the meat quandary - last installment

That meat eating has become a potential ethical dilemma indicates a change in our awareness.  As we can see from the Inuit (who eat mostly fish protein) or the Masaai (who subsist mostly on the meat, milk and blood of the cattle they raise) on the one hand, and the Hindus, most of who have been vegetarian for a few millenia, there is a cultural context to any diet that arose in no small part from the geographical surroundings and inherent food potentials. As we have been struggling with the health implications of the big-ag industrial diet that makes for-profit "products," not food, (remember, they don't make this stuff for your benefit, but for theirs: $), and which are made out of geographical context altogether, we have wrestled with the "diet of the day" out of confusion.  The Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, and what not, have all been hailed as an epiphany at one point or another.

In my view diet has to be considered not only within an ethnico-cultural-geographical context, but also in the context of consciousness evolution.  What I mean by that is that a diet reflects our current understanding of things, our beliefs, our culture, our state-of-affairs.

I believe that it is perfectly ok to eat honey and eggs and some meat and some fish If we live in a context of respect and mutual benefit for all. Check out Sally Fallon's "Nourishing Traditions" for a well researched reversal on some of our common food myths.   Most important is to eat real food - the rest is up to your personal convictions, state of mind and stomach (listen to your body; when you exit a fast food place or a steakhouse and feel heavy and stuffed and as if you couldn't eat anything for the next 24 hours, maybe that food wasn't so beneficial for you).  Food should energize you, physically and spiritually.

Your views and diet evolve as you become better informed, mine continually do.  And if you believe from the bottom of your heart that a candy bar is really really good for your body  (not just to fulfill an emotional need), then it will be.

Please see installments 1. and 2. for the complete picture on the meat quandary.

the meat quandary - in 2 more installments

2. on eating produce Will Tuttle in his World Peace Diet, and the China Study, among many, are fervently advocating vegetarian and even vegan diets.  The two main arguments are that the industrial meat industry's carbon foot print, in combination with continually increasing demand for animal protein due to a still growing (and ever more affluent) world population, is disastrous to our environmental health (which it is), and that  meat eating contributes to, or causes, cancer and other civilization diseases (which it only does under certain conditions, some of which I mentioned in my last post).

Yet, the fact that the vegetarian/vegan movement is becoming so prominent points to a shift in awareness (of the abominable industrial meat industry, its contribution to global warming, and of the unhealthiness of industrial meat and cornfed beef).  Michael Pollan's famous advice to  "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is good advice for most of us, indeed.

On another vegetably note, the basis for our existence is light, water and soil.  Produce is closer to light energy than meat is.  As we all know, plants grow through direct conversion of sunlight to energy.  When we eat plants we take in sun energy just one step removed.  When we consume meat, we are one step further removed from that light energy because we eat the animal that fed on plants that fed on sunlight.  And incidentally, humans don't usually eat predator meat because that is yet one step further removed from sun energy than meat from vegan animals.

However, as long as we keep subjecting our crops and soil to synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides (and killing the bees along with the birds in the process), and monoculturing our produce crops, and not demanding GMO labeling (which has already happened in Europe, Japan, Russia and many other industrialized countries), we are not achieving that much with vegetarianism/veganism.  We'll keep subjecting farm workers to the health dangers of working in chemically laced fields, big-ag will keep doing its thing with produce, Monsanto & Co. are still on the loose, and we are still ingesting mineral poor and poison sprayed food grown in depleted soil that had to be artificially enriched.  So, going vegetably must mean going organic/sustainable/biodynamic to have meaningful impact on body and environment.

to be continued...

the meat quandary - in 3 installments

1. on eating meat Humans have been eating protein forever, some ethnicities more of it, some less of it, depending on geographical circumstances.   Sustainable farming and animal husbandry have been practiced in conjunction since we humans became sedentary, using the animal manure as fertilizer for the crops, feeding the animals leftovers and scraps, and eating some (not lots!!) of them, all in a pretty balanced cycle.

The picture only became horrific in the last 50 years or so when we began to produce (!!) meat.  The plight of the animals in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), modern breeding aberrations, the realities of modern abattoirs and subsequent meat processing practices (documented ad nauseam (literally) in Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals) are nightmarish. One would not want to eat such meat!

The other problem is that the percentage of meat in our diet has reached addictive proportions with the decrease in meat prices, something that is not good for our body either (unless you were Inuit or Maasai, and then you wouldn't eat industrially produced meat).

Lastly, from an evolutionary perspective, increased meat consumption has been linked to increased brain growth (although I am thinking that our brains may not have grown in proportion with the increased meat consumption of the past 50 years, otherwise we might not be where we are at environmentally).

Dirt Magazine has a brief presentation on meat vs. produce in their May-June issue (article not yet online).  However, the two opinions are too simplified.  So please reserve judgement until you have read all 3 installments.

to be continued...

anti war or pro peace?

Perhaps surprisingly it’s not the same!  It is not the same to be anti big-ag/anti pesticides or pro organic.  It’s not the same to be anti abortion or pro life.  Why not?  Because energetically being anti anything perpetuates that which we protest, since that is what we keep thinking about (the energy doesn’t get the “not” part).  If you keep protesting against war, war is the energy that gets perpetuated, whereas if you lobby for peace, peace is the energy that is being strengthened. Being pro something turns our mind to that which we favor, that which we wish to manifest. That’s why it is so important to formulate what you do want in life, not what you don’t want, although defining what you don’t want first helps you to define better what it is you actually do want.

So next time you are angry with something out there – perhaps the politicians, the terrible meat industry, your coworker, your child for something s/he did – turn your thinking around and emphasize what you’d like to see instead – vote for something, buy meat that has been raised the way you prefer, talk to your coworker about the feelings his/her behavior elicits in you and what can be done about it, encourage and reward your child for the behavior you’d like to reinforce.

don't frack our future

Instead of digging into our earth, chopping it up, fracking it and injecting chemically laced water into it, carving some out of it, plundering it, hollowing it out, throwing our trash onto it and burying trash into it,

making a mess of it, plundering and raping it,

let's respect our earth, appreciate it for what it gives us, honor it, cooperate with it, and understand it.

happy earth day

It does look like “…the economy provides us with all of our products…,” as environmentalist David Suzuki writes.  However, that is simply a belief, and an erroneous one at that. Suzuki clarifies that “This is nonsense, of course.  Everything we depend on….comes from the earth and will eventually end up going back to it.”   Whether it is paper, glass, steel, fiber, or even plastic, it helps to remember that those are all made from natural materials.  But we have lost the connection to where those things really come from because our lives have become so abstract, so removed from nature. Because of the separation in our mind between man and nature, we separate ourselves literally from nature altogether, we eliminate it downright from our lives (and we tend to forget that our garbage ends up there as well - see my recent post on that subject). So here is my Earth Day thought-of-the-day:

spiritual farming

Huh, you might ask?  Yes, there is such a thing, and it is called biodynamic farming.  The Biodynamic Farming & Gardening Association’s website defines it as a “spiritual-ethical-ecological approach to agriculture, food production and nutrition.”  Fred Kirschenmann, author of Cultivating an Ecological Conscience, explained in his 2010 keynote address at the conference of the association, that the present big-ag paradigm of maximum efficiency is geared towards short-term gain, and is only possible through specialization and simplification (the small picture, immediate gratification).  However, he says, farms need to be run more like organisms (the Gaia principle), in sync with nature.

We need a new agricultural paradigm, what with the bees dying, crop varieties diminishing (Tom Standage reports that “of the 7,100 types of apple (!!!) that were being grown in America in the 19th century…6,800 are now extinct.”  WOW!), monocultures that discourage insect and bird variety and promote disease, and GMOs and pesticides as misguided solutions to increasing production with short-minded profit in mind.  While there is so much more to say about the deficiencies of the present paradigm, I’d rather look towards the future and better solutions.

Organic agriculture, sustainable agriculture,permaculture, and biodynamics are all promising alternatives, of which the first is the most profit and least nature oriented (yep).  The term permaculture comes from the contraction of permanent and culture and agriculture (there is indeed no culture without agriculture).  Permaculture is a completely sustainable agri/culture practiced in symbiosis with local nature and without waste.  Biodynamics incorporates more lofty principles.  Just like permaculture it works with the farm in a symbiotic wasteless cyclical organism-like relationship.  In addition, though, it takes into account our embeddedness in the larger cosmic picture, and considers the planetary influences on seeds, crops and soil, and works with “homeopathic” soil enhancements since the health of the soil is first and foremost in growing minerally rich produce, the ultimate aim of agriculture.

healthy soil = healthy food = healthy body

voting with your $

When you pay for something you not only send dollars but also energy its way, you vote for it, you strengthen it and its cause.  Say you shop at Walmart, or Whole Foods, or Amazon, or your local farmer (I know these are opposites in a way, that’s on purpose), you literally fill their pot with money. While it may not be immediately evident, remember that there is strength in numbers.  When a few thousand people take their food dollars away from Tyson and send them their local farmer’s way, it does make a difference.  When thousands of people become tired of built-in obsolence and take their household dollars away from shoddily made appliances and buy something well engineered that lasts, it does make a difference.  Why do you think big-ag and big-food businesses are so afraid of GMO labeling?  Because we make a statement with our money.

Today, a friend mentioned that it wasn’t necessary to buy organic avocados because they are not on the Dirty Dozen list of produce most contaminated by pesticides.  I explained that not only was the price difference only slight, but more importantly that I voted for a healthier environment and farm workers' health by buying the organic kind.

So next time you open your purse or your checkbook, remember it's a two-way street. It's not just about saving a few bucks, it's also about the cause you support.

stuff, stuff, and more stuff

 

Not sure whether you have ever given trash, your’s or that of others, much thought. But here are some statistics.  The average amount of waste each person generates has increased from 2.68lbs in 1960 to 4.5lbs in 1990.  Luckily that number has held steady due to recycling efforts.   However, it still totals about 1.35billion lbs/day or 251 million tons per year!!! Now wait - this is only personal trash, which constitutes 2% of the waste stream – yikes for the industrial waste stream!  But let’s stay with our personal garbage, because that's where we can make a difference.

The first rule of thumb is that recycling and composting are good, but buying less stuff is better.  Besides, it’s been documented that we can’t gain happiness through consumption.  Elizabeth Royte, who wrote a very enlightening book on garbage, says that “We don’t need better ways to get rid of things. We need to not get rid of things, either by keeping them cycling through the system or not… desiring them in the first place.”

But once we have garbage, what are our choices? They are dumping, incinerating, and recycling.  FYI - in untreated landfills waste can take 40 to 50 years to decompose, in treated landfills between 5 and 10 years.  Yet, plastics may take hundreds of years to decompose!   And there are other problems with landfills: their toxicity (supposedly landfills are the largest source of human generated greenhouse gases, although CAFO’s, those enormous industrial animal feeding operations that make supermarket meat are also huge culprits), and the ever increasing amounts of garbage and landfill space needed (1.because of population increase, and 2.because our consumer society model is based on ever increasing consumption– the system breaks down if we stop consuming, and then the politicians scream “recession” - stop screaming with them).

So, what can you do?

• Don’t pick up any more plastic bags from the supermarket, bring your own cloth bags
• Consume less, recycle and compost more
• Use compostable garbage bags, recycled paper products, and products made from recycled plastic
• Buy more groceries and cleaning supplies in bulk, reuse your glass jars and Chinese takeout plastic containers (I wish they would take them back, since I don’t like plastic in the first place), reuse your Ziplock bags a few times
• Subscribe to Freecycle (they are all about giving and getting for free)
• Donate your gently used unwanted stuff instead of throwing it away
• Buy clothes at 2^nd-hand stores (I am a huge fan)
• Most of all – stop wanting, wanting, wanting stuff.

poor bees

Whether Einstein really said that mankind would perish within four years if all the bees died is less important than the realization that bees are crucially important to our food chain and they are indeed dying at an alarming rate.  It is, however, true that Rudolf Steiner predicted 100 years ago that the bee population would be damaged or might die out if we kept raising and treating the bees in an industrial way – and this is exactly what is happening right now.  It is also a fact that our crops will decline by about 40% if the bees died out because there are not enough other pollinators out there. While big agri farmers and big agri beekeepers still talk about the “mysterious” colony collapse syndrome, and some scientists still remain vague about the cause (“it’s the mites” – no, the bees’ genetic make-up is weak and they can’t stand up to the mites any longer!), the cause is eminently clear to holistic beekeepers and all who are in tune with nature.  The bees’ genetic material and immune system have been weakened by the industrial approach to both beekeeping and farming.  Monocultures deprive the bees of variety in their food, the poor things feed on a diet of poisons (all the –icides we spray on crops and gardens), industrial beekeepers take their honey away and feed them diluted sugar water instead, and they wake them up in February from their winter slumber, pack the hives by the hundreds onto trucks, and shuttle them up the coast to a different orchard every six weeks.  This treatment is worse than what peasant endured in the Middle Ages.  No wonder they die of mistreatment and weakness.

What to do?  It is so encouraging that backyard and rooftop beekeeping are becoming so popular.  It is also very encouraging that more women, who are naturally more nurturing, are becoming beekeepers.  But you don’t have to become a beekeeper to help the situation.  Just stop spraying your lawn (what’s wrong with dandelions and clover?  the bees love them), stop spraying your roses (find more natural and gentle ways to interact with your garden), buy more organic produce, and simply become more informed.