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VEGETARIAN/VEGAN ACTION NEWSLETTER,

WEDNESDAY (2^ND WEDNESDAYS), September 11, 2019.

Edited by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology

To be removed from this mailing, drop me a note unsubscribe, but please continue your iadvocacy of vegetarianism and veganism.

This Newsletter is about food and its consequences in 3 categories: health, animals, and climate. Tell people about OMNI, our Veg Potluck, its comprehensive message, and Newsletter.

OMNI’s NEXT VEGETARIAN/VEGAN POTLUCK (NEWSLETTER #61), is Wednesday, SEPTEMBER 11, 2019 (2^ND Wednesdays), at OMNI, Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology. We start eating at 6:00.

Our special guest will be George Paulson, who will tell us why he chose the vegetarian/vegan life.

All are welcome to the experience of eating together and becoming better informed for a healthier and safer life for all sentient beings and for the atmosphere and soils.

CONTENTS #61, September 11, 2019

Learn a new word? Degust

Business of Expanding Plant Foods Industry

Health, Nutrition

Articles from Good Medicine

Chickens Are UnHealthy

Protecting Animals Against Carnivorism

Carl Jafina, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

Defending the Climate

Stop the Food Crisis, Support the Climate Stewardship Act

Chris Hedges

TEXTS

Degust

diˈɡəst

Part of speech: verb

Origin: Latin, early 17th century

To carefully and thoughtfully savor food

To taste in small portions

Business of Plant Foods Expanding

ADG Staff. “:Beyond Meat Opens Big with IPO.” NADG (5-3-19).

“Beyond Meat Shares Soaring Since Debut.” NADG (5-8-19).

Nathan Owens. “Tyson Debuts Its First Meat Substitute.” NADG (6-14-19).

David Bellany. The NYT. “Plan Is to Put Fish-free Fish on the Menu.” NADG (7-14-19). “Impossible Foods [Impossible Whopper now available at Burger King] is joining a crowded field of food companies developing alternatives to traditional seafood….”

Nathan Owens. “Tofurky Sues Over State’s Labeling Law.” NADG (7-23-19).

AR’s law impose fines on meatless products with a reference to meat on the package label.

Deena Shanker. Bloomberg News. “Kellogg’s Beefs Up Meatless: New Plant-based Options in Wings.” NADG (9-8-19). Next year the “Incogmeato” burger “designed to mimic meat’s look and falvor.”

HEALTH, NUTRITION

Articles from Good Medicine, published by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (Summer 2019).

Neal Barnard. “Not Health Food.” Barnard is President of the Physicians Committee. “When it comes to causing health problems, few foods are worse than chicken”:

“largest source of cancer-causing heterocyclic amines in the American diet”’

“the infections that come from chicken [feces bacteria]….are especially unsettling.”

But we have “healthier choices.”

“Replacing Red Meat with Plant Protein Lowers Risk for Heart Disease.”

“N.Y. Plant-Based Hospital Meals bill Heads to Governor’s Desk.”

“Plant-Based Meals for California Public Schools.”

STOP TORTURING ANIMALS IN RESEARCH

Good Medicine, published by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine

“A New Roadmap for Replacing Animal Testing” (Spring 2018).

Articles from Summer 2019:

“Court Rules for Physicians Committee…USDA’s Hiding of Animal Welfare Data.”

“Physicians Committee Launches Legislation to End Hazardous Waste Tests on Fish.”

“Doctors Oppose Lethal Animal Use at Brown University.”

AGAINST CARNIVORISM, PROTECTING FARM ANIMALS TOO

Carl Safina. Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. 2015.

Review: Carl Safina's 'Beyond Words' Doesn't Mince Any on Animal ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/.../review-beyond-words-carl-safina.htm...

Aug 3, 2015 - Given the subtitle of Carl Safina's fascinating and expansive new book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, it's no surprise. . . . SEE AT END INFORMATION ABOUT ALL OF SAFINA’S BOOKS.

I WROTE THIS LETTER TO JULIE CASTLE, CEO OF SAVE THEM ALL, an org. dedicated to “ending the killing of pets in our nation’s shelters.”

Dear Ms. Castle,

I opened your donation solicitation letter with pleasant expectations from your title, until I discovered you actually strive to save only PETS. I do thank you for making that effort, but you should change the title of your organization, since millions of farm animals are killed to be eaten, an extremely repugnant reality. The more we know about sentient creatures, the more we realize humans are fellow animals. You should change your name to SAVE ALL PETS.

Dick Bennett, Editor, Vegetarian Action

AGAINST EXTREME WEATHER, DEFENDING THE CLIMATE

Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. (And find the website version of this week’s letter here.)

By Jillian Mock . AUGUST 21, 2019

This week, we’re trying something different. Usually, our One Thing You Can Do feature highlights an idea for reducing your climate footprint. For a change, we decided to look at an individual action and talk about what would happen if everybody in the United States actually adopted it.

Here’s the question: What if everybody in the United States ate less meat? We don’t mean going vegetarian. Just less.

Is that realistic? “There is historical precedent,” said Richard Waite, an associate in the food program at the World Resources Institute. Overall, Americans eat about a third less beef than they did in the 1970s, he noted. It’s conceivable that we could make such a dietary shift again.

So, according to a study this month in the journal Scientific Reports, if everyone in the country reduced their consumption of beef, pork, and poultry by a quarter and substituted plant proteins, we’d save about 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That would be a reduction of a little more than 1 percent.

Just for comparison: If everyone in the country did go vegetarian, cutting meat out completely and replacing it with plant proteins of the same nutritional value, we’d save 330 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. In that case, the savings would be about 5 percent.

Keep in mind, studies like this one necessarily include some assumptions about farming practices, dietary choices and even market forces. The numbers here are an estimate based on the average American diet and agricultural emissions data.

The average American, by the way, consumes almost 215 pounds of meat per person per year, according to 2016 data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and the Food and Agriculture Organization. That includes beef, pork, poultry and lamb.

The environmental benefits of reducing meat, of course, would be lower in places that eat less meat in the first place. For reference, meat consumption in Australia is only slightly lower than the United States. Canada and the European Union are in the range of 150 pounds per person, according to the O.E.C.D.

That means, for just about any developed country, the benefits of reducing meat would be significant.

Any immediate drop in emissions would be only part of the story, though, according to Mr. Waite. Following our example from above, cutting back meat by a quarter would also free up about 23 million acres of high-quality land, an area roughly the size of Indiana.

Some of that land could be converted to more efficient food production, like growing high-protein lentils, or could be turned into forestland, which absorbs and stores carbon dioxide. Both would be crucially important as we try to feed a rising global population and to simultaneously mitigate the effects of climate change, according to a recent report by the United Nations.

The upside of eating less meat, incidentally, could go way beyond the environment. If you’re living in a Western country, it would probably be good for your health.

That was the conclusion of a report this year in the medical journal The Lancet, which suggested a dramatic reduction in red meat consumption for people who eat a lot of it, like Americans and Canadians. People in North America eat more than six times the recommended amount of red meat, the report said.

What Can You Do About the Looming Food Crisis? Take Action Today! 8-13-19

Alexis, Organic Consumers Association no-reply@organicconsumers.org via server8839.e-activist.com

1:56 PM (36 minutes ago)

to me

What Can You Do About the Looming Food Crisis? Take Action Today!

Dear Dicki,

Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned of a looming food crisis.

The impact of climate change on land is “already severe,” the panel reported. Unless we act fast, climate change will eventually lead to global food shortages and higher food prices.

What can you do?

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass the Climate Stewardship Act!

TAKE ACTION

U.S. farmers are already dealing with the impact of climate change—and it’s only going to get worse, here and around the globe.

Heavy rain and flooding in the U.S. heartland—made worse by climate change—prevented farmers from planting more than 19 million acres of crops this year.

It was the highest total of unplanted acres ever recorded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

According to last week’s IPCC report, more than 500 million people worldwide today already live in areas where the land cannot provide adequate food.

If we fail to act on climate change, the world’s food supply will only diminish.

Here’s what the IPCC says we can do to reverse these dangerous trends:

• As individuals, we can eat a climate-friendly diet:

“Balanced diets featuring plant-based foods, such as coarse grains, legumes, fruits and vegetables, and animal-sourced food produced sustainably in low greenhouse gas emission systems present major opportunities for adaptation to and limiting climate change,” said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II and one of the authors of the report.

• As nations, we can adopt policies that support “sustainable land management:”

The IPCC defines this as the “stewardship and use of land resources, including soils, water, animals and plants, to meet changing human needs, while simultaneously ensuring the long-term productive potential of these resources and the maintenance of their environmental functions.” The report authors list several examples, including agroecology, agroforestry, conservation agriculture, crop diversity, crop rotations, organic farming, pollinator protection, rain water harvesting, and range and pasture management.

These practices can “prevent and reduce land degradation, maintain land productivity, and sometimes reverse the adverse impacts of climate change on land degradation… Reducing and reversing land degradation, at scales from individual farms to entire watersheds, can provide cost-effective, immediate, and long-term benefits to communities…”

The USDA first set “land stewardship” goals in 1933, when it established the Soil Conservation Service to address the Dust Bowl. Yet in recent decades, federal policy has pushed farmers to rely on machinery, chemicals and plowing up virgin land to maintain high yields—regardless of the impact on the soil or the climate.

Farmers are interested in conservation programs, but budget cuts have forced up to 75 percent of eligible applicants to be turned away.

The Climate Stewardship Act is the first bill since the New Deal era to propose making a renewed commitment to soil health for food security and the climate.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to pass the Climate Stewardship Act!

TAKE ACTION

Thank you!

Alexis, for the OCA Team. P.S. To help support this, and other campaigns, please consider making a donation to OCA.

George Paulson Sent Me These Excellent Connections:

If you have not seen the documentary “Cowspiracy”, see it today. I think it is essential for anyone who considers himself/herself to be an environmentalist. Here is the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV04zyfLyN4

Here is an article by one of my favorite journalists and authors, Chris Hedges, on why he chose to go vegan:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/saving-the-planet-one-meal-at-a-time/

Here is an interview on Hedges’s show “On Contact” by the author of the book “Eat for the Planet.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13c9wjzADh8

Here is a recent article in Consortium News:

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/13/the-9-lie-industrial-food-climate-change/

MORE BY SAFINA

Beyond Words What Animals Think and Feel: Carl Safina - Amazon.com

https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Words-What-Animals-Think/.../080509...

Carl Safina books View 3+ more