I highly recommend Cowspiracy which I watched last night and which Bill Shipley turned me on to after donating to their fundraising campaign. I wrote the following review on the facebook page of the vegan organization that sponsored the screening at NYU last night as part of the lead-up to the Peoples Climate March this Sunday at 11:30 in Manhattan. I hope people can glean something from it, so to speak. :) Its refreshing being reminded that eating industrial animal products (and many organic and sustainable ones too) is still the number one cause of global warming and water depletion and pollution in the world, and refraining from their consumption is a more immediate step than any development in the renewable energy sector and is a massive leap forward in energy conservation, more than any other adjustments you could make in your life. *************************** Was very impressed with the film (Cowspiracy) last night but felt like it really botched the comparison of grass-based farming to industrial animal agriculture. As someone who generally eats in a Michael Pollan-esque way, I already eat a 98% vegan diet but really value the 2% of animal products and their nutrient density that I get in my diet from wild game, roadkill, insects, dumpsters, the occasional grass-fed beef, etc. Ive found this to be problematic in many discussions of veganism, that people go from the horrors of industrial ag straight to a vegan diet, glossing over the alternatives as I did during puberty when I went vegan. I subsequently suffered from severe depression because I did not bullet-proof my vegan nutrition and had little counseling, and later found out I likely suffered from a depletion of cholesterol and saturated fat which play a critical roll in mood hormone production (available in tropical vegetable oils, and animal fats). Because I had little coaching from other vegans (there really werent any around me that I knew of in high school), I likely suffered the avoidable struggle with suicide and hospitalization as a result of certain key nutrient deficiencies. Vegan nutrition is a touchy area and vegans must take extra effort to assure the wholism of their diet without denial and ideology. Another area that I wish received more discussion and was equally missing from the film is viewing diet from a truly localized culture-and-ecological-systems based perspective. Some peoples who habitat grasslands such as the african Masai eat a heavily animal-intensive diet in a quite sustainable way. Clearly this only works out for their small numbers and lack of population density and is not a model for us. Other more tropical cultures eat a mostly tuber-based vegan diet because it is more appropriate to their biome, and they can meet their nutritional needs from, for example, tropical oils instead of animal fats. They usually supplement with the occasional hunted game, insects, fish, etc. Again, not a model for a modern city-dweller but an example of a land-based diet, and a model that can be adapted. For example, where I am from in the midwest, we used to have invasive species dinner parties, where we would feature foods such as garlic mustard and asian carp. Asian carp is a scourge on the rivers of the midwest, aggressively outcompeting almost all other fish and resulting in an increasing monoculture. Instead of eating this fish, people are choosing to eat all manner of ocean fish. Eating this fish could indeed be an ecological service (an idea countered in Cowspiracy), as well as eating deer in certain regions (eastern forests) of the US that are disrupting the ecological diversity and productivity of the forests. Clearly these problems with so-called invasive species are not the result of NOT eating these animals and are the result of bad natural resource management, however replacing industrial animal consumption with consumption of these species can be part of a solution. I hope this is not too long-winded, and I hope that this post doesnt get deleted by Collectively Free on ideological grounds and can instead be used to stimulate discussion. I believe it would be foolish for anyone or group who advocates a 99% vegan diet free of any industrial animal farming to be marginalized from the discussion of these issues. Many of us are vegetarian and vegan for different reasons and the more these can be parsed out and discussed, the better.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:43:47 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015