Why Have We Declared War on Farm Animals?

I've finished reading Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Diet, and let me tell you, this girl is anything but clueless. She has this incredible way of summarizing every single reason why going vegan is the best thing for you to do and for the planet (and I don't even believe in global warming, but I do believe factory farmed food is doing lots of harm to it and our animals.) Unless you have the heart to slaughter your own cow, I don't think you should be eating one. And yet the U.S. slaughters more than 90,000 cows a day. 90,000 divided by 24 hours equals by the time you have finished that hamburger and washed it down with a coke, 3,750 cows were mercilessly murdered to appease our ceaseless, misdirected hunger.  By the time you take a few bites of hamburger in one minute, about 63 cows get hanged. As Jonathan Safran Foer says in Eating Animals, that's war. We have declared war on all cows, pigs, chickens, and fish everywhere.



They have no defense, no say, and for some reason cats and dogs are spared. Why don't we eat our dogs?  Foer and Silverstone challenge. (Actually, euthanized dogs and cats get converted into livestock feed. Didn't know that, did you? Those cats and dogs are being eaten by cows, so we are pretty much eating euthanized cats and dogs if you want to be technical about it.) So please, if you don't think you could kill the animals you eat yourself, then you probably shouldn't have any business eating them. Oh, but they're so healthy for you, our government proclaims. You gotta have meat and drink milk to be strong. That's hogwash, though, and it only takes a little digging to find out the truth. The establishment uses fear-mongering to make us worry about how much protein we're getting. We're all so obsessed about where our protein is going to come from. If you don't eat meat or dairy, then how can you get your protein? Well, as Silverstone brilliantly points out, the official term for the clinical disease of protein deficiency is called kwashiorkor. Never heard of it? That's because it's obviously not a danger. As The China Study clearly points out, what is a danger is the exact opposite: having too much protein in the system is what can kill us and does kill us daily. While my dad was visiting us here, he perused the book and was convinced. He was worried about having too-low of a cholesterol, but after reading The China Study he saw there was no reason to worry and that eating eggs and dairy was also a lose-lose proposition.



Forks Over Knives just came out in theaters and covers all of this as well. The evidence about the dangers of eating animal protein is irrefutable. Even if animal protein was good for you, declaring war on these animals is our modern-day, post-war tragedy. Don't think for one minute that an animal before slaughter does not feel any fear. And that very fear stays right there in the meat. Cortisol levels get jacked up just before slaughter, and then we eat them. It's scary meat. We are eating fear. There are much better things we can eat, many more kind foods out there. Please take the time to learn about them so you can make the right choice at the dinner table.

Eat B(right),
Veggie Daddy

Newfoundlanders and Their Love of White Food

The past two weeks I have been away from the house because we had our floors refinished and had to bug-off for a bit. So off we drove to a cabin out there in Riverhead, Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, about an hour's drive from here in St. John's. And as I have said in an earlier post, the summer here on the Avalon has been simply dreadful, hence the irony of wanting to eat warm foods in July. August hasn't been much better. And out there on the Avalon over at Harbour Grace, the weather did not serve us well either. So we went museum hunting since these activities would be indoors. We would have preferred walking on more trails, but we did manage to squeeze in the incredible Skerwink Trail in Port Rexton outside of Trinity, and the Burnt Head trail in Cupids, which was awesome (or awe-inspiring as I finally learned the actual definition on Q's contest of misused words. Peruse won the prize, and I can see why. I had no idea we've bastardized the meaning so much. Clearly, none of us have ever bothered to peruse the definition of peruse.)

Needless to say, while we visited all these museums, drove around in the rain, what have you, we got rather hungry. And it shouldn't surprise anyone when I say these various restaurants that seem to be dotted around every which where in little towns with cute, child-friendly names like Heart's Content and Dildo do not serve vegan and hardly any vegetarian fare, if at all. My wife, who I can safely say is a die-hard vegan extremist, managed to eat completely vegan during the whole trip, but I didn't seem to be able to do it, and don't think I would have enjoyed myself much if I had tried. I am certainly not going to beat myself up for eating cheese and butter despite my deep feelings about avoiding such foods. This very topic became very heated on the facebook group nl vegans. When in Rome, or the Avalon Peninsula...

As I have said earlier, I am not an extremist about it, but eating vegan is a lifestyle choice at home, not necessarily on the road, which really depends on the circumstances. I am not ready to whip myself on the back and suffer silently (see Da Vinci Code) as I eat iceberg lettuce and toast because that's the only thing on the menu I will eat. I know if I was travelling in California or Washington, D. C., or England, it'd be loads easier to go veg. But that is not the case here, especially when you venture even twenty minutes out of St. John's. To boldly go where most Newfoundlanders have gone before...Actually, I've heard stories about how there are many Newfoundlanders out there who have never gone more than a few miles from their home in their entire lives. Based on my own past as a nomad having moved over 20 times, I can't imagine.

(wildhorsespubandeatery.com)

Here's a pic of what I mostly ate on my sojourn on the outskirts of St. John's. Yep, this is a Newfoundland favorite a.k.a. fish and chips. You take your cod and deep fat fry it and in case you haven't had your fill of fried foods, you get a bonus in the form of deep fat fried potatoes a.k.a. "chips." (Don't worry, I'm not dissing this dish, but I certainly wouldn't want to eat it daily.) There's also cod au gratin and pan-fried cod if you're feeling fancy. Because of various socio-political and health reasons, I choose not to eat factory farmed food, but where does cod fit on this spectrum of foods-to-avoid? The modern fishing industry is pretty damned awful, and if you're not from here you wouldn't know there's a cod moratorium because of over-fishing, which have apparently/arguably depleted the codfish-stocks here. The history (it's hammered into your brain at every single museum) tells us that fishermen seemed to think the supply of cod here would be endless. Either that or they knew it was a finite supply and decided to take as much as they could as long as it was humanly possible. They'd deal with a sans-cod sea later. Sure enough, we still have bottom-feeders left, not to mention the fact that we're dripping in oil. Without these, I'm not sure St. John's would be booming the way it is, but that's another post.

Please take a look at this picture again:

Notice anything striking? Is it on the tip of your tongue but you just can't grasp it? The word I'm looking for here is "monochromatic." Of one color. Eating this dish completely violates Veggie Daddy Rule #3: Eat a Variety of Foods. There's also a cookbook you can get, Color Me Vegan (we don't have it yet) that enforces this entire point. Whereas Clean Food organizes recipes by season to guarantee you're eating more locally, this one organizes recipes by color!

This guarantees you're eating the rainbow, across the spectrum of available nutrients. This is what you want to do when you eat, and the darker and brighter your food is, the bigger the blast of health. So keeping this point in mind, look again at the fish and chips. Umm, Newfoundland, we have a problem. We're missing some serious color in our foods. I'm not talking about the ones you can buy at Dominion or Sobey's, but at restaurants outside of St. John's. The restaurants out there don't seem to be aware that food is supposed to be colorful and bright. "Oh my god, it's so vivid." That's what we want to say about our food, but not to the point that our Quaker Oatmeal turns blue because of those oh-so-yummy dinosaur eggs the company feels will make kids eat their oatmeal if it glows blue. If my oatmeal turned blue, I'd throw it in the trash. I certainly wouldn't let my kids eat it, you can be sure of that.

At these restaurants, the food was so white. The cod was white, the bread was white, the potatoes were white, the lettuce and tomatoes were pretty much white. Their idea of a salad is iceberg lettuce with bland pink/white tomatoes and some chopped green pepper with shredded cheddar cheese. Sorry, but this is not a salad. Iceberg lettuce is not going to cut it. Why can't they serve whole wheat bread? Not in demand? (The salad I was impressed with was a Greek salad that my father got at Skippers in Bonavista. It was actually green.) But for the most part, once you get outside of St. John's, it's pretty grim out there. Again, history tells us Newfoundlanders had little choice, but this isn't history. This is today, and St. John's is slowly getting up to speed. We already have one all-vegetarian restaurant and a couple of health-food stores. You can get a seven-course vegan tasting menu at Raymond's (if you can afford it.) And it's high time the rest of us here on the rock got up to speed with the times, even if tourists are looking for the traditional jigg's dinner. But to eat this way as a lifestyle? .These restaurant owners don't seem to be aware that tourists might have other expectations. But then if they changed their menus too much, then would-be travellers who are looking for that authentic Newfoundland experience (whatever that means) wouldn't get a true taste of the rock. We certainly can't have that. 

Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

"The stuff we throw away is what we're paying for...the packaging, printing, manufacturing, warehousing, refrigeration, and distribution. After all this has been paid off, there's not much money left for the actual ingredients in the food. This is why most processed, packaged, and prepared foods are full of chemical flavors, colors, and empty calories created to make actual food ingredients go further. Another reason for enjoying more whole, fresh, raw foods straight from the source." -- Ani Phyo, author of Ani's Raw Food Essentials.

Got this from Chapters for ten bucks. Good deal, I must say.

Veggie Daddy Rule #5: Know Thy Food Source

Veggie Daddy Fun Fact: Thomas F. Pawlick from The End of Food says the Canadian potato has lost 100% of its Vitamin A. This doesn't just apply to potatoes, but all of our fruits and vegetables, grains, and even our sodium-solution-pumped meat has lost massive amounts of nutrients over many years. Synthetic fertilizers are a big part of the blame, the food industry as a whole, but we, too, are a big part of the blame. We choose to buy inferior food. My guess is that this could turn around if we started to pay more attention to where our food comes from: who's growing it, who's making it, who's selling it, and who's buying it. And don't forget the most important question of all: What is in it? Take the Slate quiz and see how well you do. Our food has become so alien to us, we need the food companies to come up with a fancy brand name in order to tell us what it is we're eating. If the Slate quiz makes anything clear, it's that the food we are eating is not food at all. So, again, if it's not food, what in God's name is it?

That fruit you're buying that was shipped from God knows where isn't getting soft because the fruit is being harvested when it is barely ripe. Then the fruit gets subjected to bouts of toxic polyethelene gas as if in a modern-day Auschwitz re-enactment in order to "ripen" the fruit in the "ripening" rooms on the trucks as they get shipped thousands of miles to our favorite grocery store. The fruit looks amazing, and then we take it home with us and bite into that juicy tomato, which isn't juicy at all, it just looked juicy, and it has no flavor at all, it just looked like it did. What is happening to the food? It's being gassed to death in trucks. Do you think this gas might affect our health? I'll let you figure that one out.

Synthetic fertilizers only focus on three nutrients (the classic NPK formula) when we actually need seventeen essential nutrients to grow our food. Monsanto is trying to sue farmers for trying to steal their seeds as the genetically modified crops inadvertently contaminate organic, non GM crops. "The major biotech companies currently own 50 percent of the world’s commercial seeds, and we certainly don’t want to get into a situation where a few chemical companies own all our commercial seeds," says Andrew Kimbrell, founder and exec. director of the Center for Food Safety. Seeds aren't very profitable until you find some way to patent them. Now they can make you bank. Now you can "smile as you kill" as you join the others at "the top of the hill." 

Yet we must stay low to the ground and eat low on the food chain, foods close to the earth, as local and organic as possible. I just learned that genetically modified food is still considered organic. This is a joke. And the joke's on us. Thomas, a guy I know from down at Harbourside told me to Google "Cow Human Hybrid" and "Spider Goat". When I get the time, I will, but from what he told me last night, we are in serious trouble. And at the rate we are currently going, we are letting these people control our entire food supply. When will we TAKE THE POWER BACK? Only time will tell.  

Eat B(right),

Veggie Daddy

And don't forget Veggie Daddy Rule #4!