Religion, J.D. and Usha Vance.

Because this blog is steadfastly horrified by Donald Trump and his administration, it'd be easy to assume that it's run by a rampaging leftist.  

It isn't.  

Indeed, if you follow the thread you'll see where we come out on the right a fair amount, which in our view doesn't mean supporting fascism.  I'm a conservative, not a right wing populist.

We note this, as there's been a flap over J. D. Vance's comments about hoping that his wife, Usha, converts to Catholicism, as if that's somehow inappropriate.

It isn't, and any sincere Catholic with a non Catholic spouse, which includes me, hopes for that.

Vance wasn't a political figure that I followed at all until he started to campaign for the VP slot next to Donald Trump.  Frankly, I found and still find his political migration to Trumpian authoritarianism appalling.  Anyhow, I knew that he was a convert to Catholicism, but I wasn't really aware of how recent of convert he is.  Vance grew up in Evangelical Protestantism, which isn't surprising given his "hillbilly" background, and at least according to an interview I heard of him some time ago, his influential grandmother was of the non churched Southern type of Christian view.  Vance himself was an atheist by the time he went to college   By 2014, the time of his marriage, he had resumed being a non denominational Protestant Christian but he was evolving towards Catholicism by 2016.  He converted to the Faith in 2019.

Vance's path is a lot more common than people suppose.  Vance is an intelligent man, my numerous political disagreements with him notwithstanding, and he became an atheist in ignorance.  The more educated he became, the more Christian he became, and exhibiting Cardinal Newman's Rule, that lead him ultimately to Catholicism somewhat against his own will, much like C. S. Lewis became a High Church Anglican after having been an atheist, or like G. K. Chesterton argued himself into the Faith.

Vance's path to Catholicism coincided his increasing rightward political draft and his barely camouflaged transformation into a Illiberal Democrat.  He's trod the same path in that regard ad Rod Dreher, whom is a friend of his (and who is pretending, frankly, to be Orthodox).  There's numerous other intellectuals on the right at this time who likewise share that distinction, such as J. R. Reno and Patrick Dineen, and amongst them are notable converts like Eva Vlaardingerbroek.  Indeed, there's a notable movement amongst conservatives from Lutheran nations in this direction, even as a non political boom in conversions occurs in various areas in Europe.  For cradle Catholics the association with illiberal democracy can be disturbing, and even result in outright internecine fights, but it is going on.  We here will note, as we have before, that becoming politically conservative does not mean having to become a populist let alone an illiberal democrat.

Anyhow, one of the things about Catholicism is this.  We are not religious pluralist.  If Vance did not wish for his wife to become Catholic, he'd be a very bad Catholic.

Usha Vance is a Hindu.

Catholics believe extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.  There is no salvation outside the church.

Now that's a doctrine that Catholics don't emphasize much, and often real diehard radtrad Catholics don't understand.  It isn't the case that Catholics believe that only Catholics can go to Heaven.  For that matter, Catholics are very far from any kind of "once saved always saved" theology and accept that a lot of Catholics might very well go to Hell.  Rather, Catholics believe, as the Catechism states it:

"Outside the Church there is no salvation"

846 How are we to understand this affirmation, often repeated by the Church Fathers? Re-formulated positively, it means that all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body:

Basing itself on Scripture and Tradition, the Council teaches that the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.

847 This affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church:

Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation.

848 "Although in ways known to himself God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men."

Catechism of the Catholic Church. 

Vance can of course hope, and should hope, that Usha converts, as her chances of salvation are heightened.  Does that mean that if she doesn't, she's damned to Hell?  Well, we can't know the state of anyone's soul, but the fact that she hasn't would suggest that she's not consciously rejecting Christianity, but rather hasn't overcome something.

Vance himself should be worried about the state of his soul. Catholics reject IVF, which he's been backing, and lying on serious matters is a serious sin, which Vance has been doing at an epic level.

At any rate, Vance isn't doing the wrong thing by hoping his wife becomes Catholic.  He's completely correct to wish for that, including openly.

This is, however, where the liberal side of American culture, and even the American Civil Religion, and frankly the Evangelical Christians, all come into conflict with Catholics.

At some point in American history and in American culture, and it goes back pretty far it became really common for people to be sort of religious relativist.  "It doesn't matter what religion you are, as long as you are a good person."  Well, it does in fact matter what religion you are, and of course you should be a good person no matter what religion you are.

Catholicism was an oppressed religion in the United State up until basically the 1960s.  Open oppression of it lessened steadily in the century prior to the 60s, and in fact was intense prior to the 1860s.  Catholics really kept themselves in a major way as a result, and only really began to enter the wider culture after World War Two.  Al Smith's Catholicism is generally regarded as what made it impossible for him to win the Presidency prior to the war.  An early Casper politician of Irish extraction was controversial in the town's Catholic community because of the distance he put between himself and his religion.  The first Catholic Governor of Wyoming was probably Frank A. Barrett, who was a devout Catholic who went on to become the state's U.S. Senator thereafter.  Joe Hickey, another Catholic came after him.  Both Barrett and Hickey were Governors in the 1950s.  Of course, Kennedy broke the dam in 1960, but in part by pledging basically not to let his Catholicism influence him, which was a despicable pledge. 

Vance hasn't pledged that.

The only U.S. Army generals known to be Catholic during World War Two, we might note, were Lieutenant General John E. Hull and Major General Patrick J. Hurley.  This fits into the culture of the professional military class at the time and it might be noted that the first Jewish general in the U.S. Army, Maurice Rose, was a practicing Episcopalian.  Patton, often noted to be very devout, was an Episcopalian, as was Marshall.  

Anyhow, as noted, it's not the case that Catholics feel all non Catholics are going to Hell as they are not Catholic, and Catholics certainly do not believe that all Catholics are going to Heaven as they are Catholic.  Rather, Catholics believe that the Catholic Church, which is the oldest and original form of Christianity, is the church Christ founded and the one entrusted with the instruments of salvation.  In some ways, everyone who is ultimately saved is saved in some way because of the Catholic Church.  As, to use a mistranslation of von Balthasar's statement, we wish "for all men to be saved", we want everyone to be Catholics as that makes it much more assured.

This puts us way outside of the American Civil Religions' views that all religions, or perhaps all Christian religions with Judaism thrown in for good measure, are equal.

One thing it should also do, however, and recent conversions should help cradle Catholics to refocus on this, is to be concerned about people in our immediate orbit.  Vance is basically doing that, but frankly he's in a bit of a tough spot because he and his wife married before his conversion.  

Simply being in a marriage in which one member is a Catholic and the other is not, if the Catholic is a sincere Catholic, has some real challenges.  Catholicism is different and even after decades the non Catholic spouse can be really surprised by the application of the Faith by the Catholic spouse.  In "mixed" couples where the non Catholic spouse is a member of one of the churches that's very close to the Catholic Church this is less so, but even here I've known couples who attended Mass faithfully where one was a Catholic and the other a Lutheran, for instance, with the Lutheran never converting in spite of the two churches being so close.  

As Yeoman's First Law of Human Behavior is a powerful force, general run of the mill Protestant spouses may attend Mass and support their Catholic spouse early on, but over a period time, simply stop attending as most Protestants aren't under a requirement to attend any service on a Sunday. That's inevitably extremely hard on the Catholic spouse who soldiers on.  This has to be even more difficult in a situation such as Vance's in which the other spouse isn't even a member of a Christian religion at all.

Indeed, at one time Catholics were very much discouraged from marrying non Catholics, although its always occurred, and it was often a stipulation by the Catholic spouse that the other convert.  I've known several Catholic couples where this was what happened, although I think it much less common now.  The religion where this frequently occurs is the Mormon religion, which is not a Christian religion and which isn't compatible with any.  Of note there, usually fallen away Mormons simply become intensely anti religious, rather than some other religion.

Catholics only marrying Catholics was a lot easier when Catholics pretty much were associated, culturally, only with other Catholics. That day is long gone, but there's still some wisdom to the old custom here.  As with many things, the Catholic viewpoint on something like marriage is much different than the cultures, if taken seriously.  Catholics married to non Catholics are adding weight to their cross, no matter what.  And part of that weight is the hope the other spouse become Catholic.

Mocking Christianity.

But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days.  People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious,callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good,traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God,as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them.

For some of these slip into homes and make captives of women weighed down by sins, led by various desires, always trying to learn but never able to reach a knowledge of the truth.

Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so they also oppose the truth—people of depraved mind, unqualified in the faith.

But they will not make further progress, for their foolishness will be plain to all, as it was with those two.

2 Timothy, Chapter 3.

A very interesting Canadian agriculturalist whom I follow on Twitter (I don't care with Elon Musk calls it), who is also an Eastern Rite Catholic, noted that he, like me, didn't watch the Olympic opener (as will be noted, I watched the very start of it, grew bored, and wondered off).  So he, like me, was left with the media accounts, of which there are plenty, including video, of a group of drag queens mocking Da Vinci's The Last Supper.  He goes on to make the  point that the sex laden transvestite portrayal was likely calculated to offend, but that The Last Supper is not an icon, which is quite correct.

But, with some exception, the Latin Rite lacks icons.  While not the same, the great Medieval and Renaissance works of art in the West tended to be commissioned by the Church, so they have an association with it.  Put another way, in order to offend to the  degree as denigrating an icon, there'd be little other choice. ¹  Again, it's not an icon, but part of a set of religious works of art commissioned by and associated with Christianity in the West.

It's hard to grasp why this would occur, but the outrage in the Catholic Church, and there is a lot of it, is justified.  So is the embarrassment in some French circles, particularly French conservative ones.  The French far right came with in a gnat's breath of taking over the French government two weeks ago and the ultimate makeup of the upcoming French government is still unknown.  Had this happened before the election, I have a strong feeling that the French far right would be forming a government now.

That provides a topic for another thread, which we will address, but we'll note here.  Part of the rise of National Conservatism and Christian Nationalism, and even just far right populism, is due to debauchery such as this.

The Olympics itself was quick to claim that the portrayal wasn't not of The Last Supper, which of course is an Italian, not a French, Renaissance work, noting on Twitter:

The interpretation of the Greek God Dionysus makes us aware of the absurdity of violence between human beings.

Hmm. . . Dionysus is a Greek mythological figure, not a French one. . . 

Dionysus was the Greek god of  is the god of wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre.  His Roman equivalent was Bacchus.  While celebrated in Roman times, the Romans also restricted unofficial celebrations dedicated to Bacchus due to the excess he was associated with it.  

Whatever else Dionysus may stand for or have stood for, it certainly had nothing to do with being against violence between human beings.  He really had a lot more to do with booze, drunkenness, sex and insanity, and its interesting that the ancient Greeks linked all of them together.  Eirene or Irene was the divinity associated with peace, but she didn't engage in drunken excess.

Another Olympic official also reacted with a series of excuses that were fairly lame.  Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, said the display was about "inclusion".

When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised. Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.

Whatever diversity means, it doesn't mean "being together".  At least to some significant degree, it means being apart, and in the modern era, when this is being self defined in a way contrary to nature, it literally means being a Dionysus until one's self.

Jolly noted:

In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.

Um, okay.

Le Filip, the winner of  Drag Race France season three, probably got it more accurate.

I thought it would be a five-minute drag event with queer representation. I was amazed.  It started with Lady Gaga, then we had drag queens, a huge rave, and a fire in the sky. It felt like a crowning all over again. I am proud to see my friends and queer people on the world stage.² 

Whatever a person thinks of it, Le Filip grasped it better than Jolly did, quite frankly.

For many, as I have often told you and now tell you even in tears, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Their end is destruction. Their God is their stomach; their glory is in their “shame.” Their minds are occupied with earthly things.o

St. Paul to the Philippians, Chapter 3.

A portion of France, particularly urban France, has waged war with the Church and Christianity since the failed French Revolution.  Like all the revolutions that were conducted by populist mobs, their god was their belly and they turned on the Church. The same is true of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Mexican Revolution. The Church stands for the proposition that there is something greater, much greater, than us, where as populism of the left and right, at the end of the day, doesn't.  Modern "progressivism", heir to the extreme left that arose in 1798 and 1917 has the same ethos, rejecting anything outside of ourselves and rising each person to an individual Bacchus no matter how much a person's own nature may be corrupted in one fashion or another, as individual natures are the only thing that matters.  The portrayal at the Olympic opener celebrated that ethos shamefully mocking Christianity in favor of a world outlook that goes no deeper than a person's gentiles.  Their glory, is their shame.

The storms that are raging around you will turn out to be for God’s glory, your own merit, and the good of many souls. 

St. Padre Pio.

I'll be frank that I quit watching the opening ceremonies of Olympic games some time ago.  I think the last one I actually watched was the Moscow Olympics, which is now quite some time back. They've ceased to make sense to me. The Olympics are ostensibly about sports, not about the glorification of the country where they're held, or drag queens.  Indeed, I've frankly lost interest in the Olympics themselves for some reason.

This really reinforces that view, particularly as to this particular Olympics.

I feel they should just be permanently placed in Greece, for the summer games.

Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows, because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit.

Galatians, Chapter 6.

I suspect most of the viewing audience will simply regard this attack on Catholicism as part of the show, shrug it off, and move on.  In doing so, they benefit from the liberal culture the Church created in the West and the fact that central to the Christian worldview is turning the other cheek.  In contrast, France has a very large Muslim population that nobody would dare attack in such a fashion, a cartoon depicting Mohammed for instance famously resulting in murder.  There will be no drag queens taking on an Islamic topic.  None.  Islam doesn't turn the other cheek.  Likewise, Hinduism, which of course would be completely foreign to France, can't be attacked in this fashion either without almost immediate retribution.³

Catholics aren't going to do that, nor will the rest of the Christian world.

Which doesn't mean that the offense should be ignored.

Footnotes:

1.  One religious image that has endured this is the tilmahtli associated with Our Lady of Guadalupe.  Back when there was a print Playboy magazine, the company issued a Mexican edition with a Mexican woman featured on the cover replicating the image in a pornographic fashion, which brought a firestorm of criticism.

That, and this, give credence to those who claim a diabolical origin to these events.

2.  Are there no French singers to do an Olympic opening?  Why Stefani Germanotta as the opening act?  That alone is embarrassing for France.

Having said that, the Marseilles was beautifully sung by Axelle Saint-Cirel. They should have just stopped right there.

In case anyone wonders, my watching of the show was basically bookended by those two acts.  I grew tired of the masked boofador running over roofs and wondered off to take a shower and watch something else.

3.  One religion that has endured something like this is the LDS, Mormon, faith.  Target of the satiric comedic The Book Of Mormon, it's basically shrugged it off, probably figuring, correctly, that as a minority religion, it might actually benefit from being mocked, as it at least puts a spotlight on it.  I'd guess, however, that Mormons aren't keen on the portrayal, and while I've never seen it, and I'm not a Mormon, I'm not either.  As noted, nobody would put on a Broadway satiric "The Koran", nor should they.

I think I'll have a steak, rare.

Bar har har!

A  note, this is one of those threads (well actually now two combined threads) I started along time ago (in October, to be exact), and I'm just getting back around to it.

Anyhow. . . it's back on my radar, and for some amusing and not so amusing reasons.

Almost every single aspect of dietary advice that's existed in the course of my lifetime has turned out to be flat out wrong, so why would this be surprising?

A lot of health advice has to be taken with a grain, or even a bucket, of salt.  And I've tended to do that with the constant "don't eat meat" which is the deceptive morphed view of "don't eat red meat".

I've also tended to take the real advice, which I've ignored, to be don't eat fatty red meat, which is different advice actually, and as stockmen have responded to the demand, fat red meat is harder to get than it used to be anyhow.  A steak, even a prime cut, can be fat or lean.  If you order one now, unless you are specially ordering a steak in some place that's really old timey, is not going to be anywhere near as fatty as one you might have ordered in the 1970s.

Now, I'm not a dietitian, and nobody should take eating advice from me, but frankly, if your spouse would let you get by, and some will, on deer, elk, moose, antelope (particularly that) I think you could skip this entire topic.

But assuming not, you are now left with this:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

Hee hee hee.

Well, of course everyone who has a vested interest in the existing state of things is countering it. "What?  That can't be true!  I've been saying the opposite."

Well, consider this, from the NYT:

Eat Less Red Meat, Scientists Said. Now Some Believe That Was Bad Advice.

The evidence is too weak to justify telling individuals to eat less beef and pork, according to new research. The findings “erode public trust,” critics said.

Of course, by this point the public's trust in dietary advice is pretty eroded anyway, which may explain why so many Americans are practitioners of the Diet Of The Week, no matter what it may be, combined with a lot of non scientific baloney about eating this or that substance not approved by the FDA for anything.  

And as I've long stated, a lot of American's dietary habits de jour are based not on science, but on our national cultural history and the sad state of our society.

Puritans, they didn't have any food hang ups, but were pretty much opposed to almost everything fun.  Modern Americans have largely dumped their theology as they prefer to believe that God personally approves of anything they do, but they've oddly kept the strong instinct to suffer.

The best dietary advice a person could give would be to grow your own food, and hunt for your own meat, to the extent you can.  That dovetails with the best health advice a person can give, which is get regular exercise. We basically ignore all of that as we want to rationalize the modern urban lifestyle we largely detest, find an explanation for the reasons we're unhappy that don't involve making any really tough or disciplined decisions, and also, oddly enough, punish ourselves in some ritual manner that makes  us miserable but also makes us feel morally superior. It's a combination of the effects of our Fourth Law of Behavior, modern conditions, and our cultures ongoing Puritanism.

This would explain the change over the years from diet to a sort of secular Jainism.  Contrary to widespread belief, Hindus can and do eat meat, but the related Jain's do not and claim not to eat anything that lives (which they do, as almost everything in a real human diet was alive at one time and you can't live on the few things, like salt, which are not).  The Jain diet is a religiously imposed one and a very odd one at that, the underlying roots of which we'll not go into, but as odd as it is, the American vegan diet that's come up in recent years is stranger yet.  It's deeply, deeply unnatural, not good for its practitioners, and bad for the environment in spades, but it allows its adulterants to suffer with a sense of misplaced moral superiority while not having to observe any of the strict moral codes such disciplines require.  By way of a more familiar example, some Christian monastic orders or individual monks also ate strict vegetarian diets or nearly vegetarian diets, as a form of fasting, but they also pray without ceasing and completely abstain from sex, something most emaciated vegans none the less would recoil from following even though its a lot more likely to bestow real virtue upon them. But then, that requires real concentration and sacrifice, not just ordering the vegan special at dinner and then lording it over your friends.

More recently yet, now armed with a scene of benighted superiority, the followers of such diets in the west have been on a full blown Cromwellian campaign to compel it on everyone else, the most recent example of which was the really absurd example of the Golden Globes serving a vegan dinner in the name of the environment.  Well, dear vegans, your diet is arguably  the most destructive one on the planet ever imagined.

Let's be blunt.  If you really want to pour the greenhouse gases into the environment, go vegan.

Let's start with some basic facts, something Americans in particular do not like interjected into their public discourse.  Beef cattle are responsible for only 2% of US greenhouse gas emissions.  That means 98% are from something else, and farming (i.e., plant farming) contributes its share to that.  And of that 2%, a fair amount of it would be there anyway.

Eh?

Yes.  A fair amount would be there anyway.

Cattle get picked on as the cattle industry has been the whipping boy of ill informed environmentalist going back at least until the 1970s.  Themes have varied, but generally a lot of urbancentrntric or relocated urbanites took up picking on the cattle industry in the west under the strange assumption that it was responsible for the decline of everything that they loved, and if it wasn't there, things would be 100% Granola Perfect.  The basic gist of the argument was, if you boiled it down, cattlemen came in and shoved out the Indians (which is not the way that happened) and put their dirty dirty cows on the range which displaced the super clean and nifty buffalo.  If the cattle were removed, all the good old days would return.

Navajo horsemen, 1904. They weren't vegans.

The big fallacy to that, of course, is that the Indians tribes who fought so hard to retain their lands (quite a few of whom now raise cattle) would require these same lily white Granolas to also remove themselves from the range in order to achieve that natural status.  That's not part of the proposal. 

Navajo sheep.

Indeed, it doesn't even begin to grasp that the wide open spaces in the West are here today as they're livestock ranges.  The degree to which people are deluded on a topic such as this is perhaps best symbolized by an article once written by a University of Wyoming professor decrying seeing cattle out of her house windows in Laramie, when in fact the reason such a person can see that is that they must in one of the newer houses on the edge of Laramie.  Building houses destroys wild lands like nothing else.

High altitude prairie.  Ranching keeps it as such.

Next to it, ironically, is farming.

I love farming, but a farmed field is not a natural field. We'll get back to that in a moment.

That's because we're not done discussing gassy cows.

As noted, only 2% of U.S. greenhouse gases derive from cattle, and much of that is due to the way they're fed out on corn.  If you don't don that, and simply eat grass fed beef, the figure drops.

It'd never drop to 0% as ungulates fart. . . including wild ungulates.

Buffalo, in this case ones that are being raised as livestock.

One of the cherished tales of the Granola set is to recount how before the millions of cows, there were millions of buffalo.  Millions.  And those millions of buffalo. . . well. . . they farted too.

It could be pointed out that there are no doubt more cattle today than there were buffalo, but there were a lot of buffalo and they were gassy. That's the way ungulates are, to a small extent.  So, even in the Granola dream, those millions of domestic ungulates, were they gone, would be replaced, in a pure state of nature, by millions of wild ungulates.

Indeed, it might be noted, cattle themselves were a wild species originally, although not in North America. They certainly were all over Europe, Asia and Africa, however.  Indeed, they still are in Africa.

Environmentalist Ernest Hemingway with a gas contributor in Africa.

This brings us around to farming.

One of the things that's become really obvious about modern Americans is that very few of them have any concept whatsoever of how food gets on their tables.  Not even remotely.  It just appears there. 

Vegans and other vegetarians seem to have the concept that agriculture exists in the Neolithic, or even the Paleolithic era.  That is, a farmer goes out of his stone hut and roots in the ground with a sharp stick (note, such sticks were often sharpened and then hardened with fire, so we'll presume our super environmental neolithic farmer doesn't use flame. . . just more sticks).  Having done that, he plants his seeds by hand and waters them with a clay jug throughout the growing season.  Once that's completed, he carriers his food to market by hand, where it's sold in Free Trade Farmers' Markets.

No, that's not even close to how that happens.

Even this would be an advanced state of agriculture compared to the one that vegans and vegetarians seem to imagine exists.

Modern farming is petroleum dependent in a major way in reality.  Much more so than livestock production.  Every farm of any substantial size uses really heavy rolling equipment that consume buckets of diesel fuel and expel CO2 exhaust, among other things.  In addition to that, even watering systems simply to water crops depend quite often on gasoline or diesel engines, or electricity supplied by a power plant that may well be fossil fuel using. From planting to harvest there isn't a day that doesn't go buy that uses a lot of fuel.

And that crop doesn't get to wherever its going, either to be processed or to market, with out more fuel.  It's trucked to one place, and then shipped to another, and in the U.S. that's by truck.  When Jimmy Hoffa declared back in the 60s and 70s:

If you have it, a truck brought it

he was right.

And this assumes that you are restricting yourself to crops grown in North America.  If you are enjoying feasting on third world plantains or nuts or whatever, that came by a diesel powered ship and was grown in a place where the concern for fuel consumption was likely low and the environment even lower.

Indeed, the beauty of animal consumption is that animals feed themselves on what they eat, and you usually can't eat it.  Cattle live on grass, and you can't eat grass. Even cattle fed out on corn are eating something that humans are extremely inefficient at digesting (and frankly cattle aren't great at digesting, but which are better than  we are).   They water themselves and while cattlemen do use fuel to be sure, in much of hte US cattle are left to themselves to a surprising degree much of the year and another ungulate, horses, remain used for transportation much more than a person might imagine.

And to add to that, agriculture is a great killer.

Vegans and vegetarians like to imagine that by having that bowl of rice they've avoided hurting animals, but they're simply fooling themselves.  For one thing, every farm field has displaced natural habitat.  But for another, agriculture itself results in the death of a lot of animals simply by accident and occasionally by design.

All of which leads to this.  Veganism and vegetarianism aren't supported by your evolutionary biology.  That doesn't mean your current diet does either.  Ideally, you'd plant a garden and hunt for meat, or buy local lean meat if you can't hunt for it all.  That's what you'd do if you really were concerned about your diet.  If you aren't, chances are you are concerned about something else. With some, that's a frightened knowledge that they'll die combined with a primitive belief that day can be pushed back endlessly through ritual.  For many others, it's a lack of knowledge combined with, or even simply dominated by, a retained Puritanism that's become secular in nature and which demands that you must suffer, for which you may regard yourself as superior to others.

Really health or healthy environment?  Not so much.

Indeed this topic has been well explored by some other blogs, which were once going to be the topic of a separate blog entry here but now have been combined with this one.  One really interesting one is this one below, by the self styled "Buzzard", a young woman rancher in Kansas:

Changing Your Diet Won't Help the Environment but these 5 Changes Sure Will.

A big part of Buzzards point here has to do with greenhouse gases, which I'm only addressing here because of the claim that switching to vegan burgers or something is going to address that in any meaningful way.  This isn't a post on the climate, it's a post on diet, or more specifically meat.

Anyhow, the "5 Changes" the blogger discusses in detail are these:  1) Reduce your food waste; 2) Reduce your reliance on single use plastics; 3) Park the car and walk (or take public transportation; 4) Turn off your faucets and lights; and 5) Stop buying so much stuff.

The same blogger is pretty blunt with an additional administration of a dope slap with this one:

A Burger Won't Negate an Airplane.

I won't comment on all of those, and I think you ought to read the blog entry if you are interested.  But I'd note that the really interesting one of those is "Stop buying so much stuff".

Buying stuff is the modern American thing.  Even people who claim not to buy stuff, buy a lot of stuff.  The entire modern American economy is based on buying stuff.  Americans buy stuff just for something to do.  I  know more than one person who is cognizant of this that they'll choose working over an idle day as if they have an idle day, they'll buy stuff.  Indeed buying stuff is now so vital to the American economy that after the U.S. was hit by terrorist on September 11, 2001, politicians urged the American public to spend, so as to keep the economy rolling.  Americans themselves are routinely referred to by their leaders by the insulting term "consumers".

An economy based on stuff purchasing is sort of odd in a way.  I'm not arguing against buying stuff and indeed shopkeepers and manufacturers are depending upon the sale of things for their living, and always have. But the level of stuff consumption is something I haven't ever addressed on the blog and probably ought to just as an interesting societal matter.

The reason I haven't addressed it is that I don't have a good command on the consumer culture.  I've read widely that it started to come about in t he early 20th Century, but simply reviewing old ads and newspapers I suspect it came about at least as early as the post Civil War period.  Already by the turn of the prior century there were a lot of advertisements aimed at consumer spending during the Christmas period, for example, and Christmas Season advertising of a century ago is very familiar to what we see today.  Economists worry like crazy if people stop buying stuff, even while encouraging people to save, as if everyone quits buying stuff, the result is an economic depression.

Anyhow, the consumer culture in the U.S. is so deep that people really can't grasp the extent the extent to which they participate in it.  Even people who are the greenest of the greens usually are pretty deeply into it, they just don't realize it.  Indeed, they often express their greenism by things they bought to show you how green they are.

The point there is that even while we can disagree with Buzzard on items on her list, your diet probably isn't contributing that much to greenhouse gases unless, ironically, you are a vegan or vegetarian, as the amount of fuel needed to produce what you are eating in the modern farm economy is enormous.  

So, what to do if you really want to be a dietary steward of the environment?  Well we could add to her list with 6) plant a garden and 7) go hunting and fishing.  Or you could just make that your list and maybe add being careful about what you buy and how much of it you buy. Stop participating in a throw away society in other words, if you are.  Buy local if you can, including local foods.

I'd add a bit, before going on, that if Buzzard's blog hits a little too hard, you can find a lot of the same type of content on the twitter feed of one Sarah Mcnaughton in a very well presented and scientific way.  Mcnaughton, a young woman agriculturalist in North Dakota also has a blog, Sarah's NoDak Living, which is worth checking out.

Indeed, both of these blogs are connected into our blog feed under the agricultural heading on this site.

Anyhow, go hunting or fishing, preferably both, and plant a garden.  If you can't do those, you might, or might not, be able to get a fair amount of your meat and vegetables locally.  But don't go vegan, your DNA will hate you and it doesn't achieve anything other than to make you weak, crabby and make everyone view you like Oliver Cromwell dropping into a Christmas Party.

Oliver Cromwell.  Don't be Oliver Cromwell.

Persistent Myths VI: Hindus and vegetarianism

Hindus and vegetarianism

 Hindu wedding party. Chicken was probably on the reception menu.

Americans commonly believe that Indian is a vegetarian nation, because the largest religion in India is Hinduism.

Before we go on to that, we'll note that some Americans believe all Indians are Hindus.  Not hardly.  India is a "put together" nation of the former English colony variety, and not one single "nation".  It has a wide variety of ethnic identities and religions, including a Catholic population that dates back to the Apostolic age.  Islam and Buddhism are also present in India, and India still has a pretty large Communist Party, which of course is philosophically opposed to any religion.  But Hinduism is the largest religion in India.

Well, Hindus are all vegetarians, right?

Nope.  A minority of Indian Hindus are vegetarians. 

Hindus do have dietary restrictions, to be sure. The oldest one in Hinduism appears to be a ban on eating horses, cattle, or people, although this is debated.  It is thought that the ban might actually have applied to possessed horses and cattle, and any people.

Some Hindu sects are vegetarian, and these are well represented in India. But a majority of Indian Hindus are not members of those sects, and they do eat meat.  They do not eat cattle, but other meats.

This myth is interesting in that it at one time was a reason that Hindus were looked down upon, and now its a reason that some who come from outside Central Asia will point towards Hinduism, but it's simply wrong.