WHAT'SA MATTA WITH KIDS THESE DAYS?

If a group of people have been doing something for a long time, and there's no rational reason to keep doing it except what was just mentioned, inertia itself (or "tradition") is a good enough reason to keep doing it. Unless, of course, it's doing something that's wrongheaded.

"Donkey basketball" is one example. A game that was scheduled for last Saturday night "was canceled by high school Principal Michael Shore this week, for what he said is a lack of willing participants." Even for those who don't believe it's cruel, there's just not a good enough reason to risk injury to themselves in order to participate in something so ridiculous. So the inertia is wearing off there.

Other "traditional" forms of animal-based entertainment are dying off as the slack-jawed, head-scratchin' mentality they appeal to is replaced by a slightly more lucid attitude. Cities all over the world are discussing banning exotic circus animals, and some have already, as more parents take an honest look at the harrowing effect that experience has on their children. The discussion has even reached the state level here in the U.S: Tennessee has tabled the question for the year, but watch how many other states start talking about it. Meanwhile, check out this forward-looking diploma course in circus arts - notice any "animal trainer" courses?

As usual, those most heavily invested in the pathetically out-of-date entertainment tradition fondly known as bloodsports react the most hysterically. Noting "a disturbing trend: Kids aren't hunting as much as they used to," the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources commission "established a [license-]free junior hunting weekend." The hunt's open to kids 15 and younger (!) but those under 10 have to be "accompanied by an adult who remains 'in position to take immediate control of the child's bow or firearm at all times.'" That's those children younger than ten, folks.

Similarly, kids are failing to pick up a laughably moronic, ridiculous and pointless muskrat-trapping tradition, so it's dying off as well. What do these losers trap animals for? Can't say. But "one thing they all know for certain: it's no longer for profit." One clue to why they do it: "Humane people think different than we think." Well, yes, that's probably true. Or maybe, do you think it could be, humane people took the time, somewhere along the line, to learn how to entertain themselves? Without roping in, and killing, defenseless animals to prove our tuffness? Without shooting our fellow human beings because we're too stupid (drunk?) to keep track of where we are or what direction we're shooting?

A few more hunters like that, and there'll be a lot fewer hunters left. And, of course, ever-growing numbers of kids who look at them and just shake their heads, snickering quietly.

GOT VEGAN?

According to this article from Food Navigator, scientists "have dismissed the theory that people who eat meat absorb more calcium than vegetarians." And an unexpected finding from this study was that "vegan volunteers formed new bone at a significantly faster rate than their omnivore equivalents." As the headline indicates, All Meat = No Bone.

STOP THE PRESSES AGAIN

Oh. My. God. Can you believe this? Fruits and vegetables, especially fruits, lower your cancer risk - by double digits! And cranberry juice fights heart disease. And Vitamin C fights arthritis. I mean really! Who'd've ever thunk?
UPDATE 4/9: WHO confirms recent study - that "a higher intake of fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of various types of cancer."

ALL ABOUT THE OIL

Given that we're currently embroiled in a catastrophe whose clear and obvious mission is to secure American dominance over the oil market, you'd think that our government might want to check into ways to maximize the oil we have. Look into stuff like, say, the fact that livestock farming uses ten times as much fossil fuel as plant farming (in terms of food energy produced vs. fuel expended). Look into the "motor oil of the future" created from vegetable oil - that sort of thing. No, instead our tax dollars are going to fill up a humongous gas-guzzler called the FOOD SAFETY MOBILE - a mammoth RV painted with USDA slogans and colorful characters convincing you that if you get E.coli from feces-smeared meat, it's your fault! My favorite detail: Unlike a bookmobile, bloodmobile or just about any other "mobile" that takes up massive quantities of space and fuel, "The inside of the Food Safety Mobile is not open to the public." How perfectly appropriate!

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING

Back in the early part of the 20th century, when milk was still just a drink for kids, producers added value by enriching their product with Vitamin D, at levels kids would need. The problem (especially with that 3-a-day thing) now is that adults are being exhorted to consume Vitamin D and A at levels that may be excessive. Even that doesn't compare to the amount in Reiter Dairy's latest batch of chocolate milk - 22 freakin' times the amount of A and ten times the amount of D as in regular quarts. Gosh, if milk's the perfect food, why all this dangerous monkeying around?

MORE CRAP

It's not just the poor, overworked USDA that works in collusion with the animal-exploiting industries its supposed to be regulating. The Bush administration's EPA is now under fire from mainstream green groups for letting large-scale livestock farms pump as much feces into our environment as they wish. Does this sound familiar?- "allowing farms to develop the comprehensive nutrient management plans under the permit is like 'asking high school kids to write their own tests.'" The groups specifically say that "the EPA wrongly gave CAFOs [aka Big Meat] too much power in writing manure management plans, failed to make large meatpackers share responsibility for manure disposal when they subcontract with a farmer to raise livestock and did not limit the practice of spreading liquid manure on fields." Spreading liquid manure - that's one thing the Bush administration is good at.

USDA INCOMPETENCE DOOMS ANIMALS

Sure, in a slaughterhouse the animals are there to die, but a zoo is supposedly different. Not when you've got the USDA in charge of those animals' welfare. The ongoing scandal at the National Zoo, where an unknown number of animals have been killed by incompetence, has brought to light the fact that the USDA never did any surprise inspections of the place because - get this - they "had not known that the zoo was subject to surprise checks." Well, that makes sense - they were once again confusing it with a slaughterhouse, where you don't want to upset the producers by finding anything wrong with their product or process. Now the agency has gotten so embarrassed they're actually asking for the power to punish and shut down plants that repeatedly violate standards of public health. Yeah, right - I'll hold my breath till that happens. If they did that, there wouldn't be a meat producer left operating in the country.

GOT VEGETARIANISM? GOT CALCIUM

Doctors recommend vegetarianism for Calcium intake: "The Calcium taken in through vegetarian diet is alkaline and is retained in the body for a much longer period." OK, it's in India. I'm just sayin, is all.

In related news, the Miami Herald reports that Millions learn to cope with agonies from [cow's] milk, but meanwhile, soy milk, sez the Washington Post, is "Spilling Into The Mainstream." This could get messy.

WHERE DO YOU GET rid of YOUR PROTEIN?

A Harvard study has confirmed that excess protein is bad for your kidneys, and will in fact torpedo kidneys that are already at less than, say, 90%. Note that "On further analysis, the risk was only significant for animal proteins." Huh. What're the odds? If you're sure you've got perfect kidneys, they say, go ahead and try Atkins for a while, but, adds a BBC source, "there are a number of kidney diseases which do not produce symptoms until much later on in the illness" - and advises a test that will catch, um, 90% of the problems.

OF MICE AND MEN

See this one? "A genetic change that is life-threatening in humans actually appears to improve health in mice, revealing flaws in the standard research approach of studying diseases in mice to shed light on the same diseases in humans." That - and hundreds of other examples - is why I don't post items here that rely on animal studies to tell us what's good for humans.

MYSTERY MEAT

One crucial difference between meat and, say, fruits and vegetables, is that meat is easier to adulterate. Case in point: Hindus and Jews in England who were eating what they thought was just chicken found out to their dismay that it had been spiked with beef and pork proteins. Now there's plenty of outrage over this, but seemingly more over the discovery that some of the "chicken" was mostly added water. It's not as though the UK is the only place adulterated meat slips by: It turns out the USDA "jeopardized the safety of the U.S. food supply by letting in 823,632 pounds of meat from foreign plants that might not have been approved, department auditors say." What's in that meat? Illegal steroids? Mad Cow? Who knows? It's not like you can just look at it, like produce, and get an idea. Plus, this agency has a track record of missing the boat on tainted meat. But the punchline is that now the USDA is making a big show of clamping down on security in order to - yes! - safeguard the nation's food supply! Note this sentence: "After Sept. 11, the agency hired 20 more inspectors to check imported meat for contamination." Great! So what were these bozos doing all day as the 823,632 pounds slipped by?


UPDATE 3/19: ...and if you can't get behind the Hindus and the Jews and all their bizarre prohibitons on different animals, would you care if there was HUMAN FLESH mixed into it? Mmmmmm... soylent.

PLEASE COOPERATE? PRETTY PLEASE?

"U.S. consumers would not benefit from knowing which grocery stores, restaurants and butchers stocked meat products potentially contaminated with deadly bacteria, the top U.S. Agriculture Department food safety official said on Wednesday." In other news, up is down and down is up. Listen to this: "Elsa Murano told a House subcommittee that consumers would not benefit because companies send meat to places other than grocery stores and restaurants." Oh, OK. Right. That makes about as much sense as does eating this crap - or as this one: "Murano said companies would not be as cooperative if they were forced to share information." Oh, they wouldn't be cooperative, huh? Well, then why not SHUT THEM THE HELL DOWN IMMEDIATELY? No cooperative, no operative. I mean, what other industry could get away with this food-supply terrorism? Well, it's all ridiculous fun and games till you have another large recall of meat with excessive feces - aka e.coli. And even then all the crap can be kind of smirkworthy till you find out it may already have sent children to the hospital with the excruciating illness.

EDITORIAL 3/19: "The U.S. Department of Agriculture is supposed to protect American consumers from tainted meat. Instead, it appears to be more interested in protecting irresponsible meat processing companies. ...(their) attitude should make American consumers wonder whose side the Agriculture Department is on." (St. Petersburg Times)

MAKIN' TROUBLE IN FLORIDA

A law that forces milk on schoolchildren needs to be overturned by Congress says the Orlando Sentinel's in yesterday's editorial.

VEGETARIANS LIVE LONGER

That's the title of this study from Germany that found that "People who eat little or no meat can expect to live significantly longer than the general population." OK, is that settled now? More meat = Less life. However, the study of 2000 vegetarians and near-vegetarians is not a slam-dunk for the no-animal-protein crowd, possibly due to the size of the sample and some inexact categorizing, possibly not. Little distinction seems to have been made between lacto-ovo vegetarians and occasional meat-eaters. Also, 60 people, or three percent, of the people were vegans, and their lifespans did not outpace the vegetarians or the eat-just-a-little-meat folks. More, better-proportioned studies could be done with larger groups of vegans to tease out whether this is an accurate assessment for 21st-century vegans, but even if so, the fact that most Americans are killing themselves early through their glut of meat-eating is incontrovertible.

THINK GLOBALLY, EAT QUICKLY

McDonalds Around the World: In the UK the company will start selling sliced apples, grapes, pasta salad and juicy juice - vegan options, gotta love it. But meanwhile in the US the restaurant tries tired gimmicks and meat-formula tinkering, and continues to slide. And in the East, a previous harbinger of bad news for McDonalds, the founder and president of McDonalds Japan resigned in the midst of that ongoing bad scene.

A REGULAR IRREGULAR DIET

Vegetarian diet slashes cholesterol levels blares the Orlando Sentinel, on an experiment where subjects lowered cholesterol by a surprising one-third. "Whether most people would stick with such a diet is another matter," cautions this AP story, "because it involves daily okra, eggplant and Metamucil, among other things." Uh-huh. Well, whatever those "other things" might be, you can count me out of this particular vegetarian diet right here and now, Jack.

Ain't no friggin' way you're gettin' me to eat eggplant every day. And that is a fact.

STOP AND GO

Yet another hole in the theory that we can trust livestock operators with the integrity of our food: The FDA has reiterated a ban on a drug used in cattle that can cause anemia and other blood diseases in humans. Reiterated because they had already phased out the drug in 1996 in regulations that have apparently been ignored by enough farmers to warrent this public airing of dirty laundry. Not all farmers were flouting the law, but "I think it was enough for us to feel that this was not an isolated incident," said the FDA compliance officer. Great, these are the folks making sure we don't wind up with Mad Cow here; wonder what they'll reiterate next?

FORTIFY THIS!

There are a couple good lines in this story on efforts to make soy milk available to public school kids through the National School Lunch Program - like the dairy spokesperson's dismissal of enriched soy milk's equivalent nutrition with the phrase, "You can fortify anything." Uh, yeah. Like, for example, cow's milk? Which is fortified with vitamin A and D? The punch line is that it's only this added vitamin D that may make the difference, ultimately, in the one "health" area milk can claim: Osteoporosis. A recent study as concluded that "Neither milk nor a high-calcium diet appears to reduce risk of hip fractures." Instead, the only positive factor seemed to be adequate intake of - what? Yep, Vitamin D.

QUANTITY vs. QUALITY

The International Herald Tribune notes that "Rich diets, poor health are a global killer." Hmmmm. Yes, but what is it about the West's "rich" diets? A popular scapegoat is portion sizes, which are now larger than ever. But that is a large red herring: Note that in the study mentioned here, while the "best diet" control group watched portion sizes and got nowhere, those on a vegan diet reopened their blocked arteries and lost 22 pounds, without having to watch portion size at all. Gee, maybe it's not how much but what you're eating that's the problem. After all, even stubborn West Virginians were able to succeed on a "lowfat vegetarian diet." If they can do it, why not you?

LET'S SUE!

Animal Aid, a group in Britain, asserts that vegetarian and vegan children are discriminated against by hostile doctors, teachers and relatives. Well, duh. But this is more than a little silly: The Animal Aid spokesperson, Becky Lilly, said "the finding that shocked us most was the amount of pressure coming from close relatives..." Uh, yeah. Does Ms. Lilly have any close relatives??? Predictably, the article relegates the facts of vegetarianism's healthfulness to quotes from Animal Aid, "balancing" them with insights such as: "On medical grounds it can't be very good," from the eminent medical authority Anthony Worrall-Thompson, owner of the Notting Grill, a meat restaurant in West London. He adds that kids need meat for "vitamins they can't get from soya or the fungus that grows on pipes or whatever they eat." Oh-kayyyy.