And you thought clothing was bad

[nuduke]

I gather that the basis of the vegan point of view is that we're exploiting animals if we eat them or their products. That certainly is true, I suppose, but the farm workers on an organic farm are just as exploited as a cow might be and an organic farm is no better place to work than any other farm. So it might be something of a modern luxury to be vegan.

So true, Blue Train.
And what about vegetable rights?  A vegan eats carrots and apples but they have been farmed and 'exploited' by humans just like any other farmed species.
From a somewhat philosophical point of view is there really any difference between exploiting animals and vegetables?  We have no idea whether (and if) plants have awareness of their fate?  Is a farmed apple happier than a wild apple.  Is it kinder or better to feed and nurture a carrot than let it fend for itself in the wild?  If you are a vegan or vegetarian you automatically make this philosophical distinction between the fate of animals and vegetables based (as far as I can see) on a wholly notional distinction between what exploitation means or is allowed in the plant kingdom versus the animal.
I would ask why animals are more important not to exploit than vegetables?  Animals wouldn't exist without the vegetables capturing sunlight and turning it into plant tissue that animals can eat. Surely animals are the more disposable stratum of evolution because they exploit plants for their existence. 
All this is to say that I agree with Blue Train's assertion that  "

it might be something of a modern luxury to be vegan".

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That's not to deny any vegan or vegetarian their preference. This is not the issue, "chacun a son gout" I say. But I can't see how it is more virtuous to avoid eating or exploiting animals. 

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This preferential regard for the fate of animals is all a very deep rooted anthropomorphism, in all of us, which is stronger in relation to animals than plants because we see more clearly the similarities of animals to the human animal than of plants to humans.   And the more the animal is like a human, the more the anthropomorphism.  Thus we love and cuddle and keep as pets pussycats, doggies, rabbits, monkeys and the like of higher mammals.  But we don't go oooh!, aaahhh! and want to pet and snuggle with lobsters, squids, locusts or slugs.

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So I say to Vegans and Vegetarians, rejoice in your healthy preference and go easy on the 'principle' of it!

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John

[nuduke]

I should say that after offering the arguments in my previous post a few minutes ago, I should add that I don't endorse cruelty and the more repellant practices of animal mass farming any more than the rest of you (and indeed possibly vegans).  Maybe I am a bit more tolerant than some of you to how many chickens to a field or a barn!  But equally, we should pay more for our food rather than accept some of the conditions that poultry and cattle are kept in to keep the price of food 'competitive'.


However, Ric makes a point 

chickens are one of the most numerous animals on the planet because humans exploit them.

Maybe this is a cunning evolutionary ploy on the part of certain species.  Think about it - chickens, pigs and cows are far more numerous than they would have been if we didn't eat them.  Maybe by evolving for humans yummy flavours when cooked, and making us eat them and breed them, the hen, the cow and the pig gain far greater numbers (and variety) of their species which is usually defined as evolutionary success.
Yes! Perhaps it is we humans that are the pawns in the game of life.  We may be being exploited by our foods.  The chicken's point of view may be "Make the humans eat me, they grow successful and breed and therefore farm more of us."  More humans, more chickens.   
Since this is an evolutionary thing, presumably it applies equally to the carrot and the apple that are benefitting in provenance symbiotically with humans.
Consider that, high minded Vegans!
 
John 

[BlueTrain]

Goodness! I don't have anything at all to do with Lobsters (they aren't kosher), squid, locusts or slugs. It makes me wonder what the origin of kosher or halal (close but not precisely the same) dietary rules are. Many foods are prohibited, many of which most people don't eat anyway. As far as I know, however, there are no plant foods that are forbidden under anyone's rules, which is not to say that you can eat just any plant. Even so, we had rhubarb growing in the garden when I was little but I wasn't aware that it was food. Anyway, most if not all food prohibitions are religiously based. Some people, not many, eat monkey meat. There was also a belief in WWI that some imported canned meat in France was monkey meat. But that's just a curiosity in this discussion.

Part of the Islamic dietary laws involve how animals are slaughtered, so there is some concern over animal welfare. And the butcher can even be Christian or Jewish. The rules for that and kosher are fairly complicated and I don't wish to overly simplify things.

Some religious prohibitions about food have more to do with bodily submission than anything else, apparently, and self-denial, a totally foreign concept to most people. And likewise, some foods (or some things eaten as food) have more to do with just the opposite. Overall, however, I'd say that humans are highly adaptable food-wise, just like rats.

[nuduke]

Occasionally, in my childhood, my mother would cook something with tinned stewing steak.  My Father on these occasions would lick his lips and say in a satisfied voice and a strong Yorkshire accent "Aaaah, stewed monkey!".  I used to find this hilarious and as I type this I am laughing hysterically at this again.  Thanks for the unwitting nostalgic reminder, Blue Train.
John

[Greenbare Woods]

Neuroscience News:  March 5, 2020: Low carb-based diet may help to prevent or reverse signs of early brain aging in middle-aged people.

Recent study confirms that eating carbs and sugars messes with your mind.  Makes your brain age at a younger age, but brain aging could be reversed by eating a diet of animal protein and fats.

https://neurosciencenews.com/low-carb-brain-aging-15870/

[BlueTrain]

The term monkey meat, as I understand the story, originated in the Great War when both France and the U.K. had to import great quantities of meat from several different places, which mostly did not include any place where monkeys actually lived. Much was canned and of suspicious origin, and was heavily salted or spiced. It would have been either pork or beef (or corned beef). During the war on the Western Front as well for most civilians before the war, proper nutrition and sanitation was rarely either possible or probable. We forget how the masses lived in Europe and the U.K. at the time and many Americans north and south weren't really much better off. Any form of scientific approaches to health and nutrition and sanitation had only just begun then. But people somehow managed, just like most people have to do today.

[ric]

when you get into the minute detail of meat production and vegetable production things are no where clear cut from the moral prospective.   beef cattle can spend significant amounts of their lives wandering in pasture.  what looks to the uninformed to be a field of grass is in fact a diverse ecosystem , the crop the cattle are eating is unlikely to be one species of grass , theres probably allsorts of wild flowers and herbage growing aswell. then theres all the insects , butterflies and assorted creepy crawlies all the way up to wild deer. not to mention the birds in the hedgerows.  all these wild creatures are living in the same space as the cattle and by and large peacefully coexisting.

compare that to the typical vegetable field , any plant  that isnt the intended crop is either hoed or chemically sprayed,  you end up with a field of one type of plant which doesnt support any of the wild animals and bugs.  added to that the cropping area is completely dug up and any wild creatures habitats destroyed on a regular basis. the place is a monocultural desert.  even the organic veggies destroy the wildlife, they just beat it to death physically rather than destroy everything with noxious chemicals

all in all the wild creatures and plants get on infinitely better with the meat eaters compared to the industrialised veggies.

[BlueTrain]

That monocultural desert you've just described also describes the fenced-in vegetable garden behind the house in the small town where I was born in the 1940s, as well as the much larger vegetable gardens where we moved in the 1960s and which my father continued to keep until he died in the 1990s. There was no peaceful coexistence with any animals or birds (there weren't any wild animals in town and few in the country anyway). Most of our neighbors both in town and in the country had gardens like that and everybody behaved like Mr. McGregor in the Tale of Peter Rabbit. The huge farms of the Midwest prairie were really monocultural before the first plow broke ground, with nothing but a few kinds of grasses, although the American prairie is so large, there is a fair amount of diversity for the whole. The purpose of both farming and vegetable gardening, as well as raising cattle and sheep, is to support humans, not wildlife. If what I see from my dining room window is anything to go by, the wildlife will manage just fine. 

[Greenbare Woods]

I'm going to post this here for those who have suffered from infectious diseases and those who worry about coronavirus and other infections.  Its not new science but has been willfully ignored for decades.

Every time someone eats sugar or carbs it reduces you body's ability to fight off infection. It has been ignored by the corporations that push sugar and carb products.  It has been ignored by the Medical Industrial Complex that robs us while pushing their "treatments" after we get infections, and pushing their vaccinations.  A healthy diet makes you strong and able to resist infection.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition:  Role of sugars in human neutrophilic phagocytosis

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article-abstract/26/11/1180/4732762?fbclid=IwAR0AmtRoUOo6ADsXV91EApnoE5XyY-AWEO2uMhZsx3Decputryajg6pPz7k

[BlueTrain]

Your realize that bread in any form, which humans have subsisted on for centuries, contains carbohydrates. So I can't go along with that assertion. In fact, you should probably be eating bread with every meal. Any bread. Try baking some yourself one day.

[jbeegoode]

I don't think that our bread/carb domestic food supply has helped us much more than keep more of us alive cheaply, better storage, etc. It throws me of, for example, my body become hypoglycemic. It is also associated with a population that is controlled, impoverished with a lot of submissive conformity. I'm saying that it has more dominance in our general diets that it should. I'd be more comfortable, or inclined  with something closer to a hunter gatherer that something that has popped up in only the last ten thousand years. It may not be that the diet is better, but the people are more numerous, dependent and drugged by sugars.

I'm not so sure what Bob's article means to us, but the information is important as it all gets hashed out. Proteins are important. Carbs do get people sugared out. Then there is the whole vegetable thing. I do know that brain activity is a multi functioning interaction with the environment and can not be simplified, or limited to one input, or definition of a healthy brain. "utilize le ou perd le" "aut amittat eam, " or "Use it or loose it" is a very important factor, too.

As for the people standing around all 8 hour day clipping chicken's beaks off compared to a traditional farm....

Then, there is a carrot on an organic farm which is given optimum soil resources, nutrition and watering compared to a seed plucked down into some sick soil filled with chemicals and poisons, with just some PPK laid down to make it grow up to look good. If I was a carrot, I know what I'd choose!
Jbee
J

[BlueTrain]

You are free to eat anything you wish and nothing you don't want to, provided it is available and you are willing to pay the price. Same goes for drink, too. Just don't smoke anything.

[Greenbare Woods]

With the current fear of Covid-19 I'm posting this article from Immunology Science journal.  Their immunology research shows that a Keytogenic or carnivore diet will activate T cells, raise your immunity to viruses, and protect you from fatal virus infections.  It was published prior to the Covid-19 scare so it focuses on flu viruses which have already killed 16,000 Americans this year.  Activating T cells would also protect against coronavirus.  Maybe it time to rethink our diets. 

From  Science Immunology  15 Nov 2019:
Vol. 4, Issue 41, eaav2026

Influenza A virus (IAV) infection–associated morbidity and mortality are  a key global health care concern, necessitating the identification of  new therapies capable of reducing the severity of IAV infections. In  this study, we show that the consumption of a low-carbohydrate, high-fat  ketogenic diet (KD) protects mice from lethal IAV infection and  disease. KD feeding resulted in an expansion of γδ T cells in the lung  that improved barrier functions, thereby enhancing antiviral resistance.  Expansion of these protective γδ T cells required metabolic adaptation  to a ketogenic diet because neither feeding mice a high-fat,  high-carbohydrate diet nor providing chemical ketone body substrate that  bypasses hepatic ketogenesis protected against infection. Therefore,  KD-mediated immune-metabolic integration represents a viable avenue  toward preventing or alleviating influenza disease.

https://immunology.sciencemag.org/content/4/41/eaav2026

[nuduke]

Oh no!  I don't want flabby and lazy phagocytic neutrophils!  I want my neutrophils phagocyting for all they are worth....must cut down the bread!
John

[BlueTrain]

Didn't know mice ever came down with the flu. For the meat and potatoes types out there, neither was available in the grocery store last Saturday when my wife went shopping. So coming up with the optimal diet is subject to real world limitations. The default plan therefore is to eat what is available and which you can afford, same as people have always done.