I grew up near DC, and the only food I ate for my first 18 years was fruits
and vegetables grown in the garden in my parents back yard. Occasionally we
had animal flesh from a grocery store, but no vegetables nor breads were
store bought. Almost all veggies consumed were either raw or steamed. A
favorite was fresh soybeans, which is impossible to purchase almost
anywhere and is incredibly delicious.
You can probably imagine what happened when I left home for college and my
diet became full of preservatives (institutional food, fast food,
restaurant food). Yes, for almost two years I was unable to keep most food
in my system and became a target for every flu and cold imaginable. A
lesson I've never forgotten.
The point being, we are poisioning ourselves with all the crap added to our
food, be it vegetable or meat and we deserve all the unhealthiness we have
because we've let it happen and have not demanded otherwise. As for beef
(who, for the most part graze on government lands, anyway) I don't see any
major business taking the time or money to replace that ca$h crop with
something else.
Myra
PS If we all put in gardens and ate what we grew, we'd be a lot healthier,
too. The only way to effect change in America's (by far the worst) eating
habits is to let the unhealthy ones die as an example to society. Will that
ever happen? Not likely.
At 05:29 AM 1/29/98 -0500, you wrote:
>
>At 06:14 PM 1/27/98 -0800, Anton Sherwood <dasher@netcom.com> wrote:
>>>Max M writes
>>>If we would stop eating so much meat, we would loose a level
>>>in the food chain. there would be more food and we would be healthier.
>>
>>Many of our beef cattle are grazed on land that would be useless for crops.
>
>
> IAN: Well, hemp will grow in the worst soils,
> and it will even raise the level of nitrogen.
> Hemp seed is second only to the soy bean in
> protein, and unlike the soy bean is not known
> to be an allergen. Hemp seed oil is also high
> in the varieties of fat that increase the
> good cholesterol and decrease the bad, LDL.
>
> As I understand, it takes 9 pounds of gain
> consumed by a cow to yield one pound of meat.
> Of course the meat may have a higher concen-
> tration of protein than most grains, yet soy
> and hemp are sufficiently protein rich to
> meet and exceed human protein needs.
>
> I did a report back in high school calculating
> how much more food we would have if the food
> that livestock ate was not devoted to feeding
> animals born to be killed for human consumption.
> I'd have to dig up that report to get the exact
> numbers, but I recall that the amount of food
> in the world would increase about 4X or more.
> If I recall, almost 70% of grains grown go to
> the feeding of livestock to support the
> system of meat-eating mass murder.
>
> I've been a vegetarian for 19 years without
> any health related problems, and probably
> many health related benefits, although it's
> impossible to determine the bad health you've
> avoided since you cannot be both the subject
> and the control of your own experiment. But
> studies suggest that a vegetarian diet is
> far healthier than nonvegatarian diets.
> And anything that is more healty and
> more ethical is more extropian.
>
>
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