OMNI
VEGETARIAN/VEGAN
ACTION NEWSLETTER #41
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11,
2017.
Edited by Dick Bennett for a Culture of
Peace, Justice, and Ecology
Forward to help advance vegetarianism and
veganism.
To be removed from this mailing, just drop me a
line unsubscribe.
OMNI’s OCTOBER VEGETARIAN POTLUCK is
Wednesday, OCTOBER 11, 2017, at OMNI, Center for Peace, Justice, and
Ecology (2ND Wednesdays).
We start eating at 6:00.
All are welcome.
You may want to
enjoy and discuss some old or new vegetarian or vegan recipes, to talk about
healthier food, or you are concerned about cruelty to animals or global warming
and climate catastrophe. Whatever your interest it’s connected to food;
whatever your motive, come share vegetarian and vegan food and your views with
us in a friendly setting. If you are
new, get acquainted with OMNI’s director, Gladys Tiffany. OMNI is located at 3274 Lee Avenue parallel
to N. College east of the Village Inn and south of Liquor World. More
information: 935-4422; 442-4600.
If this subject is
important to you and you are looking for meaningful, part-time volunteer work,
consider coordinating the potlucks or editing this newsletter. Contact Dick or Gladys.
CONTENTS OMNI Vegetarian Action Newsletter October 11, 2017
Health and Nutrition
Follow-up from
September:
The American Heritage Book of Indians, Purchased at Garage Sale
Gerry Sloan’s Cherokee
Grandmother’s Cherokee Cooklore.
NPR Report, Navajo Source of Calcium--Ash
UAF’s Tamara
Walkingstick, Edible Trees and Other Plants, Recipes (via Teresa Maurer)
More from PETA Global
(Summer 2017). See September Vegetarian Action.
Dr. Neal Barnard. “Eating Fish Is Like Smoking Low-Tar
Cigarettes: The Notion of ‘Healthy’ Fish
Flesh Is a Myth.”
VegNews
(Oct. 2017).
Vegan Halloween: “Trick or Eat: How
can Vegan Parents Navigate Halloween…?”
“Frankenstein’s monster was a
vegetarian….’I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns
and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.’”
Books:
10th Anniversary edition
of Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan
Cookbook.
The
Super Easy Vegan Slow Cooker Cookbook.
The
No Meat Athlete Cookbook.
“Sysco Adds Meatless Burger to Lineup.”
FILMS
|
Marianne Thieme (Actor), Gertjan Zwanikken (Director) | Format:DVD
|
Protection of Animals,
Do No Harm, Compassion
More from PETA Global (Summer 2017). See September Vegetarian Action.
“WAGS Star: ‘What Has That Animal Gone Through for You to Wear This
Jacket?”
“Off the Hook: PETA
Works to End Cruelty to Sea Animals.
Suffering from Sea to Supermarket.”
“Let Lobsters ‘Rock On’! B-52s Lead Singer Fred Schneider Tells PETA
Global Readers How He Came to
Call Lobsters ‘sea life, not seafood.”
Call Lobsters ‘sea life, not seafood.”
“PETA’s Indie Rock
Album Animal Liberation Turns 30.”
VegNews
(Oct. 2017).
Book Ad: Mercy
for Animals by Nathan Runkle. What
we can and must do to end the cruelties of factory farming.
“The FBI’s Hunt for
Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms” by Glenn Greenwald. The Intercept, 9 October 2017.
“The Meat of the
Matter” by George Monbiot
Climate Crisis and the
Veg/ Vegan Link
Cowspiracy
Annick de Witt and the
Link
Health and Nutrition
Restaurant adjacent to
OMNI reopened as “Hoppin’ John’s American Bistro,” with Susie, the original
owner and well-known chef, again cooking.
The menu shows many items for vegetarians:
Chips and Dips, e.g. fried Zucchini with Chipotle Ranch, $7; Starters, e.g.
grilled asparagus with Holandaise, $9; all of the 5 Salads because Susie will
replace the meat with more veggies on request, $4 to $10; Sides, e.g. baked
potato $4. Large attractive bar. The
owner is Mike Roach.
FOLLOW UP ON Native
American FOODS IN SEPT. Newsletter
OMNI’s September
Potluck and Vegetarian Action led to
many discoveries.
SERENDIPITY
At My neighbor Gerry Sloan’s yard sale I purchased The American Heritage Book of Indians (1961), chief editor Alvin Josephy, Jr. The Index contained a dozen references to
various foods and their nations: Anasazi, Apache, Mississippi Valley, etc.
This led me to a rare cookbook once owned by his Cherokee
grandmother, Susie Irvin: Cherokee [North Carolina] Cooklore: To Make My Bread--Recipes,
Herbs, Wild Foods, History, the Feast (1951, 71pp.), edited by Mary Ulmer
& Samuel Beck (not for sale).
History, stories, photos, recipes.
Gerry loaned me this precious book to show at the September Potluck.
Frank Scheide told me about this NPR
report. (See Creasy 77 on ash.)
www.npr.org/sections/.../to-get-calcium-navajos-burn-juniper-branches-to-eat-the-ash
Aug 21, 2017 - To Get Calcium, Navajos Burn Juniper
Branches To Eat The Ash ... Lillie Pete sifts the juniper ash before adding it
to her blue corn mush.
Teresa Maurer, director of Fayetteville’s
Farmer’s Market knew the following, mainly composed of recipes:
“YOU KNOW,
PARTS OF A TREE ARE EDIBLE. Wild Foods from Arkansas Trees and other Plants” by
Tamara L. Walkingstick, Ph.D. Associate Professor-Forestry Extension Associate
Director-Arkansas Forest Resources Center University of Arkansas, Division of
Agriculture Cooperative Extension Service .
Introduction:
Many of our grandparents and parents used wild plants for food and medicine. We all know about Sassafras tea and the glorious taste of wild blackberries but we have perhaps forgotten how extensively wild plants can be used. In the early 1970's, information on native wild foods and medicinal uses of wild plants became very popular. The well-known naturalist, Euell Gibbons, reminded us that “you know, many parts of a pine tree are edible”. The objective of this fact sheet is to explore wild plants and trees as food sources. [Most of the 35 pages of this publication are recipes. –D] MORE https://mgozarks.com/images/docs/spring-ws-2016/Wild-Edibles.pdf
Introduction:
Many of our grandparents and parents used wild plants for food and medicine. We all know about Sassafras tea and the glorious taste of wild blackberries but we have perhaps forgotten how extensively wild plants can be used. In the early 1970's, information on native wild foods and medicinal uses of wild plants became very popular. The well-known naturalist, Euell Gibbons, reminded us that “you know, many parts of a pine tree are edible”. The objective of this fact sheet is to explore wild plants and trees as food sources. [Most of the 35 pages of this publication are recipes. –D] MORE https://mgozarks.com/images/docs/spring-ws-2016/Wild-Edibles.pdf
Become aware, and they will come!
“Sysco Adds Meatless Burger to Lineup.” NADG (9-16-17). “Food distributor Sysco this week added a Beyond Meat product, the Beyond
Burger.” “Tyson Foods Inc. invested in
the startup company last year” with “a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat.” “Kroger grocery stores began offering the
meatless Beyond Burger in meat aisles at more than 600 U.S. stores earlier this
summer. Sysco is the nation’s largest
food distributor.”
FILMS
Vegetarian Potluck and Vegetarian
Action have shown or discussed Cowspiracy
and What’s the Meat several
times.
I have not seen or read a review of these. They might go in Health or Animals:
|
Death on a Factory
Farm. DVD. Tom Simon and Sarah Teale (Director,
Producer) Rated: A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms. 2009. DVD. Don McCorkell (Actor, Director), Drew Edmonson (Actor).
|
||||||||
|
Marianne Thieme (Actor), Gertjan Zwanikken (Director) | Format:DVD
|
Protection of Animals, Do
No Harm, Compassion
ANIMAL RIGHTS / VEGETARIANISM
“The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing
Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms” by Glenn Greenwald. The
Intercept, 9 October
2017.
The
conclusion follows. For the entire
article go to:
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/the-fbis-hunt-for-two-missing-piglets-reveals-the-federal-cover-up-of-barbaric-factory-farms/
This article includes graphic images some readers may find
disturbing.
The factory farm industry and its armies of lobbyists wield
great influence in the halls of federal and state power, while animal rights
activists wield virtually none. This imbalance has produced increasingly
oppressive laws, accompanied by massive law enforcement resources devoted to
punishing animal activists even for the most inconsequential nonviolent
infractions — as the FBI search warrant and raid in search of “Lucy and Ethel”
illustrates.
The U.S. government, of course, has always protected and served
the interests of industry. Beginning when most of the nation was fed by small
farms, federal agencies have been particularly protective of agricultural
industry. That loyalty has only intensified as family farms have nearly
disappeared, replaced by industrial factory farms where animals are viewed
purely as commodities, instruments for profit, and treated with unconstrained
cruelty.
In general, the core moral and philosophical question at
the heart of animal rights activism is now being seriously debated: Namely,
what gives humans the right or justification to abuse, exploit, and torture
non-human species? If there comes a day when some other species (broadly
defined) — such as machines — surpass humans in intellect and cognitive
complexity, will they have a valid moral claim to treat humans
as commodities whose suffering and death can be assigned no value?
The irreconcilable contradiction of lavishing love and
protection on dogs and cats, while torturing and slaughtering farm animals
capable of a deep emotional life and great suffering, is becoming increasingly
apparent. British anthropologist Jane Goodall, in her groundbreaking book “The
Inner World of Farm Animals,” examined the science of animal cognition and
concluded: “Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment,
depression, fear, and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we
ever imagined … They are individuals in their own right.”
All of these changes have been driven by animal rights activists
who, often at great risk to themselves, have forced the public to be aware of
the savagery and cruelty supported through food consumption choices.
That’s precisely why this industry is so obsessed with intimidating,
threatening, and outlawing this form of activism: because it is so effective.
Dissidents are tolerated to the extent they remain ineffectual
and unthreatening. When they start to become successful — that is, threatening
to powerful interests — the backlash is inevitable. The tools used against them
are increasingly extreme as their success grows.
To call the FBI’s actions in raiding these animal sanctuaries a
profound waste of its resources is both an understatement and beside the point.
The real short-term goal is to target those most vulnerable —
volunteer-supported animal shelters — to scare them out of taking care of
rescued animals. And the ultimate goal is to fortify and intensify a climate of
intimidation and fear designed to deter animal rights activists from reporting
on the horrifying realities of these factory farms.
There is a temptation to turn away from and ignore this mass suffering
and cruelty because it’s so painful to confront, so much more pleasant to
remain unaware of it. Animal rights activists are determined to prevent us from
doing so, and we should all feel gratitude for their increasing success in
making us see what we are enabling when we consume the products of this
barbaric and sociopathic industry.
“The Meat of the Matter” by George
Monbiot. TRANSCEND Media Service.
ANIMAL RIGHTS / VEGETARIANISM, 9 October
2017
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/the-meat-of-the-matter/
Farming animals is as unsustainable as mining coal.
4 Oct 2017 – What will future generations, looking back on our age, see as
its monstrosities? We think of slavery, the subjugation of women, judicial
torture, the murder of heretics, imperial conquest and genocide, the First
World War and the rise of fascism, and ask ourselves how people could have
failed to see the horror of what they did. What madness of our times will
revolt our descendants?
There are plenty to choose from. But one of them, I believe,
will be the mass incarceration of animals, to enable us to eat their flesh or
eggs or drink their milk. While we call ourselves animal lovers, and lavish
kindness on our dogs and cats, we inflict brutal deprivations on billions of
animals, which are just as capable of suffering. The hypocrisy is so rank that
future generations will marvel at how we could have failed to see it.
The shift will occur with the advent of cheap artificial meat.
Technological change has often helped to catalyse ethical change. The $300m
deal China signed last month,
to buy lab-grown meat, marks the beginning of the end of livestock farming. But
it won’t happen quickly: the great suffering is likely to continue for many
years.
So the answer, we are told by celebrity chefs and food writers,
is to keep livestock outdoors: eat free range beef or lamb, not battery pork.
But all this does is to swap one disaster – mass cruelty – for another: mass
destruction.
Almost all forms of animal farming cause environmental damage,
but none more so than keeping them outdoors. The reason is inefficiency.
Grazing is not just slightly inefficient; it is stupendously wasteful. Roughly twice as much of the world’s surface is
used for grazing as for growing crops,
yet animals fed entirely on pasture produce just 1 gram out of the 81 g of
proteinconsumed per person per day.
A paper in Science
of the Total Environment reports that “livestock production is
the single largest driver of habitat loss”. Grazing livestock are a fully
automated system for ecological destruction: you need only release them onto
the land and they do the rest, browsing out tree seedlings, simplifying complex ecosystems. Their
keepers augment this assault by slaughtering large predators.
In the UK, for example, sheep supply, in terms of calories,
around 1% of our diet. Yet they occupy around 4 million hectares of
the uplands. This is more or less equivalent to all the land under crops in
this country, and more than twice the area of the built environment (1.7 million hectares). The rich mosaic of
rainforest and other habitats that once covered our hills has been erased, the
wildlife reduced to a handful of hardy species. The damage caused is out of all
proportion to the meat produced.
Replacing the meat in our diets with soya spectacularly reduces the land area required per
kilo of protein: by 70% in the case of chicken, 89% in the case of pork, and
97% in the case of beef. One study suggests that if we were all to switch to a
plant-based diet, 15 million hectares of land in Britain currently used for
farming could be returned to nature.
Alternatively, this country could feed 200 million people. An end to animal
farming would be the salvation of the world’s wildlife, our natural wonders and
magnificent habitats.
Understandably, those who keep animals have pushed back against
such facts, using an ingenious argument. Livestock grazing, they claim, can
suck carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the soil, reducing or even
reversing global warming. In a TED talk watched by 4 million
people, the rancher Allan Savory claims that his “holistic”
grazing could absorb enough carbon to return the world’s atmosphere to
pre-industrial levels. His inability, when I interviewed him,
to substantiate his claims has done nothing to dent their popularity. MORE
https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/the-meat-of-the-matter/
As the final argument crumbles, we are left facing an
uncomfortable fact: farming animals looks as incompatible with a sustained
future for humans and other species as mining coal.
That vast expanse of pastureland, from which we obtain so little
at such great environmental cost, would be better used for rewilding:
the mass restoration of nature. Not only would this help to reverse the
catastrophic decline in habitats and the diversity and abundance of wildlife,
but the returning forests, wetlands and savannahs are likely to absorb far more carbon than
even the most sophisticated forms of grazing.
The end of animal farming might be hard to swallow. But we are a
resilient and adaptable species. We have undergone a series of astonishing changes:
the adoption of sedentarism, of agriculture, of cities, of industry.
Now it is time for a new revolution, almost as profound as those
other great shifts: the switch to a plant-based diet. The technology is –
depending on how close an approximation to meat you demand (Quorn seems almost
indistinguishable from chicken or mince to me) – either here or just around the
corner. The ethical switch is happening already: even today, there are half a million vegans in
the land of roast beef. It’s time to abandon the excuses, the fake facts and
false comforts. It is time to see our moral choices as our descendants will.
Global Warming, Climate
Catastrophe, Change the System Not the Climate
“271 Million: The
Amount in metric tons, of climate-changing pollution that was prevented by a
20-percent decrease in meat consumption by Americans between 2005 and
2014—about the equivalent of emissions from 57 million cars.” VegNews (July-August 2017),
19.
VegNews (Oct. 2017).
T-Shirt Ad by The Herbivore Clothing
Company: “The World Used to Be Cooler:
Fight Climate Change—Go
Vegan.”
Vegan.”
The Relationship Between Carnivorism
and Global Warming.
Guest Blog: People
Still Don't Get the Link between Meat Consumption and Climate Change By Annick de Witt. Scientific
American, April 11, 2016. See Vegetarian Action #38.
Contents: Newsletter #40 September 13, 2017
Wednesday Sept. 13 Potluck emphasized Native American Food
Gardens and Cooking. Reference: Rosalind Creasy, Cooking from the Garden, “Native American Gardens.” Pp. 60-83.
Health and Nutrition
Enjoying Recipes from VegNews
and NADG
Drawbacks to Meat: Deadly Pathogens Mutating
Industrial Farming
Superbugs
Big Farms, Big Flu
Declining
Effectiveness of Anti-Biotics
Dead Zone in Gulf of
Mexico
Protection of Animals,
Do No Harm, Compassion
PETA Magazine, Summer 2017
Focus on Sea Animals
Sea World Changes
Eating Live Fish
Jon and Tracey Stewart Animal Rescuers
Tracey’s Book, Do Unto Animals
Global Warming,
Climate Catastrophe, Change the System Not the Climate
Braun, Meeting Paris Goals vs Eating Meat
Krantz, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient
Sequence Underreports Harms of Eating Meat, but still an important film by
one of the leaders of global warming resistance
Documentary Meat the Truth
(2008) on Livestock Gas Emissions Relevant Today?
Fight CC: Choose Vegetarian/Vegan
MORE
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