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.
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 ithe 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:
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.
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.
