Category Archives: Cultural Stuff

“It’s their misfortune that they lack big eyes.”

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Is an Egg for Breakfast Worth This? by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times tells the horrifying story of Kreider Farms, which was recently exposed by a Humane Society undercover investigation. The article describes the dirty, crowded, rodent and fly infested barns where hens are raised and argues that even chickens, who don’t display much personality, should be exempt from cruelty.

I argue that chickens have plenty of personality. I submit the following as evidence:

Guest chickens quickly sized up the threat level presented by Dog, and acted sassy toward him to the point of stealing treats from under his nose.

Guest chickens learned that the humans came through this door and rushed it whenever it opened. They would have come into the house if allowed.

Chickens are hilarious. I’m not sure how anyone who has spent time watching chickens putter around a yard could think they don’t have personalities, or could eat a factory farmed egg or chicken meat product.

Taste testing homemade horse treats

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My sister visited from North Carolina last weekend, and she brought a couple bags of homemade horse treats from her friend at Carolina Pet Treats-N-Toys to undergo some rigorous scientific testing.

Seven horses and one dog analyzed and compared the horse crumbles and the horse cubes, and the result was: both were a hit!

The treats are all natural, with ingredients like oatmeal, carrot, sugar, molasses, and Cheerios. There was not a clear winner between the two types of treat; when offered both a cube and a crumble at the same time, one in each hand, the horses did not exhibit a distinct preference.

The horses paid close attention to the flavors, and carefully analyzed each treat. They all requested multiple samples to ensure they could give a complete report.

I rounded out my research with a dog’s point of view: two paws up!

Summary: all the horses (and the dog) loved these treats, and I was happier feeding these natural, homemade treats than the processed, commercial treats from the feed store.

For more information on the horse treats, or treats for your non-equine pets, contact Jamie Baldwin of Carolina Pet Treats-N-Toys, at 336-338-3186, or buttonrabbit4@yahoo.com.

Book Review: “Depletion and Abundance” by Sharon Astyk

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Guest post from Buzzy! Thanks, Buzzy!

For HP readers who loved Omnivore’s Dilemma, get ready to take your enlightenment to the next level!  I just finished reading “Depletion and Abundance” by Sharon Astyk, and not since Omnivore’s has my worldview shifted so dramatically.

Astyk starts with the forces of Peak Oil and Climate Change, and clearly explains why we are heading for a drastically different low-energy lifestyle.  She delves into many associated topics, like over-population, water shortages, food insecurity, unemployment, etc.  But, this is NOT a Doom And Gloom book, far from it.

post apocalypse

She asks three fundamental questions:

  • What is your fair share of the world’s resources?
  • What can you do now to help postpone the “long emergency”?
  • What can you do now to plan for your family’s success during the “long emergency”?

From there she paints a colorful picture of what low-energy lives can look like.  Why we need to go back to the concept of Victory Gardens, and why we need to go forward towards a more considered and fair use of resources.

victory gardeners

It’s hard to do justice to all the eye-opening ideas she introduces over a huge range of topics, so I will just close and urge you to go read it.  Now.  Seriously, nothing you have planned for today is as important as getting a copy of this book.  My plan for today? Starting seeds.

Special thanks to my cousin T (who championed local food at least 15 years before the rest of us caught on!) for the book recommendation!

BUY THE BOOK:

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

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If you think eating responsibly is too expensive–

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost–to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves…

…for if quality matters so much more than quantity, then the price of a food may bear little relation to the value of the nutrients in it. If units of omega-3s and beta-carotene and vitamin E are what an egg shopper is really after, then Joel’s $2.20 a dozen pastured eggs actually represent a much better deal than the $0.79 a dozen industrial eggs at the supermarket.

from p. 200-201, Grass: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Pasture; and p.269, The Meal: Grass Fed.

Singaporean cow art

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I saw this lovely sculpture in Fort Canning Park’s sculpture garden:

Isn’t it a wonderful reminder that cows are animals, not just food machines? Cows should be respected. [Even though I don’t eat them, I am not against it–as long as beef eaters are careful to eat cows that were treated well and slaughtered humanely.]

Avoiding beef vs. enjoying leather

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Leather is a by-product of the beef industry, right? It comes from cows that have already been slaughtered for meat, doesn’t it?

Or maybe not. Action For Our Planet says the big cattle factory farms and slaughterhouses make up to half their profits from leather, so when you buy leather goods, you are supporting companies that practice inhumane treatment. Care2 Causes tells that more and more leather goods sold in the US are made from leather produced in China and India, where animal welfare laws are non-existent or unenforced. In Defense of Animals has a similar argument.

What’s a responsible consumer to do? Fortunately there are many synthetic leather-like materials on the market today, which are generally easier to care for than leather.

Here are a few good sites for vegan shoe, bag, and accessory shopping:

Alternative Outfitters: mens’ and womens’ shoes; bags; accessories

Moo Shoes: mens’ and womens’ shoes; bags; belts; wallets

Zappos Vegan: vegan shoes for the family, and other eco-friendly products (some of which contain leather, so be careful if you’re trying to avoid it completely)

Happy humane shopping!

Rainy day movie: Food, Inc.

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Food, Inc. is a chilling documentary full of disturbing facts about the huge corporations that run the American food system.

Hooray for local hero Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, a featured “good guy” farmer.

Quotes from the movie:

When we run an item past the supermarket scanner, we’re voting: for local not organic or not.

You can vote to change this system. Three times a day.

Buy from companies that treat workers, animals, and the environment with respect.

When you go to the supermarket, choose foods that are in season. Buy foods that are organic. Know what’s in your food. Read labels. Know what you buy.

The average meal travels 1500 miles from the farm to the supermarket. Buy foods that are grown locally. Shop at farmers’ markets. Plant a garden (even a small one).

Everyone has a right to healthy food. Make sure your farmers’ market takes food stamps. Ask your school board to provide healthy school lunches. The FDA and USDA are supposed to protect you and your family. Tell Congress to enforce food safety standards and re-introduce Kevin’s Law.

To learn more, go to http://www.takepart.com/foodinc

 

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

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From The Ethics of Eating Animals, p. 326-7

To give up eating animals is to give up on these places as human habitat, unless of course we are willing to make complete our dependence on a highly industrialized national food chain. That food chain would be in turn even more dependent than it already is on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizer, since food would need to travel even farther and fertility–in the form of manures–would be in short supply. Indeed, it is doubtful you can build a genuinely sustainable agriculture without animals to cycle nutrients and support local food production. If our concern is for the health of nature–rather than, say, the internal consistency of our moral code or the condition of our souls–then eating animals may sometimes be the most ethical thing to do.

…

Since the utilitarian is concerned exclusively with the sum of happiness and suffering, and the slaughter of an animal with no comprehension of death need not entail suffering, the Good Farm adds to the total of animal happiness, provided you replace the slaughtered animal with a new one. However, this line of thinking does not obviate the wrongness of killing an animal that “has a sense of its own existence over time, and can have preferences about its own future.” In other words, it might be okay to eat the chicken or the cow, but perhaps not the (more intelligent) pig.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

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From The Ethics of Eating Animals, p. 317

To visit a modern Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) is to enter a world that for all its technological sophistication is still designed on seventeenth-century Cartesian principles: Animals are treated as machines–“production units”–incapable of feeling pain. Since no thinking person can possibly believe this anymore, industrial animal agriculture depends on a suspension of disbelief on the part of the people who operate it and a willingness to avert one’s eyes on the part of everyone else.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma QotD

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From The Ethics of Eating Animals, p. 333

The industrialization–and brutalization–of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon: No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do. No other people in history has lived at quite so great a remove from the animals they eat. Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do. Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end–for who could stand the sight? Yes, meat would get more expensive. We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.