I was thinking about that heretical idea as I drove through my neighboring countryside, scanning empty cornfields for signs of life and wondering at the hubris of mankind. When did we decide that we can own all the lands of the Earth and use every square inch of it for our own needs? About 10,000 years ago, actually, when we invented the idea of agriculture.
Sadly, in the practice of agriculture it is impossible to not cause endless suffering to many living creatures. One could argue that the most suffering of all is caused by annual agriculture, the cultivation of vegetables, including grains, beans, and rice, that only take one year to grow from seed to food. We displace countless wild animals from their homes and lands when we cultivate annual crops. Not only that, we also kill thousands of creatures when we till the soil.
A perennial agriculture, on the other hand, based on trees, shrubs, and livestock, allows nature to thrive.
I meditated on the empty corn fields for hours. In the end, what it represents is a graveyard for all wildlife, from the invertebrate worm to the feathery bird. The entire wild ecosystem is completely interrupted by our tillage of all arable land.
About 400 million acres in the US alone is used to grow crops, which is about 40% of all US land.
This use of arable land provides ample food for all humans, but it takes away the daily meals of billions of wild animals such as rabbits, bees, rodents, turkeys, earthworms, and endless insects, and it destroys their habitat, family structure, hunting grounds, and nectaries. Not to mention the terrible slave-like conditions that many farm workers in the field are subjected to. Humans are animals as well.
See, I don't believe in any way that a vegan diet actually causes less suffering in the long run then any other diet. All annual agriculture provides fertile ground for the casual extermination of hundreds of species of animals on a yearly basis. If I include all the animals harmed in the grand picture of agriculture, not just the large mammals, I have to conclude that cultivating the cornfield is the most murderous of all activities.
That is why, in truth, a pound of grass-fed beef accounts for less suffering per capita then a pound of corn.
We are all looking at the problem of food morality through the wrong lens.
We should respect the life energy in everything that we consume, from the tree that we use for firewood to the petroleum that we use to fuel our car, both the accumulated energy of ancient sunlight captured by perennial plants.
We exploit life energy endlessly, day after day, in various and sundry ways, including driving our cars on tarred roads and turning on our plastic phones to surf the internet, all of which is powered by the dark black blood of dead trees.
Veganism is a laudable idea, but for some it provides a framework for moral superiority. Cultivating a savior complex is a natural result of following any ideological cause, and life is then seen through a framework that excludes anything that doesn't fit into that ideology. And the reality is that we all consume life energy, endlessly, in order to live our lives.
The least harmful foods to eat come from perennial plants, and the animals that eat those perennial plants. The synergy of cows and grass can hardly be bested as an ideal system.
If the primary goal of veganism is to reduce suffering, then many of us are vegan, and a diet composed of primarily grass-fed beef and dairy, as well as free-range chicken eggs and perennial plants products, is the most vegan diet that I can think of. A diet based on grass that is never tilled or disturbed allows nature to grow and flourish without our annual agricultural blades, machines, and chemicals.
We need to examine our relationship to land and the life energy it contains. In the early 1900s farmers knew that to keep the land in good tilth, which meant healthy and productive, they needed to let their fields go fallow. The idea that a piece of land is worthless if it is wild is prevalent in our society, and the idea of land allowed to go fallow is anathema.
In our modern society we feel that all things should at all times be as productive as possible.
But the funny part of the term fallow is that it doesn't mean that land is actually resting, doing nothing. No, what it means is that the farmer is not coercing the land into productivity with a blade, engine, or chemical. When allowed to fall back into fallowness, the land itself bursts forth with wild life and energy beyond what is possible with an annual agriculture. The life stories of a million creatures play out and contribute to the regeneration of a piece of fallow land, a wild acre, a small part of planet Earth.
Our current framing of the food production problem is this: Farmers need to utilize annual agriculture as heavily as possible in order to feed the population. Most farmers' mode is "boom or bust". They don't think they can spend 10 years to consciously design a perennial animal-based agriculture, because they need cash right now.
So what is really anti-vegan, what really harms animals, is this idea - that we need to produce annual crops on every square inch of land, creating a wildlife graveyard on 40% of America's land in order to feed our endless hunger.
When we get right down to brass tacks, I don't think that the majority of the people on the planet really understand what it takes to grow our own food. And this disconnection plays out across urban centers all around the globe, where people make a thousand choices trying to do the best they can with the panoply of annual agriculture products available, but think little of the variety of perennial based whole foods that pepper the outer shelves of the supermarket.
Cheap food is killing our connection to the landscape.
More people on the planet means more resources being extracted from the earth, regardless of whether or not we are vegan. Avocado producing countries are feeling the avocado squeeze because of American's high demand for guacamole. Acres of rainforest are being bulldozed to plant more avocado trees. Demand is so high that Mexico, which produces about half of the world's supply, is thinking about importing avocados, while an average Mexican can't even afford to buy them to eat.
Farmers in Mexico are cutting down pine forests in order to grow the lucrative crop and may threaten the habitat of Monarch butterflies.
All this to say, having your vegan raw food avocado chocolate cake isn't as harmless as you may think.
If we really do take a true audit of the death and destruction our lifestyles wreak upon the natural world, we would all be surprised. We all leave a trail of devastation as we go through each day, because all life consumes life in order to thrive- -this is the natural way of things, as far as I know. Is your plastic fleece hoodie so innocent, and is your root vegetable lunch so kind to the earth?
All root vegetables have to be planted in tilled land - how many deaths occurred when the land was tilled? Weeded? Cultivated? And finally, all root vegetables have to be dug up and the land prepared for next year's crop.
When you wash your fleece in your washing machine, microbeads of plastic flow into your waste stream, and ultimately down into rivers and out into the sea, causing serious health problems for marine life.
What is important right now is to focus on gaining perspective on the larger, overarching issue that we have as a society: We do not respect the life force.
Modern man just doesn't respect the life that resides in all things, and is consciously and with much deliberation consuming all the useful energy until nature, the planet, is completely out of balance.
The planet will recover one way or another. But Earth's healing process may not include us if we do not choose to live more consciously.
And I certainly don't think that means going vegan.
What it means is cultivating a real relationship with your food, for one thing. Eating locally will always trump any dietary morality play. When we eat locally, we create a relationship with the food that we put in our mouths every day. This relationship is like any other relationship, it needs work and care.
As Michael Pollan advocates, skip all the bullshit foods in the middle of the supermarket, all the packaged nonsense that is 90% corn-based. Corn-based foods are the least vegan foods you can purchase. They contain the most externalized suffering of any food group that I can imagine other then sugar, the other main ingredient on most of that packaged-foods garbage.
Instead of any packaged garbage, stock up on meats, vegetables, dairy, eggs, and all other whole foods. Just start there. Then search out your local farmers and purchase whole foods directly. Cultivate real relationships, in one way or another.
That is the only way to begin the real healing process.
We can reduce suffering on the planet by consciously entering into a relationship with the land, the people that live on the land, and the plants and animals that we consume.
Reader Comments
If we are going to save Planet Earth, I suggest we start eating some of those animals called "humans." Millions of them die of hunger every year, and this tragedy could be easily prevented if the hungry people ate some of the less hungry. I mean, after all, the United States murders hundreds of thousands all over the globe each year, and all that fine healthy protein just goes to waste. Imagine! What do we do with all that excellent food? We bury it in the ground where it is allowed to rot, instead of cooking it with some salt and pepper, a little garlic and some parsley, and feeding it to the hungry.
I live in America, where obesity is actually killing people, even children. Just ONE of those fatties could feed a whole village in Indonesia for a week. They, of course, are meat eaters, ingesting all the growth hormones that have been fed to the animals they consume, and thereby becoming obese. As the saying goes, "What goes round, comes round."
Why let it all go to waste? I mean, Europe would find it so much more amenable to welcome all those turbaned refugees, if they ate them. Then they could sincerely without any trace of hypocrisy put up signs saying, "Refugees Welcome," and each country could compete for the pleasure of cooking them. The French could braise them gently with a little garlic, and the Germans could make sausages out of them, while the Hungarians could prepare a delicious goulash.
And when we ran out of refugees, we could always go to Belfast and round up a few of those useless eaters who murder the English language, and turn them into lovely pies, with golden brown crusts and all dripping with Irish fat.
Yummy!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Sorry editors your idiocy is showing!
Is Niall trying to drive all the vegetarian and vegan readers away from SOTT? Or is he becoming hyper-sensitive to anyone with a vegan lifestyle? If so, he might actually enjoy it here in America. We have the cheapest and unhealthiest beef in the world, worse even than refugee-burgers. Even on an Irish paycheck, he could afford to eat steak with his cereal at breakfast, again at lunch, and as a bedtime snack. After a week he would be calling Laura on the phone and mooing at her.
In a similar but somewhat darker process: Irradiated youth who are being sucked into the flat-Earth vegan diet uptake thing are likely doomed to grow up making flat-Earth irradiated vegan music, flat-Earth irradiated vegan literature, flat-Earth irradiated vegan films, flat-Earth walnut-brain irradiated vegan political decisions, and a flat-Earth irradiated general field of influence, geared, purely-by-coincidence-you-understand, to whack the entirety of humanity within that field of influence right down to the second cupboard drawer.
So in saying that, where do you think the food that feeds the cattle, pigs and chicken comes from. Where is it grown? How much is grown to feed them so that they in turn can feed you? If people are genuinely unaware please look it up.
From the Smithsonian: "Of about 20 million acres of alfalfa in America, about one million grow in California. Virtually all this grass—plus millions more acres of corn and oats—is fed to livestock. Is it a waste of resources?"
"One-third of the planet’s arable land is occupied by livestock feed crop cultivation."
Nice try Sott, but it's an idiotic argument really.
But, you get bonus points for your dramatic descriptions ;-)
Vegetarians have smaller brains
If you want to get ahead, get a brain There is overwhelming evidence that we can not be a vegetarian species. In 1972 the publication of two independent investigations confirmed this.-1-2They...Their reading comprehension, math and deductive skills are better than yours.
Pythagoris
You know what seems very likely. For some people eating meat is fine and being vegan a disaster, just because. For others being vegan is perfect and eating meat a death sentence. The right of any group to impose it's needs on another is at the root of what has always destroyed peace. True liberty is at least partial defined as every one having some.
No doubt in my mind a critical review of Alan Savory's work is a vital link in the survival of the planet, irrespective of your outlook on meat.
After all the hot air expended on this topic, I think YOU have found the key, and this is probably why the SOTT editors posted these trivial articles to begin with - they were tired of the Vegan Gestapo arrogantly instructing everyone else about morality, which is a personal choice BUT, by the same token, the vegetarians who just want to live their lives without interference are offended at these editors stuffing the glories of eating dead, rotting bleeding things down their throats, so to speak. Thank you so much for your comment. - LG
LOL. I haven't got an ideology. I've always been heavy on the charcuterie, light on the fruitery.
Lemuel Gulliver said:
"I think YOU have found the key. Thank you so much for your comment."
In the face of general disapprobation, the criminal resorts to outlandish-flattery-with-puce-face-and-puke-making-feces-ruminating-grin-in-matching-crocodile-shoes-and-handbag-fashion.
You read what just was said here by HFL? I know you did - you editors read all the comments and often respond.
And you are threatening ME with banning, for posting abusive comments?
Your double standards are worthy of Donald Trump or John Bolton.
If you want to quit SOTT and come work for the US State Department, I think you would fit right in. They pay well, far better than Laura.
- Lemuel Gulliver
This is an interesting article which chimes with my experience - that humans usually lack the imagination to grasp more than a fraction of reality at any one time. Thanks for posting, SOTT.
Yours, an ex-vegan.
Quite aware that my own reactions are often ruled by this destroy your destroyer paradigm, I am fighting the urge to extract my revenge. That would only be adding to our further disconnect, when if they gave a shit to watch, all the fat old oligarchs would chuckle, clink glasses and take a satisfying deep drag on their cigars, mumbling things like, they just don't get it, do they.
We know we need to be fighting something, we just can't seem to locate a suitable target, so we practice on the very crowd, we should be going out of our way to nurture. Instead of fighting the machine, we feed it the mangled psyches of our brethren, while betraying them as heathens, when their only sin, is being human. Clever and sophisticated, this abundantly serves our hidden masters.
So while I can usually find something to admire in the offerings here, my take is we are losing, day by day, some very dear ingredients of our humanity, that will not be replaced by virtual crap.
So if the rocket men get trigger happy, or enough countries stop supporting the US petro dollar, causing a financial crash like never before seen, or all the worlds major volcanos erupt endlessly or we could simply run out of oxygen. Take your pick of a world end scenario but enjoy that steak.
How can we use the journalistic platform SOTT has established to turn world leaders to more positive outcomes like cooperation and peace, like humanitarianism for all the displaced folk on the planet. Like reforestation instead of deforestation. Like sharing the earths resources equally. Like disposing of our rubbish responsibly. Like reducing harmful emissions. If they were our goals we would find solutions.
Is that all -- considering that toxins, chem-trails, bad chemical food and water, polluted air, irradiation and a medical system that is number three on the list of causes of human death on this planet (it just surpassed strokes) It seems a little lop-sided -- should be twice that many being born to keep up with this slow cull.
BTW, seven and half billion is not that many compared to the landmass, and the great abundance available here on this planet.
Of course if we started voluntarily offing faggots like Lemule Gulliver, and that seriously lite in his loafers twit faggot Highland Fleet Lute -- how do you guys pick those faggy name. Maybe that would appease the PTB. Voluntarily giving up the useless left and the Nancy boys with silly names -- amongst a few, just might lighten the load of bullshit we have endure during any twenty-four hour period. And its a volunteer cull, well, sort of..we volunteer them.
Being a Quinn, and being born and raised and from Belfast. I seriously kick the snot out of everyone in here, especially the faggot Lemule. Except Joe, he's blood, he's one of me own.
Real men drink Guinness and eat fish and chips. Besides there's a steak in every bottle of Guinness. Ach and don't the Irish mommies feed the little babies with in a bottle. Guinness in bottle with a dummy tit.
Now speaking of beef, that's poison -- inbred, toxically feed, and injected with poisons, poison. The food it eats is poison, the injections it gets before slaughter is poison.
The mechanical process of slaughter is beyond cruel. The animal is inbred and has a been genetically fucked with for a long, long time. It has been raised as food for thousands of generations, thousands of years, the negative feedback from its evolutionary process alone it enough to kill us.
The process of chemically deterring the rotting process, is poison -- the chemicals that are put on the meat to enhance the color is poison. The cutting out of cancer tumors in the meat, so the buyer isn't disgusted, and to hide what shouldn't be eaten.
The animal suffers from degeneration, after so many generations.
Deer is much better, wild and free, organic, especially the little ones with big-brown-eyes yum yum. And there nothing like the thrill of the hunt. And the swift death of the animal.
Now on thinking about that, if I could hunt Lemule or the Lute player, maybe I could eat them -- with lots of salt and pepper and in a gravy. Maybe...would have to think about it about it a great dealmore though. I hear faggots are tough meat, something to do with all that whining they do.
how could you bear that heat said the grizzzly you re lovely rocky! you forgot chocolate
GGG in NM??
The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy - George Monbiot [Link]
Alternate facts for an alternate reality!