"Can Meat Eaters Also Be Environmentalists?"

“Yes,” says Nicolette Niman in The Atlantic Monthly (link from Hunt Gather Love).

In case anyone missed the San Francisco debate over this subject between Nicolette Niman and mad cowboy Howard Liman, Alternet has a summary. I’d say Lyman lost definitively when he claimed that humans evolved to be herbivores.

--Tagged under: Environment--

"This sucks massively: the New York Times just published an article glamorizing condensed milk. It’s as if everything learned over the past twenty years about healthful and sustainable eating has gone out the window."
— Vegan.com

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Interview with an Ex-Vegan: Stella

If you leave veganism and then post a blog entry about it, I will find you. Well not really, but if your omnivorous re-birth entry includes the phrase “brain fog,” there’s a good chance I’ll stumble across your blog one day.

But that’s not how I found Stella’s blog. In her leaving veganism entry, there was nothing about brain fogs, mind clouds or even cerebral mists. That surprised me; most of the ex-vegans that I’d known and read about only started to question their consistent, unassailable philosophy once physical deterioration struck.

So how did Stella free herself from the prison of vegan logic without that little nudge from bodily collapse?

Read on and find out.

Stella

What got you into veganism?

I’d been vegetarian off and on for about seven years, including one stint of near-veganism during college (totally vegan at home, pretty strict vegetarian elsewhere).  My first and main motivation was, as for most vegans, to reduce animal suffering.

Being a native Texan, I had always eaten plenty of meat, but I preferred the more processed varieties, even as a child — ground beef, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages.  Anything that looked like an animal part always disgusted me, especially chicken legs and wings or fish with the skin on. My father, a typical East Texan, always went deer hunting every year, and I went along a few times, always thinking to myself, if I see a deer, I’m going to wave my arms and yell, “Run, run!” However, I was not an “early articulator;” I never disliked the taste or smell of meat in general, and I never felt any deep conflict or guilt as a child about consuming animal products.

I read vegan literature off and on throughout college, and considered becoming vegan, but was never able to overcome the cultural enjoyment of Texas food along with my personal love of cheese, milk and Mexican food.  Yet I couldn’t shake the feelings of guilt about killing other sentient beings.

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--Tagged under: Environment--

--Tagged under: ExVegan Interviews--

Myth-Busting Author Calls for Grass-Fed Fridays

Lierre Keith, author of the anti-veganism best seller The Vegetarian Myth,proposes Grass-Fed Friday as a rebuttal to Meat-Free Monday:

I’m so tired of being told that a plant-based diet will save the planet. It won’t. It will only entail more drawdown of soil, rivers, species, and life. We need to get over the ideologically-induced ignorance of the vegetarian myth.

If we could increase soil organic matter even .5% on 75% of the worlds’ (devastated) rangelands, that would bring CO2 levels back down to 330 ppm. That’s all we need to do to save the planet. It’s so simple–repair what agriculture has destroyed. Put the appropriate ruminants back on restored grasslands.

So on Grass-Fed Fridays we would all gather up anyone who would listen–friends, family, colleagues, local farm bureau–and explain to them that ruminants and grass would:

* Spell the end of factory-farming

* Produce healthier food for humans

* Profoundly repair wildlife habitat

* Eliminate all pesticides and fertilizers, ending the dead zones in the oceans

* Stop catastrophic flooding along the Mississippi and other rivers

* Restore those rivers to life by leaving them their water

* Create immediate income for farmers and revive rural communities

* Stop global warming

That makes it sound easier than her book does, which calls for the end of civilization to save the planet. Civilization-free Fridays has a decent ring to it, but we can’t exactly dismantle civilization for a day and then re-build it in time for the next. I like that Keith is considering more realistic tactics and I admire the chutzpah of designating Friday as a special meat eating day, since Friday is a meat-avoiding day for some Christians. But it’ll be hard to beat Paul McCartney’s slogan: “Meat-free Monday, it’s a fun day.”

If you don’t know much about meat, Grass-Fed Fridays sounds like an ultra-vegan day of eating your own lawn. So maybe the slogan should subvert that twigs and berries image. Something like, “If they eat grass, we’ll roast their ass.” But, you know, classier.

Damn it, Paul, we need your poetry here. If the entire world can skip meat on Mondays for you, surely you can eat a steak on Fridays for us!

--Tagged under: Environment--

--Tagged under: ExVegans--

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