The Examined Life

I just finished my second read of Diet For A New America by John Robbins. For the past several years I've been heading towards a vegetarian diet for a couple of reasons: Health and spiritual. This book brings home-the-bacon so-to-speak for a third reason, our environment. I'm not all the way there yet (I was raised with 3 meals a day, and all 3 had some kind of animal product going on!). Our society is so-damn-meat based, everywhere, all the time it seems. But I'm closer than ever, and have lots of days in a row most of the time, when an animal does not have to die, or part of a forest does not have to be torn down, or gallons and gallons of our precious water is not used, for me to have a juicy rib-eye steak or some eggs with my butter and toast! Not all the way, but closer. (The book is dated, 1987, but the story keeps sounding true.) John Robbins is from the Baskin & Robbins clan. He left that clan and all that could have been his because of his passion for animals, our health, and our planet. For me that is good enough credentials. He certainly could have made a lot more money, had it a lot easier, had he stayed the easy, standard course. It seems to me that when you get a chance to learn about something, that you should stop, and learn. If it makes sense to you, then you do learn. To keep your head in the sand, to not at least inquire and see if something sounds right for you, for some old-school, un-examined reason, is actually unbelievable to me. I've seen this now and I cannot continue to pretend that it's OK to keep acting the same way as always, before I saw it. I haven't always known this, but I do now. John goes into so much about how wonderful animals are (got me reading W.H. Hudson), and the downside of what we've done in the last 30 years or so with our factory farming (it's not the same thing anymore, nothing like it!). And the impact of this on our health, and actually on our souls. But I won't work all those aspects right now. I think the environmental reasons are powerful enough for all of us . Here's some "facts" from the book. An American scientist, David Pimental, calculates that if the whole world were to eat according to U.S. agricultural practices, the planet's entire petroleum reserves would be exhausted in 13 years. A detailed 1978 study sponsored by the Departments of Interior and Commerce produced startling figures showing that the value of raw materials consumed to produce food from livestock is greater than the value of all oil, gas, and coal consumed in this country. The same study revealed the equally startling fact that the production of meats, dairy products and eggs account for one-third of the total amount of all raw materials used for all purposes in the United States. Animal wastes in the U.S. account for more than ten times as much water pollution as the total amount attributable to the entire human population! The livestock of the U.S. produce twenty times as much excrement as the entire human population of the country. (It's mostly going into our streams and rivers). Every 24 hours the animals destined for America's dinner tables produce 20 billion pounds of waste. That is 240,000 pounds of excrement a second. All in all, economists calculate that the three-state area (Oregon, Washington and Idaho) loses 17 billion kilowatt hours of electricity a year to the gluttonous water use of livestock production. That's enough to light every house in the entire nation for a month-and-a-half. In the three-state area, meat production accounts for over half the water consumed in the entire region. These areas still have to import most of their meat. If the cost of water needed to produce a pound of meat where not subsidized (by our government), the cheapest hamburger meat would cost more than $35 a pound. The water that goes into a 1,000 pound steer would float a destroyer. It takes up to a hundred times more water to produce a pound of meat than it does a pound of wheat. To produce a day's food for one meat-eater takes over 4,000 gallons of water; for a lacto-ovo vegetarian, only 1,200 gallons; for a pure vegetarian, only 300 gallons. To produce a single pound of meat takes an average of 2,500 gallons of water - as much as a typical family uses for all its combined household purposes in a month. A third of Costa Rica is today given over to cattle-raising. The entire destruction of the rain forests in Central America is a complete crime to our planet. We're loosing species after species for the Big Mac! For every person who switches to a pure vegetarian diet, an acre of trees is spared every year. The livestock population of the U.S. today consumes enough grain and soybeans to feed over five times the entire human population of the country. We feed these animals over 80% of the corn we grow, and over 95% of the oats. The National Diary Council with the government's permission, (is still) the largest and most important provider of nutrition education in the country. That the Diary Council can still convincingly promote saturated fat and cholesterol-rich diets reflects the credibility it built in the days before the link between these elements and atherosclerosis was known. This is why most of us can't quite get over the protein myth, and the idea that milk is good for us (our kindegarten teacher told us so!). Of all the myths from this whole animal-consumption game, the milk one has always cracked me up. I mean, I'm an adult human being, and milk from a cow, for it's baby, is good for me? Then, what we do to that cow to get that milk? Wow. I switched to Soy, gladly. These are the guys that created the protein myth. Get over it! In the book, these scientists are working as hard as they can to create a diet that is low in protein. The only way they could do it would be for you to eat absoltute SHIT for food every day. It's impossible to not get enough protein from vegetables, grains and fruits, impossible. Get over it! A good, reliable set of bowels is worth more to a man than any quantity of brains. (Henry Wheeler Shaw) We aren't what we eat. We are what we don't shit. (Hugh Romney)