Category: vegan

Vegetarianism and veganism. What gives?

A vegetarian ingests an animal’s personal effects by consuming merely eggs, milk and/or cheese — highly addictive substances that keep addicts coming back for more. It takes commitment and some patience while your body excretes toxins, but it’s also enormously rewarding. Immeasurably if you have genuine compassion for animals and remember that we ain’t nothing but mammals.

Learning to Think in the Anthropocene

Calfs get separated from their mothers at birth. Her breast milk is diverted to a marketplace. Oddly enough, a cow’s milk is designed for her offspring. Imagine if you can. There is no weaning process, just immediate separation of mother and calf.

Sir, would you please direct me to the supermarket’s breast-milk cooler?

Unfortunately, a vegetarian ends up causing more cruelty than a “meat” eater who eats only meat. When chickens and cows can no longer produce the goods for the dairy industry they are shipped to a slaughter houses for marginal return on investment.

As a veganist, I advocate formal legal recognition of the inalienable rights of all sentient animals to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Animals are not a necessary “resource” for a becoming life. We become inured our entire lives to the unspeakable violence that attends denial of these rights — multiple times per day for most non-vegan humans.

Look at a chart of “cuts” in a butcher shop. Connect the dots to Grey’s Anatomy. We share virtually the same vital organs, virtually the same body systems: from head to toe and wrapped in the largest organ of all, the skin. Skin keeps the organs protected from the elements. You are what you eat.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals.

Humans once lived in harmony with this planet — some time after the fifth extinction event ended reptilian species that evolved over 200,000,000 years. By comparison, human have evolved for only 200,000 years. That should humble us, but I don’t think we are terribly modest in our self-estimation. Having an extinction event named after ourselves — The Anthropocene — is not a cause for celebration.

A rodent living a matter of inches below scorched Earth was the mother of all mammals. Who knows what might follow an Anthropocene?

Thanks for reading.


Interview with a Vegan Assassin

A remarkable tale by the inimitable Peter Schreiner, it’s a story told in the spirit and with the fun of noir — A parable for our times.

Is Meat Addictive?

The Tobacco Institute assured many generations that smoking brought many positively wonderful benefits to many millions of people around the world. They blew billows of smoke clouds to win addicts to their sacrosanct product by documenting what a smoker liked to hear, to hear about research on low “tar” tobaccos, microfiber filtration, dust-free packages, outstandingly mild puffs — all smoke screens to direct attention away from the addictive nature of nicotine.

Lucky Strike

Within a statistical error range of 3%, you can find as many climate-change deniers among scientists as there are round-earth deniers.

Advertising suggested that most doctors chose Camel cigarettes. The brand that helps them keep alert to their patients’ concerns — a demanding practice according to Tobacco Institute polls. Doctors don’t smoke many Camels these days, but Big Pharma does not reward many physicians for prescribing vegan diets to their patients, do they?

My high school restricted smoking to seniors, it felt like a classy perk, a mark, a rite of passage for seniors on the school’s front steps: their own “smoking lounge.” When at university in 1965 smoking was allowed in classrooms — no wasted time standing outside. The University of Cincinnati Main Library routed smokers to a single facility: the rare-book room. It was a nice warm study hall with southern exposure.

Meat marketers played the same con game to the same slick tune, vegans (our number also within an error range of 3% of round-earth deniers).

The merchants of addictive substances know that lifelong customers are lifelines to large profits — for generations of tobacco lovers. Meat keeps doctors in the big friendly hands of Big Pharm reps. A lump of meat, a slug of dairy, a bite from an incredible, edible egg may gradually lead to a need for replacement organs, artery stents, insulin pumps, cholesterol medications… Yes, poor health contributes to the Gross National Product as undeniably as expended bullets trigger bullet-replacement orders. GNP remains a popular means for comparing a nation’s economic prowess and presumed happiness…

Bloodthirst is an addiction. It’s a dependency that is as firmly rooted in the fundament of “civilized” life as smoking, drinking, and fossil-fueling.

Fossil-fueling is an addiction to the instant energy stored for eons underground, packets of pure energy drawn from the biomass of a previous extinction event. Dinosaurs lived in a verdant environment. Dead flora and fauna pressed intensely under the rocks of ages yields instant energy. Those reptilians might still be around had fortune not dealt them a joker, a big-ass asteroid. A few mammals survived mere inches beneath protective insulation from the firestorm above the ground: planet-wide scorched earth.

Sowing the seeds of our own destruction is a bad habit, but its return on investment is massive. The science is indisputable, but so is the indisputable reflex to put fingers in your ears. Scientists who accept the Big bucks accumulated by petrochemical manufacturers don’t miss a paycheck.

Thanks for reading.

The Meat Investor: Serving Man

The year in review

Livestock stocks ended the year strong as the present and futures markets overwhelmingly outperformed vegan stocks to bring a hefty profit to all our investors. “Serving Man” remains out motto for 2019, it affirms a self-serving stance that is forward-looking and alert to market opportunism.

The meat of the matter is making and marketing meat — the profitable products obtained from the slaughter of nonhuman animals — and finding more ways to counter the criminal activities of animal-rights lunatics that make our job more difficult. These threats range from legally preventing animal-rights protesters from gathering at markets to keeping a lid on anti-meat vested interests in the media. We must counter insipid insistence on truth-in-advertising, it hampers our efforts. Eternal vigilance is our sacred vow. Our guiding principle — separation of meat and animal — is a social contract that has kept meat-keeping successful for many generations.

To Serve Man

On the good-news side, ever more creative and diversional ways help keep the social contract of deception alive, well, and thriving. We are promoting a “Chikens protesting Kows” campaign to protect our bovine-blood lover markets as a balancing measure within the meat sector. Of course, we are continuing to bulwark the processed bird distributors in their efforts. Opportunists find themselves in a win-win circumstance, fevered fervor healthens all bottom lines.

On the production side, we witness a record number of calls to the death camps for more body parts and body byproducts. Dead animals are getting snapped up in the supermarket at an extraordinary rate, but the death mills are still able to keep up with those snappings.

Once again, turkeys flocked to the extermination camps to assure body-counts sufficient to sate demand for Rockwellian Thankfulness. More than a few smart shoppers took advantage of super carload lots of corpses-sans-heads to grace holiday tables on Turkey day. Benjamin Franklin would have been proud to know that his Grade-A choice for the national bird would find a way into the stomachs of the Americans who honor patriotic fervor, fanfare and fulsomeness.

Our commitment to dollars über alles maintains product issuing from our many wholesome death chambers. Participation by workers without papers help assure that warm bodies be recruited to work the dead bodies along the carcass hook lines. Our mission is to sate family expectations where it counts: at the checkout line.

Temporary workers without papers are silent partners who generously manned the death stations this year. Public shrugs have been many, they are helpful and they are much appreciated. We also thank those huddled masses for manning stations despite faster carcass production times. All who benefit from significantly higher kills per hour will find a bonus check available in mid-February, bonus amount depending on the number of processed byproducts consumed during the Super Bowl — increased product available in November and saved for the Big Game in February might otherwise find inadequate consumption in the school lunch lines that accept our lower-grade carcasses. Death means dividends for all that decaying flesh you have frozen since Black Friday.

Unpapered Workers in a Slaughterhouse

Remember that climate change offers unexpected opportunity — stockpiling is as traditional as drive-through backups for Big Macs. So stockpile for more than snow emergencies to restock, reinvest and redouble advert efforts. Shopper-inducement software is doing an even better job at tracking eye-movements in the highest crave aisles — it’s where the eye meets the meat, where the software captures consumer movements toward product and movement of product into the shopping cart.

Eye-movement tracking

Watch for even fatter profits in 2019, and who cares how we get there.

Thanks for reading.