Willie Nelson cold play cover for sustainable agriculture - Back to the start

Thanks to David H for the link (I am even going to steal his comment on his post "Wow, go to love that.....Willie covers Coldplay and on a nice vid from Chipotle about sustainable agriculture.")

Did our love of animals propel human social evolution?

Thanks to Geraldine F for the link.
I am not buying this hook, line and sinker but you know I love a just-so story that gets the imagination going. Also its inaccurate to state only humans keep pets, check out:

• non-human animals that keep pets (aka interspecies cuddling)
• Baboons kidnap and raise feral dogs as pets
• monkey adopts kitten in Bali
• baboon adopts bush baby at kenyan sanctuary

- MA
---

From the Guardian.com
by ROBIN MCKIE
Love of animals led to language and man's domination of Earth
When our apemen ancestors began to interact with animals they developed empathy and the ability to communicate, claims anthropologist Pat Shipman

Humans became masters of the planet for a startling reason: our love of animals gave us unsurpassed power over nature. This is the claim of a leading American anthropologist who says our prehistoric ancestors' intense relationships with other creatures – including those we hunt, keep as pets and use for food – propelled humanity towards global domination.

Interacting with animals on an intimate basis led humans to develop sophisticated tools and evolve enhanced communication skills, including language itself, Dr Pat Shipman of Pennsylvania State University told the Observer. Animals also taught us that others – even other species – have emotions, needs and thoughts, while they also helped us to evolve the vital skills of empathy, understanding and compromise.

"The longest and enduring trend in human evolution has been a gradual intensification of our involvement with animals," she added. "But now our world is becoming increasingly urbanised and we are having less and less contact with them. The consequences are potentially catastrophic."

Shipman traces humanity's animal connection to the period 2.5 million years ago when our hominid ancestors first made tools. These crafted pieces of stone still litter sites in eastern Africa, including the Olduvai Gorge in Kenya, and bear testimony to the mental transformation in our ancestors' brains.

"These apemen didn't just pick up stones and use them to hammer or pound prey or plants," said Shipman. "They shaped those rocks for specific purposes. They had a mental image of the kind of tools they needed and created them by chipping away at a large piece of stone until they got what they wanted."

And what they wanted were tools for cutting up carcasses. In other words, the sharp stone flakes spread over Olduvai were not used primarily as weapons to kill animals or to hack down plants, but to process dead animals that had already been brought down by other carnivores. Apemen had begun to scavenge for meat from carcasses of prey killed by leopards, cheetahs and other carnivores. Armed with sharp blades, they could cut off chunks of antelope or deer and escape quickly before being eaten themselves by an enraged lion, they discovered.

And that was the crucial point that began our special relationship with the animal kingdom, said Shipman, whose book, The Animal Connection, is published this week. "Until that point, we had been a prey species. Carnivores ate us. Then we began scavenging before going on to hunt on our own behalf. Meat provided our ancestors with a wonderful, rich source of sustenance. However, scavenging for it left us in a very vulnerable position. We were still just as likely to be consumed when confronted by a carnivore as we were to kill in our own right. To survive, we had to learn about the behaviour of a vast number of different species – the ones we wanted to kill and the ones we wanted to avoid.

"For example, we would have learned to spot when lions were preparing to mate – when a male was showing off to a female – so that we could take some its prey while it was otherwise occupied. We would have also built up knowledge about the migration of species such as wildebeest and other animals."

In the end, this expertise would have become crucial to human survival, a point illustrated in the cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet in France and the other caves painted by humans 20,000 to 30,000 years ago. They show us that after 2 million years of evolution, humans had become utterly fixated by animals.

"These paintings are stunningly beautiful and superbly crafted," said Shipman. "Sometimes scaffolding was erected in the caves. At the same time, artists went to enormous lengths to get their pigments mixed with the right binding agents and placed in exactly the right spot. And what did they depict when they got things just right? Animals, animals and more animals.

"There are no landscapes and only a handful of poorly executed depictions of humans. By contrast the paintings of lions, stags, horses, bulls and the rest are magnificent. We were besotted with animals because our lives depended on our relationships with them."

Not long after these paintings were created, the first animal – the dog – was domesticated, followed some time later by the horse, sheep, goat and others. The development was crucial. In each case, humans had to learn to put themselves in the minds of these creatures in order to get them to do our bidding. In this way our senses of empathy and understanding, both with animals and with members of own species, were enhanced.

Our special relationship with animals is revealed today through our desire to have pets. "Humans are the only species on Earth to have one-to-one relationships with a member of another species," said Shipman. "No other creature would waste resources on a member of another family, let alone a member of another species. But we do and that is because we have evolved such close ties with specific animals over the millennia and because we are adapted to empathise with other creatures. It is a unique human attribute. We get so much from animals, much more than we appreciate."

Unfortunately, as society becomes increasingly urbanised those ties are being stretched and broken, added Shipman. "Our links to the animal world are precious and shouldn't be taken for granted," she said.

Holy shit...Human poop turned into meat alternative

Are you eating?
No? good.
Yes? Probably wait until you are done to watch/read this. Eventhough I have very little problem with invitro meat or using poop as fuel, this one made me a bit squeemish. A+ for inventiveness! -MA

Thanks to Deb M for the link!



From INhabitat
POOP BURGER: Japanese Researcher Creates Artificial Meat From Human Feces
by LORI ZIMMER

Some hardcore carnivores have a hard time finding meat alternatives such as soy protein or tofu burgers to be palatable. But non-meat eaters may lose their appetite along with their carnivorous friends over this one – a meat alternative made from HUMAN EXCREMENT. Yep, you heard me correctly — Japanese scientist Mitsuyuki Ikeda has developed a “burger” made from soya, steak sauce essence, and protein extracted from human feces.

The meatpacking industry causes 18 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the release of methane from animals. The livestock industry also consumes huge amounts of feed and water in relation to the amount of meat that it yields, and many find the industry to be inhumane and cruel to animals. These factors alone are reason enough for vegetarians to replace their meat intake with vegetable proteins and legumes. But Ikeda, a scientist at the Environmental Assessment Center in Okayama, sought to further the field of alternative proteins by recycling a form of protein-rich waste : sewage mud.

“Sewage mud” is exactly what you think it is – poop. Ikeda’s process begins by extracting protein and lipids from the “mud.” The lipids are then combined with a reaction enhancer, then whipped into “meat” in an exploder. Ikeda then makes the poop more savory, by adding soya and steak sauce.

Currently, the price of the poop burgers are 10-20 times that of regular meat, due to the cost of research, but he feels they will even out in a few years. He admits that “some people” may have a psychological aversion to eating artificial meat made of their own poop at first, but thinks many would be open to personally completing the food chain. He also notes that the burgers are extremely low in fat.

The artificial meat is low in fat and reduces waste and carbon emissions, however it’s hard to believe that any number of benefits could persuade consumers to take a bite out of a poop sandwich.

Empathy is what really sets vegetarians apart

I think this is a fascinating study even if it doesn't tease apart cause and effect. Ref for original scientific paper at bottom of post, after the brilliant op-ed piece by Daniel R. Hawes. -MA

From Psychology Today
Empathy is What Really Sets Vegetarians Apart (at least Neurologically Speaking)
by Daniel R. Hawes

An article appeared in PLoS one this May which describes brain differences between Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores in the way they process pictures of animal suffering.

The study in question is a neuroimaging study intent on investigating whether

"the neural representation of conditions of abuse and suffering might be different among subjects who made different feeding choice due to ethical reasons, and thus result in the engagement of different components of the brain networks associated with empathy and social cognition"

In addition to generally higher activations in the above mentioned areas, a second main finding of this study is that there are certain brain areas which only Vegetarians and Vegans seem to activate when processing pictures of suffering. In particular, when viewing pictures of human suffering, Vegetarians in this study recruited additional brain areas thought to be associated with bodily representations that distinguish self from others. (Notably these areas were particularly active when mutilations were shown).

The study has - of course - its own shortcomings, and I am somewhat breaking one of my own rules here by presenting fMRI related research without a thorough discussion of the statistics involved, however I feel vindicated by the fact that the authors themselves remain moderate in their conclusions by stating that

"Our results converge with theories that consider empathy as accommodating a shared representation of emotions and sensations between individuals, allowing us to understand others. They also led us to speculate that the neuronal bases of empathy involve several distinct components including mirroring mechanisms, as well as emotion contagion and representations of connectedness with the self. In addition, brain areas similar to those showing different emotional responses between groups in our study have also been found to be modulated by religiosity, further supporting a key role of affect and empathy in moral reasoning and social values."

All things considered, the study suggests that Vegetarians are more empathetic to the suffering of others, but as I contemplate the well-documented health benefits of a Vegetarian diet, as well as the environmental and social hazards of current meat eating habits and production practices, I think it is obvious that reducing your meat consumption will first and foremost be an act of compassion towards yourself.

Citation: Filippi M, Riccitelli G, Falini A, Di Salle F, Vuilleumier P, et al. (2010) The Brain Functional Networks Associated to Human and Animal Suffering Differ among Omnivores, Vegetarians and Vegans. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10847. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010847

Abstract
Empathy and affective appraisals for conspecifics are among the hallmarks of social interaction. Using functional MRI, we hypothesized that vegetarians and vegans, who made their feeding choice for ethical reasons, might show brain responses to conditions of suffering involving humans or animals different from omnivores. We recruited 20 omnivore subjects, 19 vegetarians, and 21 vegans. The groups were matched for sex and age. Brain activation was investigated using fMRI and an event-related design during observation of negative affective pictures of human beings and animals (showing mutilations, murdered people, human/animal threat, tortures, wounds, etc.). Participants saw negative-valence scenes related to humans and animals, alternating with natural landscapes. During human negative valence scenes, compared with omnivores, vegetarians and vegans had an increased recruitment of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). More critically, during animal negative valence scenes, they had decreased amygdala activation and increased activation of the lingual gyri, the left cuneus, the posterior cingulate cortex and several areas mainly located in the frontal lobes, including the ACC, the IFG and the middle frontal gyrus. Nonetheless, also substantial differences between vegetarians and vegans have been found responding to negative scenes. Vegetarians showed a selective recruitment of the right inferior parietal lobule during human negative scenes, and a prevailing activation of the ACC during animal negative scenes. Conversely, during animal negative scenes an increased activation of the inferior prefrontal cortex was observed in vegans. These results suggest that empathy toward non conspecifics has different neural representation among individuals with different feeding habits, perhaps reflecting different motivational factors and beliefs.

Thanks to Jen F for the link!

*updated*: Not Conservation (per se) and NOT Science and NOT funny

*updated* one of the abusers has been arrested (see below)- i am so proud of social media, for the small vistories and the big ones! Sadly, "Unfortunately, Ohio’s anti-cruelty law does not allow for felony-level charges for farm animal abuse, no matter how malicious the act. This is due to the lobbying influence of Ohio agribusiness interests."-MA

Sorry readers, but this was so shocking to me I had to post it, although its more animal rights then i general like to get on this blog. I am not even a supporter of PETA since I think they go overboard and often do more harm than good for animals with many of their campaigns. But if you consume dairy you should watch this video, because the cruelty involved is inconceivable. - MA

From Peta.org

In the video, which was recorded over the past few weeks by Mercy For Animals, workers at Conklin Dairy Farms are seen beating cows with crowbars and stabbing them with pitchforks. One worker wires a cow's nose to a metal bar and then repeatedly beats the cow with another bar as she bleeds.

These findings are similar to what PETA revealed when we went undercover at a Land O'Lakes supplier in Pennsylvania. Over the course of several months, PETA's investigation documented that cows who had trouble standing were kicked and electro-shocked. One cow's gangrenous, infected teat ruptured while she was being milked by a machine. Another cow collapsed in a deep pool of liquid manure and was left to languish there for hours as the urine and manure covered her body and coated her eyes, nose, and mouth.

*updated*
from the humane society of america
by Wayne Pacell
Disturbing Abuse Uncovered At Ohio Dairy Farm

I have been traveling around Ohio the past few days with a half-dozen livestock farmers, who had assembled to speak out in favor of the ballot measure to ban some of the most inhumane and reckless practices in industrialized agribusiness. But the big news on the farm animal front in Ohio during the last 24 hours was the release of graphic and sickening video of dairy cow abuse at Conklin Dairy in Plain City.

An investigator with Mercy For Animals was hired by Conklin Dairy and recorded hidden camera video during a four-week undercover operation. The video shows several employees, including farm owner Gary Conklin, abusing cows for no apparent reason. A well-known farmer in central Ohio, Conklin is seen on the video repeatedly kicking a downer cow in the face. The most malicious acts in the video were conducted by Conklin Dairy employee Billy Joe Gregg, 25. Gregg not only body slammed and repeatedly and forcefully punched cows, but stabbed confined animals with pitchforks and ruthlessly struck them in the face with a metal bar. Gregg was seen on the video telling the investigator how much he loved beating the animals.

Gregg was taken into custody yesterday and arraigned this morning, facing 12 counts of animal cruelty. No charges have been brought as yet against the farm owner or the other employees, and presumably the farm is still operating. Gary Conklin issued a statement yesterday after the video came to light. "Our family takes the care of our cows and calves very seriously," Conklin said. "The video shows animal care that is clearly inconsistent with the high standards we set for our farm and its workers, and we find the specific mistreatment shown on the video to be reprehensible and unacceptable." Conklin did not address his own apparent misconduct in the video.

The Ohio Department of Agriculture inspected the facility three times within the last year, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Officials said they did not witness any abuse and approved it as a “Grade A” facility, meaning that the milk can be sold commercially for any purpose.
Union County Sheriff Rocky Nelson told the Dispatch that the behavior he saw on the videotape was "vile and disgusting." "If there was a way this could be a felony charge, I would push for that," Nelson said.

Unfortunately, Ohio’s anti-cruelty law does not allow for felony-level charges for farm animal abuse, no matter how malicious the act. This is due to the lobbying influence of Ohio agribusiness interests.

Those same interests are fighting the Ohio ballot initiative to halt the abuse of downer cows, the strangulation of animals on the farm, and life-long confinement of veal calves, breeding sows, and laying hens in cages and crates barely larger than the animals’ bodies. Volunteers are now circulating the petition and have until June 29 to gather 402,000 signatures of registered voters in Ohio.

The farmers on the tour with me expressed their disgust for the abuses documented at Conklin Dairy. But they also spoke out against other forms of more routine cruelty within agribusiness, and called on the good people of Ohio to support this reform and return some level of responsible care and husbandry to the practice of animal agriculture.

Thanks to Jessica G-S for the link

"it's hard to argue that it's ultimately better for the cow"

From Newsweek.com & the magazine issue dated Jan 11, 2010
No More Sacred Cows
by Jennie Yabroff

The latest cookbook by Mollie Katzen, author of vegetarian bibles The Moosewood Cookbookand The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, includes recipes for spinach lasagna and vegetable tofu stir fry with orange ginger glaze. It also includes a recipe for beef stew. No, not "beef" stew, in which some soy-based protein substitute is dressed and spiced to look (and sort of taste) like meat. Beef stew. With real beef. From a cow.
Considered one of the chefs most responsible for the mainstreaming of vegetarianism in the 1970s and '80s, and a vegetarian herself for 30 years, Katzen began eating meat again a few years ago. "Somehow it got ascribed to me that I don't want people to eat meat," Katzen said. "I've just wanted to supply possibilities that were low on the food chain."
For as long as people have been foreswearing meat, they've also been sneaking the occasional corn dog. The difference is, vegetarians used to feel guilty about their sins of the flesh-consumption. Now, thanks to the cachet attached to high-end meat, they are having their burgers without sacrificing the moral high ground.
The word "flexitarian," meaning someone who mostly eats vegetarian with the occasional cheesesteak thrown in, has been around for a while. But only recently have former vegetarians been so smug about their forays to the dark side. "There is something almost primal about it," writes lapsed vegetarian Tara Austen Weaver, describing her first meat-buying expedition in The Butcher and the Vegetarian. "I haven't actually hunted dinner myself, but I set my sights and claimed the prize I sought." The "primalness" of the meat-eating (or meat-purchasing) experience comes up a lot in these conversion narratives, which inevitably take place at a quaint, family-run butcher shop. Some of these shops are even run by former vegetarians and vegans, such as Fleisher's, the upstate New York store where Julie Powell (of Julie and Juliafame) learned to carve up a steer for her forthcoming Cleaving.
Buying only grass-fed, sustainably raised (and incredibly expensive) meat allows former vegetarians to maintain the same sanctimony they expressed with their old "I don't eat anything with a face" T shirts. In response to an article by Jonathan Safran Foer about his decision to give up meat, a Brooklyn meat moralist wrote, "lovingly raised meat is not as hard to find as [Safran Foer] seems to think—at least not if you have the good fortune to live near a farmers' market. Almost all the sheep and cattle and most of the pigs and chickens raised by the farmers who sell at those markets have spent their lives in the fields, free to run, graze and root as their natures dictate." This is the argument used by born-again carnivores like Katzen: eating meat is not ethically wrong. Eating ethically wrong meat (i.e., the cheap, mass-processed, hormone-stuffed burgers and steaks that constitute 80 percent of the meat sold in the U.S.) is wrong.
While it's true that sustainably raised, grass-fed beef may be better for the consumer, it's hard to argue that it's ultimately better for the cow. What these steak apologists seem to be missing is that no matter how "lovingly" the cow was raised, no matter how much grazing or rooting he did in his life, he gave up that life to become their dinner. Carnivores who only ate the flesh of animals that had died of natural causes at the end of long, satisfying lives might have a claim to moral superiority, but what to call them? Corpsevores? And if these organic farm animals have such great lives, isn't the more humane thing to eat a cage-raised, industrially processed chicken? At least we'd be putting it out of its misery.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/228720

Discuss.

More on In Vitro Meat

From Sphere.com 
by Andrew Schneider

Scientists Create Lab-Grown Pork; Bacon Industry Unmoved
Scientists in the Netherlands have created pig in a test tube. Debate has already started on whether it will save the world, or just throw vegetarians into a quandary.

In the meantime, the researchers may be in line for a celebratory feast: They could be the new front-runners for a million-dollar prize offered by a major animal rights group.

The research team, funded by a major sausage maker and the Dutch government, used cells from a live pig to grow pork muscle tissue in a Petri dish. After extracting cells called myoblasts from the muscle of a live pig, the scientists then incubated the myoblasts in a nutrient solution, which allowed the cells to multiply and create muscle.

The implications of this breakthrough in "in vitro meat," as it's sometimes called, are potentially enormous.

Physiology professor Mark Post of Eindhoven University, who led the research team, believes it could make it possible to end world hunger. "You could take the meat from one animal and create the volume of meat previously provided by a million animals," he told the media in the United Kingdom.

Making meat in a laboratory instead of a feed lot could also reduce climate change by eliminating billions of tons of methane and other greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals across the globe.

Dutchman Mark Post, a professor of physiology and expert in biomedical engineering, is working on generating meat in his lab at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Of course, all these potential boons depend on whether consumers think the man-made meat is tasty enough to eat. And even the scientists had to admit to reporters that they don't know if their creation is flavorsome, because laboratory regulations forbid them from tasting anything they create.

It certainly doesn't sound very appetizing. It's hard to imagine ordering up eggs and "wasted muscle tissue," which is how Post described his creation.

Nonetheless, the professor believes that steps can be taken to give the lab-grown meat a more marketable, steak-like consistency.

"We need to find ways of improving it by training it and stretching it, but we will get there," Post told reporters. "This product will be good for the environment and will reduce animal suffering. If it feels and tastes like meat, people will buy it." He and his colleagues predict that within five years, sausages and other pig products made from laboratory meat could be on the market.

At this point, the U.S. pork industry doesn't sound too alarmed at the prospect of being rendered obsolete by a lab beaker.
Cindy Cunningham, an officer of the National Pork Council, called the Dutch research "very interesting." But she noted that beyond the need to take the technology to a commercial level capable of supplying enough product to replace traditionally grown meat, USDA and FDA labeling issues would have to be worked out.

"The question of consumer demand would then be the driving factor," Cunningham said.

On that end, greater marketing savvy would help. (First order of business: come up with a better label than "in vitro meat.")

But People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is also doing its part to create additional financial incentives for researchers. Last year, the group announced it would pay $1 million to anyone who came up with a way to produce large quantities of test-tube-spawned meat at competitive prices by 2012.

"Cells are capable of multiplying so many times in culture that, in theory, a single cell could be used to produce enough meat to feed the global population for a year," says New Harvest, a nonprofit research organization working to develop new meat substitutes.

The group's Web site predicts that the resulting cells will then be harvested, seasoned, cooked and consumed as a boneless, processed meat, such as sausage, hamburger or chicken nuggets.

Today, pig. Can foie gras be far behind?

See previous post on the topic: Eight ways in vitro meat will change our lives

Eight Ways In-Vitro Meat will Change Our Lives

Written By Hank Hyena
from hplusmagazine.com

"Future Flesh" is squatting on your plate. Are you nervous? Stab it with a fork. Sniff it. Bite! Chew, swallow. Congratulations! Relax and ruminate now because you're digesting a muscular invention that will massively impact the planet.

In-Vitro Meat -- aka tank steak, sci fi sausage, petri pork, beaker bacon, Frankenburger, vat-grown veal, laboratory lamb, synthetic shmeat, trans-ham, factory filet, test tube tuna, cultured chicken, or any other moniker that can seduce the shopper's stomach -- will appear in 3-10 years as a cheaper, healthier, "greener" protein that's easily manufactured in a metropolis. Its entree will be enormous; not just food-huge like curry rippling through London in the 1970's or colonized tomatoes teaming up with pasta in early 1800's Italy. No. Bigger. In-Vitro Meat will be socially transformative, like automobiles, cinema, vaccines.

1. Bye-Bye Ranches.
When In-Vitro Meat (IVM) is cheaper than meat-on-the-hoof-or-claw, no one will buy the undercut opponent. Slow-grown red meat & poultry will vanish from the marketplace, similar to whale oil's flame out when kerosene outshone it in the 1870's. Predictors believe that IVM will sell for half the cost of its murdered rivals. This will grind the $2 trillion global live-meat industry to a halt (500 billion pounds of meat are gobbled annually; this is expected to double by 2050). Bloody sentimentality will keep the slaughterhouses briefly busy as ranchers quick-kill their inventory before it becomes worthless, but soon Wall Street will be awash in unwanted pork bellies.

Special Note: IVM sales will be aided by continued outbreaks of filthy over-crowded farm animal diseases like swine flu, Mad Cow, avian flu, tuberculosis, brucellosis, and other animal-to-human plagues. Public hysteria will demand pre-emptive annihilation of the enormous herds and flocks where deadly pathogens form, after safe IVM protein is available

2. Urban Cowboys.
Today's gentle drift into urbanization will suddenly accelerate as unemployed livestock workers relocate and retrain for city occupations. Rural real estate values will plummet as vast tracts of ranch land are abandoned and sold for a pittance (70% of arable land in the world is currently used for livestock, 26% of the total land surface, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization). New use for ex-ranch land? Inexpensive vacation homes; reforested parks; fields of green products like hemp or bamboo. Hot new city job? Techies and designers for In-Vitro Meat factories.

3. Healthier Humans.
In-Vitro Meat will be 100% muscle. It will eliminate the artery-clogging saturated fat that kills us. Instead, heart-healthy Omega-3 (salmon oil) will be added. IVM will also contain no hormones, salmonella, e. coli, campylobacter, mercury, dioxin, or antibiotics that infect primitive meat. I've noted above that IVM will reduce influenza, brucellosis, TB, and Mad Cow Disease. Starvation and kwashiokor (protein deficiency) will be conquered when compact IVM kits are delivered to famine-plagued nations. The globe's water crises will be partially alleviated, due to our inheritance of the 8% of the H2O supply that was previously gulped down by livestock and their food crops. We won't even choke to death because IVM contains no malicious bones or gristle. (Although Hall of Fame slugger Jimmy Foxx choked to death on a chicken bone, about 90% of meat victims are murdered by steak).

4. Healthier Planet.
Today's meat industry is a brutal fart in the face of Gaia. A recent Worldwatch Institute report ("Livestock and Climate Change") accuses the world's 1.5 billion livestock of responsibility for 51% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Statistics are truly shitty: cattle crap 130 times more volume than a human, creating 64 million tons of sewage in the United States that's often flushed down the Mississippi River to kill fish and coral in the Gulf of Mexico. Pigs are equally putrid. There's a hog farm in Utah that oozes a bigger turd total than the entire city of Los Angeles. Livestock burps and farts are equally odious and ozone-destroying. 68% of the ammonia in the world is caused by livestock (creating acid rain), 65% of the nitrous oxide, 37% of the methane, 9% of the CO2, plus 100 other polluting gases. Big meat animals waste valuable land -- 80% of Amazon deforestation is for beef ranching, clear-cutting a Belgium-sized patch every year. Water is prodigiously gulped -- 15,000 liters of H20 produces just one kilogram of beef. 40% of the world's cereals are devoured by livestock. This scenario is clearly unsustainable, and In-Vitro Meat is the sensible alternative. (Although skeptics warn that IVM factories will produce their own emissions, research indicates that pollution will be reduced by at least 80%.) Once we get over the fact that IVM is oddly disembodied, we'll be thankful that it doesn't shit, burp, fart, eat, over graze, drink, bleed, or scream in pain.

5. Economic Upheaval.
The switch to In-Vitro Meat will pummel the finances of nations that survive on live animal industries. Many of the world leaders in massacred meat (USA, China, Brazil) have diversified incomes, but Argentina will bellow when its delicious beef is defeated. New Zealand will bleat when its lamb sales are shorn. And ocean-harvesting Vietnam and Iceland will have to fish for new vocations. Industries peripherally dependent on meat sales, like leather, dairy and wool, will also be slaughtered. Hide and leather-exporting nations like Pakistan and Kenya will be whipped, but South Korea will profit on its sales of "Koskin" and other synthetic leathers. Huge plantations of livestock crops (soybeans & corn) in Brazil, USA, Argentina, and China can be replaced with wool substitutes like sisal. Smaller nations that excel in food processing will thrive because they'll export IVM instead of importing tonnage of frozen meat. Look for economic upticks in The Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, France, and especially Japan, who's currently one of the globe's largest importers of beef.

6: Exotic & Kinky Cuisine.
In-Vitro Meat will be fashioned from any creature, not just domestics that were affordable to farm. Yes, ANY ANIMAL, even rare beasts like snow leopard, or Komodo Dragon. We will want to taste them all. Some researchers believe we will also be able to create IVM using the DNA of extinct beasts -- obviously, "DinoBurgers" will be served at every six-year-old boy's birthday party.

Humans are animals, so every hipster will try Cannibalism. Perhaps we'll just eat people we don't like, as author Iain M. Banks predicted in his short story, "The State of the Art" with diners feasting on "Stewed Idi Amin." But I imagine passionate lovers literally eating each other, growing sausages from their co-mingled tissues overnight in tabletop appliances similar to bread-making machines. And of course, masturbatory gourmands will simply gobble their own meat.

7: FarmScrapers.
The convenience of buying In-Vitro Meat fresh from the neighborhood factory will inspire urbanites to demand local vegetables and fruits. This will be accomplished with "vertical farming" -- building gigantic urban multi-level greenhouses that utilize hydroponics and interior grow-lights to create bug-free, dirt-free, quick-growing super veggies and fruit (from dwarf trees), delicious side dishes with IVM. No longer will old food arrive via long polluting transports from the hinterlands. Every metro dweller will purchase fresh meat and crispy plants within walking distance. The success of FarmScrapers will cripple rural agriculture and enhance urbanization.

8. We Stop the Shame.
In-Vitro Meat will squelch the subliminal guilt that sensitive people feel when they sit down for a carnivorous meal. Forty billion animals are killed per year in the United States alone; one million chickens per hour. I list this last even though it's the top priority for vegetarians, because they represent only 1-2% of the population, but still... IVM is a huge step forward in "Abolitionism" -- the elimination of suffering in all sentient creatures. Peter Singer, founding father of Animal Liberation, supports IVM. So does every European veggie group I contacted: VEBU (Vegetarian Federation of Germany), EVA (Ethical Vegetarian Alternative of Belgium), and the Dutch Vegetarian Society. And PETA, mentioned earlier, offers $1 million to anyone who can market a competitive IVM product by 2012.

My final prediction is this: In-Vitro Meat relishes success first in Europe, partly because its "greener," but mostly they already eat "yucky" delicacies like snails, smoked eel, blood pudding, pig's head cheese, and haggis (sheep's stomach stuffed with oatmeal). In the USA, IVM will initially invade the market in Spam cans and Hot Dogs, shapes that salivating shoppers are sold on as mysterious & artificial, but edible & absolutely American.

Original Article and further reading can be found HERE.

Thanks to Adam A. for the link

From the NYTimes - The Case for Vegetariansim

Great Article today on NYTimes.com about one writer's story on how he and his family chose to go vegetarian. The arguments are rather compelling, take 10 minutes and please read it :)

Against Meat

By JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

THE FRUITS OF FAMILY TREES
When I was young, I would often spend the weekend at my grandmother’s house. On my way in, Friday night, she would lift me from the ground in one of her fire-smothering hugs. And on the way out, Sunday afternoon, I was again taken into the air. It wasn’t until years later that I realized she was weighing me.
My grandmother survived World War II barefoot, scavenging Eastern Europe for other people’s inedibles: rotting potatoes, discarded scraps of meat, skins and the bits that clung to bones and pits. So she never cared if I colored outside the lines, as long as I cut coupons along the dashes. I remember hotel buffets: while the rest of us erected Golden Calves of breakfast, she would make sandwich upon sandwich to swaddle in napkins and stash in her bag for lunch. It was my grandmother who taught me that one tea bag makes as many cups of tea as you’re serving, and that every part of the apple is edible.
Her obsession with food wasn’t an obsession with money. (Many of those coupons I clipped were for foods she would never buy.)
Her obsession wasn’t with health. (She would beg me to drink Coke.)
My grandmother never set a place for herself at family dinners. Even when there was nothing more to be done — no soup bowls to be topped off, no pots to be stirred or ovens checked — she stayed in the kitchen, like a vigilant guard (or prisoner) in a tower. As far as I could tell, the sustenance she got from the food she made didn’t require her to eat it.
We thought she was the greatest chef who ever lived. My brothers and I would tell her as much several times a meal. And yet we were worldly enough kids to know that the greatest chef who ever lived would probably have more than one recipe (chicken with carrots), and that most great recipes involved more than two ingredients.
And why didn’t we question her when she told us that dark food is inherently more healthful than light food, or that the bulk of the nutrients are found in the peel or crust? (The sandwiches of those weekend stays were made with the saved ends of pumpernickel loaves.) She taught us that animals that are bigger than you are very good for you, animals that are smaller than you are good for you, fish (which aren’t animals) are fine for you, then tuna (which aren’t fish), then vegetables, fruits, cakes, cookies and sodas. No foods are bad for you. Sugars are great. Fats are tremendous. The fatter a child is, the fitter it is — especially if it’s a boy. Lunch is not one meal, but three, to be eaten at 11, 12:30 and 3. You are always starving.
In fact, her chicken with carrots probably was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. But that had little to do with how it was prepared, or even how it tasted. Her food was delicious because we believed it was delicious. We believed in our grandmother’s cooking more fervently than we believed in God.
More stories could be told about my grandmother than about anyone else I’ve ever met — her otherwordly childhood, the hairline margin of her survival, the totality of her loss, her immigration and further loss, the triumph and tragedy of her assimilation — and while I will one day try to tell them to my children, we almost never told them to one another. Nor did we call her by any of the obvious and earned titles. We called her the Greatest Chef.
The story of her relationship to food holds all of the other stories that could be told about her. Food, for her, is not food. It is terror, dignity, gratitude, vengeance, joy, humiliation, religion, history and, of course, love. It was as if the fruits she always offered us were picked from the destroyed branches of our family tree.

POSSIBLE AGAIN
When I was 2, the heroes of all my bedtime books were animals. The first thing I can remember learning in school was how to pet a guinea pig without accidentally killing it. One summer my family fostered a cousin’s dog. I kicked it. My father told me we don’t kick animals. When I was 7, I mourned the death of a goldfish I’d won the previous weekend. I discovered that my father had flushed it down the toilet. I told my father — using other, less familial language — we don’t flush animals down the toilet. When I was 9, I had a baby sitter who didn’t want to hurt anything. She put it just like that when I asked her why she wasn’t having chicken with my older brother and me.
“Hurt anything?” I asked.
“You know that chicken is chicken, right?”
Frank shot me a look: Mom and Dad entrusted this stupid woman with their precious babies?
Her intention might or might not have been to convert us, but being a kid herself, she lacked whatever restraint it is that so often prevents a full telling of this particular story. Without drama or rhetoric, skipping over or euphemizing, she shared what she knew.
My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.
What our baby sitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed so self-evidently true, but also because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include farmed animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.
Until I didn’t. My vegetarianism, so bombastic and unyielding in the beginning, lasted a few years, sputtered and quietly died. I never thought of a response to our baby sitter’s code but found ways to smudge, diminish and ignore it. Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving.
Mark Twain said that quitting smoking is among the easiest things you can do; he did it all the time. I would add vegetarianism to the list of easy things. In high school I became vegetarian more times than I can now remember, most often as an effort to claim a bit of identity in a world of people whose identities seemed to come effortlessly. I wanted a slogan to distinguish my mom’s Volvo’s bumper, a bake-sale cause to fill the self-conscious half-hour of school break, an occasion to get closer to the breasts of activist women. (And I continued to think it was wrong to hurt animals.) Which isn’t to say that I refrained from eating meat. Only that I refrained in public. Many dinners of those years began with my father asking, “Any dietary restrictions I need to know about tonight?”
When I went to college, I started eating meat more earnestly. Not “believing in it” — whatever that would mean — but willfully pushing the questions out of my mind. It might well have been the prevalence of vegetarianism on campus that discouraged my own — I find myself less likely to give money to a street musician whose case is overflowing with bills.
But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of active forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I didn’t know the details of factory farming, but like most everyone, I knew the gist: it is miserable for animals, the environment, farmers, public health, biodiversity, rural communities, global poverty and so on. I thought life could, should and must conform to the mold of reason, period. You can imagine how annoying this made me.
When I graduated, I ate meat — lots of every kind of meat — for about two years. Why? Because it tasted good. And because more important than reason in shaping habits are the stories we tell ourselves and one another. And I told a forgiving story about myself to myself: I was only human.
Then I was set up on a blind date with the woman who would become my wife. And only a few weeks later we found ourselves talking about two surprising topics: marriage and vegetarianism.
Her history with meat was remarkably similar to mine: there were things she believed while lying in bed at night, and there were choices made at the breakfast table the next morning. There was a gnawing (if only occasional and short-lived) dread that she was participating in something deeply wrong, and there was the acceptance of complexity and fallibility. Like me, she had intuitions that were very strong, but apparently not strong enough.
People marry for many different reasons, but one that animated our decision to take that step was the prospect of explicitly marking a new beginning. Jewish ritual and symbolism strongly encourage this notion of demarcating a sharp division with what came before — the most well-known example being the smashing of the glass at the end of the wedding ceremony. Things were as they were, but they will be different now. Things will be better. We will be better.
Sounds and feels great, but better how? I could think of endless ways to make myself better (I could learn foreign languages, be more patient, work harder), but I’d already made too many such vows to trust them anymore. I could also think of ways to make “us” better, but the meaningful things we can agree on and change in a relationship are few.
Eating animals, a concern we’d both had and had both forgotten, seemed like a place to start. So much intersects there, and so much could flow from it. In the same week, we became engaged and vegetarian.
Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom traveled from great distances to share our joy. (Find that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon, but we were in Japan, and when in Japan. . . . And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only whenever we felt like it.
And that, I thought, was that. And I thought that was just fine. I assumed we’d maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency. Why should eating be different from any of the other ethical realms of our lives? We were honest people who occasionally told lies, careful friends who sometimes acted clumsily. We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.
But then we decided to have a child, and that was a different story that would necessitate a different story.
About half an hour after my son was born, I went into the waiting room to tell the gathered family the good news.
“You said ‘he’! So it’s a boy?”
“What’s his name?”
“Who does he look like?”
“Tell us everything!”
I answered their questions as quickly as I could, then went to the corner and turned on my cellphone.
“Grandma,” I said. “We have a baby.”
Her only phone is in the kitchen. She picked up halfway into the first ring. It was just after midnight. Had she been clipping coupons? Preparing chicken with carrots to freeze for someone else to eat at some future meal? I’d never once seen or heard her cry, but tears pushed through her words as she asked, “How much does it weigh?”
A few days after we came home from the hospital, I sent a letter to a friend, including a photo of my son and some first impressions of fatherhood. He responded, simply, “Everything is possible again.” It was the perfect thing to write, because that was exactly how it felt. The world itself had another chance.

EATING ANIMALS
Seconds after being born, my son was breast-feeding. I watched him with an awe that had no precedent in my life. Without explanation or experience, he knew what to do. Millions of years of evolution had wound the knowledge into him, as it had encoded beating into his tiny heart and expansion and contraction into his newly dry lungs.
Almost four years later, he is a big brother and a remarkably sophisticated little conversationalist. Increasingly the food he eats is digested together with stories we tell. Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.
Some of my happiest childhood memories are of sushi “lunch dates” with my mom, and eating my dad’s turkey burgers with mustard and grilled onions at backyard celebrations, and of course my grandmother’s chicken with carrots. Those occasions simply wouldn’t have been the same without those foods — and that is important. To give up the taste of sushi, turkey or chicken is a loss that extends beyond giving up a pleasurable eating experience. Changing what we eat and letting tastes fade from memory create a kind of cultural loss, a forgetting. But perhaps this kind of forgetfulness is worth accepting — even worth cultivating (forgetting, too, can be cultivated). To remember my values, I need to lose certain tastes and find other handles for the memories that they once helped me carry.
My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice. According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives — which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot — are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)
According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals — which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants — is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.
Every factory-farmed animal is, as a practice, treated in ways that would be illegal if it were a dog or a cat. Turkeys have been so genetically modified they are incapable of natural reproduction. To acknowledge that these things matter is not sentimental. It is a confrontation with the facts about animals and ourselves. We know these things matter.
Meat and seafood are in no way necessary for my family — unlike some in the world, we have easy access to a wide variety of other foods. And we are healthier without it. So our choices aren’t constrained.
While the cultural uses of meat can be replaced — my mother and I now eat Italian, my father grills veggie burgers, my grandmother invented her own “vegetarian chopped liver” — there is still the question of pleasure. A vegetarian diet can be rich and fully enjoyable, but I couldn’t honestly argue, as many vegetarians try to, that it is as rich as a diet that includes meat. (Those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure.) I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit.
This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.
Children confront us with our paradoxes and dishonesty, and we are exposed. You need to find an answer for every why — Why do we do this? Why don’t we do that? — and often there isn’t a good one. So you say, simply, because. Or you tell a story that you know isn’t true. And whether or not your face reddens, you blush. The shame of parenthood — which is a good shame — is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.
And then, one day, they will choose for themselves. I don’t know what my reaction will be if they decide to eat meat. (I don’t know what my reaction will be if they decide to renounce their Judaism, root for the Red Sox or register Republican.) I’m not as worried about what they will choose as much as my ability to make them conscious of the choices before them. I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.
In the meantime, my choice on their behalf means they will never eat their great-grandmother’s singular dish. They will never receive that unique and most direct expression of her love, will perhaps never think of her as the greatest chef who ever lived. Her primal story, our family’s primal story, will have to change.
Or will it? It wasn’t until I became a parent that I understood my grandmother’s cooking. The greatest chef who ever lived wasn’t preparing food, but humans. I’m thinking of those Saturday afternoons at her kitchen table, just the two of us — black bread in the glowing toaster, a humming refrigerator that couldn’t be seen through its veil of family photographs. Over pumpernickel ends and Coke, she would tell me about her escape from Europe, the foods she had to eat and those she wouldn’t. It was the story of her life — “Listen to me,” she would plead — and I knew a vital lesson was being transmitted, even if I didn’t know, as a child, what that lesson was. I know, now, what it was.

LISTEN TO ME
“We weren’t rich, but we always had enough. Thursday we baked bread, and challah and rolls, and they lasted the whole week. Friday we had pancakes. Shabbat we always had a chicken, and soup with noodles. You would go to the butcher and ask for a little more fat. The fattiest piece was the best piece. It wasn’t like now. We didn’t have refrigerators, but we had milk and cheese. We didn’t have every kind of vegetable, but we had enough. The things that you have here and take for granted. . . . But we were happy. We didn’t know any better. And we took what we had for granted, too.
“Then it all changed. During the war it was hell on earth, and I had nothing. I left my family, you know. I was always running, day and night, because the Germans were always right behind me. If you stopped, you died. There was never enough food. I became sicker and sicker from not eating, and I’m not just talking about being skin and bones. I had sores all over my body. It became difficult to move. I wasn’t too good to eat from a garbage can. I ate the parts others wouldn’t eat. If you helped yourself, you could survive. I took whatever I could find. I ate things I wouldn’t tell you about.
“Even at the worst times, there were good people, too. Someone taught me to tie the ends of my pants so I could fill the legs with any potatoes I was able to steal. I walked miles and miles like that, because you never knew when you would be lucky again. Someone gave me a little rice, once, and I traveled two days to a market and traded it for some soap, and then traveled to another market and traded the soap for some beans. You had to have luck and intuition.
“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end, and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A farmer, a Russian, God bless him, he saw my condition, and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”
“He saved your life.”
“I didn’t eat it.”
“You didn’t eat it?”
“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean why?”
“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”
“Of course.”
“But not even to save your life?”
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Jonathan Safran Foer is a novelist. This article is adapted from his coming book, “Eating Animals,” which will be published in November

Original Article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11foer-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3

Cows with guns

Ghent Belgium to go vegetarin once per week - YAY!

via YumSugar.com

Belgium's made its mark on the culinary world with waffles and chocolate. But could Ghent, Belgium, become the world's first city known for its vegetarianism? Starting today, the city has instituted a weekly "veggie day" in which government officials opt for meatless meals. When school begins again in September, schoolchildren will also have a weekly meat-free day.

Deputy mayor of Ghent Tom Balthazar explained that the reasons for going vegetarian are manifold: in addition to tackling obesity, raising awareness for vegetarianism reduces the city's environmental footprint and helps fight hunger. "Eighteen percent of the greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the meat industry . . . and the fight against hunger will go better and smoother if we eat less meat. For producing one kilogram of meat, you need seven to 10 kilograms of grains," he said.

Citizens of Ghent still have the option to eat meat on "veggie day." However, as Balthazar (who is a self-described flexitarian) explains, the main menu on these days at city schools and many restaurants will be meatless, and the alternative menu will contain meat.

For more info on going vegetarian click here