This weeks readings,
discussions, and meals truly confirmed my choice for being vegan...I'm so
excited that I have two more weeks of learning more about the impacts our food
choices make and why veganism can be viewed as the best solution to various
problems. Already, I have greatly expanded my list of supportive data in my
argument for veganism and have gained many more details than I was aware of
before. But I guess I'll start this off with the food we had this week. I loved
that we had a breakfast meal with yummy french toast (and organic vermont maple
syrup..seriously my favorite!), a fruit salad where we had the opportunity to
sample all sorts of seeds (including chia :)) as well as the sausage patties
which were very flavorful! I also realllly enjoyed the almond milkshake. Then
we shared a quinoa dish with baked terriaki tofu and vegetable stir fry ending
with chocolate mousse for the dessert...all delicious! I have been really
trying to stay aware of my body and I feel so great after eating those meals.
Even though I've been vegan in total for about 4 years, I am continually
impressed with how foods can be prepared and what they can be used for (cashew
cream for french toast dip, and avocado for chocolate mousse!). I also love all
of the things you can learn from this class outside of the content in the
readings, such as different opinions on topics as well as cooking experiences
such as actually making almond milk and learning that freezing the bananas for
the milkshake is what differentiates it from a smoothie.
Moving on to the
readings. I never knew how many health benefits I was gaining and health issues
I was avoiding by switching to a vegan diet. The list is virtually endless IF
you consume a varied and balanced vegan diet, of course. I definitely look
forward to doing some more personal research on nutrition, food preparation,
health implications from different foods, and recipes (especially raw
desserts). I was also really pleased with our presentation. I think we worked
really well with each other and were able to easily generate discussion among
the class. Plus I learned so fricken much!
For the second class,
the first reading made a good point that many people are supporting the
"Green Revolution" where they are becoming more aware of
environmental issues and how they can be mitigated; many people would like to
reduce their ecological footprint, but few realize that among the
"eco-friendly" things you can do or products you can buy, there is no
choice that benefits the environment more than becoming vegan. Not only is
vegan food good for your health and tasty, but it also plays a huge role in how
the earth system functions. There are more than 20 billion livestock animals on
earth, more than triple the amount of humans ...why the hell are there more
livestock than humans this number seems so wrong in countless ways. The first
reading described the factory food production system as a "trilogy of
evil" that's harmful to our health, cruel to animals, and is tremendously
stressing the earth. Among those stressors is the pollution produced from the
livestock. The reading states that there is no economically feasible way to
return the animals waste to the land; if this is true and if you could think
outside of selfish monetary gains, then maybe you shouldn't be making a
business out of this if properly handling the waste earns you little profit. I
knew that a shift towards a plant-based diet would result with fewer animals in
factory farms, but prior to this reading I didn't realize that it would also
mean less manure/waste, and cleaner water. In respect to waste, the boss hog
reading was such an eye-opener. Not only do hogs excrete three times as much
waste as humans, but as the paper states "a lot of highly toxic pig shit
is another" (thing). The Smithfield farms have large vital ventilators
that if they break down for even a short amount of time, pigs start dying due
to the lethal gases and chemicals from the pink lagoon waste. I can't even
imagine how it would feel to live in an area where a pig factory farm was being
produced and having to smell it, know the atrocities that are occurring, not
being able to trust the local water, and knowing that you probably can't afford
to move someplace else. One interesting thing I learned from the discussion was
that slaughterhouses are the most dangerous places to work in the US on top of
all of the other injustices they resemble.
Also I knew that forests (especially tropical rain forests)
are being cleared at an alarming rate but I guess I just assumed it was solely
for lumber...I had no idea that a huge portion of it was being cleared for
growing feed and cattle grazing. Losing tropical rainforests are so important
because of there many benefits such as species richness, medicial remedies in
which less than 1% have been tested, their vital source of oxygen and them
being a substantial carbon sink; more reasons to support vegetariasm/veganism.
Also, this is random, I had no idea that the IPCC had so much crediability;
their data is reviewed by hundreds of scientists from all over the world and
then reviewed some more. Another interesting thing I learned in class was that
the beef from the US (that is pressumably used for public school lunches and
fastfood restaurants) was rejected for quality and is used for pet food in
Europe!
The last reading sort of fustrated me; I would have gone
about presenting the topic in a lot less opiniated manner. Some of the claims
made provided no evidence. Furthermore, as I will point out, some of the things
said are inaccurate according to the climate-focused environmental earth
science course I took last semester. In the reading they present artifical meat
cultivated in laboratories from livestock cells (in vitro meat) as an
alternative to meat substitutes and real meat. I don't really understand or
agree with this. This is an unnatural as artifically inseminating the sows in the
factory farms. Apparently they may be cheaper in cost than meat substitutes but
none of the health or environmental impacts are known and solely hearing this
argument would not convince me to go vegetarian/vegan. This reading also points
out that labeling meat substitues with certified claims of the amount of GHG
reductions compared with the GHG emmissions caused by the real meat might give
the products an edge however for folks who don't believe that climate change
exists, this could cause the complete opposite effect in which they are
offended from the claims and they won't purchase the product. Additionally, if
there were financial and political support to reconstruct the feul
infrastructure the amount of time required for that to be implemented could
take over a decade however the reading claims that the tipping point for irreversible climate disruption may have been passed at that point
but there's no definitive data on that nor does the author provide any. Also, I
don't agree that the author proceeded to make calculations of methane
emmissions using the "72 times GWP" of CO2 because I spent an entire
semester reading and learning about GWP and every literature I read referred to
methane's GWPH as being between 23-25...not 72 (even if his timescales were
different). However I do enjoy the last paragraph which could serve as a good
alternative argument to the nutrition/health, environmental, and animal
compassion arguments that are so commonly used for veganism. The author states
that "The risks of business as usual outweigh the risks of change"
thus the best available business case is to change their business practices
such that climate change can be reduced or even reversed.
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