Tuesday, January 7, 2014

VEGETARIANISM NEWSLETTER #3 JANUARY 2014

OMNI VEGETARIAN NEWSLETTER #3, January 8, 2014.    Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.

Newsletters
Index:
See: Animal Cruelty, Animal Rights, Compassion/Empathy,
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(479) 442-4600
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VP, like all of OMNI’s activities, is a member-run group.  If you would like to compile these Newsletters, take my place, start next month!  And the newsletter is open to all opinions.  Send yours to me for the next newsletter.

JANUARY POTLUCK
Wednesday, January 8, 6:30p.m.
OMNI, 3274 Lee Ave.  north of Office Depot, SE of FedEx. 
Program. . . . 


Contents #1  Nov. 12, 2013
Vegetarian Organizations, Magazines, Books, Films:
     Vegetarian Voice
     Vegetarian Times
     Vegetarian Living
     VegNews (Vegan)
Organizations, Magazines, Books, Films for Preservation of Animals
   PETA’s Animal Times
Foundations of Vegetarianism
Why People Become Vegetarians
Nutrition, Health
   Moss, Addictive Junk Food
Nutrition and Ethics
   Google Search, Food, Inc.
Food and Climate Change
   Google Search
    Meat vs. Climate
Peace
   Tuttle, World Peace Diet, Food, Compassion, Interconnectedness, Harmony
History: Recipes from Famous People
OMNI’s Library 

Contents #2
Declaration for Consideration
Nutrition
Eliz. Renter, Poisons in Meat
Get the Antibiotics Out of Turkeys
Ethics
Schweitzer, Reverence for Life
Susie Hoeller, Ethical Food
Climate Change and Food
 Google Search

Contents #3
Dick, Declaration of Support, See Newsletter #2
Animals and Vegetarianism
Cahill, Cruelty and Kindness
From Rolling Stone, Factory Farms
Google Search:  Cruelty to Animals
Humane Society of the US
SPCA
Nutrition and Pleasure

Last month we held our first and very tentative discussion of the relation between VP and the values of vegetarianism.  Here is what I sent you in Newsletter #2.


DECLARATION FOR DISCUSSION
Since OMNI has always affirmed the interconnectedness of life, the linkage of peace, justice, ecology, good health for all people, empathy with all animals, and the protection of the environment, and since
Vegetarianism empowers us to deal with the world’s environmental, health, and humane problems, the Vegetarian Potluck declares its support for an active role in promoting the values of vegetarianism:    
A vegetarian diet is more nutritious and safer than that of meat.
Vegetarianism is more ethical than a meat diet, by avoiding the cruelty and killing of animals.  As Albert Schweizer wrote:  Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace.”  
Meat eating contributes to the destruction of the air, water, and land, and to the production of C02, warming, and climate change much more than does a vegetable diet.

     The initial question for each of us to ask is:  Do I believe in these values?  And then: Will these values contribute to a better world?   And:   Do I wish to see more people embrace these values?  And: If we do can we be effective?  Finally:  Should OMNI’s VP promote the values, and to what extent, and in what ways?
     Each one of these questions is complicated, so I’ll tackle only two of them right now:  Can we be effective if we advocate the values of vegetarianism?   Is meat-eating harmful to animals, humans, and the planet?  
      Recently in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette 9(9-27-13) Dana Kelley explained how drunk driving was dramatically reduced in the US in the short span of 15 years.   Before 1980 more than half of all fatal motor vehicle crashes were alcohol-related, and more than a third of all drivers in those crashes were drunk.  
     Mothers Against Drunk Drivers was founded by Candy Lightner in 1980 after her 13-year old daughter was killed by a repeat DWI offender.  The target of MADD was not alcohol but the behavioral problem of drinking too much and driving.  Her supporters became MADD, for they shared her determination to stop drunk driving and save people’s lives.  Within 15 years drunken driving had become socially stigmatized and criminally punitive, and drunk-driving rates and deaths had plummeted by half.
     The key to MADD’s success was their conviction and concentration.  They would accomplish nothing if they simply met occasionally to enjoy each other’s company.   No.  Drunken driving was harmful, wrong, criminal, and it could be reduced if they put their minds to it.
       Of course, alcohol-related deaths by traffic accidents continue, but the epidemic’s growth was stopped and reversed.  (Kelley continues by applying the example of MADD to the problem of gun abuse.  We can reduce gun killings.)
      And their example applies to OMNI’s Potluck as well, if, that is, we believe in the values of vegetarianism and that those values—nutritional, ethical, and climatological-- resist and can reverse the drunk driving of meat-eating.  
      Each person’s convictions are their private matter, but considerable evidence shows that vegetarianism is more healthy, ethical, and environmentally friendly than meat.   Newsletter #1 included two essays on the poisons in meat, an essay and book on the ethics of eating vegetables instead of meat, and several references to writings about the role of meat in the warming of the atmosphere.  Newsletter #2 covered the same ground (and more).  
      The evidence of the harms of meat seems persuasive, but the debate over refusing meat is not over obviously (see below).  The evidence of successful public relations campaigns is powerful, but of course failures have occurred.   We can make a difference as a group, if we decide to.   Several considerations remain, but let’s pause to be sure we have sifted the present questions sufficiently.  –Dick


Vegetarian Times:  Food, Pleasure, Nutrition
     The entire Jan.-Feb. 2014 issue is devoted to this one field of interest, almost excluding ethical and climate change considerations.     With occasional exceptions, the magazine seems to offer a vegetarian (some vegan)  gourmet/nutritional magazine.  But of course it excludes meat also, which makes an indirect statement regarding other subjects.
  And gourmet is a problem at least for me.  The recipe for Baked Chips sounds delicious and easy, but what is truffle oil?   And the Greek salad calls for Mexican oregano, Fuyu persimmons, radicchio, and lacinato kale, among other ingredients.   I have all the ingredients for tomato soup recipe, but the author suggests I use mini-cutters to cut sliced bread into shapes such as stars, footballs, snowflkes!   --Dick


HISTORY: EARLY VEGETARIANISM

SHELLEY, “ON VEGETARIANISM”
There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley from Wikipedia on Shelley’s nutritional and ethical preference for vegetables.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) aligned most of his views on vegetarianism with those of Ritson. Like Ritson, Shelley believed that a meatless diet was the best mode of consumption for a healthy, disease-free life. He believed that human disease could be alleviated by a simple reversion back to a plant-based diet.[16] The eating of meat, to Shelley, was a practice that polluted the body with syphilis, among other unpleasant ailments. In A Vindication of Natural Diet he wrote, "Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuaded that he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits,"[17] these unnatural habits being the consumption of meat. He compared the negative effects of a meat-based diet to alcoholism, asking, "How many thousands have become murderers and robbers, bigots and domestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors?".[18] He goes on to suggest that, a human of gentle disposition towards animals, "rising from a meal of roots," will be a healthy man whose only threat of death will be that of his own natural, old age.[19]

GOOGLE SEARCH,  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY VEGETARIANISM, Jan. 6, 2014

1.                             Vegetarianism and Romanticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_and_Romanticism
Jump to Percy Bysshe Shelley - [edit]. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) aligned most of his views on vegetarianism with those of Ritson.

2.                             Shelley - the first celebrity vegan - Vegsource.com

www.vegsource.com/john-davis/shelley---the-first-celebrity-vegan.html
Jan 5, 2011 - Percy Bysshe Shelley, known as Bysshe to his friends, was the rock star of his day - glamorous, controversial, fought over by teenage girls, ...

3.                             Percy Bysshe Shelley - Essay on Vegetarianism... - Taroscopes

www.taroscopes.com/miscellanous-pages/shelley.html
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The language spoken, however, by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to prove that at some distant period man ...

4.                             History of Vegetarianism - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

www.ivu.org/history/shelley/
Jan 23, 2012 - A large collection of articles about the development of vegetarianism around the world for thousands of years.

5.                             Joseph Ritson, Percy Shelley and the Making of ... - Academia.edu

www.academia.edu/.../Joseph_Ritson_Percy_Shelley_and_the_Making_...
Percy Shelley's copy of Joseph Ritson's groundbreaking book on vegetarianism reveals a lot about his politics and philosophy.





NEW BOOK BY THOMAS CAHILL, HERETICS AND HEROES
Bill Moyers, on PBS  Moyers & Co., Dec. 29, 2013,  interviewed Cahill, who proposed the dichotomy of kindness and cruelty as the fundamental ethical poles.     Which life should we choose, was the question.  


ETHICS OF VEGETARIANISM
“The fundamental idea of good, therefore, is that it consists in preserving life, in favouring it and wishing to raise it to its highest point; and evil consists in the destruction of life, in the injury of life, or in the frustration of its development.”  Albert Schweitzer, “The Problem of Ethics in the Evolution of Human Thought.”


     
FACTORY FARMS OR MORE HUMANE MEAT PRODUCTION OR NO MEAT? 
The Stomach-Churning Reason Why Meat Is So Cheap
By Lindsay Abrams, Salon
14 December 13 
Rolling Stone lifts the veil on animal abuse at factory farms
olling Stone just posted an in-depth, Snowfall-esque feature on the litany of abuses carried out by Big Meat. It covers, in horrific detail, the extent to which meat and dairy producers will go - and the extent to which the government will overlook or even approve of their behavior - in order to raise the estimated 9 billion broiler chickens, 113 million pigs, 33 million cows and 250 million turkeys consumed each year in the U.S.
It includes sound effects, pop-up factoids and some truly brutal descriptions of conditions on factory farms, like the following:
You're a typical milk cow in America, and this is your life. You are raised, like pigs, on a concrete slab in a stall barely bigger than your body. There, you never touch grass or see sun till the day you're herded to slaughter. A cocktail of drugs, combined with breeding decisions, has grossly distended the size of your udder such that you'd trip over it if allowed to graze, which of course you're not. Your hooves have rotted black from standing in your own shit, your teats are scarred, swollen and leaking pus - infected by mastitis - and you're sick to the verge of total collapse from giving nearly 22,000 pounds of milk a year. (That's more than double what your forebears produced just 40 years ago.) By the time they've used you up (typically at four years of age), your bones are so brittle that they often snap beneath you and leave you unable to get off the ground on your own power.
That account of the typical doesn't include the instances of extraordinary abuse (one activist: "I had a job at a barn with this sick-fuck boss who was proud of the stuff he did to cows. One day, we're doing repairs on a gate in the barn and a couple of cows stroll over to watch us work. Well, one grazes him with her snout, just to be playful, and he smashes her in the face with his wrench. I also got him bragging about past assaults, like tying a cow to a fence and taking turns beating her, getting the other guys to work her over.") For the very not-faint-of-heart, there are videos, too.
The article fingers companies like Tyson and Perdue for transforming meat production into a tightly controlled, top-down system, under which they "began treating animals as production units, not living, feeling creatures with basic rights." And it's not enough that laws and USDA regulators aren't protecting these abusive and unsafe practices from happening, it continues. A new spate of lobbyist-driven "ag-gag" legislation is keeping activists from stepping in and doing the government's job for them. Various state laws make it illegal, for example, to film a farm from a public road, or to hold on to evidence for longer than 48 hours before presenting it to the police.
After a whole lot of bleakness, the article ends with a vision of humane slaughter, imagining a future when we can subsist on a more natural and regional food system. Everything that comes before it presents a solid case for us making the necessary sacrifices to get to that point - as one activist told Rolling Stone: "Wherever you stand on the issue of eating animals, I think we agree that making their lives hell is too high a price for cheap food."   (from David D)


ETHICS OF EATING MEAT, GOOGLE SEARCH, JANUARY 6, 2014

1.                             Ethics of eating meat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_eating_meat
In many societies, controversy and debate have arisen over the ethics of eatinganimals. Two of the main ethical objections have been to (1) the unnecessary ...Ethical views on eating meat - ‎Treatment of animals - ‎Animal consciousness

2.                               The Winner of Our Contest on the Ethics of Eating Meat - NYTimes ...www.nytimes.com/.../the-winner-of-our-contest-on-the-ethics-of-eating-...

May 3, 2012 - Is it ethical to eat meat? That short question, posed in these pages a few weeks ago, inspired a debate heated enough to roast a fatted calf (or a ...

3.                             Why It's Ethical to Eat Meat | Michael Ruhlman

ruhlman.com/2012/05/why-its-ethical-to-eat-meat/
May 29, 2012 - It's no secret that I am a vigorous & unapologetic carnivore. I believe: to eat humanely raised & slaughtered animals is not only ethical, it's ...

4.                             Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat | Food & Wine

www.foodandwine.com/articles/why-vegetarians-are-eating-meat
Yes, my husband has started eating meat again after a seven-year hiatus as anethically motivated and health-conscious vegetarian. About a year ago, we ...

5.                             BBC - Ethics - Animal ethics: Eating animals

www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/eating_1.shtml
Is it wrong in principle to raise and kill animals so that human beings can eat meat and fish? Does it stop being wrong if the processes involved are carried out ...

6.                             Bulletproof Editorial for the New York Times: Why Eating Meat is ...

www.bulletproofexec.com/bulletproof-editorial-for-the-new-york-times-...
Several weeks ago the New York Times gave an invitation to its readers: “Tell us why it is ethical to eat meat.” The winner, Jay Bost, a vegetarian returned to ...

7.                             Why It's Unethical To Eat Animals - Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary

www.woodstocksanctuary.org/learn-3/why-its-unethical-to-eat-animals/
In any discussion concerning the ethics of eating animals, it's important to begin ...insist that meat-eating is “natural”—and therefore morally neutral— because ...

8.                             Paul Schwennesen: Ethics of Eating Meat - Huffington Post

www.huffingtonpost.com/paul.../ethics-of-eating-meat_b_1510173.html
May 14, 2012 - Asking whether eating meat is "ethical" is like asking whether having sex is ethical. Biological imperatives do not pander to such arbitrary ...

9.                             How To Be An Ethical Carnivore - io9

io9.com/how-to-be-a-conscious-carnivore-1370968240
Sep 23, 2013 - Not everybody can or wants to become a vegetarian. But for those of us who insist on eating meat, that doesn't mean we have to be complete ...

10.                         The Ethics of Eating Meat - The Weston A. Price Foundation

www.westonaprice.org/health-issues/ethics-of-eating-meat
Jun 30, 2002 - A philosophical look at meat eating, including effects on environment, factory farming, productivity, the moral imperative, science, theology, and ...
Searches related to eTHICS of eating meat


FACTORY FARMING, CRUELTY TO FARM ANIMALS GOOGLE SEARCH, PAGE ONE, JANUARY 1, 2014

1.                             Factory Farming: Cruelty to Animals | Animals Used for Food | The ...

www.peta.org › Issues  Animals Used for Food
Your source for great-tasting vegan and vegetarian recipes, information on all aspects of vegan and vegetarian living, news about PETA's campaigns to stop ...

2.                             Farm Animal Cruelty | ASPCA

www.aspca.org › Fight Cruelty
At every step of their lives, all animals should be treated with compassion and protected from suffering. Sadly, billions of farm animals lack even the most basic ...

3.                             Undercover Investigations of Factory Farms and Slaughterhouses

www.mercyforanimals.org/investigations.aspx
DiGiorno quickly cut ties with the dairy factory farm, while MFA and a state lawmaker ...Less than a year after an MFA investigation led to criminal animal cruelty ...

4.                               Cruel Confinement of Farm Animals : The Humane Society of the ...www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/

Factory farms cram egg-laying hens into cages so tiny they can't even spread their wings. Breeding pigs and veal calves are stuffed into cramped individual ...

5.                             Protect Farm Animals : The Humane Society of the United States

www.humanesociety.org/issues/campaigns/factory_farming/
This video, narrated by James Cromwell, reveals the cruelty animals suffer on factoryfarms, and tells you what you can do to help. Working to reduce the ...

6.                             Last Chance for Animals - Factory Farming

www.lcanimal.org/index.php/campaigns/other-issues/factory-farming
97% of the 10 billion animals tortured and killed each year are farm animals ... The consequences of this agribusiness are institutionalized animal cruelty...Factory Farming | Farm Sanctuary
www.farmsanctuary.org/learn/factory-farming/
Far from the idyllic, spacious pastures that are shown in advertisements for meat, milk, and eggs, factory farms typically consist of large numbers of animals ...

7.                             Taping of Farm Cruelty Is Becoming the Crime - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/.../taping-of-farm-cruelty-is-becoming-the-crime.html
Apr 6, 2013 - On one covert video, farm workers illegally burn the ankles of Tennessee... in Wyoming charged nine farm employees with cruelty to animals.

8.                             Raw.info: Animal cruelty >> A raw truth of factory farming

www.raw.info/the-problem/animal-cruelty
Factory farming prioritises maximum production above all else, ignoring the welfare ofanimals.

9.                             Cruelty to farm animals demands exposure - The Washington Post

www.washingtonpost.com/.../cruelty-to-farm-animals.../9a972c8e-a6bf-11e...
Apr 26, 2013 - That, though, has helped make them effective tools in the fight against illegal and cruel treatment of farm animals. It's alarming that a number of ...News for cruelty to farm animals (blog) ‎- 5 days ago
This year, 15 bills in 11 states attempted to make undercover videos on farms illegal. Not a single one passed. Activists say a broad-based ...
1.                  Clean fun or animal cruelty?
SKNVibes.com‎ - 1 day ago


The Humane Society of the United States

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Animal cruelty can be either deliberate abuse or simply the failure to take care of an animal. Either way, and whether the animal is a pet, a farm animal, or wildlife, the victim can suffer terribly. Don’t despair, though—anyone can take steps against cruelty.

People with emotional problems may beat, shoot, or stab animals or set them on fire. Those who abuse animals are very likely to be violent to other people—even their own family—too.
Neglect is not giving an animal the right food, water, shelter or vet care. Because their misery goes on for so long, animals who die of neglect can suffer just as much as animals who are harmed on purpose.
All U.S. states have animal cruelty laws, and 47 states treat some forms of abuse as felonies. Farmers and researchers can do cruel things to animals that other people can't do legally, but all states have some protection for pets like dogs and cats.

Take Action Against Animal Cruelty

If you think an animal is being abused, either through violence or through cruel neglect, you can take action to help!


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Cows on a factory farm
Last week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed new guidelines designed to curb the rampant over- and misuse of antibiotics on factory farms. Eighty percent of all antibiotics bought in the United States are purchased to give to farm animals.
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END VEGETARIANISM NEWSLETTER #3




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