Hunter-Gatherer - Vegetarianism

Violent vegetarians

John — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:07:15 +0000

"But any intuition that vegetarianism and humanitarianism go together was shattered in the 20th-century by the treatment of animals under Nazism. Hitler and many of his henchmen were vegetarians, not so much out of compassion for animals as from an obsession with purity, a pagan desire to reconnect to the soil, and a reaction to the anthropocentrism and meat rituals of Judaism. In an unsurpassed display of the human capacity for moral compartmentalization, the Nazis, despite their unspeakable experiments on living humans, instituted the strongest laws for the protection of animals in research that Europe had ever seen. Their laws also mandated humane treatment of animals in farms, movie sets, and restaurants, where fish had to be anesthetized and lobsters killed swiftly before they were cooked. Ever since that bizarre chapter in the history of animal rights, advocates of vegetarianism have had to retire one of their oldest arguments: that eating meat makes people aggressive, and abstaining from it makes them peaceful."

This is from Steve Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, and in the chapter context of showing long-run historical declines in cruelty and violence towards animals.

There is no such thing as a vegan

John — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 18:56:49 +0000

And there is no life without death. Via arnndffr, hat tip to Steven Duque.

What if 3 million vegans bought grass-fed beef? How to build an alternative to factory farming

John — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:13:07 +0000

That's the question I asked myself today while having a drink with a former vegan girl (who now eats paleo). She loves visiting New York City because she can buy natural fats, like leaf lard, which are unavailable in Connecticut. Unavailable because there aren't enough people who want to buy it. Translation: there isn't enough market demand. Which begs the question -- what if vegetarians stopped drinking self-righteous tea, rolled up their yoga mats, and started to help build an alternative to the factory farm system? Not by lobbying. Not by working on farms. But by buying and eating animal products from farms that feed and raise their animals right.

Let's do the math.

Assume the total US population is 300 million
Conservatively, let's say 1% of the population is vegan/vegetarian
Assume 8 ounces of meat per day. (This is average for the US, but double the rest of the world. But that's because the rest of the world is poor, and as they get richer, they're eating more meat.)
Call it $7 per pound

That nets out to $3.8 billion per year. The revenue for all of Whole Foods in 2009 was $8 billion, so it's half of the turnover at Whole Foods. I'd like to see a list of the organic farms and food companies that have gotten off the ground because Whole Foods started to stock their product.

Now some of you might say, eh, $3.8 billion isn't actually that much when you look at all the food profits out there. Cargill 2009 revenue = $116 billion. Archer Daniels Midland 2009 revenue = $69 billion. Yes, but when you're getting a new market off the ground, every dollar of demand punches above its weight. Ask any entrepreneur or small business owner. Getting that first dollar of revenue is hard. Finding a product that people will actually buy is hard. Once you have some consumers, booked a little revenue, and you're not burning through cash, you suddenly have a growth platform.

Consider the shoe market. Demand for Vibram FiveFingers has exploded. They've been selling millions of pairs. But compared to the overall shoe market, VFFs are still a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. But it's caused the big guys to all respond -- and they've started R&D into minimalist footwear themselves. And now we have Merrill, Nike, New Balance, Saucony, and more all angling to get in on the party. There is more positive innovation happening in the shoe industry right now than in the past few decades combined. Because a relatively small group of passionate advocates of barefoot and minimalist walking and running LOVED the product. And started telling their friends.

It's not all that different with meat. If more meat providers started delivering a higher quality product at an acceptable price, you can sure as hell bet that the big guys will take notice. And they will start coming up with ways to get in on the action. Hmm...I can charge more for these chickens if I treat them a little better? And then you've got the R&D budgets of the big guys working on your problem. That's the beauty of free enterprise.

But instead, vegetarians withdraw into Vegetarian Land. Where the optimal health recommendations conveniently match your political beliefs. And they sit on the sidelines, eating their gourmet vegan cupcakes and spelt crackers, and feeling morally superior.

Well, not all of them.

Prominent vegan advocate: "I was wrong about veganism."

John — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 17:20:38 +0000

This is big. George Monbiot has been one of the most vocal advocates of veganism for environmental reasons. And he just changed his tune. In a recent article for the Guardian, Monbiot now accepts a role for eating meat as part of a healthy food system and environment. He admits that new calculations show the environmental impact of raising livestock is less than had been claimed, and that properly raising farm animals (not via our factory farm system) is not only benign, but worthwhile.

There's a temptation to gloat -- let's not do that. Instead, let's take a moment to respect Monbiot's open-mindedness and the evidence-based way he changed his thinking. It's not easy to write a column saying that you've been espousing wrong ideas for the past decade in pursuit of noble goals.

"This will not be an easy column to write. I am about to put down 1,200 words in support of a book that starts by attacking me and often returns to this sport. But it has persuaded me that I was wrong. More to the point, it has opened my eyes to some fascinating complexities in what seemed to be a black and white case."

Vegans have been the driving force in bringing awareness to the failings of our factory farm system -- both from an ethical and health perspective. Respect that. So they overshot a bit.

On to the guts of the article:

One of the key insights to efficient feeding of livestock is understanding the animals' natural diet. Sounds a lot like paleo for animals to me.

"Cattle are excellent converters of grass but terrible converters of concentrated feed. The feed would have been much better used to make pork. Pigs, in the meantime, have been forbidden in many parts of the rich world from doing what they do best: converting waste into meat.

...

Feeding meat and bone meal to cows was insane. Feeding it to pigs, whose natural diet incorporates a fair bit of meat, makes sense, as long as it is rendered properly."

Frequently cited environmental stats on raising livestock are *way* off.

"Like many greens I have thoughtlessly repeated the claim that it requires 100,000 litres of water to produce every kilogram of beef. Fairlie shows that this figure is wrong by around three orders of magnitude."

"Similarly daft assumptions underlie the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, a higher proportion than transport. Fairlie shows that it made a number of basic mistakes."

Vegan farming isn't a solution

"[Fairlie] also shows that many vegetable oils have a bigger footprint than animal fats, and reminds us that even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or ecological exclusion of animals: in this case pests. On the other hand, he slaughters the claims made by some livestock farmers about the soil carbon they can lock away."

By not eating ethically and properly raised meat, vegans aren't influencing the debate...or the market.

"By keeping out of the debate over how livestock should be kept, those of us who have advocated veganism have allowed the champions of cruel, destructive, famine-inducing meat farming to prevail. It's time we got stuck in."

Wow. Sounds a lot like what former vegan Lierre Kieth passionately advocated in The Vegetarian Myth. Read the whole article.

And here is the book that changed Monbiot's mind. Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie.

(Thanks to Lauri for the pointer.)

Vegetarian dinner party (British humor)

John — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 04:29:57 +0000

Brilliantly funny and smart, as the Brits do. It's Mitchell and Webb. Thanks to Levi for the pointer.

Assorted links

John — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:16:36 +0000

1. The military exposes the myth of the modern running shoe

2. Raids are increasing on farms and private food-supply clubs

3. Former vegetarian rips into the religion of veganism

4. Do men and women have significantly different dietary requirements? Maybe, maybe not

5. The Barefoot Bandit movie

6. AM New York (free subway newspaper) covers the caveman diet (pg. 20)

The China Study exposed: actual data does not support vegetarian health claims

John — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:03:28 +0000

Many of you may have heard of The China Study -- an extensive 20-year study of millions of Chinese, their diet, and disease. T. Colin Campbell, the lead research from Cornell (and outspoken vegan advocate), concludes that we should be eating a plant-based diet devoid of beef, poultry, eggs, fish, and milk. The China Study has even influenced John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, and new Whole Foods dietary recommendations in stores.

Well, the raw data is in, and the story ain't so pretty. See the breaking news from Richard Nikoley at Free the Animal, and go straight to the take-down (warning: long!) from former vegan/vegetarian Denise Minger at Raw Foods SOS.

More to come...

Laboratory meat

John — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 04:59:28 +0000

From time to time, I see articles on the promise of "cultured meat" -- or meat grown in a laboratory from stem cells. Here is the latest, about a little non-profit called New Harvest:

"Matheny's meat starts in a lab, where scientists extract stem cells from animal muscles. The cells are placed in a nutrient bath to develop and then on plastic scaffolding that allows them to form into strips as they multiply. Mark Post, a professor of tissue engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, may be close to realizing New Harvest's vision. Post's lab is producing 2 mm thick strips that are almost an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. Pack enough together, and you've got a meal."

They're still having some issues though:

"One problem is flavor. Post hasn't tasted his own handiwork because he says he's averse to eating his experiments. But he's been told by those who have that it doesn't taste like the real thing."

No shit. Look, I'm all for scientific and technological progress that will help 6+ billion people live on this planet. And the first halting steps of discovery are always easy to ridicule. But I am enormously skeptical that this type of effort is going to produce anything resembling real food.

Even grass-fed cattle and factory farm cattle have different nutritional profiles. Same genetic programming + different food intake = different gene expression. No wonder lab protein doesn't taste like meat.
Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food details the 150-year history of trying to manufacture breast milk with formula. And it's 150 years of hubris in which we've done everything we could to avoid learning how complex real food actually is.
These scientists fall prey to nutritionism, or reducing complex food to its constituent parts. They're just trying to grow muscle protein, plain and simple. But what about fat? And all the other amazing vitamins and nutrients found in meat and seafood? (Oh, the research grant didn't cover fat so we didn't grow it.)
Look at some of the other "meat substitutes" that they're hailing. Mostly soy products. Mostly bad for you. And being grown using fossil fuels in vast monocultures. Take a look at on New Harvest's homepage for their vision of the future. Vegetarian Utopia:

Even if you get people to go veg, it's not exactly helping to create a better, alternative food system for the vast majority of people who are never going to give up meat...or even switch to meat substitutes. The meat-eaters will think it's gross, and the vegetarians and vegans who care are going to be too grossed out by lab meat.

Here's a taste of New Harvest's views on meat:

"Despite its popularity, meat — both in its production and in its consumption — has a number of adverse effects on human health, environmental quality, and animal welfare. These include: diseases associated with the over-consumption of animal fats; meat-borne pathogens and contaminants; antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to the routine use of antibiotics in livestock; inefficient use of resources in cycling grains and water through animals to produce protein; soil, air, and water pollution from farm animal wastes; and inhumane treatment of farm animals. As meat consumption continues to increase, worldwide, these problems are now a global concern."

The environmental and ethical problems are all issues with factory farming, not meat consumption, per se. Regarding health, I wonder if they saw the recent findings on red meat.

New Harvest's solution to factory farming is to remove the farm and leave the factory. Blueprints below:

(Thanks to Pablo for the pointer.)