Editor:
On the matter of veganism, while I can understand the merits of eating less meat and supporting local, organic, responsible producers is great for the health of the planet, I would like to offer a word of caution: telling people how they should nourish their bodies is not a good look.
I’m referring to “Hypocrisy Now,” which ran in the Green Issue (April 20). If I had a dollar for every vegan I’ve heard preach the values of their way of living, I would be able to singlehandedly preserve all the land in the world being lost to huge commercial animal farms.
Humans are not evolved to eat all vegan diets. (Please don’t say that it’s fine because apes do it. We are not apes, by the way.) There is so much evidence of this, not just based on science, but also on millennia of human history. Yes, of course, we should drastically cut down on meat. Meat should be nothing but sprinkles. Perhaps in the future we will evolve to be vegans in a way that supports our bodies, but that doesn’t happen over night. In the meantime, feel free to quit telling me what’s best for my body. People have different requirements. I don’t mind that you’re vegan and I’m glad it works for you and your body’s specific needs, but please stop with the assumptions that everyone is like you.
Instead of entirely turning one’s back on the problem, i.e. industrial agriculture, like it’s going to solve the problem, why not support those local producers who farm responsibly? People are never going to stop eating meat (it’s literally in our DNA), so shunning the farmers isn’t going to solve the problem. And stop calling us “hypocrites” for f**** sake. As if name calling was ever a call to action.
Loo K, McKinleyville
Editor:
I guess I now understand the phrase “sacred cow,” after reading this week’s letters to the editor (Mailbox, April 27). It seems folks would rather live “high on the hog” than look at the actual footprint of their meat consumption. (Yeah, like the world is really going to be fed on grass-fed beef and backyard chicken).
The cruelty and environmental destructiveness of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) is the real consequence of our meat hunger. “Meet the meat you eat” and “if you haven’t caught it or shot it, don’t eat it” might be guidelines for those who still want to enjoy their meat with a cleaner conscience. And the endorphins you get when you eat meat feel so good. Meat is still going to jack up your insulin levels and increase your risk of cancer and heart disease but, hey, alcohol and cigarettes aren’t good for you, either, and are still widely enjoyed: let them eat meat.
Laura Snyder Julian, Blue Lake
This article appears in What Now?.
The main driving issue for vegans is to reduce the harm done to other living beings. Once a person sees what that means, they automatically stop eating animal products, without even trying. Being vegan is about increased awareness; the personal physical benefits are just a nice side effect of the openness to compassion.
I’m surprised that the letter by Loo K. would even be published in any paper. Clearly this person is highly uneducated and is in no place to criticize vegan activists. He provides no evidence for his ethical right kill and eat animals when plant foods will provide all of the nutrition the human body needs. The plant based diet is the only diet that can reduce heart disease and cure type II diabetes. These are facts, just like the fact that homo sapiens are apes. Ask any zoologist. But as Merrill Peterson mentioned, this is an ethical argument, period. We have to stop you from eating meat because that meat once had a brain and feelings attached to it. You cannot justify enslaving pigs, chickens, turkeys, cows, goats, or fish. If you would not like to live a miserable life and suffer a miserable death then you have no right to inflict that upon someone else, just because you are an ignorant bigot.
“Humans are not evolved to eat all vegan diets. (Please don’t say that it’s fine because apes do it. We are not apes, by the way.) There is so much evidence of this, not just based on science, but also on millennia of human history. Yes, of course, we should drastically cut down on meat. Meat should be nothing but sprinkles. Perhaps in the future we will evolve to be vegans in a way that supports our bodies, but that doesn’t happen over night. In the meantime, feel free to quit telling me what’s best for my body. People have different requirements. I don’t mind that you’re vegan and I’m glad it works for you and your body’s specific needs, but please stop with the assumptions that everyone is like you. “
1. All essential nutrients can be found from plant foods and in nature. You won’t be able to list one that isn’t.
2. Just because we have eaten meat throughout history, it doesn’t mean we are best suited to, or should in the modern era, when we have the choice to eat an abundance of plant food instead.
3. I don’t want to tell you what to do, but I’m willing to bet both of my balls that you don’t track every nutrient that passes through your body, have not even thought about what essential nutrients it is you’re getting from meat that you feel you would lack as a vegan, and have no intentions to measure and balance your meat intake based on your findings. You probably eat meat everyday which you buy in the supermarket, which has nothing to do with human history, and you probably eat dairy, which as you may know, we’ve only been doing for 10,000 years, and thousands of years less than that as a global trend. For the other 190,000 years of homo sapien history, we weren’t known to suck on cow nipples shortly after they’ve given birth.
I’ll throw my hands up and say fair enough, if you do try and limit your meat in-take to only what is needed, and you’ve thrown out truly unnatural practices like eating baby cow milk and chicken periods. But if you’ve written this absolute pissfest of an article and appealed to the necessity of eating animals, but still eat them as much as you like, then this is seriously pathetic.
Veganism is not about “reducetarianism” this author seems to refer to and is also not a diet. Plant-based is a diet but vegan is an ethical stance. Every single human being could live healthily as a vegan on an entirely plant-based diet because all nutrients humans need to be healthy and survive can be found in plant foods in nature. B12 is naturally occurring in the soil and could be naturally attained through eating all plant foods, but because of modern agriculture fruits and vegetables are so washed down that the B12 is stripped of fruits and vegetables and therefore vegans need to take a B12 supplement. Every single other nutrient can be obtained without a required supplement on a plant based diet. Once you recognize that its is morally wrong to use animals you go vegan. Its not a matter of reducing our meat intake or reducing our dairy or other animal product consumption. Veganism is about recognizing that all animal products result in animals unnecessarily suffering and dying and therefore if we believe animals matter morally we end our participation in animal exploitation. That’s it going vegan is simple and easy.