SOUTHERN-FRIED AHIMSA

I think I missed Vegan of the Month for January. But here's February's, with a headline I like so much I swiped it for this entry. Sharif Harb launched The Vegan Baking Company in Knoxville, the first baker there to offer a vegan option, and predictably, it's taken off. Now anyone in Knoxville who has ethical or health concerns about animal products can have their cake and eat it too.

"WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR HEART DISEASE?"

This is quite a damning development for animal protein in this month's American Journal of Epidemiology: "Older women who eat a relatively large amount of protein from red meat or dairy products may have an elevated risk of dying from heart disease, the results of a large study suggest." Yep, pretty large - almost 30,000 postmenopausal women, and note that the difference wasn't in the amount of protein but where it comes from. "Those who reported the highest intake of protein from red meat and dairy products had a roughly 40 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease over the next 15 years compared with women with the lowest intake of these foods." It's spelled out even more clearly after the article suggests minimizing red meat and dairy and opting for, say, chicken or fish: "Better still, perhaps, would be vegetable protein sources, such as beans, nuts, tofu and peanut butter; the study found that women with the highest intakes of these foods had a 30 percent lower risk of heart disease death than women with the lowest intakes." And in case you didn't get the "low-carb" connection, they spell that out too: "The findings, say researchers, call into question the long-term safety of high-protein diets -- at least the ones that don't distinguish the protein in steak and cream from that in tofu and nuts." The article also notes that "a woman who opts for two servings of red meat every day instead of a similar number of calories from carbs would have a 44 percent higher risk of dying from heart disease over the next 15 years. A similar pattern emerged when the researchers looked at dairy foods, including milk, cream, ice cream, yogurt and cheese."

Meat and Milk: Heart disease central. Could it be any clearer?

WHEN I GROW UP, I'M GOING TO BOVINE UNIVERSITY!

Oh, this'll be good. Blank Park Zoo in Des Moines is proposing a three million dollar exhibit of farm animals to "teach about modern agriculture, including animal welfare practices and high-tech birthing and breeding techniques." Supposedly "the farm zoo will tell visitors how and why farm animals were domesticated, what they eat and why they are raised the way they are." The guy that answers that last question has the easiest job: He just stands there and every five seconds or so and says: "Greed."

FOIE GRAS SHOP SHUT DOWN

Aside from the main point of this story - Sonoma Saveurs closing - the verbal gymnastics required to deny the reality of animal activists having an impact on foie gras consumption is entertaining in this article. "In the end, Sonoma Saveurs, the controversial foie gras emporium and restaurant that drew the ire of animal rights activists and was targeted by vandals, didn't close last week because of any organized boycott. The reason was purely economic -- slow business." Whether or not there existed an "organized boycott," the effect is the same as what was achieved: Slowing the business, making the place close. Good riddance.

STOP THE PRESSES! SLAUGHTERHOUSES EXPLOITATIVE!

It's no news to most of us that in addition to being hellish sanctums of death, America's slaughterhouses are exploiting immigrant labor. But now there's an official GAO report (PDF), and the International Herald Tribune introduces it with a bit of refreshing candor: "Most Americans do not want to know how the meat they eat is produced, if only so they can continue to eat it. Nearly every aspect of meat production in America is disturbing, from the way animals are raised, to inadequate inspection of the final product. When it comes to what happens in the slaughterhouse, most consumers mentally avert their eyes." Exactly. It's the fact that we are, as a whole, prissy scaredy-cats unwilling to confront what's going on there that allows animals, human and non-human, to be abused without limit.


The report finds that "some major players in the American meat industry prey upon a large population of immigrant workers who are either ignorant of their fundamental rights or are undocumented aliens who are afraid of calling attention to themselves. As a result, those workers often receive little or no compensation for injuries, and any attempt by them to organize is met with hostility." But their constant, institutionalized suffering of human-rights abuses isn't important - not compared to your ability to easily get cheap fast food that you're used to. Keep your priorities straight!

GIVE UP BEEF TODAY - GET MAD COW IN 2017?

That's the same span of time for Japan's first human case of mad cow disease, which authorities last week said was probably contracted in 1989. "The confirmation - which was revealed after the man died of the fatal brain-wasting disease in December - is likely to further alarm a public skittish about food safety," says the AP story. Except that the public barely pays attention to anything, so we'll have to see if this has any effect whatsoever that way. But the fact remains that anyone who thinks they'll be safe from Mad Cow once the USDA and FDA actually start enforcing their new safety procedures is delusional.

PWNED!

Sorry, but this headline just made me chuckle: Animal linguistics: In Racine, pets are still 'owned' If you've hung out with gamers, or with people who have hung out with them, you know that "owned" (or more properly, "pwned") is a synonym for "defeated" or "bested." The hed gives me the image of a guy playing checkers with his dog, and upon winning, jumping up, dancing and pointing at the dog, saying "Haaaa!!! OWNED!!!!!"

LAUGHING ALL THE WAY TO THE JAILHOUSE

Reuters reports on that fast-food lawsuit that was so laughable when it was filed: "A federal appeals court on Tuesday revived part of the widely-watched obesity suit against McDonald's Corp. that accuses the world's biggest fast-food company of using misleading advertising to lure children into eating fattening, unhealthy foods. The U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a trial judge wrongfully threw out certain portions of the complaint in September 2003 on grounds that it lacked information linking the plaintiffs injuries with eating McDonald's foods." Keep laughing, folks - laughing past the stockyard...

SMOKIN' S***

There's been a lot of hype lately about manure, a "byproduct" of animal farming, as a fuel source, as though this now justifies exploiting and killing the animals who produce it. But it's worth keeping in mind that this byproduct can also be fuel for other things, such as the 2,000-ton pile of burning cow manure in Milford, Nebraska that's been going for more than two months now.

As often happens, the catchy lede to the article verbalizes the cognitive dissonance required of meat-eaters, even as it attempts to downplay it: "Urban dwellers who enjoy dining on filet mignon at five-star restaurants would probably just as soon not know about David Dickinson's dilemma. Bad for the appetite, you know." David Dickinson's dilemma is "a dung pile measuring 100 feet long, 30 feet high and 50 feet wide that began burning about two months ago and continues to smolder despite Herculean attempts to douse it. While city folks might have trouble imagining a dung pile of such proportions, they are common sights in rural states." Common sights... and smells!

ANOTHER CANCER TROUNCED BY FRUITS & VEGETABLES

The latest is kidney cancer. According to researchers in the International Journal of Cancer who studied 61,000 women aged 40-76 for 13 years, fruits and vegetables - especially bananas, root vegetables, white cabbage and "salad veg" - offered strong protection against the most common form of kidney cancer.

Still waiting for any study showing meat to lower the risk of any form of cancer. (Via Vegan Porn)

MAD COW STILL ON THE MARCH IN BACKGROUND

The more North American Mad Cows are found, the less attention the issue seems to get. Now that the latest Canadian cow has been completely dissected, BSE issues are again on the back burner. You may not have heard that some of the Mad cow's fellow herd members are still being tracked - in the United States, or that there's "New concern over the spread of CJD" as prions are again found outside of the muscles and tissues we're always assured are the only "high-risk" areas, or that BSE has for the first time been found in a goat. Don't worry your pretty little head about any of these, though. (BSE - it's what's for dinner...)

DEER "CULLING" DOESN'T WORK

That is, the most common spin on "culling" - i.e. mass-murdering - deer, which is that there's a population crisis that has to be dealt with once and for all with this extreme measure, is utterly bogus. The only way the death-based system works is by applying it over and over and over again, shooting more and more deer in a constant killing cycle, because in the short term "culling" achieves the opposite effect of that advertised.

Animal activists already know this, but it's good to see it spelled out so clearly in this article: Tim Thompson, a wildlife biologist with the Department of Natural Resources in Iowa, is quoted as saying "I was amazed at how high it rebounded," and explaining that "as the deer herd in an area is thinned, diminished competition and a greater food supply can create an ideal habitat for the remaining population." The piece goes further to point out that hunters are not an efficient population-control mechanism ("Hunters don't do as good a job as they think," says a USDA wildlife biologist specializing in deer) and even further than that to explain why game officials continue to rely on killing rather than sane, safe and effective population-control approaches like contraception: "In fact, some officials would rather encourage hunting because they see deer as a resource that contributes to a lucrative hunting industry." Yep. Not news to the rest of us, but a nice change of pace to see it in "the news."

ANOTHER VACATION?

No, I was just completely consumed with a particular project, which is now completed. But I was keeping track of stuff that was happening, so you'll see some backlogged stuff here over the next few days. Sorry for any inconvenience to longtime, rabid Meat Facts fans.

'WE'LL FIND MORE'

Canadians should expect to see more mad cow cases dating from after the 1997 ruminant feed ban, says a beef industry spokesman. "I was on a conference call the other day, and we were batting around the hypothetical scenario - it's November, and we've just gotten our eighth case," said Ron Axelson, general manager of the Alberta Cattle Feeders' Association. "We've got to ask ourselves what the next step's going to be at that point. Because we will find more." Whew! Good thing that's just in Canada, which our beef industry has absolutely nothing to do with.

HEISENBERG'S CAT

So even if the overall funding mechanism weren't corrupt, or if their physiology weren't way off from ours, it turns out that animal experiments are unreliable for yet another reason - one that harkens back to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. This was a conjecture that the act of observing something for the purpose of measuring it might have an effect on the measurement itself. Now we hear from Contemporary Topics in Laboratory Animal Science that "Mice, rabbits, rats, beagles, geese, and other animals all show measurable physiological stress responses to routine laboratory procedures that have been up until now viewed as relatively benign."

"For example, a mouse who is picked up and briefly held experiences several physiological reactions. As stress-response hormones flood the bloodstream, the mouse exhibits a racing pulse and a spike in blood pressure. These symptoms can persist for up to an hour after each event. Immune response is also affected. In rats and mice, the growth of tumors is strongly influenced by how much the animals are handled.

The study's author notes that "Research on tumor development, immune function, endocrine and cardiovascular disorders, neoplasms, developmental defects, and psychological phenomena are particularly vulnerable to data being contaminated by animals' stress effects."

SECOND MCD CEO IN A YEAR TO DIE OF MEAT-RELATED DISEASE

Charlie Bell has died of cancer in his hometown of Sydney, Australia. Bell lasted less than a year on the job, having replaced Jim Cantalupo, who died suddenly in April of a heart attack after a little more than a year as CEO. Both causes of death are well-documented as illnesses related to meat consumption, but who knows? Maybe it was just the stress of trying to turn around a company that's been doing the wrong thing for so long. Either way, I believe it was David Peterson who quipped that CEO of McDonald's seems to be a more dangerous job than Iraqi policeman.

I WANT YOU... TO GO VEG!

There are many ways to interpret (read: spin) the upcoming dietary guidelines, but it's clear that the USDA is being forced to move more toward reality, and away from the meat-and-dairy-dominated "four food groups" nonsense of the previous generation. My favorite way of putting it comes from Newsday, which calls it "practically a vegetarian manifesto. Uncle Sam wants you to eat a plant-based diet."

RESCUE WORKERS TURN VEGETARIAN

I don't have anything to add to this. "The gruesome task of retrieving the bodies of tsunami victims has turned many Thai rescue workers vegetarian, the Matichon newspaper said on Friday. ...Matichon said vegetarian food was all the rage in one nearby village, where a makeshift relief kitchen produced about 1,000 boxes of meatless food a day. The newspaper quoted a survivor as saying that the smell of death had put her off meat."

BIRD FLU - WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT... AGAIN

Hey. That estimate of how many people got bird flu in the 2003 Netherlands outbreak? It was off the mark. Turns out bird flu is thirty times more dangerous than previously suspected.

Before, they reported 69 cases. But a new Dutch investigation shows it was closer to 2,000 people, meaning that this flu is much more contagious than we had understood it to be. "Even more ominous is the finding that person-to-person spread was vastly more efficient than ever before seen with bird flu. Nearly 60 percent of infected poultry workers' household contacts showed signs of infection."

Are those poultry workers lives, in addition to those of the poultry, really so worthless that an impulse buy of crispy fried chicken is more important? Then what about all the lives globally that are being put at risk? When does the obvious correlation become important enough to do act upon?

LIPS THAT TOUCH LIVER...

"People should limit eating liver to once a week and be careful about other sources of vitamin A, say food experts. Too much is toxic and increases the risk of bone fractures, according to advisers to the Food Standards Agency." That's the word from the BBC. So... liver and other sources of vitamin A are dangerous, huh? Well, no. Liver and Vitamin A supplements are. Plant sources, we discover further down in the story, are, in fact, the answer. "Preformed vitamin A, called retinol, is found only in foods of animal origin and is particularly plentiful in liver. Plant foods, such as carrots and spinach, contain compounds that are converted to vitamin A in the body, but it is unlikely that these levels can become toxic."

Vitamin A from plants: Pretty obvious, really, unless you're a Weston Price fanatic.