, with no actual link, or even a bibliographic reference.
What motive do you think they have for doing that?
D. Mason
One thing I do, which I know is not readily available to people in very large cities, is buy what meat I can from local producers. They can be found by word of mouth in smaller towns and rural areas, You can also spot some “fresh pork” or “fresh meat” type signs if you’re prone to taking country drives. I have access to local pork and chicken farmers, and the pig farmer occasionally has some beef as well. I can inspect the conditions in which the animals are kept myself, whenever I stop by to purchase some meat. The price is more and It’s much further away than the local supermarket – these small cost increases are worth it to me. I know I’m getting food that’s not loaded up with steroids, chemicals from feeds and god knows what else… plus a nice trip to the country.
ThymeZone
Well, the joke is on us. We have a government that is opposed to laws. They laugh at laws, they hold laws and courts and judges in contempt, they preach that laws and regulations are baaaaaaaaad.
Well, except for that one time when they impeached Clinton and crowed about the “rule of law.” Hey, that was funny.
Andrew
I volunteer(ed) at the country animal shelter for years. (It wasn’t the lovey-dovey no-kill shelter run by the local humane society either.) I talked to the animal control folks all of the time and saw dogs used for fighting and some pretty horrible cases. I still think the food industry is much worse.
The Other Steve
I suspect TZ is right on this one. There is a tremendous number of people who have pets who really shouldn’t.
Michael D.
Tell me Michael, how much time have you actually spent on a farm?
———-Not much
Have you ever helped load hogs into a trailer to take to market?
———-Nope. But I’ve seen videos of them with broken limbs being dragged with chains onto those trucks.
Have you ever vaccinated baby pigs?
———-Nope. But I have seen videos of them having their tails cut off and their teeth clipped. I’ve seen them being castrated. All of this is done WITHOUT ANESTHESIA, which is the industry standard, by the way.
Have you ever helped grind feed?
———-Nope. But I do know that hogs are regularly fed feed that includes rendered swine. Besides that, what’s your point?
Have you ever helped bail hay or straw?
———-Nope. What’s your point?
Have you ever walked beans?
———-Nope. Again, what’s your point?
Driven a tractor?
———-Ditto…
demimondian
Yup.
And you response will explain why you don’t get a whole lot of sympathy when you contract a meat-borne illness, too. You don’t expect me to pay for your self-destructive habits, right? The workhouse is always there, after all.
Evinfuilt
I’m very happy to see this thread turn-around and show alternatives to the PETA line.
I personally shop at a great local market, except when the farmers market is open. At both of these places I can get my meat that was raised locally and humanely (heck, I get cows that eat grass for a nice long while, then finish on corn before having a nail pounded into their skull, and butchered up for my enjoyment.)
I’ve gone to the slaughterhouse, I know whats involved with what goes on my plate. It actually makes me respect my food more.
And if you want to be really cautious. Get yourself mail-order bison, there is no known method to factory farm bison. So its all humane and much better for you too.
Get involved in finding sustainable sea-food. For me in Texas that means farm raised catfish (make sure the farms aren’t near a river where they may accidentally dump lots of nitrates in, during a flood), some nice Tilipia, and a bunch more. Lots of good resources available.
The meat costs more, but it tastes better (and half the guilt!) So you eat less, and fill yourself up on good local veggies (or start your own garden at home, add a year round hydroponic setup in your house for herbs and tomato’s.)
All without having to do what PETA says, while they humilate humans, kill pets and dump them in freezers, and support eco-terrorism.
Then allow the scientists who already jump through toons of flaming loops to do research when absolutely neccassary. They have souls too, and don’t want to farm animals and will do everything (already required by law) to not harm or discomfort the animals they research on. Allow these animals to keep diabetes drugs flowing, or for me personally my hormone replacements (or I’ll get real cranky.)
Then allow my 2 cats and 2 dogs to live happily at my house. I rescued all four from shelters, since they would otherwise be abandoned and die (well one was from a rare no-kill shelter.)
The laws exist to prevent what happened. They are unenforced, why? Because the government you elected decided that enforcing laws gets in the way business.
Now when I get home, I think I’ll have some head-cheese, and a few rocky mtn oysters.
Dug Jay
As much as it pains me, I have to admit that I pretty much agree with everything ThymeZone has written. You want to change your position now, TZ?
The Other Steve
The Humane society isn’t no-kill. No-kill are usually third party groups, and then it depends on how responsible the shelter or rescue group is. There have been some cases of no-kill shelters who get in over their heads, and the animals are subjected to horrible conditions.
The Other Steve
And it tastes better!
ThymeZone
Wait … I think Dickens already wrote your character, Ebenezer.
Nicole
The NYTimes Book Review did a piece on Scully’s book when it first came out, including asking Scully, if it were better for a feed animal to have a few months or years of life living as a free-range farm animal, than not to have lived at all. Scully concurred that, if kept and cared for in humane conditions, it was probably better to experience life, even in a short dose. Hey, most wild animals don’t come to very nice ends, if the pigeons in NYC I see caught by redtail hawks are any indication. But I don’t think there’s any moral or ethical justification for keeping feed animals the way we do (and TOS, that’s what the book is about, not the small, family farm that you seem to think is where all meat comes from. Would that all meat did). And saying “They’ve never known any different” is just a cop-out. The conditions they’re kept in is barbaric. And those who eat factory-farm meat directly support it. Not to mention the waste produced by these farms is very, very bad for the environment (small farms, on the other hand, can and do provide habitat for an assortment of wildlife).
We can’t fix every problem in the world (duh), but if we’d be willing to eat meat less often, and pay more (because it costs more to raise it humanely) we’d be doing good for a lot of things- the environment, our own health, and the emotional lives of the animals we raise for our use. And the thing is, meat is a luxury. We don’t need it to survive- humans are generalists and can manage to survive on quite a lot of different things. We eat it because it tastes good.
“Dominion” is a good book, with an interesting view-point (it’s not often you hear vegetarianism argued from a Christian standpoint), and I’m glad to see someone bring it back into discussion.
demimondian
Look, let’s get something really clear here: raising animals for meat entails a kind of lethal transformation, as most carnivores and omnivores prefer their meat dead. That means taking a living creature and turning it into a dead one, so that subsequent processing can transform it into, you know, “food”? If you eat meat, then, um, yeah…it was killed before you ate it.
The Other Steve
This is why small family farms are so important.
We’ve made such a rush to get low cost, that we’ve forgotten about everything else that is important.
Andrew
Well, it’s not THE Humane Society, it’s a local shelter run by a private rescue group. But I think of it as A humane society type of place.
Yeah, I’ve had to explain to a lot of people why no-kill shelters are not exactly what they seem to be. My county shelter took all of the animals rejected by the no-kill shelter.
ThymeZone
Who knew?
Reminds me of this blurb, which is the best observation on the topic I ever saw:
Who said it first? Maher? Carlin? Bruce? I don’t know.
However, as much of a chuckle as that is, I personally would rather have no meat, less meat, or more expensive meat than tolerate inhumane conditions at the packing plant and feedlot. And I want government to do its frigging job and regulate and enforce the regulations.
Just for the record, I loves me some barbeque and a good burger. My family potroast recipe is the best.
demimondian
I’m going to take a middle ground here, Nicole. There was a time when meat eating did play a key role in our species’ survival; it’s concentrated protein and calories in a readily available package, and we, as great apes, have evolved to use it. Like most generalists, we benefit from eating foods from all possible sources.
That said, there is nothing with which meat provides you that you must get there. By compromising, and adopting lacto-ovo-vegetarianism, you can fill in all of the gaps pretty easily, but then you’ve bought back into the truly hideous method factory farms use to raise animals. Veganism, though…well, it’d work for me, but I’m an adult male, done growing and not ever going to bear a child. It’s not really all that healthy for children or mothers.
The Other Steve
Michael made a typical old-style liberal argument. Take a position against something so extreme, that it alienates everybody who would probably support that position.
You want to argue against factory farms, I’m right there with you.
But Michael argues against farming because he’s ignorant and doesn’t know the difference.
ThymeZone
What, post standing up? No thanks.
Har.
I official disavow any post I ever made that agrees with you. Those posts were written by an imposter. I am the real ThymeZone.
Tim F.
Wha? I’m not necessarily against your general point, but try to keep within hailing distance of plausibility.
My general beef with Michael’s thread here is that moral arguments almost always lose to economic arguments. Emphasizing [self] righteousness over common interest is without a doubt the major failure of environmentalism, and the same problem gets in the way of improving our meat industry.
Look at it this way – we have to grow the food that cows eat. Almost nobody except $20-a-pound boutique operations graze their animals. Not only do cows transfer only 10% of their food (at the _very_ best) into people food, but we don’t even feed them the right kind of food. Cows can barely digest corn so we spend ungodly amounts of time, energy and antibiotics just keeping them alive.
So let’s look at the basic self interest problems. Because of unregulated, universal antibiotic use, without which corn-fed cows often get sick and die, a good part of our antibiotic resistance problem starts in feedlots. Then there’s the energy argument – since modern agriculture is basically the practice of converting oil into food, we could spend as much as 90% less energy (and land and clean water) on agriculture and not reduce our dietary intake one iota. Then you could add the health benefits of eating less meat. Every conceivable indicator shows that the nation is beyond ripe for that approach.
Don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for tortured feedlot animals. Everytime I see someone take a break from protesting foie gras to eat a McBurger I want to laugh in their face. But shaming people into doing the right thing, while sometimes effective (e.g., dolphins and tuna), more often loses out against more levelheaded ways of reaching the same conclusion.
ThymeZone
I’m really surprised that Michael knows of the existence of farming.
Haltelcere
Care to share?
Googootz
“There is a tremendous number of people who have pets who really shouldn’t.”
There is also a tremendous number of people who have children who really shouldn’t.
Comments about the cruelty of the animal food industry:
Cost drives it all. You want inexpensive meat, you get mass produced cattle.
Also, if you had to kill your own dinner, you probably would treat it better when it was breathing, you’d be more thankful for it, and you’d probably eat less of it.
The cruelty in how migrant farm workers are treated:
You don’t want to pay five bucks for a head of lettuce? That’s why we have illegal alien migrant workers being paid a pittance.
Americans will pick lettuce if the wage is high enough. Let farm workers unionize and the wage will go up. Once the cost of labor reaches the level where it’s cost effective, somebody will produce a machine that will pick lettuce just as effectively, thus bringing the wage for human pickers to an equilibrium.
ThymeZone
In terms of the number of animals involved and the number of people involved, I’m pretty sure I am right.
Most of the angst over mistreatment of food animals revolves around the routine operations, and the killing itself. Whereas the current uproar is over the mistreatment of ill animals who should have triggered other actions, not shoving them around with forklifts and putting them into the product stream.
Yeah, for ordinary mistreatment of animals, I would be glad (if we could find a way to prove it) to bet you money that the pet mistreatment numbers far exceed anything going on in industry. It’s basically a ubiquitous problem. Like I said, talk to the people who see it every day, don’t sit here on a blog and argue with me.
Michael D.
Please show me where I argued against farming? Maybe it was this part:
Almost all of the meat sold in America IS produced on the factory farm. Almost ALL of the meat we eat is produced inhumanely. Factory farms are, by their very design, INHUMANE.
Punchy
Nope. Animals for research are cared for, extensively. There’s a TON of regs that must be followed. Yes, many die at the end of the experiment, but they are euthanized humanely. Everything is approved ahead of time by an committee.
Can’t speak for the food industry, but animals in research are kept in great care.
Ralphf
One other benefit not mentioned is how much reducing meat consumption reduces green house gases.
ThymeZone
Yes, but as long as we get more worked up about food animals than we do about human farm workers, that is not likely to happen.
Liberalism is really a bitch, isn’t it? It’s hard to know what to get outraged about.
Willem van Oranje
Going vega or veggie is not necessary. Going organic is good enough.
My hometown (in the Netherlands) has an organic butcher and the first time I went there, it brought back all the smells of my early childhood. I was brought up on a farm and my parents used to get a pig slaughtered once a year which was brought home for freezing etc. Just because of that smell, it was a treat to go shopping there. You don’t get those smells in an ordinary butchery anymore.
My supermarket nowadays has a choice for bioindustry meat or organic meat. I usually choose organic. It’s more expensive but the smell and the taste is much much better. Bioindustry meat is usually pimped too with a lot of salted water, esp. chicken.
J sub D
Why? Because I eat meat? A quick glance at human dentation shoes that mankind evolved as an omnivore. I’m not going to fight millions of years of evolution.
Or is it because I’d like my daily ration of flesh to be a little cheaper, so I can more cash for ostentatious displays of wealth?
Or maybe because when I look around the country and the world I find other, more important, things to work my worry beads over with?
ThymeZone
Hmm. Well, I spent a lot of time in a research lab in a facility that is something of a household name. Can’t say what I was doing there (anonymity, and all) but I wasn’t cleaning the toilets, let me put it that way.
I also was not involved in the research work. But I saw it going on right in front of me. Let me put it this way:
The treatment was clean, professional torture. Very clean, very professional, very caring torture.
zzyzx
I’ve been a vegetarian for nearly 22 years now. It’s pretty darn easy these days to make the change in any big city without really depriving yourself from yummy food. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re feeling that strongly, you might want to at least try it for a bit and see how it goes.
ThymeZone
I think we can solve two problems at once if simply start eating illegal aliens.
ThymeZone
Yeah, and look at you: You have a vowel obstruction.
Jay Andrew Allen
Folks on this thread need to stop confusing a “farm” with a CAFO (Confined Animal Feed Operation). Farms can – and many do – produce meat as humanely as possible, without corn-feeding cows and stuffing them full of steroids and antibiotics until they become non-ambulatory.
Michael – you should also read THE OMNIVORE’S DILEMMA by Michael Pollan. Pollan visited a CAFO and documented the atrocities he beheld – from the animals who were falling-down sick, to the lagoon of manure that was so toxic no farmer could ever use it on his fields.
Michael D.
Agreed. I saw the same thing for 4 years in the lab at my college while I was studying psychology.
J sub D
E. coli.
Spinich.
Deaths, illnesses and recalls.
Have a salad. ;-)
zzyzx
Hmmmm, I first saw Zzyzx Road less than a year after becoming a vegetarian. Coincidence?!?!
demimondian
TZ, as you know, I used to work in the research side of what you call “clean, professional, caring torture”. None of my colleagues, nor I, would ever have disagreed with your assessment; animal research *is* clean, professional, caring torture.
Animal research is a necessary evil. That doesn’t make it less evil, merely the least of many evils, just as recognizing it to be evil does not make it less necessary, either.
mantis
You’ll be happier, too. I stopped eating all meat eight years ago, and I’m much healthier now, and I eat a much wider variety of foods than I did when I was a carnosaur. Sure, I get the urge to eat a bacon cheeseburger now and then, but if I did I think I’d probably get sick.
Just be sure to get your iron (beans, dried fruits, spinach, breads and pasta, etc.).
qingl78
This seems to be a particularly American phenom. Alberta and most Canadian provinces that have a large beef industry have free range cattle. Can’t tell you much about slaughter houses though. Can tell you that Cows are usually treated well. Pigs are treated ok for the most part. Chickens on the other hand…. It is like we are getting revenge for something.
demimondian
Dangerous contamination due to the raising of cattle on corn. Murder by meat.
Dork
Pretty sure, TOS, that it’s quite plausable that the knife misses every so often (what mechanical equipment doesn’t fail on occasion?), and what should be a dead bird is instead of live one.
Just saying. Article’s points seem entirely plausible.
/takes another bite of chicken sandwich
Michael D.
Enjoy your necessary mascara!
ThymeZone
Send me an email at tz_blogger_@ya_hoo.c_om
Remove the underscores.
Krista
Indeed. The husband and I have greatly reduced the amount of meat that we eat. It was mainly for economic reasons, as it gets pricey to eat meat every day. The meat we buy from the house is all pretty much local, as our closest store is the local Co-op, and we have an awesome free-range poultry farmer just down the road.
Yeah, I’ll still buy some fish sticks, and yeah, every so often I’m going to go to Wendy’s and get me a classic double with cheese (plain please — I don’t like condiments). But I think that the whole factory farming thing is one of those things that won’t change overnight. If we all can make small changes — eating less meat, and trying to find better sources of it for the vast majority of our consumption — then eventually these producers will HAVE to treat their animals more humanely.
Interesting post, though — I recently bought The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and I think I’m going to give it a read over the next few days. Maybe my entire attitude will change.
ThymeZone
Can’t disagree.
ThymeZone
Retinitis pigmentosa.
Pretty sure.
Just kidding.
tBone
In the outbreak a couple of years ago, the cattle were grass-fed. Wild pigs were the likely transport mechanism that moved the e coli into the spinach fields.
In other news, Soylent Green? People. Peeeeoooople.
Punchy
Bullshit. You cannot do research, at least at a university level, on animals if the animal will be in pain the whole time. No committee would ever allow it. Animal Care would never allow it.
I wont speak for industry research; they must balance ethics with dollah billz (which is disgusting). But research animals in academia are not “tortured”. If they are, that researcher is in violation of his approved protocol.
Valkyrie
Being a mother doesn’t mean being a carnivore; I’m 6 months pregnant, a vegan, and have a healthy, strong, active fetus growing in me. My doctor doesn’t fret, because my diet is healthy; I get the nutrients that my baby and I both require.
Although I’d like to think that my choice to become a vegan would inspire or contribute to world change, it won’t. Factory farming still happens. Animals are still killed (and yes, I’m an ethical vegan; I feel better when my diet doesn’t involve the furry members of this planet. And for the idiots, I grew up on a farm and know exactly what it’s all about. Did YOU ever slit a pig’s throat and dip him in boiling water to loosen the skin?). What I get out of being vegan is health and a happier karma. And for me and my family, that’s enough.
Do what you feel is right, Michael, and ignore the trolls.
dslak
I married an Indian, which has greatly reduced my consumption of meat. At least the payoff has been tasty.
Krista
Actually, Michael, very few cosmtic companies test on animals anymore. Here’s a list of all of the ones that don’t. The only major cosmetic name that I couldn’t find on there was Noxell (i.e. Cover Girl). It could be that they’re on there, but perhaps under a different name or something. At any rate, there is plenty to get upset about wrt animal testing without getting spazzed out about mascara.
Charles Fox
I went vegetarian about a year ago now, never thinking at the time that I could stick it out. Turned out to be pretty easy for me. I’m not pure, I still have a burger every two months or so, but otherwise I don’t miss it at all. One thing I hate is when my fellow vegetarians get all holier-than-thou and try to push their diet down other people’s throats. But since you’re considering it anyway I just wanted to drop a word of encouragement. Even if this just turns out to be a passing experiment for you, at the very least you’ll probably learn a few new neat recipes. Good luck!
John S.
Ooh, pick me!
I worked every summer for five years on my brother’s beef and veal farm in upstate New York.
I will say that for your average farm run by families or collectives, the treatment of animals is quite humane. People who grow up on farms or in farming communities generally have extremely humane attitudes.
The problem is with big company farms. They don’t look at the animals as living creatures, they only see $$$. For them it is all about profit margin and cost benefit. The same attitude applies to nearly every product made by a large corporation.
ThymeZone
That’s the criterion? Wow, I feel a lot better about it now.
Michael D.
Except:
Giorgio
Clairol
Max Factor
Faberge
Oscar de la Renta
Cover Girl
Neotoric Cosmetics
Sally Beauty Supply
Here’s a list of other companies.
J. Michael Neal
One of my cats sent you an e-mail, right? I bet I can even guess which one. It’s a lie, I tell you. It is not true that I have never fed her, ever.
Googootz
I don’t think of it as a liberal position. It’s letting free-market capitalism determine the wage.
As for getting worked up over food animals vs. human farm workers, it just illustrates the Wal-Mart effect: Lots of people complain that Walmart is evil, but they shop their for the low prices anyway. Call it hypocritical if you like, but what people say and what people do are frequently two different things.
grumpy realist
Well, I just ended up paying $4 for a carton of organic eggs from free-range chickens. So much for “ovo-lacto-vegetarianism” being all that cheap. And the organic lentils I bought at Whole Foods were $2.89/lb. (About the cheapest stuff I found there was the bulk organic carrots. Not much protein in those.)
For a lot of people, they’re just not going to be able to afford eating “morally”.
Tim F.
Michael,
Blanket statements condemning animal research are the ultimate failure of moral arguments against economic reality. Nobody who has ever helped a family member overcome cancer will ever take your argument seriously again.
Before responding by anecdote, note that I said blanket statements. Some research is pointlessly cruel and much of it can be done better or not at all without much loss to humanity. None of that contradicts the absolute and undeniable value of medical animal research.
ThymeZone
“Meow tuna meow salmon meow chicken meow cough hairball meow claw sofa meow catbox meow meow meow meow meow.”
It’s hard not to be moved by something like that.
chopper
i buy all my meat from farmers whose animals are raised on pasture. the beef is about 1-2$ a pound more expensive than decent-quality corn-fed stuff from the local butcher.
i don’t see where people get this idea that pastured meat is so much more expensive. maybe if you compare it to the bottom-of-the-barrel shit at the grocery store, but that stuff is barely meat.
ThymeZone
In the end, it’s the mistreatement of owners by cats that will be the real tragedy of our time.
YellowJournalism
Cover Girl still participates in animal torture. It’s called, “America’s Next Top Model.”
in canaduh
Tim F/Micheal
I m shocked at how you let people like The Other Steve use such crude foul language when responding to Micheal’s posts. Even if you disagree he deserves to be treated respectfully
ThymeZone
I must say, as I take leave of these surroundings for a while, bottom line, I have no sympathy for the people who run the plant shown in the subject video. They may have been put out of business by this thing, and that’s fine with me.
chopper
i dunno. i consider myself an ‘ethical meat eater’, although some vegans might hate that phrase.
i think meat is a good part of a person’s diet, as long as you keep the portions low and vary it. i also think that meat can be sustainable enough if you do the above and get meat from sources that pasture their animals. the meat is way healthier too.
i realized a long time ago that the only way i could rationalize eating meat from the point of view of animal treatment and environmentalism is to only eat meat that fit into that world view. luckily, that sort of meat is widely available to me even in the city. it costs more, but then again why wouldn’t it?
Zifnab
Cause you’re being a cynical little asshat for the sake of being a cynical little asshat. “Oh look! Animals are being treated inhumanely and people are disgusted. This’ll save me a buck at the grocery store! Hum-de-dum.” Thanks, Mother Teressa, your empathy and intellectual acumen truly knows no bounds. It’s always nice to know that in the face of corporate cruelty designed to save a buck, we can find an absolute wanker willing to smile at the whole situation cause he’s saving another $.50/lb on pork chops.
I’ve got ten to one odds that if we start bombing goat herders in Iran, you’re going to run to Google Finance to check how much your Raytheon stock went up by.
Mr. Moderate
Umm, it doesn’t cost $20 a pound if you know where to look. I just bought ten pounds of local, organic, grass fed, free range, antibiotic free, humanely slaughtered beef for $6.50 a pound. That included cuts of chuck and other which would probably be between $3.50 to $5.00 a pound around here anyway. It is a fallacy that you can’t find this in an affordable fashion.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
When Clinton was president, chickens were raised in palaces, and were tickled to death by kittens!
Actually, I’m stunned it took 20+ posts for you guys to get to “It’s Bush’s Fault®!” although it only took TZ five to blame Reagan (someone has never read his Sinclair).
Scum, for eating meat? JFK ate meat. FDR ate meat. Che Guevara ate meat! Barack Obama loves to cook and eat meat! Were/are they scum, too? Not Che!
The balance between a) ethical care of animals which are conceived and raised for the express purpose of food and b) cost/price concerns is a tricky one. I think the key is, if you feel uncomfortable with the way Tyson treats chickens (or you want a chicken that tastes like chicken), there are alternatives. Don’t buy from Tyson, buy free-range organic.
But I don’t think you (as
self-righteouscompassionate liberals) want to get into the business of telling a poor or fixed-income family that they are going to have to pay three times as much for their chicken because you don’t approve of Tyson’s process and want them to change it. When you’re talking about food, your personal ethics are a middle-class luxury that should affect only your own personal choices.chopper
those two terms mean absolutely nothing.
Zifnab
They should have been. They won’t be. This’ll continuing happening until you get people in the executive branches who give a fuck.
Next time a DA or a mayor comes up for re-election, find out his stance on animal rights. Make your votes accordingly.
chopper
zactly. shit, i go to the butcher and i can get a really nice corn-fed steak for 15$ a pound. i can get the same steak, grass-finished, from a farmer for 16-17.
plus, while being on a first-name basis with your butcher is nice, being on a first-name basis with the guy that actually raises the meat is better.
demimondian
Oh, look. EEEL is back!
Wanker.
tBone
Or do what I do: have a relative who raises animals (humanely) and butchers some (err, semi-humanely?) each year to share with the family. Problem solved.
How about the people who have had their air, rivers or groundwater polluted by CAFOs? Do they get any say in the matter?
demimondian
Of course not. Laws are for the little people…
to obey.
Michael D.
in canaduh: I have learned to ignore the type of crap some people throw at me here.
Redleg
What’s more obscene is the apparent disdain for the issue of food safety by those Bush officials most responsible for ensuring safe food. I expect that within a day or two, the Sec. of Agriculture will be telling us that she intends to continue eating lots and lots of beef.
Tim C
From now on, all I will eat is soylent green.
Evinfuilt
lol, and I guarantee Fois Gras was more humane (the pipe stuffed down their throat is similar to the beak stuffed down their throat, by their own mother.)
We have to stop putting Human emotions onto animals. They are different, and they are tasty.
Krista
Or have relatives who hunt and fish. That helps too.
This conversation has made me more committed to avoiding factory farming. I’m not going to avoid meat altogether. We’ve tried eating vegetarian for stretches of time, but my husband does very physical work, and just found that his energy was way too low. Besides — we like meat. But, I think I can definitely commit to buying my meat and eggs from small, local suppliers.
It is awfully nice to see that people are starting to be a lot more aware of where their food comes from. I think that this awareness will play a big part. Hopefully more and more people will choose small-farm meat. It’s not only better and more humane, but it could help keep a lot of these small farms from having to close due to the factory-farm competition.
Thanks for the cosmetics list, Michael. I’ll definitely have a good look at it.
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
Michael – this is absolutely wonderful! Consider seeking out your local vegetarian group/club/etc. for support, information and plain old good times. Also, email me if I can ever help.
Eliminating meat from your diet at first seems deprivational, but you quickly learn there is a huge amount of great food out there and meat really is a minor part of it all.
Hillary
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
You and I are lucky — I’m getting four blue-foot chickens (allegedly a close cousin to the poulet de Bresse that spoiled me for life in France a few years back) and a turkey from my sister-in-law’s ranch next month, but few have access to that kind of arrangement. It’s great meat, although the chickens weren’t exactly raised in Bresse conditions (no mussels and milk for their breakfast — poor things).
Safe treatment and ethical treatment of animals are two separate issues in that case.
Evinfuilt
Imagine that, a propaganda site with decades old information. Used by you to deny me my medicine, or allow my grandparents to die from Diabetes.
Wow, go back to being a Rethug, you seem good at disconnecting your head from reality.
Let me guess, after tonight you’ll go burn down some researchers house to get the point across. Because you know thats what ALF does, they attack humans working on honest research to prevent people from getting healthy.
There are already laws and procedures in place, it makes something already difficult, very time consuming too. But don’t let reality get in the way of your knee jerk reaction.
Stop and think about this, the Dali Lama actually approves of Animal Research. Why? Because of the millions of lives saved every year from it.
That’s what militant Veganism gets you, DEATH! Veganism is a cult on how to out do each other at killing themselves off to save a couple cute furry animals (that then get killed by the Falcons just released in town to control the pigeon population.)
chopper
can i subscribe to your newsletter?
Punchy
Raytheon makes goats now?
Tom in Texas
Anyone notice that flat earth veggie chips ad PJM is running? I am agog that a veggie companie would call themselves such (though it is pretty funny), and even more bumfuzzled they chose PJM to advertise through.
HyperIon
i skipped to the end to post this so apologies if this is a repetition. i recommend Nina Planck’s “Real Food”. she is adamant about the dangers of raising infants as vegans. although pollan’s “omnivore’s dilemma” gets more press, RF makes a scientific case for all of the author’s views. her ideas on LDL are very interesting. she has convinced me to try raw milk. fortunately seattle has many locations where it can be purchased. i am considering buy a cow share.
Michael D.
I have never once argued against using animals for medical research. I argue all the time against using them to test cosmetics.
Punchy
Sorry, Kris, but I dont buy this. Perhaps the companies themselves no longer perform the testing, but their products are being tested on animals by someone somewhere along the line. As a chemist, I cannot imagine mixing a variety of acids, bases, surfactants, esters, artificial colors and emulsifiers and thickening agents and then asking a human to wipe it on thier skin first.
Somewhere, in a contract lab a thousand miles away, Avon is having their new exfoiant tested on a rat’s skin.
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
There might be real, reasonable arguments out there against changing one’s diet, but these shallow wankings are not among them:
>>I’m not going to fight millions of years of evolution.
So can we assume that if you get appendicitis or a heart attack, you will not intervene and just let natural selection take its course? And that you support naturally evolved behaviors such as slavery and warfare? and that you disdain other non-evolutionarily-derived behaviors such as using technology?
>>Everytime I see someone take a break from protesting foie gras to eat a McBurger I want to laugh in their face.
I seriously doubt you’ve ever seen this. I know many foie gras protesters and they were all veg’n. Maybe there are a few out there who haven’t made the connection, but they are such a minute fraction of the foie gras protest population that generalization is invalid. btw, great tactic, that: putting people down who are merely trying to do the right thing. Doesn’t stop them, and just makes you look like a jerk. Must have worked great in junior high.
>>When you’re talking about food, your personal ethics are a middle-class luxury that should affect only your own personal choices.
No, factory foods are huge exploiters of the environment AND labor. And btw, this statement – “your personal ethics are a middle-class luxury” – could be used to enable any evil. I suspect you didn’t really mean that but I would give that viewpoint some more thought.
Hillary
PS – “First they ignore you… Then they mock you… Then they fight you… Then you win.” – Gandhi
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
>>I think I can definitely commit to buying my meat and eggs from small, local suppliers.
Krista (and others) – that’s a wonderful compromise step.
Best,
Hillary
Krista
Likely right — I’ll have to be more conscious of this. At least now though, there does seem to be a lot more choices out there in regards to cruelty-free products. I’m just noodling around right now on caringconsumer.com. Can I promise that I’ll never, ever again use a product that’s been tested on animals? No, I can’t promise that. Can I promise that I will make a conscious effort to choose cruelty-free products? Yeah, I think I can do that.
Every little bit counts for something, right?
Face
I’ve always wondered if the rats with the mascara, when placed back into the cage, get hit on more often by the male rats more often than the control rats.
Krista
By the way, Avon is actually on Caring Consumer’s list as a company that doesn’t test on animals. Here’s the full list.
Sirkowski
I watched the video.
Not nice, but I’ve seen a lot worse.
Anthropomorphism is hardly a good reason to go veggie.
demimondian
First, Valkyrie, congrats! Please notice that I was careful to distinguish between LOV and strictly vegetarian. You can absolutely have healthy pregnancies as a veggie or as a vegan — the latter is just much harder, and typically involves dietary supplementation. Your doctor, of course, will have already told you all that.
Punchy
That’s my point. You dont want a product on your skin/in your hair/in your body that hasn’t been tested first. And testing requires evaluating possible rashes, burns, allergic responses, etc for each formulation. Nary a company in existance would use humans for this first round of saftey testing. They all use animal skin for this.
You should insist that your makeup has been animal tested first. At least you know those companies aren’t bullshitting you with that feel-good, lying sticker.
demimondian
Punchy’s right — someone, somewhere, is spraying that stuff into a rabbit’s eyes, spreading it on a shaved patch of a rat’s skin, and feeding it to a pig. It won’t be Avon, no, but it’ll be a “supplier” to a “supplier”. The company can’t afford the risk otherwise.
tom.a
Durbin, imo, spoke appropriately. He can’t get legislative change based on feeling bad for the animals or wanting us humans to have some humanity. He needs to say it can cause harm to the public so safety issues come into play, THAT congress can act on.
J sub D
I’ll plead guilty to cynicism. I’m a meat eater, I don’t apologize or agonize over it. I’ve got other, more relevant (to me) things to worry about. Put on a hair shirt and beat your breasts about how we treat chickens all you want. Don’t expect me to remain unamused by it.
Krista
That’s something I’m wondering, though. Yes, there are new ingredients out there in the cosmetics world, but wouldn’t a very large percentage of the raw ingredients in cosmetics have already been tested over and over again? They aren’t continuing to test them, are they? Seems awfully pointless.
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
Punchy –
You don’t want a product in your skin, etc., that *requires* animal testing. The only reason they require it is because of all the chemical ingredients they put in it. A product made of benign and healthy ingredients shouldn’t require testing, and there are plenty of them out there.
Animal testing is a racket – it really doesn’t make the public safer. It leads people to think that unsafe products are safe, and became entrenched through government inertia and corporate lobbying. (There is a huge industry devoted to providing animals for testing, and conducting the tests.)
Europe, btw, is way ahead of us in moving toward cellular and non-animal models which are more effective. and there was wonderful news last week that even the US is moving beyond it:
Three U.S. agencies aim to end animal testing
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2008-02-14-animal-tests_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip
they are referring to the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Toxicology Program and the National Institutes of Health.
Hillary
demimondian
They are, and it isn’t.
Individual items can be safe, but dangerous in combination. Emulsifiers, for instance, are constantly being improved and modified; someday, somewhere, one will also amplify allergic responses by several orders of magnitude. As a result, women who are very very slightly sensitive to rose water will go into anaphylactic shock when they apply a base with the emulsifier.
The companies try to avoid that.
mantis
I’ve always wondered if the rats with the mascara, when placed back into the cage, get hit on more often by the male rats more often than the control rats.
Cute, but animal testing of cosmetics doesn’t actually involve control groups. They just want to know if the chemicals they’re using burn the animals’ skin off, and are not presenting research for review.
demimondian
If you were aggressive and nasty, I’d go into full on mockery mode. Instead, since I think you’re sincere, if misguided, I think I’ll be nice.
That statement is utter nonsense. There are many benign and healthy ingredients which you should never mix. There are also a great many benign and healthy ingredients you can, safely, mix. The only way to know which is which is to test them.
Claiming that something is healthy because we’ve used it for eons is foolish; there are too many things which we’ve found to be dangerous in the last fifty years for that to pass the laugh test. (Lead paint, anyone? Distilled mercury? Silver dietary supplements?) There is one way, and one way only, to determine if something is safe, and that is to test it.
demimondian
Actually, no. The studies do use control groups; they need to be able to withstand the mockery of professional expert witnesses who discuss the results in a courtroom.
Punchy
I echo what Demi says north of me. Anything designed to be applied topically has to be shown not to cause an adverse reaction(s). You may tell the gov’t, “well, beeswax and sodium dodecyl and HPMC and cortisone all, by themselves, are harmless”, but they will demand that you prove that, in combination, they remain so.
As a company, you can either use a rat, find out how toxic your brew really is in combination, and be out about $4, or attempt to go all ethical, and have 19 year-old Jane the Human Tester melt her face using this mis-formulation. Hence, the rat. Every time. I’m not anti-animal; I’m only dealing with reality and liability and feasability of the whole industry.
Punchy
Um….hmmm….what? There’s always a control. When you rub one animal with a mix and it turns red, you must know if the red is due to the mix, or the rubbing. Your control has been rubbed with control saline, and does not turn red. Ergo, your product causes localized inflammation.
No control? No conclusions. Every experiment uses controls.
tBone
I was just being a smartass. Every time I see the price of meat in the grocery store I’m reminded of how good I’ve got it.
In this case, ethical treatment of animals (or lack thereof) has a direct impact on the safety issue.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like self-righteous vegetarianism either – but dismissing all of their points as bourgeois self-indulgence is silly too.
TenguPhule
Uh, I hate to break this to you, but not eating meat and still being able to get all of the needed nutrients needed for optimal health is a luxury.
Thanks to government subsidies, it is cheaper to eat meat in one form or another then it is to get those proteins from other sources.
Some of us do not have luxury of being choosy when it comes to meeting that food budget.
Dork
I’m glad to see “tBone” is not a vegetarian. Otherwise my head would have exploded with irony overload. Everytime I consider going veggie, I look at my wonderful incisors and realize I need a drumstick.
TenguPhule
Local Nudists Club 101?
TenguPhule
Sulfer, Saltpeter and Charcoal.
Fairly harmless by themselves.
Mixed together however….
TenguPhule
Soylent Brown. Now in new Cheeto flavor!
Krista
And now I know. I’d often wondered about the rationale behind continuing to test known ingredients. Thank you demi (and also TenguPhile, for your pithy version of the same response). I’ve learned something today.
TenguPhule
I’m sorry, when exactly did the Clenis appoint officials in charge of Food and Drug Safety who didn’t give a shit about doing their jobs?
Right, I thought so.
demimondian
Even better: tobacco leaves. Rum. Steep.
I’ll see your gunpowder, and raise you nicotianic acid: “cancer in a bottle”.
tBone
I’ve considered it, but then I’d have to change my handle. Who wants that kind of hassle?
Annamal
I’m from New Zealand (where being a vegetarian is often taken as a personal challenge) and I just thought I should point out that a recent study of energy use (in response to the whole food miles argument) showed producing our grass fed meat and shipping it to Europe used less energy than Europeans factory farming their own meat.
Grass fed really is the way to go from an ethical and environmental perspective.
TenguPhule
Quadludes and vodka.
I’ll call with a Suicide Shot.
TenguPhule
I do wish that overenthusiastic activists would take a few deep breaths to calm down. Honey, Vinger and all that.
Meat is a part of the diet, Granted I personally would love to see that meat come from lower down the food chain as it is both more efficient and nutrious…not to mention I doubt anyone but the most obsessed activist would object to factory farming grasshoppers and caterpillars.
Unfortunately for some reason this particular government doesn’t seem to believe in giving out grants for insect farming on a industrial scale.
demimondian
Or do what I do: make contact with a ranch near to where you live that raises animals in reasonable conditions and butchers them as humanely as possible.
The key point is that (1) you can afford to buy meat which isn’t factory farmed, (2) you can afford to raise a family on it, even one which has three fast-growing pre-teen and teen-aged boys in it, and (3) you get to know a lot more about the animals your eating than you otherwise would.
BTW…hyperlon, I’d make sure I had a vet look at any animal I was getting raw milk from. There have been several TB scares in the Vancouver, WA area recently due to raw milk.
demimondian
Only if you spell the trank’s name right: methaqualone (quaaludes).
Interestingly, that brings all this back around to animal testing. According to wiki (where I went to check the spelling of the generic chemical name), there was a period during which crush ‘ludes were smoked. This was only a problem because the pill contained binders which were toxic when ignited, although inert when consumed.
borehole
“We have to stop putting Human emotions onto animals. They are different, and they are tasty.”
Yeah, human emotions like pain.
Seriously, Michael, try maxing out your veg intake and leaving some room for humanely-raised meat & dairy before you go whole-hog, as it were. I always meant to switch back when I could afford to patronize farms that treat their animals decently, but after a couple of meatless years your body’ll reject anything remotely fleshy and it’s a bitch to retrain. Plus there’s a psychological angle–I try every couple of months and I usually can’t get the first mouthful to stay down.
Point is, the only way to smash big agra is to support actual farms. Don’t end up like me, a Nader voter of the animal-welfare world.
TenguPhule
Even animal testing can’t match the ingenuity of human stupidity.
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
Demimondan –
Appreciate the lack of mockery. I see your point about combining ingredients. How do you feel about testing on (i.e., torturing) animals for a product that is truly superfluous or useless, like cosmetics and cleaning products. I’m not asking whether one has the right to do it – unfortunately we do – but only whether you believe it is ethically important.
I also wonder whether you think it’s ethical in situations where there are already-tested products out there that do the job.
You seem pretty knowledgeable, but didn’t comment on my larger point – that animal testing provides the illusion of safety more than the actual safety.
Thank you again for not mocking.
Hillary
demimondian
I don’t see how there’s a problem at all. Of course one shouldn’t use animal-tested cosmetics if it can be avoided. Equally of course, I don’t eat veal, and avoid foie gras aggressively.
I avoid animal tested cosmetics to the extent possible (and you other guys? what do you wash your hair with?) On the other hand, I sort of want my toothpaste to have been tested for toxicity, so I’m afraid I stop short of not brushing my teeth.
Punchy
Can I answer? Are cleaning products superfluous? Most would say no. Therefore, their relative necessity demands their presence. Thus, tests would have to be done to make sure a few drops on skin doesn’t initiate a chemical reaction whereby the skin peels off or causes excessive pain. It’s just a matter of liability that these are tested on animals first.
demimondian
I think that Hillary meant soap and shampoo when she wrote “cleaning products”. She probably wasn’t thinking of dishwasher detergent or floor wax. (My guess, in fact, is that most people don’t even realize that dishwasher detergent and floor wax are tested for safety before they’re sold.)
mantis
No control? No conclusions. Every experiment uses controls.
Only if you’re concerned someone will scrutinize the results. I was probably too broad in my earlier comment (posted too quickly). There are less-than-reputable labs out there that do testing basically so their client can say they did it, and with little interest in reliable conclusions (and often without using trained or licensed toxicologists). Unlike with pharmaceuticals, the FDA does not require testing for cosmetics, so there are no regulations. Some manufacturers have been known to use such labs.
Every experiment uses controls? Only if you’re interested in reliable results, and not just insurance should you be accused of something. Companies bank on the likelihood that should their product have an adverse effect and cause them to be sued, that the results won’t be scrutinized (usually because nearly all such cases are settled out of court).
I’ll admit that I haven’t really studied the issue in many years, but when I did I saw evidence of shotty practices and less-than-scientific experiments. I’ll go digging and see what I can find.
fed up
can mr. cole plz dispose of the ridiculous michael person who posts these things, thank you very much, he makes the blog far less readable.
smokestack
Congrats on your decision! I’ve been vegetarian for 10 years and never looked back. Rather than felling restricted by my decision, it’s opened up a whole new world of foods and cooking.
Digital Amish
I’m one of the lucky ones. I live in a mostly rural portion of W. Wash. We buy beef (and milk) from a local organic dairy . A side a couple times a year. Year old steers, grass fed, pastured, no hormones. The price, including cutting and wrapping by a local butcher, comes out a little higher than supermarket prices but not much. Not worrying about recalls and contamination make it worthwhile.
But with 300 million people to feed in this country and 6+ billion worldwide, I don’t see this being a viable option for everyone. I just don’t see the world being adequatly fed without large scale agriculural production methods.
demimondian
As to “the illusion of safety instead of real safety”, it’s really not true. Obviously, if you mean “complete safety”, there’s no way to provide complete safety, so animal testing doesn’t solve that.
However, what animal testing does do, and does very well, is reduce the risk. Many formulations are thrown out before they reach the market, and the flaws in many of those formulations were only detected by whole-system animal testing. (That is, the danger wasn’t exposed by a cellular screen or other test which didn’t involve a complete animal.)
You need to be extremely careful about loving the products of the past. Many, many of them were unimaginably dangerous by our current standards. Face creams with lead in them were routinely available as cosmetics well into the twentieth century. Eye drops with arsenic in them. “Plumbing” derives its name from the ductile, heavy, easily worked metal that was used to make water pipes, and, later on, to make the solder with which those pipes were held together: again, lead. When I was a child, I used to dread trips to the gas station, because the smell of the auto fuel inside the car afterwards would make me very ill — which isn’t surprising, given how toxic gasoline fumes actually are.
I could go on and on. The lead example is quite telling; the only way which we actually quantified the incredible risk lead poses to children is through the much reviled animal testing.
Hating animal experimentation is a good thing; as I’ve said north of here, it’s a necessary evil. Just don’t let your hatred blind you to the “necessary” part.
wasabi gasp
Damn you, Michael D.!
Its been over 10 years since I was freed of the shackles of LOV-land. I have since found room for a second cheeseburger, where one would do. Bacon has become a garnish for bacon. I salute General Tso. The question “Chicken or fish?” no longer devolves into chaos and horror. And, my plump is pleasant.
Thanks dooooood!
Now on top of everything else my renewed pasty white veggie life will bring, somewhere in answering the question “Why did you become a vegitarian?”, I’ll be heard saying “No, not the guy from the Beastie Boys.”
demimondian
wasabi gasp —
why can’t you libs take resposibility for your own selves? Michael D. can’t make you do anything; your choice to follow his svengalesque pleadings is purely your own, and nobody else’s.
Nicole
Respectfully disagree- I was a strict vegetarian for years, when I was at my economically poorest (well below $20,000 a year). Food cost me less than it did my friends who were omnivores. Even now, as an occasional (humanely raised) meat-eater, my food costs are less than if I ate meat at every meal. And my health is as good as ever. Better, actually, because when you cut out meat you wind up eating more beans, rice, and other cheap but high fiber foods. Not to mention I learned to love veggies because I had to (nothing like cutting out meat when you don’t actually like vegetables. I gained a lot of weight on cheese sandwiches before I learned to love the broccoli).
Agreed, but we’re not in an Ice Age now, and my point was that as we don’t need it to survive, it makes even less sense to willfully finance blatant cruelty so that we can get a dollar hamburger.
For all the anthropomorphizing arguments- it is very well documented that factory-farmed animals exhibit clear signs of stress (another reason they wind up pumped full of antibiotics, as stress causes illness). If a company has to cut off chickens’ beaks to keep them from pecking each other to death, then it’s not doing right by the chickens.
On pet cruelty vs. feed animal cruelty- combined, there are about 100 million dogs and cats in US households. Which is about the same number of pigs slaughtered every year in the US. Since most of those pigs (and millions of chickens and cows, etc) are from factory-farms, I think we can safely assume feed animal cruelty outweighs pet cruelty, Thyme.
I myself am not opposed to raising animals for food; my issue is with how those animals are kept while they’re alive. Cheap protein just isn’t worth the cruelty.
chopper
if you aren’t willing to figure out how, sure. it isn’t that hard, it’s just that eating meat is easier. i wouldn’t call it a ‘luxury’ though.
wasabi gasp
demi,
Huh? Was that jolt of dolt supposed to be taken seriously?
Zuzu
Congratulations, Michael. Aside from the ethical considerations, you have made a decision that may likely extend your life by years.
I have been a vegetarian for nearly 20 years now. I was a vegan for 10 of those years, and only began eating eggs and dairy again over the last few years. I make a point to try only to buy organic, ethically produced egg and dairy products. I am happy and healthy, and I enjoy what I eat. Oh yes, I try to avoid leather products.
I heard once that the single most effective thing you can do to help the environment is to stop eating meat. I don’t know if that’s strictly true, but considering the immense negative impact of the livestock industry on the planet, I can imagine it’s up there on the list:
Livestock’s Long Shadow
Hillary Rettig / The Lifelong Activist
Demi and Punchy –
I meant all cleaning products, including floor stuff.
My point was that the products themselves are unnecessary. good safe cosmetics, shampoos, floor wax, etc. already exist. You can clean your floors with diluted vinegar. Will it get as clean as some high-powered chemical – no – but it’s clean enough and safer for all concerned. A friend who is a microbiologist says that he sees chemicals in home cleaning products that were formerly reserved for laboratories. in other words, to sell products, corporations promote an unreasonably high bar on cleanliness. as I’m sure you know, this is an unhealthy situation for many reasons including the chemicals involved and data that indicate that over-disinfecting can lead to childhood illness and superbugs.
Also, I know all about lead paint, arsenic face paint, Coke with cocaine, etc. I’m not saying blindly emulate the past. But there are products that have been used that are known to be safe. you can concoct some decent skin creams with non-toxic vegetable ingredients, for instance.
Hillary
Dave
What you haven’t thought about, Mike, is the fact that most people are going to essentially shrug and say “That’s bad, but its not my problem.”
Children without health insurance “Disgusting, but it’s not my problem.”
Thousands of Iraqis dying because we screwed up there country “How awful, but it’s not my problem.”
People in Africa dying because of abstinence only education “that’s terrible, but it’s not my problem.”
Sen. Durbin was appealing to these people the only way you can, by pointing out “it is your problem.”
Sojourner
Wow, not in Ohio. Meat is a lot more expensive than beans and grains.
Where do you live?
TenguPhule
Grain and beans don’t provide all of the needed amino acids without help.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
Tired maxims mean nothing to a family with $100 to spend for a week’s worth of food. The chicken factory provides something of value to some people, obviously. Again, do you want to tell these poor people that their prices are going to double or treble because you think the chickens are getting a raw deal? Go for it — not me, man.
And I was very careful about the “ethics = luxury” thing being specific to the case we are discussing. I guess you chose not to remember that part.
TenguPhule
I’m sure that’s the case on Planet They had it Coming to Them So It’s Their Own Damn Fault.
On Planet Earth, we have something called Cost of Living.
TenguPhule
It sickens me to admit that EEEL and I are in agreement over this.
At this point and time, due in no small part to trends, laws and the subsidized market it is asking a lot from people who are worrying about how to just keep the meals steady to care about things such as the ethics of eating meat.
TenguPhule
Cleaning products are superfluous or useless?
Please, that’s begging for snark right there.
Shall we declare a total ban on any technical innovation whatsoever then?
We shoot animals up in rockets to see if it’s okay for people to go on up. We expose animals to chemical biproducts in order to prove that company claims it’s okay to dump in the local water table is a bad idea.
There had to be common sense applied. Both sides have a point, some testing is plain stupid but some of it is needed. And it’s not going away.
Zuzu
Plenty of people would disagree with that assessment. For instance:
“Actually, human bodies are better suited for a vegetarian diet. Carnivorous animals have long, curved fangs, claws, and a short digestive tract. Humans have flat, flexible nails and our so-called “canine” teeth are minuscule compared to those of carnivores, and even compared to vegetarian primates like gorillas and oranguatans. Our tiny canine teeth are better suited to biting into fruits than tearing through tough hides. We have flat molars and a long digestive tract suited to a diet of vegetables, fruits, and grains.”
Fry’s
One need not agree with all of this argument, but I think it makes a lot more sense than saying our tiny canines are proof that we’re meat-eaters.
TenguPhule
For those of us blessed with easy access to fresh local produce (which I am fortunately) that is true.
It’s when you’re not so lucky that it becomes a problem.
Also, there’s that little problem of how certain elements in vegetables are not as easily absorbed by the human body as they are when in meat, different compound formats and all that.
Hence my advocation of an insectivore diet. For the same amount of feed you can get several times more edible protein from a caterpillar then a cow.
And fried grasshoppers make great game snacks.
TenguPhule
We are descended from scavengers and insectovores who also ate bone marrow, hence our lack of true carnivore armament.
Eating fresh kills came much later.
TenguPhule
All of it animal tested already.
And yes, they exist…but someone will always try to build a better mousetrap.
Again, do you want to ban all innovation to stop this? Because people and companies will keep on tinkering to try and make a profit.
chopper
most newfangled ones are. hell, i can clean pretty much my whole house and everything in it using plain soap, vinegar, baking soda, lemon juice and borax. none of which need any ‘testing’ for safety.
Zuzu
I doubt it would have been Maher. He’s a PETA board member.
Zuzu
Which isn’t the same as saying we “evovled” as meat-eaters.
Sojourner
Help from plant sources.
TenguPhule
Yes. And it’s a lot harder then from meat. Human digestive system doesn’t absorb most of it, we’re remarkably inefficient that way.
Zuzu
Actually, that doesn’t seem to be the case:
TenguPhule
We evolved into eating meat, as a high energy food it was tough to beat. Still is.
Sojourner
citation?
Zuzu
How very elitest of you. Let them eat crap because they’re poor, and poor equals ignorant.
Beans and corn tortillas provide a good, cheap, source of protein…which people have subsisted on for generations.
The fact is that most other cultures use very little meat in their diets. If you see beef in a burrito, it’s shredded. If you see meat in an Asian dish, it’s usually in tiny pieces mixed in with the vegetables.
Zuzu
No. We became accustomed to it. You haven’t provided any evidence of physical evolution to adapt to it.
TenguPhule
Our eyes face forward instead of side to side.
Zuzu
Yeah, because we used to be birds.
TenguPhule
To be fair, this is because meat was expensive and rare to most people in those cultures. Also, they ate different forms of animal protein.
Mexico, the burritos have shredded meats. Grasshoppers are also eaten in large quantities around the country.
Asia, pork and fowl were the main domesticated animal meats. Chopping it into tiny bits in stir fry was more about conserving fuel, it cooks faster that way.
Hot pot? Roast Duck? Kebobs? Turtle? Goat? Organ meat surprise?
Bizzare Foods on the Travel channel is a wonderful education.
demimondian
Actually, EEEL, FDDD and I spent several years of our graduate school careers as vegetarians — because we were living on $4-5K/year, and couldn’t afford meat. I will tell you from personal experience that it’s cheaper to be veggie than not.
We were lucky, in that we cook and like beans and other legumes, and we ate eggs and cheese — packaged protein for highly evolved scavengers, you know — but we certainly weren’t starving, which we would have been had we lived on a diet based on meat as our primary protein source.
Zuzu
I didn’t say otherwise. But the fact is they have had an incredibly successful run on a low-meat diet.
Zuzu
As a matter of fact, my comment about the low-meat diets was in response to EEEL’s silly claim that the poor should eat crap simply because it’s cheaper.
demimondian
Zuzu — low-meat != no meat. There is no question that we eat far more meat than we even benefit from, much less that we need. There is equally no question that meat is a high value source of calories for all great apes, and that, yes, our mixed dentition shows that we’re just like the other great apes in that regard; if anything, in fact, we’re more carnivorous than most apes, since our teeth are too light to chew many vegetables without cooking them.
Don
Anyone interested in the issue of the cost of eating bad vs healthy owes it to themselves to follow Michael Pollen’s articles over the last few years and his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Others may not agree but for me the most compelling parts of the book were in the first 1/3 which examined the omnipresence of corn in the American diet and the impact of corn subsidies (vs the pre-70s price floor & loan) in the Farm Bill.
He mentions it very quickly, but our entire way of eating turns on it: that cheap food isn’t really cheap. And it’s changed entirely the way I read the paper whenever the subject of ethanol comes up.
Today’s WaPo, in fact, had a bit: a letter from the head of the National Corn Grower’s Association says the following:
After reading tOD my immediate reaction is “is this another hybrid that can’t grow without petroleum-based fertilizers?” Because if so, what does this accomplish for us?
Don
Whupsie daisy – I should have linked Michael Pollan’s article from last year on the farm bill.
TenguPhule
Nod.
But unfortunately we have shit like vienna sausage in a can instead of a healthy food environment.
Xanthippas
Yeah, and it’s bad for their health, and public health in general. And the price is going up anyway, because the rest of the world wants more meat too. So thanks for being clueless, and for your faux care about the poor, and try again.
Chris Johnson
Well, cheers Michael, go for it.
I’ve read Fast Food Nation and still eat meat- but I’m wary of buying any of it out of a supermarket. I get it at the corner store, which started as a butcher shop and still does that.
Good luck fixing the situation by being outraged but deregulating business. I think your libertarian instincts just hit a ‘wake the fuck up’ moment ;)
Anne Laurie
Somebody show Michael D. some rape porn — maybe he’ll announce he’s giving up having sex with other people.
“Hard cases make bad law”, and watching megacorporations abuse the protein units (including the human protein units) unfortunate enough to fall under their sway is not a sensible way to make everyone else’s nutritional choices. We (as people advantaged enough to be reading political blogs) can make more informed choices about buying local, cruelty-low, non-factory meat. We can choose to be vegetarians, or even vegans. But there’s a lot more complexity to our choices than PETA, which is the far-left equivalent of the Army of God, is ever going to credit.
As for the question of whether “pet” or “meat” animals have it worst — by tonnage, it’ll be the cows & pigs every time. By individuals, from what I’ve seen of humane society statistics, mistreated chickens outnumber mistreated dogs & cats by a factor of several. The real issue is not “who has it worse” but “how do we stop/reduce *all* of the mistreatment” — you don’t help dogs by mistreating chickens, unless you’re dumb enough to let the megacorps make the Best the enemy of your Good..
Or a Chinese factory worker’s face. Wait, I mean a “volunteer researcher’s” face! Yeah, you *wish* I were kidding about that one. We can always kick the Bad Stuff into another baliwick (like letting undocumented workers cripple themselves in American meat-packing plants, a century-old tradition) if we’re too eager for the cheap high of Righteousness to untangle the roots of where we went wrong. True change is hard & complicated & takes thought and cooperation; “giving up meat” because you saw an ugly video is easy & cheap.
Zuzu
Interesting point, but I’m not sure that one follows the other.
Zuzu
A-yep.
Zuzu
I just got his latest, which looks to be an interesting read as well:
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
That’s so stupid, I don’t know where to start. I’m not saying that anyone should tell them anything about what adults choose to eat. How, pray tell, are you going to stop poor adult people from buying cheap, mass-produced food? Then, explain McDonalds.
I’ve forgotten what a Bizarro World this place is these days. Not telling adult people what they can’t eat is elitist?
Guav
I had an epiphany like yours on my 18 birthday and went vegan. Now I’m 35 years old, and still vegan.
Scully had a good article in The American Conservative a few years back.
Zuzu
Dear EEEL –
As usual, you display your selective reading/processing skills.
Nowhere did I say you were telling them anything. You were, on the other hand, pronouncing that the poor were being “provided something of some value to them,” without considering that it might actually be poor value. And assuming that, being poor, they are just too stupid to be presented alternatives.
You also ignored the rest of my comment, which pointed out that other cultures have traditionally known how to get a nutritional bang for their buck.
demimondian
Even if you add in fire and basic tools, cereal grains and the time to prepare them are only available to humans who can farm them. That’s a change which came only about 6 to 8 thousand years ago; prior to that, we must have been largely carnivorous.
Basic tools don’t provide you with enough time to cook things which “take time”. You can roast meat, but not simmer it. You can fire roast wild grains, but not make a porridge. To eat those things raw, you need to heavy dentition of a gorilla or a chimpanzee — and we wouldn’t be able to talk with jaws capable of carrying such teeth.
Zuzu
Well, I agree that we don’t have the teeth/jaws capable of chewing bamboo stalks, but we are pretty well set up for most of the gatherer’s array: fruits, berries, seeds, nuts, greens, and many if not most roots.
I’m not saying we were never carnivorous…I just don’t see the argument that we are naturally built for it.
demimondian
Then we’re probably agreeing violently. We are not obligate carnivores, but, absent bronze age farming technology, we cannot extract enough protein from raw seeds to provide a complete protein source. Given that, it would be highly unlikely that we aren’t evolved to consume meat, since we’ve been dependent on it for so long.
db
I think I saw illegal immigrants operating those forklifts…. aha!!! There lies the problem; let’s deport them all and that will solve this problem!
Man, this “illegal immigrant switch-and-bait” is a great way to go through life… I can get away with anything now!
Zuzu
Well yes, except the word “evolved” implies a physiological change that I just don’t see.
rachel
Er… No. Consider hot rock cooking as merely one method for making porrige or stew when you don’t have containers that can be put directly on the fire.
jcricket
But really, if we all become vegetarians, haven’t the terrorists won? Doesn’t it come back to that?
You know that “vegetarian” is going to start being a smear the Republicans use more often soon, since it seems socialist is just about all outta juice.
Zuzu
Yep, right up there with “latte-drinking, Volvo-driving … “
empty
For anyone interested in vegetarian alternatives as well as social justice issues Satya is a really cool magazine – put out by a bunch of really cool people.
Zuzu
Final issue … ?
demimondian
I wasn’t clear; I’m sorry. I wasn’t arguing that the methods weren’t available — beside hot rock cooking, there’s basket cooking, pit cooking, and a variety of other direct and indirect methods available.
I was talking about the combination of time, amount, and mechanism. Porridge takes TIME to prepare, particularly from crushed (as opposed to ground) grain. Beans and legumes are an even greater problem, as they require drying to be preserved, and reconstitution to then be eaten. It’s not the mechanism I’m thinking about — it’s the time and stability to make the material.
demimondian
Look at the weight of our jaw when compared to that of H. erectus, say, to say nothing of Neanderthalis gracilis. We’ve traded off a more varied diet for someplace to put our brains.
jake
I read this post while eating a Big Mac. Am I going to hell?
tBone
Maybe you’re not looking hard enough?
empty
Sh*T! Well it used to be a real cool magazine when I used to live in this world.
Zuzu
That is an interesting point. How do you compare that to the skull formation of pure carnivores, for example?
Zuzu
Thanks tBone, that’s a fascinating article. It sort of goes along with demi’s point (I think), with this interesting emphasis:
Zuzu
Well, the website looks pretty interesting.
demimondian
tBone has a nice reference to a national geographic article on human dentition north of here. (For some reason, I thought gorillas did eat meat, albeit in very small quantities. Guess I was wrong.)
The tradeoff has to do with the ridges above our eyes — they serve as anchor points for the muscles which draw up the mandible. Our brains have grown into the space which used to be consumed by the brow ridges and their support structures. Interestingly, the part of our brains which has hypertrophied into that region is our prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most specialized for planning and the like.
tBone
I think what they’re implying is that if we continue on this evolutionary path, we’ll become a bunch of weak-jawed fatasses with children who require enormously expensive specialty care for their snaggle-toothed maws.
Hey, wait . . .
tBone
I question this. If it were true, you’d never see a member of the Bush administration in public without a hat on.
Zuzu
Fascinatin’ stuff.
Zuzu
So you’re saying the British have been ahead of us on the evolutionary scale?
empty
Ouch.
tBone
Anglophobe.
TenguPhule
Offer healthier, cheap, mass-produced food.
Fried Grasshopper, anyone?
TenguPhule
No, but in about 8 hours your colon will probably feel like it is.
TenguPhule
Yes, they did come up with Doctor Who, after all.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
No way — poor people get things of less value than rich people? No freaking way. I think you’ve got a doctoral thesis there.
Of course, Tyson chicken (sticking with that example) is of lesser quality than poulet de Bresse! But it’s chicken, and some people like chicken, and it only costs 0.89/lb, as opposed to $4/lb for a free-range bird, and that’s all some people can afford or are willing to spend. I can’t understand what you don’t get about this.
Projecting much? They’ve got all the alternatives in the world, and they don’t need you to tell them what they are. So to sum up: You are the elitist here (not surprising for an evangelical veggie), patronizing the poor as needing to be “presented alternatives,” and I am the egalitarian, saying that they are rational adults, not clueless children, and they are able to make their own choices without your expert opinion as to what they should eat and how much they can spend.
I ignored it because it isn’t germane at all to the topic. We’re talking about what rational adults want and how they get what they want, not what alternatives to give them once we decide that they can’t have what they want because it offends your sensibilities.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
I’ll bet those Oachacan chile crickets aren’t electroshocked. They’re fried… ALIVE! Call PETA!
demimondian
Hey, none of it comes close to what we do to lobsters — dunk them alive into boiling water. That’s an even slower death than immersion in boiling oil.
Zuzu
And lard is the cheapest of all. So what?
So to sum up: You are the elitist here (not surprising for an evangelical veggie), patronizing the poor as needing to be “presented alternatives,” and I am the egalitarian, saying that they are rational adults, not clueless children, and they are able to make their own choices without your expert opinion as to what they should eat and how much they can spend.
Actually, I don’t evangelize at all. This board is the first place I’ve talked about vegetarianism in ages.
Talk about projecting. You make a habit of infantilizing others and so assume others do the same. When they mention what the market makes available, you must pronounce that as “patronizing,” telling people what choices to make, etc.
See what I mean? No, likely not.
Zuzu
Corrected format:
Actually, I don’t evangelize at all. This board is the first place I’ve talked about vegetarianism in ages.
Talk about projecting. You make a habit of infantilizing others and so assume others do the same. When they mention what the market makes available, you must pronounce that as “patronizing,” telling people what choices to make, etc.
TenguPhule
And if wishes were fishes….
When choice A is the same as choice B with a different taste, that’s not much of a choice, now is it?
Why assholes like you pretend that this is a fine thing is beyond me, I suppose you must truly experience life at the bottom before you can develop what passes humanity.
LiberalTarian
Yeah, I miss the days my mom and dad used to raise a couple head of cattle and give us half a cow for Christmas. It was awesome.
Then my dad died of Creutzfeld Jakobs Disease.
Seriously. So, I have something of an educated interest in the wholesomeness of the food supply. He caught the infectious agent somewhere. And, in an almost criminal display of indifference, neither the CDC nor any other government agency tried to find out how he might have caught the disease. More importantly, they didn’t want to collect any data that CJD killed him, and they didn’t care that he had had surgeries that could have infected surgical instruments that would then be used on other people.
So, the government could give a flying fuck if we all fall dead from eating tainted meat.
But, you can be exposed 40 years or more before it kills you. They have these laws about feeding cattle other animals (but they give calves blood meal when they wean them, so oops, I guess they mean most other animal animal parts). People use blood meal and bone meal in their gardens and plants, and does anyone tell them the risk? Gee, we have an epidemic of prion diseases, including Alzheimers, and at 300+ cases of CJD every year (not that the CDC tracks it or has any reporting requirements, or even that most doctors recognize it when they see it).
I still eat meat, but I am not naive about whether the meat is contaminated. I don’t eat any kind of sausage or ground meat–since it is often contaminated with neural matter (look up cattle slaughter, it isn’t any kind of secret). The machines they use to strip the meat from the bone often crack the bones, and splatter the meat with neural tissue. At any given time people can test ground meat or any mass-produced meat for neural tissue, and it is there about 25% of the time.
This is a greed problem, pure and simple. Temple Grandin, and others, have devised fear-free, clean methods of slaughter. We eat meat, and many will continue to eat meat. Lifting a diseased, downer cow into a shute for a couple hundred lousy bucks? Pure, unadulterated greed. That can be fixed (if we don’t put any more fucking Republicans or Bush dogs in office). But, humans are greedy. If Michael D. wants to deal with it this way, more power to him.
Not that it will help much unless he is willing to grow all his own food. Look up perchlorate in the food supply–if it ain’t one thing, it’s another.
Zuzu
You know, recycled cigarette butts could be one of the cheapest food products around, and people should be allowed to buy it. Because it’s all about what people should be allowed to buy, not about what it’s ethical and appropriate to put on the market.
Zuzu
First of all, please accept my condolences on the tragic loss of your dad.
Second, you raise an interesting question I hadn’t thought much about in this context: do you think kosher meat may be inherently better this way?
Matt
I’m not going to bother reading through all the comments, but I just wanted to say, thanks for writing this and for making the choice you did.
TenguPhule
And here is the crux of the problem.
It’s a shitty situation, one that I’d like improved.
It won’t be easy, it won’t be cheap and people like EEEL will fight against it tooth and nail all the way.
Both sides of the problem need to be addressed, the shitty producers, the shitty distribution system and the shitty pay rates that force so many people to be mor e worried about getting a meal then about what happened to get it there.
Zuzu
Good points.
Michael D.
To an extent, I admire Temple Grandin because at least she is trying something. BUT, she is a supporter of Factory Farming, and none of those places take her seriously. They pay her for advice just so they say they did. For example, she recommends that pigs get a soft, pliable toy to play with in their severely confining pen.
What does the industry do with this recommendation? They dangle a chain in front of the pig. That’s the toy.
The problem is the factory farm. Its design doesn’t allow for any of the recommendations people like Grandin might make. A soft, pliable ball costs more than a chain, and 6″ less space is cheaper than 6″ more space. That’s all they need to know.
Michael D.
And, by the way, even if you are a vegetarian, or if you only buy ethically raised meat, you are still supporting Factory Farms.
It’s called the Farm Bill.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
Zuzu:
That’s silly (even ignoring that such a product would be illegal under FDA laws). If we’d let Kellogg’s put ciggie-butt breakfast cereal on the market, you’d still have nothing to fear, because the market — even the poor people who you think are so gullible and stupid — will reject it out of hand, and Kellogg’s will lose money and pull it from the market (which is why it will never happen).
If you feel that Butterball turkey is not “appropriate” for the market (and the market strongly suggests that you are wrong, by the way), good luck convincing a majority of Congress to pass whatever laws would align America to your sensibilities.
Tengu:
Beans and tortillas are the same as chicken with a different taste? Care to expound, or do you just not understand what we’re talking about?
What won’t be easy? What won’t be cheap? Why would you assume I’d be against doing That Which Must Not Be Named? Why won’t you guys talk specifics about what you want done? Do you even know what you want?
Your arguments have obviously reached bottom-of-the-barrel stage, so I’ll just sum up mine and be done with it.
1) Most people like to eat meat, and you’ll never change that.
2) Even poor people — especially poor people — are aware of the many non-meat alternatives available to them in this, the most diverse food market the planet has ever seen. They want to eat meat anyway.
3) Some people need or desire low-cost brands, a need which big companies satisfy (within the law, of course).
4) Everyone has his own morals. Good luck legislating yours. Just be aware that the people you would be hurting the most are those who could not afford prices to rise.
TenguPhule
You can buy processed to shit beans and processed to shit bleached tortillas or you can buy processed to shit fast food or processed to shit canned food or some nice processed to shit deli food. Same shit, different taste.
You could also get chicken or meat…and go hungry the rest of the week. Or shall we encourage a five finger discount?
Don’t spout to me about choices when a shitty system combining with runaway inflation is throwing food security for people to hell.
TenguPhule
We have to legislate ours because yours amount to “Fuck everyone else, I want it all for myself” and the Democrats can’t march your kind into the sea…yet.
John Harrold
This statement implies a serious lack of understanding of the basic science required to discuss this topic rationally. By saying this you have lost any credibility you might have had with me.
For those who are not aware, ‘chemical ingredient’ is a vague and useless term. Water is a chemical, as is table salt. “Chemicals”, by their virtue of fitting into that category, are not bad or unhealthy. And something that may be bad for you in one form (chlorine gas) may be required in another form (chlorine in sodium chloride (table salt)).
odanu
I’m rapidly turning into a “game-atarian’. That is, I eat very little farmed meat, because my husband hunts, and brings in over 200 lbs a year of never tortured, home-butchered deer and wild fowl. I wholely support game conservation, having seen what wild horses in too small a habitat allowed to breed without predators suffer through.
I also grow a great deal of my produce on my tiny suburban lot (using Square Foot Gardening techniques to maximize my yield).
I doubt I’ll ever make the leap to full fledged vegetarian, but I do strive to live a cruelty free life as much as possible.
Jamey
Says the Republican.
Michael, shut the fuck up. Eat what you want. Fuck who you want. But please stop trying to be “profound.”
Michael D.
Shorter Jamey: I like to comment because I get to see my name on Web pages. :-)
Zuzu
Sophisticated, nuanced analysis as always. And quick to pick up on the actual point being made.
And such a great sense of self-irony, too. Or is it self-parody?
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
That might be the dumbest thing you’ve ever written, Tengu, and you seem to be functionally retarded most of the time.
I’m the one sticking up for the little guy here, against the elitists who want to decide for poor people what they should be allowed to eat. If I “wanted it all for myself,” whatever that means, I wouldn’t give a shit about the price of Tyson chicken. Man, you’re an idiot.
And good luck with your fantasy of murdering everyone who doesn’t agree with you. Ah, the true colors of every Progressive.
Ellison, Ellensburg, Ellers, and Lambchop
Empty, pointless, nonsense snark. If you’ve got nothing, you don’t have to post. Or just post the traditional: “I got nothing.”