April 2011

GREETINGS

As planned, and as reported in this column last month, we met at the March potluck and sent letters to 31 school food administrators in our area suggesting that they try offering meatless dishes in their cafeterias, and enclosing a set of a dozen tasty-sounding vegan institutional-size recipes with each letter. We also offered to make a presentation to students about it if anyone was interested. We have not heard back from any of the people we wrote to. That does not necessarily mean that they didn’t consider acting on our suggestion, or even do so – it just means that they did not seek additional contact. Which leaves us kind of in limbo, wondering what impact we had or didn’t have. If we do that again next year, perhaps we should also plan to do some sort of follow-up.

Meanwhile, the Spring continues (if you can call it that, weatherwise…), and we do have a couple of good activities planned for April. On Saturday, April 2, MARV will again have a table at the Green Living Festival at the Domes, having been invited back after being there last year. Also, the Urban Ecology Center’s Earth Day activities will be on Saturday, April 30, from noon to 4 PM; and MARV has been warmly welcomed back to be included as before among the informational tables in their lobby, the only condition being (as usual) that we avoid anything that presents graphic animal cruelty, since many young children will be there.

M.A.R.V. ACTIVITIES

Sunday, Apr. 3, 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).

The food theme for April is macrobiotic food, and for May will be gluten-free food.

The subsequent regular potluck will be on May 1.

Sat., Apr. 2, Green Living Festival tabling at the Domes, 9:30 AM – 5 PM

Other veg-friendly potlucks

There will not be a macrobiotic potluck in April, but there very well may be one in May.

The Urban Ecology Center’s vegetarian potluck will be on Thurs., Apr. 21 at 6:30 PM at 1500 E. Park Pl. – bring plate and fork as well as your meatless dish. Phone is 414-964-8505.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

“Reducing meat consumption… is far more eco-friendly than switching to locally-grown tomatoes… by switching from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs or a vegetable-based diet less than one day a week, you achieve more greenhouse gas emissions reduction than you would by buying all locally-sourced food.”

NEWS

There are still problems with animal foods.

A new paper from researchers at the Dalhousie School for Resource and Environmental Studies reaffirmed other findings that meat-eating is extremely hard on the environment, especially in its release of greenhouse gasses.

We reported previously on the discovery of drug residues that are not good to eat in the meat from dairy cows sent to slaughter; now a farmers’ association is scheduling webinars to help farmers avoid the problem – meaning it must be widespread… Another earlier report on the rising price of grains is reflected in a Wisconsin State Farmer article on trials to explore reducing corn in dairy cow diets.

A Miami couple and their company face federal charges for knowingly importing and selling cheese and other dairy products contaminated with salmonella and other bacteria.

Meanwhile, chronic wasting disease (the deer equivalent of mad cow disease) has not gone away. The latest news is that the state of Wisconsin may buy an 80-acre game farm in Portage County at which dozens of deer were found to be suffering from the illness.

Then there was the Cornucopia Institute report that Dean Foods’ Horizon organic label is including in its “Fat-Free Milk Plus DHA Omega-3” an alga-derived DHA oil that is not authorized to be used in organic foods. This is not the first time that Horizon’s organic purity has been challenged: the brand is also associated with factory-farm rather than humane or ecologically sound ways to handle their cows.

A more vegan thing to drink is coffee, about which I picked up two different news items. On the one hand, Columbian coffee farmers are suffering crop losses due to the rising temperatures and less predictable rains of global climate change; prices are already rising in consequence. On the other hand, the Rainforest Alliance is working hard at promoting traditionally shade-grown, eco-friendly, fair trade coffee through social-media networks.

Even more basic is water, and E Magazine ran two items calling attention to the fact that one in seven people on Earth lacks access to clean water, while 2.5 billion have no proper sanitation facilities; the items reported on efforts to help alleviate this situation by entities as diverse as Aveda personal care products company and a North Carolina bartender.

In a more controversial matter, a new report from the Harvard Women’s Health Study found that “women whose diets were rich in omega-3 fatty acids found in fish” suffered significantly less age-related macular degeneration. It is true that fish provide a ready-made source of the longer chain omega-3s that plants lack. But it is also true that if you eat the dark green leafies, walnuts, and flax and hemp seeds and their oils which provide the basic omega-3s, your body (just like the little fishes’ bodies) will make the longer-chain fatty acids from them.

A different kind of controversy is the whining by the American Farm Bureau Federation to Congress that new EPA regulations capping agricultural discharges into Chesapeake Bay would wreak havoc on agriculture there. In fact, it would only wreak havoc on factory farming (especially of chickens) which is good. But people hate having to change their ways.

There are also bits of good news. A recent Dining section of the New York Times featured meatless burgers, and said good things about them, asserting that “the veggie burger seems finally to have achieved self-actualization,” and explaining that “If the growing passion for plant-based diets is here to stay, chefs – even in restaurants where you won’t find the slightest trace of spirulina – are paying attention.” And Wisconsin State Farmer ran an item about a company, Hantz Farms, that plans to start deve-loping vacant land in Detroit for farming and green-space food production.

And of course, plant food is still good for you. Vegetarian Voice printed a report about research in the British Medical Journal which found that eating more leafy green vegetables reduces one’s chance of developing type 2 diabetes. Another of VV’s News Notes dis-cussed the way brightly-colored vegetables and fruits, especially purple and blue ones, help guard against poorly chelated iron in the body and thus protect against various degenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis.

Prevention magazine reported that cocoa, with its many flavonols, is beneficial to your good gut bugs, and could therefore be a sub-stitute for those who don’t like yogurt.

Another Prevention article looked at common health complaints and the dietary deficiencies they might point to – and what foods can cor-rect them. Joint pain, for example, could indi-cate a need for manganese and copper, which are found in nuts and spinach (as well as sup-plements if needed). Being forgetful might indicate a need for more omega-3 fatty acids: as mentioned above, dark green leafy vege-tables are your primary source, as well as wal-nuts, flax seeds and oil, and hemp seeds and oil – but the article also pointed out that one’s first step should probably be to get rid refined and processed foods. And rising blood pressure might indicate a need for less sodium and more potassium, accomplished by cutting down on salt and adding seven to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day.

An item in Vegetarian Times reported on an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article which suggested that the goal of reducing in-flammation in the body in order to protect the heart might best be met by working on the variety rather than mere quantity of fruits and vegetables in the diet, as each different kind of produce provides a different set of antioxidents which may all synergize together.

A different Vegetarian Times article looked at hemp seed, pointing out that it not only pro-vides an ideal ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, which both help the brain and help fight inflammation and the assorted diseases associated with it, but that it also provides plenty of vitamin E and protein, including the amino acid arginine which may help protect the heart. The seeds can be added to many dishes, and the oil makes a delicious salad dressing.

DIALOG

The New York Times Science and Health section published a rather silly and annoying full-fledged article/essay by a woman who had briefly gone vegetarian after being stuck in traffic behind a truck taking pigs to slaughter, but then talked herself back into eating meat on the grounds that plants want to live too.

It is certainly true, as she points out, that plants, when damaged, produce enzymes and other chemical conditions and signals which work to attract those bugs which predate on whatever is chomping the plant, or make the plant itself less tasty or useful to whatever is attacking it. But the idea that this makes eating plants just the same as eating animals is surely an excellent example of how people can use false logic to convince themselves of whatever they’d rather think.

For one thing, plants protect themselves chemically from harm simply because those of their ancestors that happened to have genes that did so were the ones that survived and reproduced – and natural selection does not require thought or feeling or volition.

Never mind that there is a real qualitative difference between a genetically-coded bio-chemical reaction on the one hand, and the fear, pain, and suffering possible when there is a nervous system and brain on the other.

Never mind either that there is in fact a dietary regimen that would get around the problem of plants “wanting” to live, even if it were a problem. Fruitarians eat only seeds and seed cases, on the accurate grounds that plants make far more seeds than are needed to preserve their species (think of the number of apples on each tree each year, over many many years, just so that a handful of new trees can grow up). Fruitarians eat seeds and grains (which are botanical seeds), nuts, beans, and fruits including those botanical fruits that we think of as vegetables (such as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squashes, etc.); someone who only wanted food that could potentially be had without directly killing anything could theoretically even eat nonfertile eggs and milk.

So the argument that plants want to live too and therefore you might as well eat everything including meat is pretty airheaded. What it points to, I think, is how much humans hate change: if you can argue to yourself that the hard thing you maybe ought to do doesn’t matter anyway, then you’re off the hook of trying to do it. But if vegetarians want to move the general population away from the status quo of meat-eating, we better address this issue.

Change can be scary, and departing from what one knows certainly takes effort; the reluctance of Chesapeake Bay agribusiness to adopt more ecologically sound methods, mentioned above, is an example of the result. Further, one may anticipate having to lose something one enjoys. I keep warning my childbirth students that their pleasant life as a child-free couple will end with their baby’s arrival, and be followed by a fairly unpleasant period of adjustment – but that in the end they’ll not only adjust successfully, but have a far richer life than before: the effort will have been worth it.