meat

Eat Fruit to Judge Intelligence

- Adam Clare

Meat eaters are really good at denying the intelligence of other living beings according to a new study. When people were told to eat fruit their assessment of an animal’s intelligence was higher, with meat eating people they denied that the animal could be intelligent.

In a study that excluded vegetarians, psychologist Brock Bastian of the University of Queensland in Australia and his colleagues first asked par­ticipants to commit to eating either meat slices or apple wedges. Before eating, everyone wrote an essay describing the full life cycle of a butchered animal and then rated the mental faculties of a cow or a sheep. Participants who knew that they would have to eat meat later in the study made much more conservative assessments of the animal mind, on average, denying that it could think and feel enough to suffer. The study was published last October in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“People engage in the denial of mind in animals to allow them to engage in the behavior of eating animals with less negative effect,” Bastian says. The re­searchers argue that although humans have the ability to imagine themselves in someone else’s shoes—or hooves—doing so is not always helpful. People living in carnivorous cultures may have developed this strategy of denial to better align their morals with their traditions so they may continue to consume meat without being consumed by guilt.

Read some more here.

Good Reasons to Have a Vegan Diet

- Adam Clare

Unfortunately I’m no vegan, but this article is inspiring me to try harder at being one!

The article is an interview with Gene Baur, who is the founder of US-based animal rescue organization Farm Sanctuary about why a vegan diet is good for the planet, animals, and you.

What’s responsible for the rise of veganism?
I think there’s a convergence of issues. There’s more awareness of the cruelty in factory farming with the internet, YouTube and photos being widely distributed. There are growing healthcare problems. In the US, heart disease and cancer are the number-one killers and both can be seriously lessened by switching more to a plant-based diet containing whole foods instead of processed junk food. There are also the environmental consequences of basing a diet on animals. The UN put out a report called Livestock’s Long Shadow that talked about how livestock industry is one of the top contributors to serious environmental problems including climate change. As we face more economic challenges, I believe there will be a natural tendency towards more plant-based farming.
Would you like to see everyone become a vegan?
I’d love to see that, but I recognize everyone has to make their own choice. It’s my belief that this is the best way to live and the most humane way to live and the healthiest. There are a lot of things in this world we cannot control but one thing we can control is what we eat. Choose food that makes us healthy and makes us feel good and not make us say, “Oh, I don’t want to know where that came from.” Our food choices have big consequences on our health, the well-being of animals and the planet and I just want people to be mindful of that.

Read more here.

Vegetarians are Happier than Meat Eaters

- Adam Clare 7 Comments

I’m a vegetarian and I think I’m pretty happy most of the time; I thought it was constantly sharing good news that made me happy, but it might be my diet.

If you still eat a lot of meat, you might want to reconsider your diet and get a little happier. 🙂

The researchers found the vegetarians reported diets significantly lower in EPA and DHA, the omega-3 fatty acids that we get from eating fish, and which many studies have found are a key factor in improving both physical and mental health. So they expected to find the vegetarians would have higher incidences of issues like depression, anxiety, and mood problems. Instead, they found the opposite result. Vegetarians scored lower on depression tests and had better mood profiles than their fish- and meat-eating peers. “While dietary intake of EPA and DHA has an important role in brain function, we found no evidence that the absence of direct intake of these fatty acids in vegetarians adversely affects mood state,” the study reports. “These results challenge what is known about the link between dietary fats and brain function and suggest an unrecognized benefit of vegetarian diets.”

Read more at Planet Green.

Bugerville Supports Local Food Movement

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

The local food movement is one that can use a lot of support, so it’s always good to see companies and people supporting the idea. Eating local helps your local economy and it can mean less carbon is emitted to get food from farm to fork. (Remember that you can greatly and easily lower how much energy it takes to get food on your plate by eating vegetarian style.) Now there’s a chain of burger stores in the USA that encourages using local food.

Enter Burgerville, a 39-restaurant gourmet fast food chain in the Pacific Northwest. The chain already uses local and sustainable ingredients in its food, and now Burgerville is taking its commitment to the locavore movement a step further with new seasonal food combinations. Each menu item highlights a single in-season ingredient sourced from local farms committed to sustainable practices.
This month, for example, Burgerville is featuring a rosemary chicken sandwich and rosemary shoestring potatoes, priced at $5.99 and $2.99, respectively. April’s spinach focus will bring a spinach florentine pastry and spinach salad. Many of Burgerville’s items come from family farms like T. Malatesta Farms in Canby, Oregon and Liepold Farms in Boring, Oregon. In the past, such small farms have been virtually ignored by the fast food industry.

Save the Environment: Don’t Eat Meat

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Yes, I’m a vegetarian, and yes I think most people should be; however, will I force you to be vegetarian? – not yet. In fact, I only discuss why I’m veggie when asked (with the obvious exception of posting here). One reason I love not eating animals is that it’s really awesome for the environment to not feed animals in the first place. Oh, the irony. An article from Alternet sheds some light on how not eating meat is great for the environment.

Even more hidden from public view is the role of animal feeding in global warming. The shocking fact is that production of beef, pork and poultry is a bigger part of the climate problem than the cars and trucks we drive, indeed of the whole transportation sector. In our fantasies — and ads — we see contented cows eating grass, but the fact is all but a lucky few spend much of their lives in dismal feedlots where grass does not grow, getting fat on corn and other unspeakable byproducts. Internationally, two-thirds of the earth’s available agricultural land is used to raise animals and their feed crops, primarily corn and soybeans, and the trend is accelerating as people in Latin America and Asia increasingly demand an Americanized diet rich in meat. The need to grow more animal feed and more animals has been devastating rainforests and areas like Brazil’s Cerrado region, the world’s most biologically diverse savannah, long before the demand for biofuels began escalating.

It’s What We Eat

Vegetarians have long understood this issue, but asking the American public to eat less meat is still a radical idea, politically untouchable. Yet the meat industry is a giant source of greenhouse gases, of which carbon dioxide is only one, and not the most dangerous one. All those steer feedlots and factory buildings crammed with pigs and chickens produce immense amounts of animal wastes that give off methane. On an equivalent basis to carbon dioxide, methane is twenty-three times more potent as a greenhouse gas. When you add in the production of fertilizer and other aspects of animal farming (including land use changes, feed transport, etc.) livestock farming is responsible for nearly one-fifth of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, more than the transportation sector, according to a 2006 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

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