One of the strongest indictments of the meat industry I've ever seen is my good friend Mark Bittman's TED talk, "on what's wrong with what we eat." In this talk, Mark discusses the benefits of eating plants and the problems of eating meat, including the extreme cruelty of modern farming, the harm to human health of eating so much meat, and the environmental nightmare that meat production causes.
In the talk, it's the environmental nightmare that seems to most capture Mark's imagination: He begins the talk by comparing modern diets to the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb. Stating that modern meat production is "a holocaust of a different kind," Mark discusses the fact that about one-fifth of all global warming gases come from the meat industry, and then proceeds to detail other environmental problems with meat production -- desertification, water use and pollution, loss of biodiversity, and so on.
Throughout the talk, Mark makes it clear that "we don't need animal products [for health]," and that plants should be supplanting animals in the human diet. Mark has been beating the drum of responsible eating as well as anyone in the three years since he delivered this TED talk, most recently with a thought-provoking Opinionator blog that raises many of the same issues, but with a brand new target that I find curious and a bit counter-productive.
To be clear: I am okay with the fact that Mark does not in the end -- now or in his TED talk -- decide that the solution to the problem of the meat industry is to advocate veganism; after all, he is honest about the tragic consequences of meat consumption, and many who read his influential words will move in the direction of conscious eating, and others will go farther, doing as he says, which is even more than he (laudably) does.
Mark and I differ over the issue of meat alternatives; I like them, he doesn't. His indictment of them appears to be based on the fact that they are processed, which is true (there are, of course, many more processed foods with animal products in them, but let's not go there). But unlike the subjects of his usual culinary fusillades, high protein meat alternatives are not packed with fat or simple carbohydrates, they are environmentally exponentially superior to meat, and they don't support the egregious cruelty to animals of the modern meat industry. Honestly, it seems to me that his objection is more aesthetic; faux meat offends Mark as a gastronome, not on any real ethical grounds (as far as I can tell).
Here's why I'm unabashedly pro-faux, and why I promoted faux meat for Oprah's 378 staffers who went vegan for a week: It's much better for human health, exponentially better for our environment, and infinitely better for animals.
Like Mark, I wish that we lived in a world where every family had the time, know-how, means, and motivation to prepare healthful, from-scratch meals brimming with organic vegetables, whole grains, and slow-cooked beans; and I agree with Mark that encouraging movement in that direction is important. There is no doubt that this is the ideal, and that we'd all be a lot better off if we ate this way.
But we don't live in a perfect world. As Mark pointed out in his TED talk, the vast majority of Americans are surviving on frozen pepperoni pizzas, buckets of chicken, Big Gulps, chips, and chocolate bars. The closest many kids may get to eating a vegetable on any given day may be the French fries on their lunch tray.
That's why, when I led Oprah and her Harpo staffers through a 7-day vegan challenge recently, my approach was to take their current lifestyle and eating habits into account, and ease them into eating vegan by showing how easy it is to swap out fattening, high-cholesterol animal products for vegan versions of their traditional favorite foods.
The Oprah staffer, Jill, featured on the show didn't go from eating whole foods from the farmer's market to packaged vegan convenience foods. Rather, instead of buying a carton of cow's milk, she bought a carton of almond milk. Instead of a bag of dairy cheese, she chose a bag of tasty Daiya vegan cheese made from tapioca and other natural ingredients. Instead of buying plastic-wrapped meat that was produced with antibiotics and other drugs, she bought delicious (and drug-free) Gardein brand faux meats, which are made from amaranth, quinoa, soy, and wheat.
Simply by choosing vegan versions of the staples she already used, Jill effortlessly and dramatically reduced her family's intake of saturated fat, completely eliminated cholesterol from their meals, and reduced their risk of many of the nation's top killers. In one week, Oprah's staffers lost 444 cumulative pounds, and many said they planned to stick with eating vegan, because they had so much more energy and simply felt great. That's not surprising: According to the American Dietetic Association (link above), vegetarians are less prone to heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes than meat-eaters.
She also made her family safer from the pathogens and toxins found in animal flesh, including salmonella and campylobacter (in a Consumer Reports study, two-thirds of grocery market chicken was found to be infected with one or both of these dangerous bacteria) and arsenic, which is fed to chickens to stimulate growth.
As I mentioned on the show, for me the big thing is cruelty to animals: The average meat-eating American consumes about 35 farmed animals every single year, and each of these animals is raised and killed in ways that would warrant felony, cruelty charges were these protected animals, like dogs or cats. When we eat meat we are basically paying people to do things to animals that none of us would engage in personally; just because we don't see it up close doesn't mean we aren't culpable.
And as Mark so eloquently detailed in his TED talk, by dropping meat, eggs, and dairy products, we eliminate the largest contributors to climate change and other serious environmental problems from our family's lifestyle. That's why Mark began his talk with the mushroom cloud comparison -- it wasn't even the sodas and other processed food he was most assiduously indicting; it was meat.
Showing people who are trying to move toward a plant-based diet that they can still eat their favorite comfort foods is an important way to break down barriers and resistance to a new way of eating. Once the mind opens, it continues to expand. For many people, starting out on transitional foods like vegan meats, cheeses, and milks is a first, fantastic step, and they'll likely later incorporate more "real foods" like unprocessed grains, beans, vegetables, and fruits into their diet.
Moving toward a way of eating that is kind to our bodies, the earth, and animals is about progress, not perfection. It's about leaning into it by making smarter everyday choices. We may take different paths to get there, but in the end, any step away from a meat-and-dairy-centric diet and toward a plant-based way of eating is a tremendously positive (and delicious) step.
Not convinced? Watch Mark TED talk.
Please check out my new book, "Veganist," for more on how a plant-based diet affects your health and the world around you.
Veganism in a Nutshell -- The Vegetarian Resource Group
Vegetarian Food - Vegan Recipes - Vegetarian Cooking - Raw Food ...
Vegetarian diet: How to get the best nutrition - MayoClinic.com
Taste testing Tofurkey and other fake meats. - By Dahlia Lithwick ...
Who's Afraid of Fake Meat? - NYTimes.com
Tastes Like Chicken: The Quest for Fake Meat - TIME
You would never consciously let anyone do anything 'bad' to animals, and yet you consciously let people raise them and kill them for your own benefit? Do you think a cow doesn't think it's 'bad' that they are being killed? You'll be happy to know that this IS a day where we can avoid that, as the millions of vegans throughout the US and UK have demonstrated. And you can do it without eating processed food too, if you so desire.
Also, your local farmer 'promising' he is as nice as possible to his pigs is assigning the fox to guard the hen house. What else would a farmer say? In my experience with dozens of factory farmers, they all say that. They might even believe it, but that's because they define anything they do to an animal for profit as not abusive. Their definition of abuse is so narrow to avoid ever having to admit they are guilty of it, even though they are chopping chickens' beaks off, cutting the tails off pigs, and castrating them without painkillers. Can we agree that taking a farmer's word for it is on the naive side? :)
Not trying to offend, but in my own thinking this is what I've come up with when I tried to justify eating meat and other products from animals. In the end, we don't need to enslave and kill other animals to live.
And death is the only fuel for life, in a sense. Everything you consume for survival that was once alive has to die to keep you going. Pig, artichoke, or carrot. So while I admire the compassion and tenderness that drive much of the impulse to refrain from eating meat, it's still a very selective response to the ethics of being alive.
Especially White Men should not consume unfermented soy.
There has been a dramatic rise in the incidence of Hypothyroidism in America and most cases involve someone who recently switched to vegetarianism and has made soy a regular part of their diet.
WATER, TEXTURED SOY PROTEIN CONCENTRATE, CORN OIL, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF AUTOLYZED YEAST EXTRACT, VEGETABLE GUM, NATURAL FLAVORS FROM VEGETABLE SOURCES, MALTODEXTRIN, SOY FIBER, SALT, CARRAGEENAN, POTATO STARCH, ONION POWDER, CARAMEL COLOR, DISODIUM INOSINATE, DISODIUM GUANYLATE, KONJAC FLOUR, SUNFLOWER OIL, SESAME SEED OIL, SOY SAUCE (WATER, SOYBEANS, WHEAT, SALT), CONCENTRATED ONION JUICE, ASCORBIC ACID, VINEGAR POWDER, CITRIC ACID, ASPARTIC ACID, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, MALIC ACID, SUCCINIC ACID, TARTARIC ACID, LACTIC ACID, WHEAT FLOUR, SOY LECITHIN.
- beef (grass-fed in the Sierra foothills, bought from a farmer friend),
- kale (from my own garden) cooked in homemade chicken broth (made from leftover chicken bones)
- potato (not sure where it was from).
I think I'll stick with my diet.
I'm a little scared when I see ingredients like disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate on the label. If ingredients have names that don't roll off your tongue, they probably shouldn't go in your mouth! (one of my Pollan-esque "food rules"). Of course, a lot of those ingredients are fairly innocuous - onion powder, sesame seed oil, and the like. And it's not like a healthy, natural meal like yours can't contain additional flavoring and seasoning ingredients. Autolyzed yeast extract is a little problematic - basically, it's just a fancy term for Marmite, but I can see where it might be a problem for people allergic to glutamic acid.
The only soy I really eat is in the form of tempeh and miso. They're both fermented, so that helps greatly reduce the phytochemical content. Only organic and non-GMO. Plus, no hexane!
I really like quinoa, too. I use it to substitute for rice in a lot of dishes. It's a complete protein (more so than soy) and fairly low on the glycemic index. I can't STAND white rice (tastes of nothing to me), so whenever I do eat rice it's of the brown variety.
Aspartic acid additives, the main ingredient in aspartame (which literally started out as a chemical warfare agent) is a neurological excitotoxin that has been connected with a number of health maladies, including migraines, nausea, abdominal pain, fatigue, sleep disorders, vision problems, anxiety attacks, depression, and asthma. It should particularly be avoided by pregnant women and people with asthma.
The combination of disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate is used as a sneaky way to hide MSG in foods. When those two ingredients are seen in a product that doesn't list MSG as an ingredient, it is because they work by enhancing the glutamic acid in the soy protein concentrate to create MSG. The chemical combination of disodiium inosinate and disodium guanylate, known as disodium 5'-ribonucleotides, is not used independent of the presence glutamic acid that turns it into MSG, because it would be expensive and pointless otherwise. The dangers of MSG are no secret.
Caramel coloring may sound innocuous, but it in reality it is anything but. The name is purposely deceptive. In reality, it is created by a high temperature, high pressure chemical reaction between sugars, ammonia, and sulfites, forming 2-methylimidazole and 4-methylimidazole, which have been shown to be very dangerous carcinogens in several studies, and have been associated with hypertension as well.
Along with the many dangers of the nasty stuff known as soy protein concentrate, the industrial processing is pretty scary. Most soy protein concentrate is processed with hexane!!!
I have been having a hard time finding veggie burgers that do not contain soy.
So far the only brand I can find is Amy's Classic California Veggie burgers.
I think you're missing the point of this article, which is for people whose life decisions put minimizing the torture and suffering of animals and the destruction of the Earth above a transient palette preference.
If you would like to make an argument for hedonism, be my guest, but I think the common premise of this discussion is that there is something more important than what tastes good, since that is pretty much just a base childish impulse that developed human beings should aim to quash.
Then again, I guess I should be humble in front of a 200,000 year-old.
I will frankly admit that it would be hard to refute (except on personal, unarguable-either-way, moral grounds) arguments for "animals you raise yourself on your own pasture". I guess the question I have regards scalability. Most folks are not in a position to raise animals on their own pasture - in fact, in my jurisdiction it is illegal to keep livestock of any form, even backyard chickens.
This is kind of related to a question I've been meaning to ask for a while and hadn't gotten around to (and I'm asking this because I genuinely value your opinion, not because I'm just posing some rhetorical question): what do you feel is the most ethical diet for people who genuinely have no reasonable access to humane/sustainable/insert-adjective-of-your-choice meat, eggs, and dairy products? Just go with the factory-farmed stuff?
I think Stanescu's article, while surely no coup-de-grace, is a little more intelligent than others have given it credit for. I'm particularly sympathetic to the criticism of the strain of elitism running throughout much of Pollan's writing, and of the reactionary politics of Joel Salatin. Particularly notable is Salatin's hypocrisy in refusing to ship meat anywhere because that's not "local", but he'll ship t-shirts and DVDs anywhere, for free.
Salatin frankly makes no sense - if, as he claims, animals have no soul and are not created in God's image, then why does he oppose the "cruelty of factory farming"?
It was humurous to see you plugging your own paper here though, so thanks for the laugh, but I will continue to trust in people who actually understand sustainable farming, such as Macarthur genius award winners Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, and conservationist Gary Nabhan, as well as the head of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture Fred Kirschenmann, Buckminster Fuller prize winning soil scientist and land management expert Allan Savory, and world renowned sustainable farmers such as Gene Logsdon, Eliot Coleman, and yes, Joel Salatin, instead of vegangelical activists who write about what they perceive as the literary implications of sustainable farming.
1) Please give me a link to a study that shows this
2) Specifically, what biochemical compound in meat is it that causes this?
I would recommend reading The China Study by Dr. T. Colin Campbell
I am also patiently waiting for the biochemical explanation for the dangers of meat and saturated fat and how they "clog arteries" and cause obesity, heart disease, and cancer that will refute what Gary Taubes has explained so well about how it is actually carbohydrate intolerance and insulin-resistance that causes the above list of maladies.
Colorectal:
Santarelli RL, Pierre F, Corpet DE. Processed meat and colorectal cancer: a review of epidemiologic and experimental evidence. Nutr Cancer. 2008 ; 60(2): 131–144.
Larsson SC ; Wolk A. Meat consumption and risk of colorectal cancer: a meta-analysis of prospective studies. Int J Cancer. 2006; 119(11):2657-64.
Chao A, Thun JT, Connell CJ, et al. Meat Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer JAMA 2005;293:172-182.
Dose dependent effect of dietary meat on endogenous colonic N-nitrosation. Carcinogenesis 2001; 22(1):199-202.
Prostate:
Sinha R, Park Y, Graubard BI, et al. Meat and meat-related compounds and risk of prostate cancer in a large prospective cohort study in the United States. Am J Epidemiol. 2009 Nov 1;170(9):1165-77.
Richman EL et al. Intakes of meat, fish, poultry, and eggs and risk of prostate cancer progression. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 Dec 30.
Lung
Deneo- Pelligrini H, De Stefani E, Ronco A, et al. Meat consumption and risk of lung cancer; a case- control study from Uruguay. Lung Cancer 1996;14 (2-3):195-205.
Lymphomas/leukemias
Zhang S, Hunter DJ, Rosner BA, et al. Greater intake of meats and fats associated with higher risk of non-Hodgkins lymphoma. J Nat Cancer Inst 1999;91(20):1751-58.
Can you please link me directly to these studies so I may read them and determine if they used the proper controls? Also, are you able to answer my second question: which biochemical compound in the meat is responsible of the onset of these diseases?
I found the last study cited. Did you read it? It's a cohort study where food choices were determined by a mailed survey.. The results also note a strong correlation with age and height. Lastly, there is no mention of of the meat quality. This is a rather unreliable study!
sounds like every abolitionist vegan's dream
GMO's are a prime example.
"Fake meats" can help people transition but I prefer to teach people about eating "real" food as the goal. Yes, people are busy but what can be more important than taking care of personal and planetary health? Without both of those, there's not much reason to keep going.
Fanned!
Please watch your language; that kind of ignorance is dangerous.