January 2009

GREETINGS

Happy New Year!

Would you believe it’s now time to start thinking about what we might do for the Great American Meat-Out? It’s only two and a half months away, and in order to brainstorm and then arrange what we’ve decided on, it is not at all too early to get going.

In the last couple of years we’ve had nice tabling experiences at Alverno College. But this only reaches a relatively small number of people. Any ideas about doing something else as well? – and keep in mind that nothing says we can’t do more than one thing: we could do Alverno again and something else too.

One possibility is to properly organize something that I suggested for last October’s World Vegetarian Day but that did not get off the ground that time. I thought that we might try a multiple letter-to-the-editor writing; the problem was that everybody was busy doing other things. Someone suggested that it might work better to schedule a separate meeting, probably at someone’s home, at which people could get together for the purpose of writing such letters. That sounds to me like a possibility that could work. What do people think?

Then perhaps we should see about tabling at UWM again. Or some other place? Or something else entirely? Come to the January potluck with your ideas, or phone me at 414-962-2703 or Jody at 414-764-7262.

It’s also time to talk to the Urban Ecology Center about participating again in their usual Earth Day event. And at least these matters allow us to dream about the coming of Spring!

M.A.R.V. ACTIVITIES

Sunday, Jan. 4, 5 PM, regular potluck at the Friends’ Meeting House, 3224 N. Gordon Pl. in Riverwest (from Humboldt Blvd., go east on Auer a few short blocks to the parking lot). Theme will be discussion of what to do for the Meat-Out.

Subsequent regular potlucks will be on Feb. 1, March 1, April 5, and May 3.

Other veg-friendly meetings

There will not be a macrobiotic potluck in January.

The Urban Ecology Center’s vegetarian potluck will be on Thursday, Jan. 15, at 6:30 PM at 1500 E. Park Place. – bring plate and fork as well as your meatless dish. Phone is 414-964-8505,

To find out about Vegan Meetup’s possible January's events, check the Vegan Meetup website.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

“…last month, UN officials cited agriculture and transportation as the two sectors that remained most ‘problematic.’ [regarding carbon emissions]… Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change… says people should eat less meat to control their carbon footprints.”

NY Times, Dec. 4, 2008, p. 1

NEWS

Animal foods remain bad in various ways.

In Ireland, Britain’s Food Standards Agency warned people not to eat Irish pork due to contamination by dioxins, although also (of course) assuring people that the risks were not significant(?). Apparently oil from a feed company’s equipment had gotten into the pig feed and tainted it. On a completely different note, an earnest article in a mid-December issue of Wisconsin State Farmer warned readers to keep food poisoning off the holiday menu by avoiding raw beef and raw eggs, while a BBC item explained that marinating meat in beer or wine before grilling reduces cancer-causing compounds that grilling produces (avoiding beef and eggs altogether obviously did not occur to any of them). And more melamine-tainted eggs from China turned up in Hong Kong.

Then there are meat-borne diseases. Bird flu continues to spread among poultry, although there may have been fewer human deaths than in past years; all the human deaths occurred in Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and Egypt. Chronic Wasting Disease (the deer version of mad cow disease) was found in a deer in a Jefferson County hunting preserve here in Wisconsin. The US government continued funding for an Illinois program to prevent mad cow disease there.

Governmental efforts at regulation of meat production and sales made news this month. Canada took steps to dispute US Country Of Origin Labeling for meat on the grounds that COOL labeling is responsible for reduction of imports of Canadian hogs into the US. The bankruptcy of that kosher meat-packing plant continues to leave its workers out in the cold. The Bush administration worked feverishly to maximize its damage in its last weeks by issuing rules that exempt farms from reporting toxic fumes released by manure, and that undercut the organic nature of USDA-certified organic dairy operations. On the other hand, an EPA proposal to tax livestock on their greenhouse gas emissions caused predictably apoplectic reactions from the people who raise that livestock.

Animal emissions, meat-eating, and human hunger all intersected in various news items this month. The NY Times article quoted from above discussed the fact that meat eating is increasing worldwide, at the same time that it’s becoming recognized as the prime contributor to global climate change. Efforts to address this problem range from encouraging people to eat less meat to finding ways to decrease livestock animals’ emissions. At the same time, the cost of food is increasing, leaving more people hungry. A Vegetarian Voice article reminded readers yet again that feeding grain and beans to livestock only decreases the amount of net food available for people. The same point was made by letter-writers to E Magazine, who responded to an article in that publication which worried about the ecological impact of raising soy in Brazil; the respondents pointed out that raising soy in deforested rain forest areas to feed cattle was the problem, not raising soy in other places for human consumption. The good news on this issue came from the VV article, which described how Plenty, the outreach group from Tennessee’s vegan Farm, has successfully helped poor villagers in Central America to improve their nutrition through growing their own soy and building local small businesses to turn it into soymilk and tofu.

Of course, it is generally good news that plant foods are still good for you.

Broccoli has been cited as having yet another health benefit. Apparently its antioxidant sulforaphanes not only help the immune system, but can also help decrease the effects of chronic pulmonary obstructive disease. Its cousin, red cabbage, was the subject of a recent report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, which discussed cabbage’s anthocyanin flavonoids as having anti-cancer properties as well as fighting fat; interestingly, larger servings of red cabbage led to better absorption of the anthocyanins than smaller servings.

Curcumin, the active ingredient in the spice turmeric (which gives curry its yellow color), may help reduce the chance of getting cancer or developing Alzheimer’s disease – and has also been shown now to reduce the size of blood clots in the brain. And an Outpost Exchange article on Alzheimer’s mentioned dietary tactics for reducing one’s risk; these included eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, with adequate vitamin E (found in nuts, seeds, and oils), omega-3 fatty acids (found in flax seeds and their oils, hemp seed oil, dark green leafy vegetables, and walnuts), and adequate folic acid (dark green leaves and whole grains).

A new study discussed in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at diet and disease in 64,000 middle-aged Chinese women; among its findings was the discovery that eating legumes in general and soybeans in particular definitely helped people avoid developing type 2 diabetes.

An interesting article in VV discussed iodine deficiency, since a 2003 study in Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism found a significant number of vegetarian study participants to be iodine deficient. The vegetarians in this study ate sea salt rather than industrially-produced iodized salt, and did not eat any sea vegetables. Iodine is an essential nutrient, necessary for proper thyroid function, so it is recommended that vegetarians eat iodized salt and/or regular small amounts of sea vegetables such as kelp/ kombu, wakame, hijiki, and dulse; unpeeled potatoes and navy beans may also be sources (depending on the soil they were grown in).

Prevention magazine, which is always trying to help people diet, suggested making burgers out of mushrooms instead of beef to save calories. Another of its items recommended creating the perfect snack by pairing fiber, fluid, and protein to keep one feeling full without too many calories; all the pairings were vegetarian (and mostly vegan): a pear with a handful of almonds; baby carrots with hummus; celery with almond butter; kiwifruit with walnuts; string beans with cheese; apple with peanut butter; and red bell pepper slices with yogurt.

A new study from researchers at Tulane University and Harvard School of Public Health found that diet can play a major role in developing type 2 diabetes or not; specifically, eating leafy greens and whole fruit can help avoid that illness, while juice (due to its quickly-absorbed sugars) can raise one’s risk.

Another Prevention item praised tahini (ground sesame seed paste) as a superfood, with its combination of protein, calcium, and good monounsaturated fats.

And Prevention also reported on a review of nearly 100 studies which consistently show that organic fruits, vegetables, and grains have about 25% more nutrients than chemically-grown ones, and in some cases as much as 50% more antioxidents.

Finally, now that it’s really winter, seasonal produce includes nonlocal citrus fruits, local apples, and storage vegetables such as potatoes, onions, cabbages, turnips, winter squashes, and other roots.

DIALOG

The news these days feels more like “olds.”

It was in 1975 that Frances Moore Lappe published Diet For a Small Planet, warning that the American-style meat-heavy diet consumes too many resources and vegetable crops to be sustainable as the world’s population grew, and advocating a switch to vegetarianism in order that all might be fed. Now, here we are, reading news stories about exactly that problem.

Global climate shift began to become noticeable in the 1980s (I particularly remember the scorching summer of 1988); now we’re finally seeing public policy starting to look at its causes and at ways to counter it – and the talk about methane and nitrous oxide from food animals keeps coming up.

“Eat your vegetables” is as old as mothering, and the promotion of a diet full of produce in order to be healthy has been around for decades. And while vegetarianism has been an option for millennia (I once quoted from the Biblical book of Daniel as an instance), avoiding meat so as to prevent animal suffering dates back to the Jains of India and, in Western society, at least to the nineteenth century.

So all the reasons why vegetarianism is a good idea are not new. Only the urgency of spreading the word – and more important, the practice – of eating less or no animal foods is now becoming stark. Time is no longer on our side. Things need to start changing now.

This creates a bit of a dilemma. For on the one hand vegetarians need to start becoming very vocal about the fact that people’s meat-eating has to decrease; in the case of the world’s poor who do not eat meat because they can’t but would like to, helping them learn that it is possible and good to be well-fed without adding meat to the diet is an enormously difficult task. On the other hand, we also need to be aware that no one likes to be told what to do, and that no one likes to feel they are being judged by others. And dietary choices are very deeply felt. How to spread the word that folks should change their dietary habits and expectations, without being judgmental about it: that is the problem. It’s worth remembering that “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

One part of the solution is to practice what we preach, being vegetarian more publicly and noticeably than heretofore, as a model of what people can do, and how they can do it. Another aspect of this is to publicize all the delicious meatless cuisines and dishes that people can eat without missing the meat, so as to make vegetarianism appealing. A third tactic is certainly to emphasize the personal health and climate-change aspects of a good vegetarian diet, since this is an area in which scientific objectivity can be invoked rather than personal beliefs (thus avoiding the suggestion that we feel our choices are morally superior to others’). But indeed, if we are going to be on the right side morally, we need to remember that each person in on their own path, that no one deliberately tries to be bad, and that while eating a lot less meat than people now do must become the rule, it can only happen as each individual decides for themselves that it’s right for them.