[BCFSN] food Digest, Vol 395, Issue 4

[Lydia Travers]

Re: thought you might be interested in this article about world food.  Why
I took the plunge at last and converted (almost) to veganism By George
Monbiot, published in the Guardian 10th August 2016

The world can cope with 7 or even 10 billion people. But only if we stop
eating meat. Livestock farming is the most potent means by which we amplify
our presence on the planet. It’s the amount of land an animal-based diet
needs that makes it so destructive.

An analysis by the farmer and scholar Simon Fairlie
<http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/can-britain-feed-itself>
suggests that Britain could easily feed itself within its own borders. But
while a diet containing a moderate amount of meat, dairy and eggs would
require the use of 11 million hectares of land (4m of which would be
arable), a vegan diet would demand a total of just 3m. Not only do humans
need no pasture, but we use grains and pulses more efficiently when we eat
them ourselves.

This would enable 15m hectares of the land now used for farming to be set
aside for nature. Alternatively, on a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200
million people. It’s not hard to see, extending this thought experiment to
the rest of the world, how gently we could tread if we stopped keeping
animals. Rainforests, savannahs, wetlands, magnificent wildlife can live
alongside us, but not alongside our current diet
<http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/Machovina_2015.pdf>.

Because we have failed to understand this in terms of space, we believe we
can solve the problem by switching from indoor production to free range
meat and eggs. Nothing could be further from the truth. Free range farming
is kinder to livestock but crueller to the rest of the living world
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/22/festive-christmas-meal-long-haul-flight-meats-damaging-planet>
.

When people criticise farming, they preface it with the word intensive. But
extensive farming, almost by definition, does greater harm: more land is
needed to rear the same amount of food. Keeping cattle or sheep on ranches,
whether in the Amazon, the US, Australia or the hills of Britain, is even
more of a planet-busting indulgence than beef feedlots and hog cities,
cruel and hideous as these are.

Over several years, as I became more aware of these inconvenient truths, I
gradually dropped farmed meat from my diet. But still I ate milk and eggs.
I knew the dire environmental impacts of the crops (such as maize
<http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/sum.12068/abstract> and soya
<http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/soy/impacts/>) on
which dairy cows and chickens are fed. I knew about the waste, the climate
change, the air pollution
<http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v525/n7569/full/nature15371.html>.
But greed got the better of me. Cheese, yoghurt, butter, eggs – I loved
them all.

Then something happened that broke down the wall of denial. Last September
I arranged to spend a day beside the River Culm in Devon, renowned for its
wildlife and beauty. But the stretch I intended to explore had been reduced
to a stinking ditch, almost lifeless except for sewage fungus. I traced the
pollution back to a dairy farm. A local man told me the disaster had been
developing for months. But his efforts to persuade the Environment Agency
(the government regulator) to take action had been fruitless.

I published the photos I had taken
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/05/think-dairy-farming-is-benign-our-rivers-tell-a-different-story>
in the Guardian, and they caused a stir. Still, however, the Environment
Agency refused to take action. Its excuses were so preposterous that I
realised this was more than simple incompetence. After publishing another
article about this farce
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/nov/12/toothless-environment-agency-is-allowing-the-living-world-to-be-wrecked-with-impunity>,
I was contacted, separately, by two staff members at the agency. They told
me they had been instructed to disregard all incidents of this kind. The
cause, they believed, was political pressure from the government.

That did it. Why, I reasoned, should I support an industry the government
refuses to regulate? Since then, I have cut almost all animal products from
my diet. I’m not religious about it. If I’m at a friend’s house I might
revert to vegetarianism. If I’m away from home, I will take a drop of milk
in my tea. About once a fortnight I have an egg for my breakfast, perhaps
once a month a fish I catch or a herring or some anchovies (if you eat
fish, take them from the bottom of the foodchain). Perhaps three or four
times a year, on special occasions, I will eat farmed meat: partly out of
greed, partly because I don’t want to be even more of a spectre at the
feast than I am already. This slight adaptation, I feel, reduces the
chances that I will lapse.

I still eat roadkill
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/aug/27/why-i-ate-a-roadkill-squirrel>
when I can find it, and animals killed as agricultural pests whose bodies
might otherwise be dumped. At the moment, while pigeons, deer, rabbits and
squirrels are so abundant in this country and are being killed for purposes
other than meat production, eating the carcasses seems to be without
ecological consequence. Perhaps you could call me a pestitarian.

Even so, such meals are rare. My rough calculation suggests that 97% of my
diet now consists of plants. I eat plenty of pulses, seeds and nuts and
heaps of vegetables. That almost allows me to join the 500,000 people in
Britain
<https://www.vegansociety.com/whats-new/news/find-out-how-many-vegans-are-great-britain>
who are full vegans – but not quite. Of course, these choices also have
impacts, but they are generally far lower than those of meat, dairy and
eggs. If you want to eat less soya, eat soya: eating animal products tends
to mean consuming far more of this crop, albeit indirectly. Replacing meat
with soya reduces the clearance of natural vegetation, per kilogramme of
protein, by 96% <http://www.pnas.org/content/107/43/18371.full.pdf>.

After almost a year on this diet, I have dropped from 12 stone to 11. I
feel better than I’ve done for years, and my craving for fat has all but
disappeared. Cheese is no more appealing to me now than a lump of lard. My
asthma has almost gone. There are a number of possible explanations, but I
wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with cutting out milk. I
have to think harder about what I cook, but that is no bad thing.

Meat eating is strongly associated with conventional images of masculinity
<http://www.press.uchicago.edu/pressReleases/2012/May/JCR_1205_MeatMen.html>,
and some people appear to feel threatened by those who give up animal
products. An Italian politician this week proposed jailing parents
<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/italy-vegan-law-parents-force-diet-children-face-jail-a7180206.html>
who impose a vegan diet on their children, in case it leaves them
malnourished. Curiously, he failed to recommend the same sanction for
feeding them on chips and sausages.

By chance, at a festival this summer, I again met the man from Devon who
had tried to persuade the Environment Agency to take action on the River
Culm. He told me that nothing has changed. When there’s a choice between
protecting the living world and appeasing powerful lobby groups, most
governments will take the second option. But we can withdraw our consent
from this corruption. If you exercise that choice, I doubt you will regret
it.

www.monbiot.com

On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 7:54 AM, <food-request at bcfsn.org> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. Fwd: Information for Nourish the Nation Fundraiser (Dawn Morrison)
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Dawn Morrison <dmo6842 at gmail.com>
> To: "ifs at bcfsn.org" <ifs at bcfsn.org>, "wgifs at bcfsn.org" <wgifs at bcfsn.org>,
> BCFSN list <food at bcfsn.org>, "<alr at fooddemocracy.org>" <
> alr at fooddemocracy.org>
> Cc:
> Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2015 07:54:52 -0700
> Subject: [BCFSN] Fwd: Information for Nourish the Nation Fundraiser
> Hi All,
> Please distribute this call for support far and wide in your circles and
> click on the link in the forwarded message below to donate to the efforts
> of a very important Elder and leader who needs help in his hard work to
> achieve Indigenous food sovereignty.
>
>
> Dawn Morrison,
>
> BC Food Systems Network
> Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty
> C/O 555 East 55th Avenue
> Vancouver, B.C, V5X 1N6
> Mobile: 778.879.5106
> Email: dmo6842 at gmail.com
> Website: www.indigenousfoodsystems.org
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Ruby Smith Díaz <cohuatlicue at gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Mar 24, 2015 at 5:53 PM
> Subject: Information for Nourish the Nation Fundraiser
> To: dmo6842 at gmail.com
>
>
> Meet Wolverine. He is 84 years old, and lives in C’yele near Chase, BC,
> Secwepemc Nation.
>
> Each morning, Wolverine gets up, and tends to a garden full of beans,
> squash, corn, tomato, carrots and potatoes, all traditionally grown without
> the use of GMO’s or pesticides.
>
> But this isn’t just any garden. And this isn’t your average 84 year old.
>
> Wolverine tends to a whopping 8 acres of land, and gives away almost the
> entirety of his harvest to elders in autonomous communities, single
> families, and to courageous camps of individuals defending their
> traditional territories against the onslaught of devastating extraction
> projects.
> What makes this even more incredible?  Wolverine attends to this
> insurmountable revolutionary project all by himself, and this year's
> harvest will mark the 20th anniversary of the Gustafsen Lake Standoff,
> where Wolverine and a handful of other Secwepemc Warriors bravely defended
> their sacred Sundance land from hundreds of RCMP members.
>
> In order to put the seeds in the ground for harvest this year, we need
> your help.   Every single dollar that you donate will go towards the
> purchase of a greenhouse, rototiller, an irrigation upgrade, and fencing-
> all to keep this project alive.
>
> Please donate what you can in honour of this fierce elder, Wolverine at
> www.nourishthenation.ca
>
> Questions? Email wage.solidarity at gmail.com
>
>
>
> --
> In love and solidarity,
>
> Ruby Smith Díaz
> Facilitation. Social Justice. Heart.
> rubysmithdiaz.tumblr.com
>
>
>
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