STUDY: VEGANISM BEST FOR PLANET EARTH

Two professors in geophysical science at the University of Chicago have done a study to determine what diet is the most energy-efficient in terms of the planet's resources. Surprise! It's veganism!

The article notes that "The strict vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient, followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient." That's right, good ol' "I'll just switch to fish" not only is loaded with contaminants for you, it's also bad for the planet. The researchers did tie in the fact that there's no health advantage to ruining the health of the Earth: "The adverse effects of dietary animal fat intake on cardiovascular diseases is by now well established. Similar effects are also seen when meat, rather than fat, intake is considered," Martin and Eshel wrote. "To our knowledge, there is currently no credible evidence that plant-based diets actually undermine health; the balance of available evidence suggests that plant-based diets are at the very least just as safe as mixed ones, and most likely safer."

I guess it's really true that what goes around comes around - at least in the case of the Earth.

MILK GLASS IS HALF EMPTY

This quick overview of the dairy controversy is representative of a number of articles that are showing up pretty regularly, which we would not have seen in the mainstream press just a decade ago.

Still, as usual, it's pretty deficient, pitting "all those dairy ads" and the USDA's dietary guidelines against two prominent scientific experts who, as the article notes, are "from dairy-farming families, but their views have entirely turned around because of their research." Classic "he-said, he-said" stuff - on the one hand, on the other hand, etc. - as long as you don't mention that "all those dairy ads" are simply bald-faced commercial industry promotion and that our Department of Agriculture is proven again and again to be a branch office of the cattle industry. Let's compare this to the articles we'll be seeing five years from now. I doubt the smokescreen can hold out too much longer.

MICHAEL POLLAN'S DILEMMA

Michael Pollan is an engaging and obviously thoughtful writer on issues of food and ethics. His Omnivore's Dilemma, of which I've only read excerpts, looks to continue and extend his quest to find the perfect tightrope to walk between giving in to cultural pressure to be unconscious about food and the imperative to consistently eat consciously. But his titular quandary is a classic false dilemma: The choice isn't between gustatory pleasure and ethics - veganism offers both. The "dilemma" really is, will you or won't you live according to the ideals you actually believe in? Will you allow your comfort in the familiar to trump your reluctance to participate in needless cruelty and environmental destruction?

Pollan is good enough at philosophy and logic to work out the fact that there's no real justification for continuing to breed and eat animals. Yet blinded by his desire to excuse his own comfort level, even he falls back on utterly ridiculous arguments such as "domestic animals owe us one because we're responsible for their existence," which Peter Singer pretty handily demolishes in this Mother Jones interview, and maybe-if-I-eat-organic-chicken-that's-good-enough wishful thinking.

That said, Pollan does a good job of bringing a lot of facts to light about the excessses of the Western lifestyle, and with every piece he seems to be inching closer to making that crucial connection between honesty and action. So we eagerly await his next opus on this topic!

YET ANOTHER FRIDAY RECALL

Pssssst! Speaking of the venerable tradition of Friday recalls, did you hear that 78 tons of ground beef had been recalled for E.Coli contamination? (That's right, seventy-eight freaking tons of beef - well over the amount the average American consumes in a full year!)

What's that? You say you didn't hear? You didn't get this detailed list of products you're supposed to check for in case you have deadly E.Coli lurking in your fridge? You didn't know to go and carefully examine this PDF-only release from the USDA? OK, then, their system is working perfectly! Carry on.

FRIDAY BOOKEND

How fitting that the meat-recall scandal that pegged so many of its developments on Friday coverage, and so succeeded in keeping this story - to this day - from the consciousness of most Americans, was wrapped up (at least for not) on a Friday. What a coinkidink, as Micky Dolenz would say.

You may recall (ha!) that "eight people died and more than 50 were sickened in the outbreak, which led to one of the largest meat recalls in U.S. history" - or you may not, since the companies involved, in collusion with the USDA, managed to keep a layer of smoke and mirrors between their obvious involvement and the public, largely via the Friday strategy. Pilgrim's Pride long maintained they had absolutely nothing to do with the people's deaths, that the strain of listeria had not really been tied to their plant, and the USDA did not publicly call them on this until well after any significant media coverage had stopped. Now they've quietly - and that is the operative word - settled. OK, rack 'em up again and let's feed some chicken feces to the next unknowing crowd!

ABOUT THAT WAR ON E.COLI

"The federal government warned consumers Monday to take precautions cooking meat after disease detectives concluded there is a connection between 14 cases of illness caused by a dangerous strain of E. coli that has been found in seven states across the country in the last six months.

Amanda Eamich, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service, said scientific tests only recently connected the illnesses to the same pathogen - known by its scientific name E. coli 0157:H7 - but the source of the pathogen has not yet been determined."

Since they haven't nailed down (or at least, finished PR negotiations with) the source, this is not a recall yet, but you can still be on the lookout for listeria-soaked dried beef and ham salad until they do.

MORE MYSTERY MEAT

You can almost set your watch by it: After much hullabaloo, back when the national news media was focused on this, as to how it was going to get right to the bottom of the Alabama Mad Cow and its origins, the USDA has come up with next to nothing, and hardly anyone is reporting this discrepancy. Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, though, notes that as of last week, the cow's origins "remain a mystery."

The article notes that "USDA promised daily Internet updates on the investigation, posted at www.aphis.usda.gov/newsroom/hot_issues/bse.shtml, then didn’t give any new information for the next three days." And after those three days, there's been squat - go check for yourself.

In a continuation of the tradition of USDA follies, the article goes on to note that the agency's initial announcement got the breed of the cow wrong, and that upon digging up the body, had "estimated" the cow's age at 10 years. But there's some contention about that estimate, since it conveniently dates the animal's birth before the 1998 feed ban. South Korea, for one, isn't blithely accepting this "estimate" and says the U.S. has failed to prove its claim that a cow found infected with BSE there last month is 10 years old. The country will continue to ban US beef until the USDA produces more compelling evidence of this claim. I'm sure they'll step up and delivers that evidence immediately - assuming, that is, that the dog didn't eat it.

I'LL JUST SWITCH TO FISHSCAM

More ranting about ads: I opened my New Yorker to find an ad that I at first thought was a parody, it was so ridiculous: Warning readers against eating whales and then suggesting that's the only way you'd need to worry about getting too much mercury, the ad has no brand or affilliation attached to it - it only directs readers to a site that I thought was the joke's tipoff: FISHSCAM.com.

But no, the people behind this (who - surprise! - turn out to be Philip-Morris-funded Rick Berman and deadly-food-industry cohorts once again) think FISHSCAM is a good brand-name for their attempt to bat away the mountain of documentation showing the dangers of mercury in a wide variety of fatty fishes. Yes, that's "fishes," not, ahem, "whales."

The site's name and the fact that their entire campaign is built around a 'straw mammal' argument are funny enough. What's funnier still is their annotated enemies list. Usually Berman is content to simply trump up any flaws he can find in a given organization, but here they have to be tied to the reckless claims the organizations have made about fish-eating. And as you read down the page, eventually, despite Berman's attempts to rebut them, the sheer number and variety of attacks on the healthfulness of fish from divergent sources suggest not some fearmongering conspiracy but a panoply of reasons, some more compelling than others, why fish should not by any rational measure be considered a "health food."

VEGAN FIREFIGHTERS

Interesting little NYTimes story about a firehouse full of vegan firefighters, who are not "that way" because of the bond they've created with any animals whose lives they've saved, but out of a sheer, bald-faced acknowledgement that they need to be as healthy as possible to do their job well.

VEGANISM: LOSE WEIGHT, STAY HEALTHY

A new study in the April issue of Nutrition Reviews shows that "vegetarian populations tend to be slimmer than meat-eaters, and they experience lower rates of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other life-threatening conditions linked to overweight and obesity." The article notes that "Rates of obesity in the general population are skyrocketing, while in vegetarians, obesity prevalence ranges from 0 percent to six percent."

WHERE'S THE FTC?

Remember how commercials for kids' toys used to show the toys doing stuff that kids might imagine they could do, but the toys wouldn't actually do by themselves, and advertisers were eventually forced to drop these flights of fancy? There's an analogous situation in a commercial I just saw when I watched a Bravo show that contained a five-second clip of my quail-hunting game.

The commercial, from the dairy industry, depicts a neighbor known to avoid milk attempting to pick up the handles of a wheelbarrow, and his arms falling off. A kid who has been exhorted by his mom to "drink your milk" (again, reminding us that kids actually dislike cow's milk whenever it doesn't have cookies attached and have to be cajoled, threatened and wheedled into drinking it) sees this and is shocked into drinking his milk, spilling it all over himself and the table in his eagerness.

So I get that this is all supposed to be a big hilarious joke, but it's occurring in the context of an ongoing disinformation campaign through which the dairy industry attempts to persuade the public that cow's milk is essential for strong bones. There's no indication within the reality of the ad that the neighbor is "pretending" to have lost his arms, thus a violent tragedy is presented without qualification as the clear result of not drinking milk.

Other than kids' toys, where's the analogy here? Is there any other food, medicine or otherwise, that is allowed to lie to the public through this "entertaining" venue? Would an ad depicting how eating one hamburger causes an immediate heart attack pass muster on the airwaves? For link fun, here's a fun overview of some of the issues involved in deceptive advertising, and this one certainly fits right in there.

VEGGIE OPTIONS IN RED-MEAT BASTIONS


Not only are more kids' camps (of "mystery meat" fame) making veggie options available, at least one camp is serving vegan meals exclusively. And as if that weren't enough, I've heard talk that you'll finally be able to buy vegetarian hot dogs at the Phillies ballpark starting this season.

PIG OUT!

It never ceases to amuse me how far people will go to tamper with nature in order to maintain their "natural" diet, how much they'll abandon tradition in order to keep eating something for the sole reason that they're used to it. The latest in this trend is the supposed heart-healthy pork that has gotten headlines worldwide. We won't bother to list all the health problems unrelated to heart disease that pork consumption is associated with; the joke here is that you could do this with just about any plant food and get a food that has a terrific net gain for health, instead of this one where you hope it turns out to be a wash.

MORE SOURCES OF MAD COW

Mad Cow's not just for beef-eaters anymore: An study published in Science confirms that CWD prions are present in muscle meat of white-tailed deer, and the issue of vCJD in the blood supply is beginning to scare a lot more people. Meanwhile, Japan is considering re-opening its borders to US beef, but the Japanese people seem to have already instituted their own de facto ban.

ARE YOU SITTING DOWN?

I hope so, because here comes some absolutely shocking news: "People who eat meat and carry on doing so put on more weight over a five year period than people who switch over to vegetarianism." A study of 22,000 people by Cancer Research UK carried out at Oxford University found that although we all put on weight as we get older, "vegetarians put on less weight than meat eaters, and vegans put on less weight than vegetarians." Meat eaters on average gained four times as much weight as vegetarians and vegans. And just to add that last coffin nail, the lead researcher specified that "contrary to current popular views that a diet low in carbohydrates and high in protein keeps weight down, we found that the lowest weight gain came in people with high intake of carbohydrate and low intake of protein." Researchers failed, however, to examine the link between high protein intake and a susceptibility to falls while slipping on ice.

THREE STRIKES AND WE'RE DONE!

Showcasing the grasp of logic that has made it the global laughingstock of food industry oversight, the USDA announced today that now that it has found three mad cows in the U.S. it's time to... wait for it... stop testing so many cows! In addition to going from hundreds of thousands back to something around 40,000 cattle, the USDA will also rely on "market forces" and livestock producers' good intentions to assure that BSE-infected cattle can be traced back to their point of origin. Hopefully, market forces will also be able to cure the consumers who contract the fatal disease from the vast swath of untested U.S. beef.

I'M BACK - AND SO IS MAD COW

I was telling myself "tomorrow I'm gonna get back to blogging, no matter what." But I still might've blown it off without this impetus: A cow in Alabama has tested positive for mad cow disease, confirming the third U.S. case of the brain-wasting ailment.

Don't worry, though... "The cow did not enter the food supply for people or animals," officials said, waiting until the media glare subsided in order to issue a long-after-the-fact correction that the meat did in fact enter the food supply. Oh, wait, I just added that last part. Guess I was confused by the USDA's repeated history in these matters.

BLOG-A-LAPSE

Sorry about the, um, "light posting" since January 20th. I got swept up in an unplanned new project and will have to wait till next week to get back to full blogging mode. In the meantime, here's a post I did on Metafilter about the USDA Inspector General's report on Mad Cow compliance (read: lack-of-compliance), and here's a cute little Flash Game for you to play.

See ya soon...

MAD COW FRIDAY: JAPAN REINSTATES BAN

Well that sure didn't take long. A little over a month after lifting its 2-year ban on imports of US beef over Mad Cow fears, Japan has reinstated the ban. And why? Oh, you know, just "the discovery of spinal material in a shipment that should have been removed due to the risk of mad cow disease." Hmmmmm. Oh well, I'm sure it was just that one shipment that had the problem, right?

Don't worry, though, folks, the USDA is making sweeping changes right away: "Within the United States, two USDA inspectors instead of one will now be required to review every shipment of beef to be exported to Japan." Did you get that? They're going to make doubly sure that the beef they send to Japan is safe... while you sit here and eat all that single-inspector beef that might or might not have BSE-carrying spinal cord in it.

Let's just be clear that this belies once again the whining that US vegetarians and consumer activists were the ones whipping up Mad Cow fear. It's the US Beef industry that is creating the fear by their shoddy practices (as well as the shoddy concept behind their industry) and it's international trade that's in the driver's seat of everything they do.

THAT'LL KEEP US SAFE FROM BIN LADEN

"Eleven people were indicted in a series of arsons, claimed by the radical groups Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, in five Western states, the Justice Department said Friday." With the incredible level of hooplah and grandstanding, you wouldn't know that the body count from these 'ecoterrorists' is exactly zero.

The disproportionate targeting of animal-rights and environmental activists (vs., say, right-wing militias and dangerous hate groups) is already obvious and has been commented on here. Let me stress that I don't approve of arson as a protest strategy - anything that can easily get someone killed as a direct result should be avoided by anyone working for a non-violent culture. BUT it has to be said: Terrorism is not about destroying property, it's about using the threat of personal, physical violence as a substitute for arguing a point. To my knowledge (I have not read the full indictment) none of these actions, nor any others here of ELF and ALF, crossed that line.

However, SHAC and its ilk routinely does cross that line, which is why it's easy for the mainstream to lump us all into the dangerous and hateful bin: "We know where you sleep at night" is what protesters down the street were shouting last week outside a drug company, helping both the employees and passersby grasp the concept that vegans only care about the lives of animals, not people. Previously SHAC has pioneered the concept of "home demos," breaking individual Huntingdon employees' windows and traumatizing their neighbors - and mnost egregiously, stocked its web site with the names, ages, and school addresses of Huntingdon employees’ children. Brilliant PR, guys. It wouldn't surprise me if Rick Berman himself turned out to be behind these actions - no one could do a better job of turning the public off to our message, and helping the government fool them into thinking that animal rights = terrorism.