I was reading The New York Times recently, and when I got to the Sunday Review section, I stopped cold. There was a disturbing picture of a chicken with a piece of broccoli for a head and an article entitled “A Chicken Without Guilt.”
I had my suspicions as to what this was about, but I read on anyway.
It was no surprise that the author of the article is a fan of fake meat, and wants us to replace eating animals with eating plant-based meat products.
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Nutrients in Chicken Vs. Soy "Chicken" Patty |
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Almost across the board, there is no comparison… chicken has more protein and nutrients, zero fattening carbs and no sugar. It’s more nutritious than fake chicken soy patties could ever be. Source: Self Nutrition Data. www.nutritiondata.self.com. |
He writes, “Really: Would I rather eat cruelly raised, unhealthful, polluting chicken, or a plant product that’s nutritionally similar or superior … and requires no cutting off heads or other nasty things?”
He likes that the newest fake meat from soy can fool him because it tastes good. As if taste is the main thing to be concerned about. In other words, as long as it tastes like meat, then the meat lovers have everything they could possibly want! The only objection is that the synthetic stuff doesn’t yet taste like chicken.
I remember seeing an article a while back that claimed we would all soon be “in-vitrotarians” – that we would eat meat that is grown on racks from meat cells instead of from animals. And this article talks a little bit about that. Except he tries to differentiate his argument by saying “Hey, I’m not talking about stuff grown in test tubes. I’m talking about real food made from nature; real soybeans.”
I mean… where do I start?
You Can’t Opt Out
The ignorance… that this guy is in The NY Times. It’s so absolutely incredible to me that a well-intentioned, well-connected, educated reporter can write at that level but be so uninformed about something as basic as this. That he doesn’t know that he’s dependent on the cycle of nature. That he’s indebted to it. A part of it.
That he is part of a chain in a circle that no one can opt out of. What, he thinks he can because he doesn’t like the idea? He doesn’t get to make that call. We’re born into this play, and this is our role.
He writes, “Even the Department of Agriculture is on the side of plant-based diets.” Well, they would be, because that’s where the profit is. The Department of Agriculture exists to promote the interests of American farmers, not to protect you and me.
If our government were really committed to making sure we fed the most people with the best nutrition at the lowest cost and the most effectively, they would have everybody eat two eggs a day, a relatively small portion of meat a couple of times a day, and to supplement with locally grown vegetables and fruits.
It would be inexpensive, easy on the environment. They would tell people “If you live in Florida, don’t buy stuff from across the other side of the country because it costs too much and is too hard on the environment to transport it.
“Try to pick things locally, make sure you get a couple of eggs because they’re healthy for everybody and they’re very low-cost, very fast to produce, have a low effect on the environment, they’re sustainable, they cost less than a dime a piece, and they give you everything you need.”
It would solve all the problems of letting the schools feed the children all this junk with no nutrition that makes the kids fat.
If you had the government really committed to the best health for the most people, it wouldn’t be hard for them to come to that conclusion. But the government doesn’t actually believe that what I’m telling you is true.
But the reason they don’t believe it’s true is because they’ve had their vision clouded by other motives and interests that get involved in the process. Government is influenced by that, and they listen. It’s created this culture that is supported by those interests, which are not your best interests.
Worse Than Big Brother
It’s worse than anything George Orwell could have dreamed up when he wrote those books about the future, and how you’d have big brother, or the pigs taking over.
His book Animal Farm is really about politics, and the politicians’ capacity to influence the thinking of the masses to the point of nonsensical ridiculousness. The new-speak. That you couldn’t call things what they really were because you wanted the words to reflect what the ruling party wanted you to think about that thing.
We see that now. It’s happened to a ridiculous degree. But to far more insidious consequences than Orwell predicted. The Times author writes, “Why use the poor chicken as a machine to produce meat when you can use a machine to produce meat that seems like chicken?”
Above: A commercial chicken barn… basically a steel box that produces roaster chickens. Below: A pasture where chickens are raised naturally. Which direction would you rather our food production go in?
That belies a very profound ignorance. He presumes that everybody can accept that it’s better to have a machine produce our food than an animal for food. That it’s OK to completely opt out of the cycle of life.
It’s a very basic foundation for your existence on this planet – that you were born with a debt to this cycle. That you only borrow resources and then you return them. When you borrow them, you are indebted to pay them back. That’s the way it works. You can’t really get out of it.
You can try, and you can delay, but then the whole cycle suffers and everyone else in the cycle suffers and then it will kill you. Because we don’t have an alternative.
And, there’s no way we can make it better. It’s beautiful beyond our capacity to completely understand. We don’t even know all the things that are going on. Just be glad and be grateful that you are born into it. Rejoice, instead of thinking you’ve got something better.
Our long-term destiny might be to understand, and then transcend it somehow. But to think that we are smart enough, and just to take a piece of that chain without awareness that it’s even a part of the chain, and just say we don’t need that, do this instead… it’s ignorance.
Part of transcending is acceptance and rejoicing. That you’re blessed to be a part of it.
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What Are You Really Eating? Even if you follow a low-carb, no-grain diet, the meat you buy from the grocery store has been fed grain. Chickens are fed soymeal, most of which is patented and genetically modified, and the farmers are not allowed to know its contents. This unnatural soy then makes its way into the eggs and the tissue of the chicken, and then we eat those unnaturally raised animals. If the chicken is unnatural in a way that humans have never experienced, how can we know the consequences of eating it? It may be giving you health problems. But not because it’s meat. In fact, I regard pasture-raised meat among the healthiest of all foods. |
To say, “Why have a chicken as a machine when we could have a machine make chicken” is a rejection of the entire cycle of life.
Even worse, he writes, “Almost all unbiased people agree that less meat is better than more.” But he’s very, very biased and hasn’t spoken to people who aren’t biased, or he wouldn’t have that view. There’s really no evidence that eating natural meat is bad for you.
All the evidence that meat is bad came from adulterated meat – from animals that have been unnaturally grown with hormones and kept alive by antibiotics and fed an unnatural diet of grain. The evidence that meat is wrong comes from meat that is itself wrong.
We changed the nature of it, and the consequences have been horrible. And now the Times article author is suggesting we do the same thing – create something artificially – to replace chicken.
He’s saying, instead of making a place that looks like a machine that houses live chickens, why don’t we make it all machine. He looks at those chickens being commercially raised and farmed inside of a steel barn, and says, “This is wrong. So why don’t we do it a hundred times more wrong. Then maybe it won’t be wrong anymore.”
It’s an extreme example of two wrongs don’t make a right. What I’m saying is yes, it’s wrong, but we need to go back in the other direction. We need to take the machine (the steel barn) off the top of the chickens and let them run around outside in the sunshine and grass like they’re supposed to.
Because the unethical treatment of animals is not that we eat them. Nothing is more natural than that. It’s part of life.|
I’m saying it’s unethical not to eat meat. And it’s even worse – despite what the author and so-called “ethical” vegetarians try to tell you – to try to manufacture new foods from grains to replace meat. Because these cultivated crops kill more animals and ruin the ecosystem more than any amount of meat-eating ever has or ever could.
Next, I’ll show you what I mean, and what you can do about it…