OMNI
VEGETARIAN ACTION NEWSLETTER #29, June 8, 2016.
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; #20, August 12, 2015; #21, September 9, 2015; #22, Oct. 14,
2015; #23, Nov. ; # 24, Dec. 9, 2015;
#25, Jan. 13, 2016; #26, Feb. 10, 2016; #27, April 13, 2016; #28, May 11, 2016). 1576 total OMNI
Newsletter posts as of Apr 12, 2016. Thank you Marc.
If you need to be
removed from this list or want it to go to another address, just reply to this
email and I'll get you fixed up.
NO Veggie/Vegan Potluck THIS SUMMER.
See you in September.
Why
Vegetarian? See our pamphlet on the
materials table to the left as you enter OMNI.
Contents
Vegetarian Action Newsletter #29
I. Nutrition, Health
Veganism for All, Brown Vegan
Vegan Recipes
Pollan’s 7 Words Plus 1
II. Animal Rights
Protecting Feral Cats
Tyson Video
Mercy for Animals
Animal Legal Defense Fund
Dick, Arkansas Makin’ Progress
Dick, Looking on the Bright Side
III. Climate Change,
Overpopulation, Carnivorism
Kunstler, Magic and the Fate of the Nation
Farm Bureau v. Cowspiracy
IV. Limits to Growth
McKibben, Eaarth
I.
NUTRITION,
HEALTH
BECOMING VEGAN
Brown Vegan,
Monique Koch
Article in VegNews
(March/April 2016, 74) mentions also the “black vegan movement.”
www.brownvegan.com/
Helping families start a simple, delicious and long-term vegan lifestyle
together.
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VEGAN RECIPES
Anya Kassoff, The
Vibrant Table: Recipes from My Always Vegetarian, Mostly Vegan, and Sometimes
Raw Kitchen. 2014.
Angela Liddon.
The OH She Glows Cookbook: Over
100 Vegan Recipes to Glow from the Inside Out.
2014.
Motto
of 7 words from Pollan: Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not Too Much (and
he adds Exercise).
7 Rules for Eating
By Daniel
J. DeNoon, Reviewed by Louise
Chang, MD on March 23, 2009
Choose Food Over Food-Like Substances, Food Writer Michael
Pollan Tells CDC
March 23, 2009 -- We Americans suffer a national eating disorder: our unhealthy obsession with healthy eating.
That's the diagnosis delivered by
food author Michael Pollan in a lecture given last week to an overflow crowd of
CDC scientists.
As part of an effort to bring new
ideas to the national debate on food issues, the CDC invited Pollan -- a harsh
critic of U.S. food policies -- to address CDC researchers and to meet with
leaders of the federal agency.
"The French paradox is that they have better heart
healththan we do despite being a cheese-eating, wine-swilling,
fois-gras-gobbling people," Pollan said. "The American paradox is we
are a people who worry unreasonably about dietary health yet have the worst
diet in the world."
In various parts of the world,
Pollan noted, necessity has forced human beings to adapt to all kinds of diets.
"The Masai subsist on cattle blood and meat and milk and little else. Native
Americans subsist on beans and maize. And the Inuit in Greenland subsist on
whale blubber and a little bit of lichen," he said. "The irony is,
the one diet we have invented for ourselves -- the Western diet -- is the one
that makes us sick."
Snowballing rates of obesity, diabetes,
and heart disease in the U.S. can be traced to our
unhealthy diet. So how do we change?
7 Words & 7 Rules
for Eating
Pollan says everything he's learned
about food and health can be summed up in seven words: "Eat food, not too
much, mostly plants."
Probably the first two words are
most important. "Eat food" means to eat real food -- vegetables,
fruits, whole grains, and, yes, fish and meat -- and to avoid what Pollan calls
"edible food-like substances."
Here's how:
·
Don't eat anything your great
grandmother wouldn't recognize as food. "When you pick up that box of
portable yogurt tubes, or eat something with 15 ingredients you can't
pronounce, ask yourself, "What are those things doing there?" Pollan
says.
·
Don’t eat anything with more than
five ingredients, or ingredients you can't pronounce.
·
Stay out of the middle of the
supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. Real food tends to be on the
outer edge of the store near the loading docks, where it can be replaced with
fresh foods when it goes bad.
·
Don't eat anything that won't
eventually rot. "There are exceptions -- honey -- but as a rule, things
like Twinkies that never go bad aren't food," Pollan says.
·
It is not just what you eat but how
you eat. "Always leave the table a little hungry," Pollan says. "Many cultures have
rules that you stop eating before you are full. In Japan, they say eat until
you are four-fifths full. Islamic culture has a similar rule, and in German
culture they say, 'Tie off the sack before it's full.'"
·
Families traditionally ate together,
around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It's a good tradition.
Enjoy meals with the people you love. "Remember when eating between meals
felt wrong?" Pollan asks.
·
Don't buy food where you buy your
gasoline. In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.
II.
ANIMAL
SENTIENCE, COMPASSION, ANIMAL PROTECTION AND RIGHTS
Protecting
Feral Cats
Alley Cat Allies, alleycat.org. Founded to advocate for humane treatment of
feral cats.
ASPCA, The American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, aspca.org.
150 years of championing and rescuing cats of all kinds.
North Shore Animal League in the New
York Tri-State area with partnering nationwide, animalleague.org to increase
adoptions. A leader in the no-kill
rescue movement.
Best Friends Animal Society,
bestfriends.org. Largest no-kill animal
sanctuary in the nation in Kanab, Utah, and partners around the country for
adoption and spay/neuter programs.
TYSON ANIMAL
ABUSE VIDEO
“Group’s Video Claims Abuse at Tyson
Plant.” AD-G (May 26, 2016).
“Mercy for Animals…has released a
video that the group says shows abuse and neglect at a Tyson Foods plant in
Tennessee.” More than half of the report
gives Tyson’s response: 1) Tyson is deeply concerned for their animals, 2) the
video reused “old videos about matters we’ve already…taken action on,” and 3)
Tyson uses “third-party animal welfare checks” on its farms. The effect of the report was to nullify
Mercy’s video.
I went to Mercy for Animals’ web
site and found this 5-26 from PRNewswire:
Tyson Foods Slammed Again By Mercy
For Animals' Hidden-Camera Video Exposing Sickening Animal Abuse
Mercy
For Animals Calls On World's Largest Poultry Producer to Implement Welfare
Standards After Undercover Investigation Shows Birds Suffering From Disease and
Crippling Leg Deformities
May
25, 2016, 06:05 ET from Mercy For Animals (http://www.mercyforanimals.org/about
)
·
NASHVILLE, Tenn., May 25,
2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Mercy For Animals exposes horrific animal
cruelty and neglect at Tyson Foods in a new video, available today at www.TysonTorturesAnimals.com. The
video shows thousands of baby birds bred to grow so fast they became crippled
under their own weight, workers carelessly kicking, clubbing, and throwing
chickens, and thousands of severely sick and injured animals left to suffer
without proper veterinary care or access to food and water.
Mercy For Animals is calling on
Tyson to swiftly adopt meaningful animal welfare policies to end many of the
worst forms of animal abuse in its supply chain. Tyson Foods is the largest
poultry producer in the world.
Mercy For Animals
will host a tele-press conference at 10 a.m. Eastern at
888-221-1773.
Most of the video was shot within
the past few weeks at a Tyson contract farm in Lewisburg, Tennessee, but
it also includes footage from multiple Mercy For Animals investigations within
the past year at Tyson factory farms and slaughterhouses across the country.
The disturbing video—part of a major campaign to convince Tyson executives to
end the company's cruelest practices—reveals widespread animal abuse and
suffering, including the following:
·
Workers violently clubbing animals
to death, breaking their necks, and leaving severely sick and injured animals
to die without food or water
·
Baby birds carelessly thrown to the
ground from transport crates suffering broken bones and other severe injuries
·
Chickens bred to grow so fast they
became crippled under their own weight and frequently died from heart attacks
and organ failure
·
Hundreds of thousands of birds crammed
into filthy, windowless sheds forced to live in their own waste and toxic
ammonia fumes
Mercy For Animals is calling on
Tyson Foods to implement meaningful animal welfare requirements for all of its
company-owned and contract farms and slaughterhouses, including providing birds
with more space, clean litter, access to natural light, and environmental
enrichments, and replacing live-shackle slaughter methods with less cruel
systems that eliminate the horrific suffering caused by dumping, shackling, shocking,
and slitting the throats of conscious animals.
"Tyson Foods is literally
torturing chickens to death," said Nathan Runkle, president of Mercy
For Animals. "They are crammed into filthy, windowless sheds; thrown,
kicked, and brutalized by careless workers; and bred to grow so fast they
suffer from painful leg deformities and heart attacks. This is sickening animal
abuse no company with morals should support. Tyson Foods has not only the
power, but also the ethical responsibility to end the worst forms of animal
cruelty in its supply chain."
To
view the undercover video, visit www.TysonTorturesAnimals.com.
aldf.org/
Animal Legal Defense Fund
For more than three decades, the Animal Legal Defense Fund has
been fighting to protect the lives and advance the interests of animals through
the legal ...
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ARKANSAS MAKIN’ PROGESS, DOIN’ GOOD
FOR ALL
The latest number of Arkansas Food
& Farm goes goofy for pork and beef.
The cover shows a farmer feeding a roaming pig a choice clump of grass
by hand. Next to the pig is the
statement: “Happy Little Pig! See p.
28.” There we find an article with
photos of free-range cattle and the same farmer, Damon, still feeding his pigs
by hand. “’I love what I do,’ says
Damon. ‘At 2.a.m. out in the rain, I
still love it. Feeding your family feels
so good. Feeding my community feels
good. So I feel good at the end of the
day.’ And for everyone who knows the
value and joy of eating local, lovingly raised meat and produce, getting a part
of that good feeling is as simple as visit to Olde Crow’” (the local General
Store).
This cheeriness one feels throughout the magazine. The Farm Bureau bought
a full-page ad to advertise the marvel of pig slaughter. “More than 1.8 million pigs are produced in
Arkansas Annually.” “The total value of
Arkansas pork production exceeds $80 million per year.” “Each American eats around 18 pounds of bacon
per year. That’s about 5,608,654,506
pounds for the entire U.S., which is equal to 7.68 Empire State
Buildings.” A huge up-thrusting fist
holding slices of bacon dominates the center of the ad. Finally, along the wrist is the ultimate
feel-good sentiment: “I love Bacon” (love signified by the familiar heart) (p.
44).
And the best of all? The kindly
productive pork farmers (no cold and callous industry) is “shrinking the pork
footprint”—reducing water use, land use, carbon footprint! (p. 45). --Dick
LOOKING ON THE GOOD SIDE; Or, NOT
ALL NAZIS WERE BAD
A little known slice of the history of Nazi barbarity is the occasional exception;
so rare it was that only a scrap of evidence has been found, and its truth
remains in dispute. As the story goes,
of the many prisons built to contain German citizens guilty of the unpatriotic
behavior against the fatherland and the fuehrer of being despicably weak, one
was commanded by an SS officer secretly harboring high humane values. Under his rule, three types of prisoners were
held until executed in a manner appropriate to his or her crime: beaten to death with a heavy sledge hammer,
boiled alive, or hung on a meat hook.
But whatever was to be his or her fate, the warden ensured a humane life
preceding their execution: a cell large
enough for exercising, three nourishing meals a day, a comfortable bed free of fleas,
and plenty of reading and music. And the
warden’s kindness extended to the moment of execution: the hammer was applied to the head for
instant unconsciousness if not death, the water was furiously boiling for quick
senselessness if not unconsciousness, and the hook was placed as carefully as
possible under the recreant’s chin to produce death within five minutes. Each day as the ceremony concluded, the
Supervisor felt happy he had performed his lawful duty as humanely as possible,
and went home untroubled to play with his children. --Dick.
III.
CLIMATE
CHANGE: OVERPOPULATION, OVERCONSUMPTION
(US), CARNIVORISM
James Howard Kunstler. Too
Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation. Atlantic Monthly P, 2012.
“A population rising remorselessly
above the capacity of agriculture to provide for it and weather conditions that
push agriculture to the margins of its limits to provide is a very bad
combination” (210).
“Meanwhile the Malthusian equation of population
growth exceeding the expansion of the food supply has final caught up with
the human race after the head fake of the so-called green revolution.” Kunstler continues that the “revolution” is
attributable “largely to cheap oil and natural gas.” “In effect, the world has been eating oil
transformed into wheat, rice, and soybeans.”
And we are running out of fossil fuels, and population continues to
increase. “Malthus was right after
all. Human beings reproduce
exponentially and food production does not.
The combination of reduced oil and gas by-products, an extreme shortage
of phosphates, less capital available for industrial-scale growers, and soil
degradation is colliding with climate change to produce the perfect conditions
for food shortages” (212).
Then Kunstler adds the factor of
decreasing water. “The result will be a
collapse of agricultural output, sooner rather than later, even while the
population continues to grow—remember, even hungry people have sex” (213).
FARM BUREAU ARKANSAS TELLING THE
TRUTH?
Advert in Spring Harvest 2016 (ArkansasFoodand Farm.Com):
“According to the EPA, Agriculture is
responsible for only 9% of total greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.” Background photo of plant sprouting.
Cowspiracy:
The Sustainability Secret is gaining
adherents. Recently the UUA Unitarian
Universalist Assoc. endorsed the movement against eating animals in a full-page
statement in its magazine, UUWORLD (Spring 2016), praising the film. “ANIMAL AGRICULTURE IS THE MOST DESTRUCTVE
INDUSTRY FACING THE PLANET TODAY”
(www.uuam.org ).
IV. GROWTH
(See OMNI’s “Growth
Watch” http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/06/notes-on-economic-growth.html
)
BILL MCKIBBEN, EAARTH (2010)
Pp. 90-97 McKibben praises the Club of Rome and its 1973 book, Limits to Growth. The early ‘70s were an optimistic
spurt of service to the earth: the first Earth Day, the EPA established, first
fuel economy cars, 55-mile per-hour speed limit, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Pres. Carter’s White
House reception for him, Carter’s WH solar panels, and Limits to Growth—transl. into 30 languages and 30 million copies
sold. The researchers of this book saw
the likelihood of our planet overwhelmed by growth and development. “They foresaw this planet Eaarth [growth and all of its
consequences], and if we’d heeded
them we might have prevented its birth” (91). –Dick
# 28 May 11, 2016, http://jamesrichardbennett.blogspot.com/2016/05/vegetarian-action-newsletter-28-may-11.html
END VEGETARIAN ACTION
NEWSLETTER #29, June 8, 2016
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