OMNI
VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #20, August 12, 2015.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice,
and Ecology.
(#4 Feb. 12, 2014; #5 March 12, 2014; #6
April 9, 2014; #7 May 14, 2014; #8, June 11, 2014; #9 July 9, 2014; #10, August
11, 2014; #11 September 10, 2014; #12 October 8, 2014; #13, November 12, 2014;
#14, December 10, 2014; #15, January 14, 2015; #16, Feb. 11, 2015; #17, March
11, 2015; #18, April 8, 2015; #19, June 10, 2015). Thank you Marc.
Veggie Potluck
Wed AUGUST 12 - 6:00 pm @ OMNI
Food-friendly faces with delicious dishes who
want to meet you. You don't have to be a vegetarian to enjoy this
potluck. You just have to care about the well-being of animals and the
planet. Hope to see you!
.
OMNI’S
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See:
Animal Cruelty, Animal Friendship, Animal Rights, Critical Thinking,
Education, Empathy/Compassion, Ecology,
Ethics, Gandhi, Global Warming/Causes, Health, St. Francis, Torture,
Vegetarianism, Violence, Wars, for starters.
OMNI
NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL DAYS PROJECT
October
World Vegetarian MONTH. Oct. 16, UN
World Food DAY.
Contents #18 and #19 at
end
Contents Vegetarian Action #20, August 12, 2015
“By the Pinch and the Pound” by Laura Miller
and Emilie Hardman, in Protest on the
Page. Tracks the evolution of vegetarian and
vegan cookbooks and catalogues the
arguments for not eating meat or using animal products. See Bill Lueders, “A Slogan in Every Pot:
Cookbooks as Protest Literature.” The Progressive (July-August 2015).
Nutrition, Health
This
subject has been and is being thoroughly covered particularly by the corporate
food industry, but you might want to read Michael Moss,
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.
Rights and Protection of
Animals
PETA’s
Latest Number of Animal Times
Dick,
Center for Human Well-being
Vegan Liberationist Gary Yurofsky, “Best
Speech You Will Ever Hear”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K36Zu0pA4U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K36Zu0pA4U
Global Warming, Climate
Change
PETA’s
Animal Times
HEALTH, NUTRITION
You Really Can’t Eat Just One, and Here’s the
Reason
‘Salt Sugar Fat’ by Michael Moss
By SCOTT MOWBRAYMARCH
17, 2013, The New York Times
Americans eat 33 pounds of cheese and cheese products per
year, per person, which is triple the consumption rate of the 1970s. Fans of
Humboldt Fog and Cabot Clothbound Cheddar may hope this signals the return of
the artisan producer, but Michael Moss gives all credit to mighty Kraft and the
other food giants.
“In the hands of food manufacturers, cheese has become
an ingredient,” Mr. Moss writes. Thus we have cheese-injected pizza
crusts and cheese-draped frozen entrees, cheesy chips and cheezy crackers.
Cheese and its processed derivatives were deployed across a gazillion new
products and line extensions during decades when Americans, as a fat-avoidance
tactic, were actually cutting their milk consumption by 75 percent. From a
fat-consumption point of view, he says, “trading cheese for milk has been a
poor bargain indeed.”
And that is the nub of Mr. Moss’s case: By concentrating
fat, salt and sugar in products formulated for maximum “bliss,” Big Food has
spent almost a century distorting the American diet in favor of calorie-dense
products whose consumption pattern has been mirrored by the calamitous rise
in obesity rates. Entire food categories
were invented to support this strategy (Mr. Moss is particularly fascinated by
Kraft’s near-billion-dollar line of Lunchables snack trays), as processors bent
the American appetite to Wall Street’s will.
Photo
Michael MossCreditTony Cenicola/The New York Times
Mr. Moss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York
Times who put the phrase “pink slime” into high rotation with a 2009 article on
beef safety, deftly lays out the complicated marriage of science and marketing
that got us where we are. Is that place a state of addiction? The book uses the
language of addiction liberally — soldiers returned from World War II “hooked
on Coke,” kids “lunge” for the sugar bowl, a typical salt lover is a “hapless
junkie” — and it’s a metaphorical usage that must drive some research purists
bananas.
But there is science too. Mr. Moss dives extensively into
food-industry and academic research into the brain’s pleasure centers, where
sugar and fat sing their siren songs. If not addiction, the love of
hyper-processed foods may be what Dr. David A. Kessler, a former Food and Drug
Administration director, called “conditioned hypereating” in a 2009 book that
covered some of the same ground.
Importantly, Mr. Moss reports deeply from inside the food
companies: researchers, marketers, strategists, C.E.O.’s and many who have left
their work, some with regrets about how good they were at leveraging the bliss
point. “Salt Sugar Fat” is not a polemic, nor a raised platform for food
purists to fire broadsides at evil empires. This is inside stuff, and the book
is all the stronger for it.
Why, then, is the book a bit wearying? Partly it’s because
this is not a new story, not surprising to anyone who has contemplated the list
of 31 ingredients on a tiny packet of Cheez-It Gripz. Partly it’s because the
book moves slowly, in wide eddies, first considering sugar, then fat, then
salt, whose functions are nominally different but ultimately the same.
There is plenty here to make one’s blood pressure rise. (Must a
child-targeted snack pack contain 830 milligrams of sodium and 39 grams of
sugar? Really?) But the finer points of factory-to-table food formulation are
not riveting. Nor does Mr. Moss consider that many of the techniques developed
by food scientists — fat-globule dispersion, sugar-crystal manipulation — were
cherished by Escoffier. Chefs have long played with the chemistry of food,
intuitively hunting down the “bliss point” with as much gusto as any chip
scientist at Frito-Lay.
Mr. Moss also strains to dramatize the preoccupations of
marketers, describing a “hold your breath” moment when Kraft learned whether
customers would lose interest in Lunchables after the company moved from yellow
cardboard sleeve to a sleeveless box. One Lunchables team brainstormed the
question of “what could a pizza be like that would fit into the Lunchables
world?” “The Jungle” this isn’t, nor “Fast Food Nation.”
Still, Mr. Moss meticulously lands his punches. The result
is the sinking realization that we’ve eaten like a nation of impulsive
teenagers, happy to pay for a diet of carnival food. As one sensory researcher
notes, everything on American food shelves that can be sweetened has been
sweetened. Our adolescent food culture fell hard for the romance of industrial
perfectibility and the “convenience doctrine”: the proposition that easy should
define good in American eating.
Today, Mr. Moss says, the food companies have boxed
themselves in, blessed and saddled with fattening foods that are “so tasty,
people can’t resist eating them.” Healthier formulations of heavily processed
food, he insists, simply don’t taste as good. (This may be true of the most
highly processed foods, but, based on extensive tasting in my work, it’s not so
for a wide range of new foods now flooding the supermarkets from both small
companies and the giants.)
Mr. Moss does credit industry efforts to reduce salt, fat
and sugar. He gives a lengthy account of debates and initiatives that followed
Phillip Morris’s purchase of General Foods and Kraft in the 1980s, which left
veterans of the tobacco wars mulling the possibility of lawsuits and
legislation associated with obesity. There are, within these companies, people
pushing to accelerate the reformulations, and Mr. Moss talks to them.
However, the market punishes those who let margins slip in
the name of health — as PepsiCo, for example, has been punished. This is not an
optimistic book. The only counsel Mr. Moss offers consumers dribbles in with
the last two sentences: “After all, we decide what to buy. We decide how much
to eat.”
By focusing relentlessly on the food giants, Mr. Moss
presents them as hegemonic — dominating food supply, defining food culture,
producing food that by their own (and their consumers’) definition has been as
tasty as food can be. Arguably this was so. Is it so now?
Mr. Moss quotes a few experts who believe a consumer
backlash is under way, a generational pulling away from the ersatz. But he
barely glances in that direction. Missing is any consideration of the ferment
now bubbling away in America’s food culture.
Consider the boom in farmer’s markets, the elevation of the
chef, the proliferation of urban food trucks, the return of the artisan, the
growth of craft beer at the expense of big corporate brewing, the admittedly
high-end but notable success of Whole Foods, even the appearance of oatmeal and
better coffee in McDonald’s, not to mention the appearance of healthy grains
and nonfat Greek yogurts and myriad global-pantry products on Wal-Mart’s
shelves.
Perhaps the teenager shows signs of growing up? If so, not
even Wall Street could stop such a tectonic cultural shift. Mr. Moss’s book is
a little like a plate of processed cheese: fresh, in its way, but behind the
culinary curve.
SALT
SUGAR FAT
How the Food Giants Hooked Us
By Michael Moss
446 pages. Random House. $28.
RIGHTS AND PROTECTION OF ANIMALS
Editorial in Peta’s Animal Times (#2, 2015), “Why Animal
Rights?” The editor cites Peter
Singer, Jeremy Bentham, and Peta founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk in the
moral argument against deliberately causing suffering.
See Newkirk’s book, The PETA Practical Guide to Animal Rights.
Center for Food Animal Wellbeing to
Host Fifth Annual Symposium on Current Issues and Advances June 11, 2015
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. –
The Center for Food Animal Wellbeing
will host its fifth annual symposium Aug.
6 on current issues and advances in food animal wellbeing. The center is a
unit of the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
The one-day symposium
will be in the Leland Tollet Auditorium inside the John W. Tyson Poultry
Science Building on the University of Arkansas campus. Registration is $25.
"This year we
have an incredible roster of speakers covering animal welfare topics and
related issues of current interest to those of us in animal agriculture,"
said Yvonne Vizzier Thaxton, director for the Center for Food Animal Wellbeing.
. . .
The goal for the
Center for Food Animal Wellbeing is to improve animal health, animal handling,
food safety and productivity by developing and defining objective measurements
of wellbeing including measures of behavior, stress physiology,
neurophysiology, immunology, microbiology and production efficiency. . . .
Registration
information and the program are online atfoodanimalwellbeing.uark.edu/AnnualSymposium.
TOPICS
CONTACTS
Imagined replies:
Ms.,
I welcome your announcement.
I am a representative of the Center
for Human Wellbeing for the Merciful Treatment of Old People and the
Mentally Incompetent. The goal for the
Center is to improve human health, and kinder human handling and productivity
by developing and defining objective measurements of wellbeing, including
measures of behavior, stress physiology, neurophysiology, immunology,
microbiology and production efficiency.
Ms.,
Thank you for your invitation.
I represent the Center for Human Wellbeing,
the purpose of which is to prepare difficult people for a useful
death. We provide efficient and painless
methods for ending life; indeed, our clients are not killed until they are
their healthiest and can provide the very best body parts. That they are not volunteers but must be
compelled is to be expected, given the need for leather and the shortage of people,
but our soothing surroundings and sedatives actually make the whole experience
pleasurable.
Here is a letter I might have written:
Ms.
I read about the conference and wish
to ask your cooperation in our group's desire to demonstrate during the conference
in an appropriate location. You see, “Food Animal Wellbeing” sounds like a euphemism for production efficiency to
increase profit during mass slaughter of sentient beings. You see also, I
am the founder of the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology, and the founder
of its Vegetarian group. I oppose the killing of animals, for many
reasons, but particularly because I do not believe their well-being is promoted
by their slaughter. And I am astonished you would choose August 6 for
your Symposium, the day the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the civilian city of
Hiroshima. But mass extermination does
not seem to concern the Symposium.
Thank you,
Dick Bennett
442-4600
|
“Best Speech You Will Ever Hear” – Animal
Liberation Vegan Gary Yourofsky - YouTube, Google Search, July 14, 2015
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K36Zu0pA4U
Apr 1, 2014 - Uploaded by TheVeganZombie2
New and Updated version of Gary Yourofsky's 'Best Speech You
Will ... Hear Gary talk about compassion and kindness to animalsand
about ...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMaetrqLXc
Jun 7, 2013 - Uploaded by Simone Reyes
BEST ANIMAL RIGHTS SPEECH by
SIMONE REYES .... agree that animals need some more
respect, I don't think they'll ever get equal rights.
3.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUJRz8Eb2o
Jul 11, 2014 - Uploaded by Bite Size Vegan
The BEST Speech You Will Ever Hear!
... hear gary talk about compassion and kindness to animals and
about the horrors of the meat and dairy ...
4.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQCe4qEexjc
May 16, 2012 - Uploaded by Kindness Trust
"This is the most amazing thing I've ever heard. ... This
is the transcript to the speech: On behalf of St James Ethics
Centre, the Wheeler ... Animal Rights is now the greatest Social
Justice issue since the abolition of slavery.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5hGQDLprA8
Feb 6, 2015 - Uploaded by Gary Yourofsky
An inspirational life-changing speech by Gary
Yourofsky, ananimal liberation activist, national
lecturer ... +Cesar Ferradas This is sooo great!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KliOwyw4ghY
Jul 11, 2014 - Uploaded by Bite Size Vegan
gary yourofsky answers questions about veganism, compassion,
and animal rights at city college, new york on ...
ANIMALS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
From PETA’s Animal Times (#2, 2015)
Advocacy by Kelly Chin:
HELP CURB CLIMATE
CHANGE: TRY VEGAN.
Choosing
meat-free meals combats environmental destruction, saves animals from a
miserable life and painful death, and is better for your health.
Meat and Water ad by Pamela
Anderson:
“Meat And Dairy Farms Drain Half the
Country’s Water.” The solution to water shortage
is not taking shorter showers.
And this
essay from the David Suzuki Foundation
·
David
·
Donate
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Food and climate
change
(Credit: Loose Ends via Flickr.)
It's not only how we choose to travel or heat our homes that determines
our carbon footprint. What we eat also has a climate impact. Understanding the
resources that go into producing our meals can make us more aware of the
relationship between food and climate change, and help us make better choices.
There are several factors that contribute to
food's climate impact, including: how low on the food chain it is, how
much energy is used to produce it (and whether
the food is grown organically or with chemical inputs), and how far it has to
travel before it gets to the table.
Meat and climate change
Meat production is a
major contributor to climate change. It is estimated that livestock production accounts for 70 per
cent of all agricultural land use and occupies 30 per cent of the land surface
of the planet. Because of their sheer numbers, livestock produce a considerable
volume of greenhouse gases (such as methane and nitrous oxide) that contribute
to climate change. In fact, the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) has estimated that livestock production is responsible for
18% of greenhouse gases.
Sign up for our
newsletter
The growing of livestock and other animals for
food is also an extremely inefficient process. For example, it takes
approximately five to seven kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef.
Each of those kilograms of grain takes considerable energy and water to
produce, process, and transport.
As meat consumption has grown around the
world, so has its climate impact.
The problems with chemical agriculture
Other agricultural practices can impact the
climate. Synthetic pesticides and fertilizers are widely used in agriculture,
and are often made from fossil fuels. Manufacturing and transporting these
chemicals uses significant quantities of energy and produces greenhouse gases. Not surprisingly, studies
have shown that chemical farming uses considerably more energy per unit of
production than organic farms, which do not use these chemical inputs. In
addition, the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers in soils produces nitrous
oxide, a greenhouse gas that is approximately 300 times more powerful than
carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
Organic farms, on the other hand — which rely
on natural manure and compost for fertilizer — store much more carbon in the soil, keeping it
out of the atmosphere.
Food that's closer to home
Where your food comes from is also a factor.
Currently, the average meal travels 1200 km from the farm to plate. Food that
is grown closer to home will therefore have fewer transportation emissions
associated with it, and also be fresher and support local farmers. And as the
distance food travels decreases, so does the need for processing and
refrigeration to reduce spoilage.
Local or organic: which is better for the
climate?
While it's good to buy locally grown food for
many reasons, 'food miles' (the distance food is transported from the time of
its production until it reaches the consumer) actually make up a relatively
small percentage of the overall carbon footprint of food — approximately 11% on
average, according to studies. How the food is grown makes up a much larger
percentage — roughly 83%.
For example, one study showed that lamb raised
in New Zealand and shipped 18,000 kilometers to the UK still produced less than
one quarter of the greenhouse gases than local British lamb. Why? Because local
flocks were fed grains, which take a lot of energy to grow, while the New
Zealand flocks were grazed on grass. Shipping the lamb to the UK was
responsible for only 5% of the overall greenhouse gases, whereas 80% of the
emissions were from farm activities. Similar lifecycle assessments have found
the same results for other foods. One assessment done for packaged orange juice found that over a third of
the lifecycle emissions came from just the synthetic fertilizer used on the
orange groves.
Choosing to buy food that is organically grown
can therefore be a better choice for the climate. But if possible, buy food
that that is organic and local.
So what can you do to reduce your impact when
you eat?
Eat meat-free meals
• Try to eat at least one meat-free meal
per day. If you're already doing that, gradually increase the number of
meat-free meals you eat.
• Plan ahead. If going meatless means
changing your habits drastically, you'll enjoy it more if you do some research
and find really yummy recipes before you go shopping.
• Choose veggie restaurants and meatless
menu alternatives when you go out — they're sprouting up all over the
place!
• Check out these cool websites: Vegetarian
Times, Epicurious, World Community Cookbooks
Buy organic and local whenever possible
• Vote with your fork. Let your local
farmers know organic is the way to grow! In addition to being better for the
climate, organic food has many other advantages. First, it is grown without
genetically modified organisms. As well, organic meat, poultry, eggs and dairy
come from animals that are not fed antibiotics or growth hormones. And because
organic foods are grown in healthy soils, they are typically more nutritious,
containing more vitamins and minerals. Finally, organic farms promote genetic
biodiversity, create less water pollution and soil damage, and result in fewer
poisonings of farm workers, and less harm to wildlife.
• Read labels when you shop. Choose
food that is organically grown and locally produced.
• Talk to the produce manager at your
grocery store. Tell them what you want and why.
Other things you can do
• Don't waste food. Close to half of
all food produced worldwide is wasted after production, discarded in
processing, transport, supermarkets and kitchens. When people throw food out,
all the resources to grow, ship, package and produce it are wasted, too,
including massive amounts of water. Click here to find out how you can help
end food waste.
• Grow some of your own food. Growing
vegetables at home eliminates some of the transport required to get food to
your table. It also lets you grow your food without chemicals. You can grow
some great vegetables in even the smallest of spaces such as a balcony or patio
space. Try growing herbs, tomatoes, lettuce, and other veggies.
• Do an inventory of how you look after
your garden and lawn. Get rid of toxic substances (but discard them
appropriately so those poisons don't end up in landfills). For information on
how to do this, check out Product Care and the Georgia
Strait Alliance Toxic Smart page. Find safe alternatives, and learn
how to garden organically. It's easy!
Contents of Vegetarian
Action Newsletter #18, April 8, 2015
Nutrition, Health
PBS, Frontline,
“The Trouble with Chicken”
VegNews, the Vegan
Magazine
Fighting
for the Future of Food
Animal Rights and Protection
Stein and LaVeck. Film Peaceable
Kingdom.
Vegetarian
Voice.
Namit Arora.
Ethical Arguments Against Eating Animals
Mercy for Animals Film
Climate Change
Cowspiracy
Contents Vegetarian Action #19
Dan
Dean
Remembering
Donna and Kelly’s DON’T FENCE ME IN
Cindy
Sheehan’s Soapbox
Health,
Nutrition
The Trouble with Chickens, PBS, Frontline Film
Living Downstream Film
Rights
and Protection of Animals
Three
Books for Christians
Global
Warming, Climate Change
Food
Not Lawns, Food Not Lawns
Natural
Grocers
END VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #20, AUGUST 2015
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