A Vegan Adventure

[nina rosen]

Are there other vegans (no oil either) who are interested in discussing their experiences being in a world where you are a bit of the odd "duck?" How about a vegan comedy hour to laugh at the challenges of trying to eat healthy and feeling strange about it.Leonardo da vinci was a vegetarian who wore pink and now we get to wear the Mona Lisa smile.

I'm trying, as a new try, to eat only that which doesn't have a mother or a face. I can't be the only one, yet I haven't run into any fellow effort-makers of this sort:yinyang:. It has become kind of a spiritual adventure.

[n4rky]

It isn't easy. A vegan has to be extremely careful about who s/he trusts to cook, cannot go to many restaurants, and is in conflict with friends and family who disparage her/his "religion." Grocery shopping is an exercise in repeated reading of often incomprehensible labels. I have learned that before I can go anywhere, I must plan how I will eat. Vegan restaurants are few and often far between; staff at other establishments may be dismissive of or non-comprehending of our food choices. Even the soap in a public restroom must be presumed to contain animal products.

But for me, the worst part of turning vegan was the discovery that so many vegan women only complain about a shortage of vegan men in order to entice men into going vegan. Then it turns out that these women either are already in relationships or are so busy with animal rights issues that they have no time for relationships. I'm vegan anyway, for a number of reasons, but this manipulation of a human need for relationships leaves a particularly bad taste.
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[zkoolman]

Hello Nina:

Reading your post made me smile.... I have been a vegetarian for over 50 years and I remember when people would look at me very funny when I mentioned my eating choice !!! They absolutely could not believe that a 6'5" 250 lb guy that is very fit could be so big and healthy without any meat, fish, etc. Some still do.... I have traveled allot and that is even more interesting, or at least used to be. Nowdays I am more vegan then vegetarian, though if I wasn't so lazy in the kitchen I would probably be totaly vegan.

My Parents have been vegetarians for over 70 years, vegan for the last 15 or so, and they tell very funny stories about trying to eat out in their travels.

If you wish, I could send you a vegan cook book that has some very tasty, as well as interesting, recipes my mother and my sisters (also vegetarian/vegan) put together and published. Free.

Why eat greens, grains, etc., second hand when you can eat them first hand ??

Loren

[djmama]

Regarding eating out, please come to Gaia's Garden, formerly Govinda's. We're in Santa Rosa at 1899 Mendocino Ave., in front of Community Market.

Gaia's Garden is an international vegetarian buffet, not totally vegan, but definitely vegan friendly. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, everything is vegan except for the halavah dessert and obvious things like cottage cheese and shredded cheese on the salad bar. On the other days, the dinner entree and pasta sauce may contain dairy, but there is still a lot for vegans to eat: all our soups, breads and curries are vegan; only one of our great salad dressings has dairy (ask about honey if you don't want it), and there is always a vegan dessert.

We're open for lunch Mondays-Fridays from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and for dinner from 5-9 p.m. On Saturdays, we're open for dinner from 6-9 p.m. Between lunch and dinner, weather permitting, we serve Boca burgers, soup and chai to go from our outdoor grill - all vegan.

Cheers!

Susan

[n4rky]

It was very nice to find Govinda's recently. This is a buffet; it was economical and good. You say there has been a name change. Has anything else changed?
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[rachanna]

I second that. Gaia's Garden is a great place to eat. The food is good, the atmosphere is delightful, and the price is right. I had gobs of their vegan pesto today, along with my dahl, rice and abundant salad. All outstanding. Plus, it just feels like a business I'd like to support. Check it out....I think you'll see what I mean!

:-)

Julie





Regarding eating out, please come to Gaia's Garden, formerly Govinda's. We're in Santa Rosa at 1899 Mendocino Ave., in front of Community Market.

Gaia's Garden is an international vegetarian buffet, not totally vegan, but definitely vegan friendly. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, everything is vegan except for the halavah dessert and obvious things like cottage cheese and shredded cheese on the salad bar. On the other days, the dinner entree and pasta sauce may contain dairy, but there is still a lot for vegans to eat: all our soups, breads and curries are vegan; only one of our great salad dressings has dairy (ask about honey if you don't want it), and there is always a vegan dessert.

We're open for lunch Mondays-Fridays from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and for dinner from 5-9 p.m. On Saturdays, we're open for dinner from 6-9 p.m. Between lunch and dinner, weather permitting, we serve Boca burgers, soup and chai to go from our outdoor grill - all vegan.

Cheers!

Susan[/quote]

[Thad]

If you really look at the world and imagine ~ do you get enough energy out of your diet to imagine being able to defend yourselves when things finally get to where their going from people who might want to eat you?
There could be people who might want to eat you as prime. Cows and steers and calves generally eat vegetarian, and people like that meat.



I second that. Gaia's Garden is a great place to eat. The food is good, the atmosphere is delightful, and the price is right. I had gobs of their vegan pesto today, along with my dahl, rice and abundant salad. All outstanding. Plus, it just feels like a business I'd like to support. Check it out....I think you'll see what I mean!

:-)

Julie





Regarding eating out, please come to Gaia's Garden, formerly Govinda's. We're in Santa Rosa at 1899 Mendocino Ave., in front of Community Market.

Gaia's Garden is an international vegetarian buffet, not totally vegan, but definitely vegan friendly. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, everything is vegan except for the halavah dessert and obvious things like cottage cheese and shredded cheese on the salad bar. On the other days, the dinner entree and pasta sauce may contain dairy, but there is still a lot for vegans to eat: all our soups, breads and curries are vegan; only one of our great salad dressings has dairy (ask about honey if you don't want it), and there is always a vegan dessert.

We're open for lunch Mondays-Fridays from 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. and for dinner from 5-9 p.m. On Saturdays, we're open for dinner from 6-9 p.m. Between lunch and dinner, weather permitting, we serve Boca burgers, soup and chai to go from our outdoor grill - all vegan.

Cheers!

Susan[/quote]

[Deborah]

It was very nice to find Govinda's recently. This is a buffet; it was economical and good. You say there has been a name change. Has anything else changed?
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Hi, I am looking for a good vegan, raw,if possible, and hopefully organic restaurant, in Sonoma county. I live in Sebastopol. Where is Govinda's?
All help appreciated..
Sincerely,
deborah

[alexis0797]

Hi Nina,

I'm about 75% vegan. . .I know several other vegans, and tons of vegetarians. Sonoma County is one of the best places in the country to be veg. . .so many resources! Govinda's is OK, but I prefer the veg options at most ethnic restaurants. Many of the restaurants here also have McDougall menus, which in addtion to being vegan are also low fat!

Elizabeth







Are there other vegans (no oil either) who are interested in discussing their experiences being in a world where you are a bit of the odd "duck?" How about a vegan comedy hour to laugh at the challenges of trying to eat healthy and feeling strange about it.Leonardo da vinci was a vegetarian who wore pink and now we get to wear the Mona Lisa smile.

I'm trying, as a new try, to eat only that which doesn't have a mother or a face. I can't be the only one, yet I haven't run into any fellow effort-makers of this sort:yinyang:. It has become kind of a spiritual adventure.

[n4rky]

Gaia's Garden is just north of Santa Rosa Junior College. For raw food (but pricey), Seed on Sebastopol Ave., south of downtown but north of Highway 12, off of--I'm not sure whether it's Santa Rosa Ave. or Mendocino at that point--is excellent.

Now, as to Thad with tired arguments against veganism: First, what is it about our lifestyle that so threatens you that you must attack it? Really now. It isn't like we're patronizing a business that harms you or anybody else. If anything, you should be welcoming a reduced demand for meat as it will reduce the upward pressure on prices.

That is, unless you raise livestock. And if that's the case, I would suggest the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Livestock's Long Shadow. And just so you know, some recent (though admittedly dubious) research suggests the FAO report may actually understate the tremendous environmental damage done by the livestock industry. I'll leave alone your complicity in the inexcusable viciousness with which humans treat animals when they see them as commodities.

As to your specific point, there are vegan athletes. I know of one who does rather brutal triathlons. She used to work at the Palo Alto Whole Foods. Another, who is the stock answer for your question, is a body-builder.

The fact is that a vegan diet is generally much healthier than an omnivorous diet. It is the one diet shown to reverse heart disease. Vegans live on average ten years longer than omnivores. And as PETA has immodestly pointed out, the circulatory benefits extend to our sex lives.

Perhaps that is what threatens you, Thad.

[alanora]

Why the elimination of say olive oil? No mother, no face....minimally processed-pressed?


Are there other vegans (no oil either) who are interested in discussing their experiences being in a world where you are a bit of the odd "duck?" How about a vegan comedy hour to laugh at the challenges of trying to eat healthy and feeling strange about it.Leonardo da vinci was a vegetarian who wore pink and now we get to wear the Mona Lisa smile.

I'm trying, as a new try, to eat only that which doesn't have a mother or a face. I can't be the only one, yet I haven't run into any fellow effort-makers of this sort:yinyang:. It has become kind of a spiritual adventure.

[feltonius]

Hi N4rky,

I would call your reply to Thad's obviously tongue-and-cheek post a little bit sN4rky...I mean, if you are what you eat eats, then his joke is by moving down the food chain, you are lining up with the food. I think he was kidding! But then you got angry, and so had to attack me personally. Did you realize you were about to put forth some tired arguments yourself? Surely it was an accident, I think people who choose this diet tend to be considerate folks...



Now, as to Thad with tired arguments against veganism: First, what is it about our lifestyle that so threatens you that you must attack it? Really now. It isn't like we're patronizing a business that harms you or anybody else. If anything, you should be welcoming a reduced demand for meat as
it will reduce the upward pressure on prices.

really actually n4rky, the only thing that threatens me about veganism is when one attacks livestock raising as 100% bad for the planet. you wouldn't do that, would you?



That is, unless you raise livestock. And if that's the case, I would suggest the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Livestock's Long Shadow. And just so you know, some recent (though admittedly dubious) research suggests the FAO report may actually understate the tremendous environmental damage done by the livestock industry. I'll leave alone your complicity in the inexcusable viciousness with which humans treat animals when they see them as commodities.

I'm complicit in this because I eat it? OK, what if I raise it myself? What if I see my livestock as precious and valuable and adorable? What if I can manage different kinds of livestock in a way that increases the fertility of the soil, deepens topsoil, sinks carbon, and energizes a soil microbial population better enabling them to deal with pollution?

Did you know that vegans eat vegetables which are grown largely in monocultures which are destroying the earth? all that soy needed for protein, the only thing that lives in a field of soy is soy. All those pesticides and herbicides are killing the wild oceans. I'll leave alone your complicity in the inexcusable viciousness with which humans treat the environment when they attempt to feed humanity entirely with vegetables.



As to your specific point, there are vegan athletes. I know of one who does rather brutal triathlons. She used to work at the Palo Alto Whole Foods. Another, who is the stock answer for your question, is a body-builder.

I thought his point was about the taboo around cannibalism. Not a point so much as a snide remark. But while we are on the topic of vegan athletes, of course some must exist. How many reach the top echelon of their sport? How many gold medals does PETA claim in their ranks?



The fact is that a vegan diet is generally much healthier than an omnivorous diet. It is the one diet shown to reverse heart disease. Vegans live on average ten years longer than omnivores.

Even as I'm skeptical that is really an answerable question, I don't doubt it. Did you know you can increase your life, probably at least that long, by eating a lot LESS food? Basically, if you can figure out a way to eat 40% of the total intake that you eat now, you'll live longer. Anyone wanna try? Anyone?



And as PETA has immodestly pointed out, the circulatory benefits extend to our sex lives.

And then there's PETA. Who reminds us that with them as a spokesperson, the anti-animal eating movement will never gain much traction. Its sad in a way, because the fact is that most factory-farmed livestock _is_ raised poorly, treated as a commodity, and perhaps even unhealthy due to the effects of stress on the poor animals. It would be nice if people who cared had partners in a solution, in finding a better way. Instead, the goal is to get everyone who cares to stop engaging? What a strange way to help animals...



Perhaps that is what threatens you, Thad.

I'll say it one last time: I dont think he was threatened. I think _you_ felt threatened, and your response was to threaten me (I keep livestock). I'm thrilled at your improved circulation. I'm impressed at your resolve and deliberation in making eating choices. I think the whole country should take a step in your direction. I just wish you'd separate me out from industrial agriculture as you defend your decision, which is obviously your privilege and right as a citizen of this great bulletin board.

[n4rky]

Oh yay. Just what we always love: a flame war.


I would call your reply to Thad's obviously tongue-and-cheek post a little bit sN4rky...I mean, if you are what you eat eats, then his joke is by moving down the food chain, you are lining up with the food.

Okay, so if you are what you eat, does that mean you're dead meat? (It's a bumper sticker.)


I think he was kidding! But then you got angry, and so had to attack me personally.I said... You said... He said... This kind of nonsense is even more tired than most psychobabble.


Did you realize you were about to put forth some tired arguments yourself? Surely it was an accident, I think people who choose this diet tend to be considerate folks...

really actually n4rky, the only thing that threatens me about veganism is when one attacks livestock raising as 100% bad for the planet. you wouldn't do that, would you?Only because it is. It takes sixteen times as much land and lots more water to raise a pound of meat than it does a pound of grain. A lot of that is because you have to divert so much land to growing feedstock, even for factory farms. But I guess as a "food" producer, you profit from the food crisis. You absolutely adore the fact that as prosperity is redistributed from the United States to other places, even more people are eating this incredibly wasteful and environmentally destructive diet.


I'm complicit in this because I eat it? OK, what if I raise it myself? What if I see my livestock as precious and valuable and adorable?What if, indeed. Precious as in the money you make sending these animals to slaughter? Valuable as in the same? Adorable as in either your love of money or right up to the unconscionable brutality of slaughter? (Yes, poorly paid and exploited slaughterhouse workers take out their frustrations sadistically on already frightened animals.)


What if I can manage different kinds of livestock in a way that increases the fertility of the soil, deepens topsoil, sinks carbon, and energizes a soil microbial population better enabling them to deal with pollution?What if you could do all this without brutalizing animals? Oh, but you don't want to face the reality that at some point you are directly or indirectly a very, very brutal person.


Did you know that vegans eat vegetables which are grown largely in monocultures which are destroying the earth? all that soy needed for protein, the only thing that lives in a field of soy is soy. All those pesticides and herbicides are killing the wild oceans.I guess you've never heard of organic produce. One reason to prefer local produce is to encourage local farmers to grow a wider variety. And you're forgetting about the vast fields of monoculture needed to feed livestock.

But I'll tell you what lives in dead meat: salmonella. And we've been hearing an awful lot about that lately.


I'll leave alone your complicity in the inexcusable viciousness with which humans treat the environment when they attempt to feed humanity entirely with vegetables.Here you entirely cease to make any sense at all. Do you attribute sentience to a carrot?


I thought his point was about the taboo around cannibalism. Not a point so much as a snide remark. But while we are on the topic of vegan athletes, of course some must exist. How many reach the top echelon of their sport? How many gold medals does PETA claim in their ranks?I guess it's too much to ask you to do a Google search. This list (https://www.veganathlete.com/vegan_vegetarian_athletes.php) might help.


Even as I'm skeptical that is really an answerable question, I don't doubt it. Did you know you can increase your life, probably at least that long, by eating a lot LESS food? Basically, if you can figure out a way to eat 40% of the total intake that you eat now, you'll live longer. Anyone wanna try? Anyone?

And then there's PETA. Who reminds us that with them as a spokesperson, the anti-animal eating movement will never gain much traction.Here, we agree. PETA is in fact worse than you argue. But that is a topic for another topic.


Its sad in a way, because the fact is that most factory-farmed livestock _is_ raised poorly, treated as a commodity, and perhaps even unhealthy due to the effects of stress on the poor animals. It would be nice if people who cared had partners in a solution, in finding a better way. Instead, the goal is to get everyone who cares to stop engaging? What a strange way to help animals...The bottom line here remains that meat production is cruel, wasteful, and polluting. Going vegan is far and away the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce water pollution, and to feed more people. But people who eat meat or raise livestock for meat refuse to face that, either because they don't care or because they don't think they can.


I'll say it one last time: I dont think he was threatened. I think _you_ felt threatened, and your response was to threaten me (I keep livestock).I merely point out extremely well-documented facts about the livestock industry. Vegans have to listen to bile like yours and Thad's all the time. It stopped being funny decades ago (if it ever was).


I'm thrilled at your improved circulation. I'm impressed at your resolve and deliberation in making eating choices. I think the whole country should take a step in your direction. I just wish you'd separate me out from industrial agriculture as you defend your decision, which is obviously your privilege and right as a citizen of this great bulletin board.There is a premise underlying all of this that humans are superior to nature, that we may use nature in any way that we choose. Yet the fact of global warming shows that we are part of the environment, not superior to it. Livestock's Long Shadow (https://https://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM) shows that the livestock industry wastes land, pollutes, wastes water, and contributes more to climate change than anything else humans do.

We're out of harmony with our environment and the Doomsday Clock (https://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview) stands at five minutes to midnight. If we continue the way we are, the earth may cease to be a place where we can live.

We have had a drought for years in California. Unemployment is bad everywhere (and worse than the government admits), but has been especially bad in the Central Valley, because we've been assuming we have the water to redistribute. We don't. And it looks like climate change will make California more arid, not less.

But you defend livestock rearing, trying to claim you aren't like the rest. There is no humane way to slaughter an animal. And there is no water-efficient or land-efficient way to raise livestock.

We need to change our relationship with nature, if we are to survive as a species. And going vegan is only one part of that.

[someguy]

Did you know that vegans eat vegetables which are grown largely in monocultures which are destroying the earth? all that soy needed for protein, the only thing that lives in a field of soy is soy.



I think we should also consider the massive and rapid(ly increasing) destruction of our rainforests to grow soy. Most of the soy is obviously going to industrialized meat producers who are mistreating these cows, malnourishing these cows (because cows aren't supposed to eat soy or corn, but Grass that is Green!), drugging these cows, and f*cking us (consumers) over nutritionally, environmentally and morally.

Note:
Biofuels and Vegetarianism are also contributing massively to our rainforest's destruction, as well as the depletion of nutrient dense topsoil around the globe. This in turn is allowing Co2 levels to rise, and creating mass starvation in third world countries!

So if you eat meat , buy it from farmers like feltonius who raise animals the right way. Stop giving your money to these corporate giants who will exploit plants, animals, our oceans, our air, whole environments/ecosystems, and people to no end.

[zkoolman]

Thad:

Where does that statement come from ??

Being a vegetarian since birth has had it's moments, but as an example: as a Vietnam era Vet that enlisted (What was I thinking ??), I went through basic training and three years of the Army as a vegetarian. And that was hard as it was the "old Army", not the new "PC" one where they make accomodations for just about everything. I was in better shape then most of my co-enlistee's and on more then one occasion had to carry their 50 lb back packs in addition to mine to finish a run or "challange". Back then we ran 5 miles a day with a 50 lb pack and our M16, just to start the day..... And if I was such a weakling, physically and/or mentally, why did the Army invite me to go to West Point ??


Today @ 55 I run a construction crew and can still do circles around most of the young guys that have to drink "Red Bull" and thermo's fulls of coffee or whatever to make it through the day. While I have one cup of coffee in the early am, that is the only stimulant I have.

And I would have no problem surviving where people might want to "eat me". Bring it on, I say. When they run out of meat, gas, bullets, and shelter, and have never survived without those things they are going to have a hard time of it.....

Some of us already live off the grid, eat healthy without meat, and are doing quite well, thank you.

Now what say you, mister narrow minded ??

Loren




If you really look at the world and imagine ~ do you get enough energy out of your diet to imagine being able to defend yourselves when things finally get to where their going from people who might want to eat you?
There could be people who might want to eat you as prime. Cows and steers and calves generally eat vegetarian, and people like that meat.


[/quote]

[zkoolman]

Oh my..... As if soy is the only food vegetarians/vegans eat.

Not really interested in getting into it with you about deforestation, etc., but maybe you should look at what really is the root of deforrestation. Soy growing is one of the least of the causes !!

Loren



I think we should also consider the massive and rapid(ly increasing) destruction of our rainforests to grow soy. Most of the soy is obviously going to industrialized meat producers who are mistreating these cows, malnourishing these cows (because cows aren't supposed to eat soy or corn, but Grass that is Green!), drugging these cows, and f*cking us (consumers) over nutritionally, environmentally and morally.

Note:
Biofuels and Vegetarianism are also contributing massively to our rainforest's destruction, as well as the depletion of nutrient dense topsoil around the globe. This in turn is allowing Co2 levels to rise, and creating mass starvation in third world countries!

So if you eat meat , buy it from farmers like feltonius who raise animals the right way. Stop giving your money to these corporate giants who will exploit plants, animals, our oceans, our air, whole environments/ecosystems, and people to no end.

[someguy]

Oh my..... As if soy is the only food vegetarians/vegans eat.

Not really interested in getting into it with you about deforestation, etc., but maybe you should look at what really is the root of deforrestation. Soy growing is one of the least of the causes !!

Loren

Soy is in like 99% of processed food nowadays. Everyone eats soy, but vegetarians demand it and have fueled an entire soy based industry that is compounding this problem.

Also, I said "deforestation of the rainforest." Soy (along with all grain based agriculture) is causing tremendous damage to our rainforests.

Don;t take my word for it, check out this article: Rainforest Action Network: Growing Disaster: How Agribusiness Expansion into Rainforests is Threatening the Climate (https://ran.org/campaigns/rainforest_agribusiness/resources/fact_sheets/growing_disaster_how_agribusiness_expansion_into_rainforests_is_threatening_the_climate/)

Here are the first two paragraphs of that article: Tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate of 100,000 acres per day [1]. The expansion of industrial palm oil and soy plantations poses a major threat to the world’s largest intact rainforests – the Amazon and the tropical forests of Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. The primary cause of deforestation in the Amazon is the expansion of plantations for soy production, 60 percent of which is funded by U.S. agribusiness giants ADM, Bunge and Cargill [2]. Palm oil plantations are expanding into the tropical forests of Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea

Scientists agree that the world’s rainforests are the best natural defense against climate change because they store vast amounts of carbon. For example, Indonesian old-growth rainforests store almost 750 tons of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of 620 flights between New York and London – per acre. When cleared, rainforests release that carbon into the atmosphere, furthering global warming rather than curbing it.

[n4rky]

A lot of that soy is used as a base for livestock feed. This is a factor both for rain forests and in the United States (https://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/feed/): "Livestock producers like to use corn and soy as a base for their animal feed, because these protein-rich grains fatten up their animals, and because they’re incredibly cheap as a result of the government subsidies."

[Thad]

A person has been living on coffee and beer and working and eating whatever when they were hungry, not enough wherewithal to be scientific about their diet, so they come up needing cartilage repair and so eating cartilage from animal joints, big knuckles of meat, how better could vegetarian provide for immediate cartilage nutrients?

[someguy]

A lot of that soy is used as a base for livestock feed. This is a factor both for rain forests and in the United States (https://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/feed/): "Livestock producers like to use corn and soy as a base for their animal feed, because these protein-rich grains fatten up their animals, and because they’re incredibly cheap as a result of the government subsidies."

I said that already. I also said that type of industrialized farming practice is horrible and absolutely unnecessary. Soy is not something that cows should be eating. That is just greed on the part of those farmers who choose to increase their profits in an unethical/unhealthy manner. The one thing that cows should be eating is Green Grass!!!! That is what they are designed to digest. So farmers that do treat their livestock appropriately are not contributing to the soy industry and should be supported at all costs. And all this talk about how "It takes sixteen times as much land and lots more water to raise a pound of meat than it does a pound of grain. A lot of that is because you have to divert so much land to growing feedstock, even for factory farms."

Well it clearly doesn't have to be that way. All you need is some open pasture and some water, and if your cows are dairy cows you'll get an amazing superfood daily and tons of it too, and if your intending to eat the flesh and organs of such a well fed and treated cow, you'll be eating very healthy nutrient dense stuff, unmatched by vegetables and fruits.

And like you said, the government subsidies make it too cheap for these factory farmers. And Monsanto GMO products supposedly made growing grains (especially corn and soy) easy and cheap, for a while. Which brings up a whole different set of political issues...... Like the suppression of small well intended farmers by our government (grain lobbyists) and the proposed taxing of Methane output from all cow farmers, not just the mass industry farmers who fatten these cows up with terrible grains that they cannot digest properly causing them to have diarrhea, massive bloating, chronic illness and infection, depression, etc....

[n4rky]

A person has been living on coffee and beer and working and eating whatever when they were hungry, not enough wherewithal to be scientific about their diet, so they come up needing cartilage repair and so eating cartilage from animal joints, big knuckles of meat, how better could vegetarian provide for immediate cartilage nutrients?

Apparently the crucial nutrient for cartilage repair is glucosamine which is available from vegan sources.

[scamperwillow]

Slice of Life in Sebastopol is a good vegetarian restaurant with vegan and raw options.



Hi, I am looking for a good vegan, raw,if possible, and hopefully organic restaurant, in Sonoma county. I live in Sebastopol. Where is Govinda's?
All help appreciated..
Sincerely,
deborah

[feltonius]

Oh yay. Just what we always love: a flame war.

personally, I like debate, but dislike flame wars. I'm happy to engage in a debate if it stays civil and doesn't get personal.

in response to the question: is livestock raising 100% bad w/out exception



Only because it is. It takes sixteen times as much land and lots more water to raise a pound of meat than it does a pound of grain. A lot of that is because you have to divert so much land to growing feedstock, even for factory farms.

What is it to "take" land? Land is allocated to a use, for this or that or something other. The question is, over TIME, is the land improved or degraded? I think its very possible to show that a piece of land used for management intensive grazing is better off, has deeper topsoil, and is better for global climate than a same sized piece used for a monoculture of lettuce or cotton or tomatoes. We really don't "take" the land as they say, we "borrow" it from our children. Right now it seems you only "take" land with condos, strip malls...

This argument really is stuck in the factory farming paradigm. "A lot of that is because you have to divert so much land to growing feedstock, even for factory farms" How about ONLY for factory farms? Cows and sheep, if the correct breed is chosen, can live 100% without supplement. Yes, chickens and pigs require grain supplements, but can also be great recyclers, farming produces waste even when you really try not to.



But I guess as a "food" producer, you profit from the food crisis. You absolutely adore the fact that as prosperity is redistributed from the United States to other places, even more people are eating this incredibly wasteful and environmentally destructive diet.


I'm small time, really. I make no money. really. but this isn't really about me, is it?



What if, indeed. Precious as in the money you make sending these animals to slaughter? Valuable as in the same? Adorable as in either your love of money or right up to the unconscionable brutality of slaughter?


honestly, I just break even if I dont calculate costs like buildings, fences, and equipment. then I'm losing money badly.

I think "Stranger in a Strange Land" did a nice job of depicting the way I think my animals look upon the question of dinner. If you prefer "Charlotte's Web" then that's OK by me.



(Yes, poorly paid and exploited slaughterhouse workers take out their frustrations sadistically on already frightened animals.)


Well, on my farm we do our own slaughter. My chickens are slaughtered by an unfrustrated college graduate who's, as I've pointed out, not making much money at it, but is taking my rewards partially from the gratitude I get from customers and partly from watching the fertility improvements on the property.

Once again, instead of attacking the problem, the advice is to just avoid it. Exploitation of workers is a serious social ill. It is not caused by eating meat, and a global shift towards vegetables will not solve the exploitation, just shift its location. Anyway, you must know that exploitation occurs on the vegetable fields, we just don't know what they are doing to our broccoli to handle their frustration because nobody has taken a secret video yet...



What if you could do all this without brutalizing animals? Oh, but you don't want to face the reality that at some point you are directly or indirectly a very, very brutal person.

You might be right. I think its clear how serene and peaceful a person can get when they dont eat meat.

Why is death so brutal when it is applied to animals? That's part of the price of being born, for all of us, that one day you have to also be dead. What is so different about planting a seed with the intention of harvesting the plant before it goes to seed, and breeding an animal with the intention of eating it before it makes new babies?



Did you know that vegans eat vegetables which are grown largely in monocultures which are destroying the earth? all that soy needed for protein, the only thing that lives in a field of soy is soy. All those pesticides and herbicides are killing the wild oceans.


I guess you've never heard of organic produce. One reason to prefer local produce is to encourage local farmers to grow a wider variety. And you're forgetting about the vast fields of monoculture needed to feed livestock.

But I'll tell you what lives in dead meat: salmonella. And we've been hearing an awful lot about that lately.

Actually, I have actually taken college level coursework in organic farming. I have some bad news for you, organic farming includes the spraying of pesticides and herbicides. The organic farmer simply has a smaller list of chemicals that they are allowed to use. They have to be derived from an organic source, like a chrysanthemum. Distilled, refined, and sprayed, it will kill every honey bee in the area for a week, but organic nonetheless. Nope, encouraging a wider variety is sadly NOT the only reason to prefer local food. Because you can look someone in the eye, have a conversation with them about their values and their land, then you have some idea of how bad they nuked their fields...

(in response to me saying people treat the soil brutally when they farm vegetables)


Here you entirely cease to make any sense at all. Do you attribute sentience to a carrot?

no, I was attributing sentience to mother nature. But just because there's no "mother" who actually feels pain when someone sprays a chemical or denudes an ecosystem to replace it with a monocrop doesn't mean its not as evil as being cruel to animals. Why are bugs so valueless to you when cows and sheep are so valuable? why do you hold the pocket gopher and the field mouse and raptor so far below the chicken and the cow? My point is that there's winners and losers in the animal kingdom regardless of the land use chosen, so its kindof hypocritical to protect all chickens from death by decree as you rototill 100 gophers, or worse, remove their food supply so they starve.



I guess it's too much to ask you to do a Google search. This list (https://www.veganathlete.com/vegan_vegetarian_athletes.php) might help.


I concede that point.




The bottom line here remains that meat production is cruel, wasteful, and polluting. Going vegan is far and away the best way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, reduce water pollution, and to feed more people. But people who eat meat or raise livestock for meat refuse to face that, either because they don't care or because they don't think they can.


I do not feel as though you've proved that at all. You return again and again to the well known problems with the factory farming model, and do not address the farm-as-ecosystem model where livestock are used in ways that mimic processes found in nature. It is my belief that managing land in this way is the best hope for humanity. I just dont think you understand the fertility and topsoil problems related to farming, and in the big picture it just doesn't work to try to grow a lot of organic produce without getting your fertility from somewhere. Currently non-organic produce's fertility comes from burning oil to fix atmospheric nitrogen. Organic produce's fertility comes from animals.



I merely point out extremely well-documented facts about the livestock industry. Vegans have to listen to bile like yours and Thad's all the time. It stopped being funny decades ago (if it ever was).


I take exception to calling my views "bile." I'm trying to debate an important philosophical issue. This thread was probably a bad place for this to start, but I dont understand this technology well enough yet to move the part of the thread that got off topic to the wacco-reader. I have tried to acknowlege the legitimacy of your views as well as your value as a person.



There is a premise underlying all of this that humans are superior to nature, that we may use nature in any way that we choose. Yet the fact of global warming shows that we are part of the environment, not superior to it. Livestock's Long Shadow (https://https://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM) shows that the livestock industry wastes land, pollutes, wastes water, and contributes more to climate change than anything else humans do.


I was going to make the same "we are not disconnected from nature" argument. We are here, we are growing in population, and our planet is a living, changing, dynamic place. We need to collect our knowledge of how things are and constantly improve our methods to continue to survive over the long haul. We can try the old method of making nature submit while we grow veggies, and we can grow animals and take an enlightened approach working within nature to enhance systems that are known to work, and vice-versa. Its not about what comes out at the end, its about _how_ we go about creating it whatever we end up creating. Livestock raising done right is part of the solution not the problem, and there's a widespread consensus among those who produce food around that.



We're out of harmony with our environment and the Doomsday Clock (https://www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview) stands at five minutes to midnight. If we continue the way we are, the earth may cease to be a place where we can live.


? doomsday clock ? is that a wizard of oz thing? isn't there, like, a person deciding where the hand goes?



We have had a drought for years in California. Unemployment is bad everywhere (and worse than the government admits), but has been especially bad in the Central Valley, because we've been assuming we have the water to redistribute. We don't. And it looks like climate change will make California more arid, not less.

But you defend livestock rearing, trying to claim you aren't like the rest. There is no humane way to slaughter an animal. And there is no water-efficient or land-efficient way to raise livestock.

We need to change our relationship with nature, if we are to survive as a species. And going vegan is only one part of that.

drought: a good example. lets take your organic lettuce mix from Earthbound farms. Did you know how they do weed control without roundup? fire up the diesel tractor and rototill, then water it in really good. water some more. when the weeds sprout, fire up the diesel and till again. Water some more, etc up to 5 times! By contrast, I capture rainwater from my barn roof to water my animals.

unemployment: this is mostly a political tactic by agri-business to take advantage of the economic climate to get people to stop protecting the fish. The unemployment in the valley isn't that much worse this year than in other years, especially when you consider the recession. They just want us to stop protecting the chinook salmon so they can continue to farm that organic lettuce in areas where the ground water is too saline for anything other than canola. So they should grow that, but that's not how our government works yet alas. Isn't it ironic though, and downright trippy, that the only protection for the salmon are those who "brutally" fish for them and kill them to eat them and sell them to others that eat them. These people are the salmon's _only_ chance for survival against the powerful organic vegetable lobby. The vegan community wouldn't even be paying attention as the salmon slips away for irrigation-agriculture, they hate fishing and don't mind if fishing boats stay at the dock. They would mind if the redwoods are gone because the salmon are no longer shuttling nutrients up from the deep oceans and depositing them into forests, but by then it would be too late. Back when there still were salmon, instead of seeing the big picture people see fishing as this animal cruelty issue, and they weren't paying attention to what we did to their spawning grounds. Luckily for the salmon, they do taste really good, and there are still people fighting for them and their need for water to spawn.

humane slaughter: its true, most animals, if shown the abbatoir and a nice green pasture to be in, would walk towards the pasture. However, the philosophical question that is more applicable is: what would you choose, life on a family farm or life in the wild? life on a farm or never be born? We all have to ask ourselves how we think the animals would respond to those questions, and its OK if we come out different and some choose to not eat meat.

But if "livestock raising" continues to be the target instead of "factory farming" or "industrial agriculture" of all types than at best we are wasting valuable energy that could be spent forming a coalition to solve real problems, and at worst we are providing just the distraction the bad guys need to keep doing what they are doing, profit all the way hahaha

[n4rky]

What is it to "take" land? Land is allocated to a use, for this or that or something other. The question is, over TIME, is the land improved or degraded? I think its very possible to show that a piece of land used for management intensive grazing is better off, has deeper topsoil, and is better for global climate than a same sized piece used for a monoculture of lettuce or cotton or tomatoes. We really don't "take" the land as they say, we "borrow" it from our children. Right now it seems you only "take" land with condos, strip malls...

You're completely missing the point here. There is a limited amount of arable land on planet earth. And there is a growing population. And climate change will increase food insecurity in developing countries, where population is growing fastest.

It takes sixteen times as much land to feed a given number of people with meat as it does to raise crops and feed the same number of people. We can't afford to allocate land to meat production that can be used to raise crops that can feed more people.


This argument really is stuck in the factory farming paradigm. "A lot of that is because you have to divert so much land to growing feedstock, even for factory farms" How about ONLY for factory farms? Cows and sheep, if the correct breed is chosen, can live 100% without supplement. Yes, chickens and pigs require grain supplements, but can also be great recyclers, farming produces waste even when you really try not to.

And you seem really stuck on not acknowledging how much more land it takes to feed people in meat production than it does with crops.


I'm small time, really. I make no money. really. but this isn't really about me, is it?

This will sound purist, but actually it is. As long as people eat meat, they abuse animals and use land inefficiently. As long as people eat meat, there is pressure to produce meat in vast quantities that seemingly require even more barbaric means of treating animals than what you claim you do (which, given slaughterhouse treatment, is quite bad enough).


honestly, I just break even if I dont calculate costs like buildings, fences, and equipment. then I'm losing money badly.

So you have every financial incentive to quit. Only ideology keeps you in this business.


Well, on my farm we do our own slaughter. My chickens are slaughtered by an unfrustrated college graduate who's, as I've pointed out, not making much money at it, but is taking my rewards partially from the gratitude I get from customers and partly from watching the fertility improvements on the property.

I'm supposed to be glad your college student isn't mistreating the animals as s/he kills them but you acknowledge further down that animals do suffer at slaughter. So the charge of brutality stands.


Once again, instead of attacking the problem, the advice is to just avoid it. Exploitation of workers is a serious social ill. It is not caused by eating meat, and a global shift towards vegetables will not solve the exploitation, just shift its location. Anyway, you must know that exploitation occurs on the vegetable fields, we just don't know what they are doing to our broccoli to handle their frustration because nobody has taken a secret video yet...

Actually, there have been videos taken of the conditions farm workers endure. But here you seem to attribute sentience to broccoli. Your argument seems to assume I endorse exploitation of workers as long as they are working in the fields rather than in the slaughterhouses, but this is not an argument I have made.

If we want this discussion to get further out of hand than it already is, then we can take on attitudes towards capitalism. My time is limited.


You might be right. I think its clear how serene and peaceful a person can get when they dont eat meat.

Why is death so brutal when it is applied to animals? That's part of the price of being born, for all of us, that one day you have to also be dead. What is so different about planting a seed with the intention of harvesting the plant before it goes to seed, and breeding an animal with the intention of eating it before it makes new babies?

I'll acknowledge that vegans define sentience strangely as an ability to feel pain. Setting aside that you won't find that definition in any standard dictionary, it gets even weirder when applied to insects--on whose behalf many vegans eschew honey--whose nervous systems may well lack the capacity to feel pain.

But you're clearly going too far when you suggest that plants suffer in the way that animals do. You acknowledge here that animals do suffer in slaughter.


Actually, I have actually taken college level coursework in organic farming. I have some bad news for you, organic farming includes the spraying of pesticides and herbicides. The organic farmer simply has a smaller list of chemicals that they are allowed to use. They have to be derived from an organic source, like a chrysanthemum. Distilled, refined, and sprayed, it will kill every honey bee in the area for a week, but organic nonetheless. Nope, encouraging a wider variety is sadly NOT the only reason to prefer local food. Because you can look someone in the eye, have a conversation with them about their values and their land, then you have some idea of how bad they nuked their fields...

If I claimed that, as you put it, "encouraging a wider variety is sadly NOT the only reason to prefer local food," I misspoke. I believe I wrote that it was a reason, not the only reason.

I am under the impression that organic farming is better for the environment than non-organic farming. Are you contesting this?

Or are you taking the use of any pesticide or fertilizer as bad unless your animals emit it?


no, I was attributing sentience to mother nature. But just because there's no "mother" who actually feels pain when someone sprays a chemical or denudes an ecosystem to replace it with a monocrop doesn't mean its not as evil as being cruel to animals. Why are bugs so valueless to you when cows and sheep are so valuable? why do you hold the pocket gopher and the field mouse and raptor so far below the chicken and the cow? My point is that there's winners and losers in the animal kingdom regardless of the land use chosen, so its kindof hypocritical to protect all chickens from death by decree as you rototill 100 gophers, or worse, remove their food supply so they starve.

Your argument amounts to a slippery slope. If I mistreat any animals, it must be okay to mistreat all animals, especially when mistreating all animals wastes land and encourages environmentally devastating diets.


I do not feel as though you've proved that at all. You return again and again to the well known problems with the factory farming model, and do not address the farm-as-ecosystem model where livestock are used in ways that mimic processes found in nature. It is my belief that managing land in this way is the best hope for humanity. I just dont think you understand the fertility and topsoil problems related to farming, and in the big picture it just doesn't work to try to grow a lot of organic produce without getting your fertility from somewhere. Currently non-organic produce's fertility comes from burning oil to fix atmospheric nitrogen. Organic produce's fertility comes from animals.

This is because you fail to acknowledge the land use issues. Crops raised on an acre of land can feed sixteen times as many people as livestock raised on that same land. Proper use of human and companion animal excrement would both reduce water pollution problems and resolve the fertilization issues that you seem all worked up about.


I take exception to calling my views "bile." I'm trying to debate an important philosophical issue. This thread was probably a bad place for this to start, but I dont understand this technology well enough yet to move the part of the thread that got off topic to the wacco-reader. I have tried to acknowlege the legitimacy of your views as well as your value as a person.

You're trying to debate philosophy? Excuse me, but when it comes to real life suffering and starvation, that seems a bit removed from reality.


I was going to make the same "we are not disconnected from nature" argument. We are here, we are growing in population, and our planet is a living, changing, dynamic place. We need to collect our knowledge of how things are and constantly improve our methods to continue to survive over the long haul. We can try the old method of making nature submit while we grow veggies, and we can grow animals and take an enlightened approach working within nature to enhance systems that are known to work, and vice-versa. Its not about what comes out at the end, its about _how_ we go about creating it whatever we end up creating. Livestock raising done right is part of the solution not the problem, and there's a widespread consensus among those who produce food around that.

And you still fail to acknowledge the land use issue.


? doomsday clock ? is that a wizard of oz thing? isn't there, like, a person deciding where the hand goes?

The doomsday clock is published by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. You would have seen this if you had bothered to click on the link I supplied.


drought: a good example. lets take your organic lettuce mix from Earthbound farms. Did you know how they do weed control without roundup? fire up the diesel tractor and rototill, then water it in really good. water some more. when the weeds sprout, fire up the diesel and till again. Water some more, etc up to 5 times! By contrast, I capture rainwater from my barn roof to water my animals.

And you think you use less water for your animals than farmers use in crops? Again I refer you to the Food and Agriculture Organization's report, Livestock's Long Shadow. But what you're about to point to is a poor example. California's Central Valley farmers are notoriously wasteful of water and destructive of the soil.


unemployment: this is mostly a political tactic by agri-business to take advantage of the economic climate to get people to stop protecting the fish. The unemployment in the valley isn't that much worse this year than in other years, especially when you consider the recession. They just want us to stop protecting the chinook salmon so they can continue to farm that organic lettuce in areas where the ground water is too saline for anything other than canola. So they should grow that, but that's not how our government works yet alas. Isn't it ironic though, and downright trippy, that the only protection for the salmon are those who "brutally" fish for them and kill them to eat them and sell them to others that eat them. These people are the salmon's _only_ chance for survival against the powerful organic vegetable lobby. The vegan community wouldn't even be paying attention as the salmon slips away for irrigation-agriculture, they hate fishing and don't mind if fishing boats stay at the dock. They would mind if the redwoods are gone because the salmon are no longer shuttling nutrients up from the deep oceans and depositing them into forests, but by then it would be too late. Back when there still were salmon, instead of seeing the big picture people see fishing as this animal cruelty issue, and they weren't paying attention to what we did to their spawning grounds. Luckily for the salmon, they do taste really good, and there are still people fighting for them and their need for water to spawn.

We're confounding a few issues here. One is the horrendous water waste issues of Central Valley agriculture. It's possible to do far, far better, but the corporations involved don't choose to make the investment. And probably the Central Valley is not a place where we should have such intensive agriculture. Moreover, it will probably cease to be usable due to poisoned soils with high salinity and low water levels, exacerbated by climate change. That much we mostly agree on.

But broadening the scope a bit, fish stocks are in decline worldwide due to overfishing, certainly not all because of California's misallocation of water resources.

Both of these issues are really environmental issues much more than they are vegan issues per se, though obviously true vegans aren't patronizing overfishing.


humane slaughter: its true, most animals, if shown the abbatoir and a nice green pasture to be in, would walk towards the pasture. However, the philosophical question that is more applicable is: what would you choose, life on a family farm or life in the wild? life on a farm or never be born? We all have to ask ourselves how we think the animals would respond to those questions, and its OK if we come out different and some choose to not eat meat.

You have already acknowledge the cruelty of slaughter. On factory farms, I think there can be no question that the animals would be better off never having been born. They are abused from birth to slaughter.

But your case falls into neither of those dichotomous poles. My suggestion is that what would be best is to let animals reproduce as they will--it is not they who overpopulate this earth--and to let them live their lives. This of course is quite different from the fate of male animals in the dairy and egg industries.

What's fundamental here is a vegan conviction that humans do not have a right to dictate the lives of animals, that we are not superior to them, that we are not superior to nature. We must live with nature rather than control it.

But ultimately, your position remains firmly in the "control" paradigm. These animals, you posit, should be grateful to us for even allowing them to live. Never mind the multitudes of species throughout the planet who manage this just fine without our interference (and suffer only as we deprive them of habitat).


But if "livestock raising" continues to be the target instead of "factory farming" or "industrial agriculture" of all types than at best we are wasting valuable energy that could be spent forming a coalition to solve real problems, and at worst we are providing just the distraction the bad guys need to keep doing what they are doing, profit all the way hahaha

Yes, livestock raising continues to be my target, for all of the reasons I have previously stated.

[n4rky]

That's why I think knocking anyone, or being offended by others food choices is ineffective, or simply put: non-positive, controlling, and stems from uncertainty or confusion (not trying to be judgmental-I've had my moments).

I would point out that Nina Rosen began this thread with the following:


Are there other vegans (no oil either) who are interested in discussing their experiences being in a world where you are a bit of the odd "duck?" How about a vegan comedy hour to laugh at the challenges of trying to eat healthy and feeling strange about it.

That was not an invitation for people to come in and attack or belittle vegans. Yet this is what happened. Jeanie, with all due respect to you and those who have expressed appreciation for your post, I wasn't looking for this. Neither, certainly, was Nina.

So while we're in the "love everybody" mode (a mode which evidently excludes the animals whose lives are at stake and whose suffering is overlooked by a mislabeled "live and let live" attitude), those who come into a thread like this and hijack it to defend their own dietary choices by attacking the choice of the person who initiated the thread are fully deserving of criticism.

[amity]

thanks Susan and all for pointing a kind finger towards Gaia's garden -- and for encouraging victor jorgensen to mount his show there -- the mosaics are beautiful and definitely worth a look if you haven't been by to see them -- it will be over soon, so take a gander at this art, better in person but also at The Mosaic Maker: Unique creations in stained glass mosaics, commissions, portraits, mythological art, and fine art of exceptional quality. (https://www.themosaicmaker.com)

amity hotchkiss

[nina rosen]

:hello:
...And now it's time for the vegan comedy hour.:Yinyangv::wink::hello:
Dance, sing, eat, play with animals...

[alanora]

Does any one out there know if my soy allergy would be triggered by eating some of the meat from a soy enriched fed animal?

A lot of that soy is used as a base for livestock feed. This is a factor both for rain forests and in the United States (https://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/feed/): "Livestock producers like to use corn and soy as a base for their animal feed, because these protein-rich grains fatten up their animals, and because they’re incredibly cheap as a result of the government subsidies."

[djmama]

Good point. I'd like to recommend Abyssinia, just west of 4th Street and Brookwood in Santa Rosa. The food is Eritrean and absolutely delicious. They serve meat, but they have vegetarian dishes and the vegetarian sampler is a delight for two. I'm pretty sure it's vegan, you could check.


Hi Nina,

I'm about 75% vegan. . .I know several other vegans, and tons of vegetarians. Sonoma County is one of the best places in the country to be veg. . .so many resources! Govinda's is OK, but I prefer the veg options at most ethnic restaurants. Many of the restaurants here also have McDougall menus, which in addtion to being vegan are also low fat!

Elizabeth

[podfish]

I beg to differ - we've invented the concept of humane slaughter. No other carnivore worries about such a thing. Kinda by definition. Now if you want to argue that as a species we've evolved beyond nature's rules and should voluntarily avoid causing pain in any living thing, that's different and isn't really conducive to rational argument.


......
What if you could do all this without brutalizing animals? .... There is no humane way to slaughter an animal....

We need to change our relationship with nature, if we are to survive as a species. And going vegan is only one part of that.

[n4rky]

I beg to differ - we've invented the concept of humane slaughter. No other carnivore worries about such a thing. Kinda by definition. Now if you want to argue that as a species we've evolved beyond nature's rules and should voluntarily avoid causing pain in any living thing, that's different and isn't really conducive to rational argument.

A distinguishing characteristic of humanity is that we have the capacity to choose our relationships with others, with nature, with societies around the world, and with other species.

The field of ethics is all about how we make those choices. It is a part of the philosophy discipline. So before you make wild claims about what is and is not "conducive to rational argument," I suggest you take some classes on the topic.

[scamperwillow]

I just visited my doctor and she told me to lower my cholesterol either by taking statins or by not eating anything with a face.... uh oh - gotta take this more seriously now..... (she actually said "animal products")

[n4rky]

Why the elimination of say olive oil? No mother, no face....minimally processed-pressed?

I don't know about this either. Perhaps Nina knows of something about the processing of olives that I don't.

There are a few things out there that many vegans will avoid even though no animal ingredients appear on the label. The final stage in refining sugar, for example, apparently involves an animal product which I'm not remembering precisely. Some beers also use an animal product at some point in their production.

Other vegans think this goes too far (https://www.vegan.org/FAQs/index.html). An unfortunate part of the adventure is in choosing the lines you draw and then defending those choices not just with non-vegans but with vegans. A contest arises as to just who is a "real" vegan.

While I am extremely annoyed by the hijacking of this thread into a forum for belittling and attacking a vegan lifestyle, one of the attackers tried to equate vegetables with (non-human) animals. This is all about the lines we draw in trying to ethically choose a diet. Taking it much farther than I ever would, fruitarians avoid killing plants. Most vegans accept yeast, for example, which is classified as an animal. Some accept honey, because--and I'm inclined to agree--we don't attribute the capacity to feel pain to insects.

Even a process-based definition of veganism involves lines which must be drawn: enslaved bees pollinate many of the crops we consume (especially including fruit trees). Insects die on the windshields and in the radiators of trucks that deliver produce.

So I can't explain Nina's line on olive oil. But I am curious about the issue in this particular case.

[n4rky]

Does any one out there know if my soy allergy would be triggered by eating some of the meat from a soy enriched fed animal?

I'm guessing that if this were the case, you would already have found out the hard way.

[C Tut]

I'm trying, as a new try, to eat only that which doesn't have a mother or a face.

I must ask, why are things which have a face or mother more highly valued than those that don't? Are we not all "god's creatures", or whatever you would like to call us? When eating plants you are eating a living organism with beauty and purpose, and sapping its vitality so that you may thrive. To say you eat only that which does not have a mother or face seems like a very anthropomorphic and arbitrary line to draw...

[airdancer]

Sonoma County has two Vegan, Raw restaurants. Cafe Gratitude is in Healdsburg and is amazing. Note: If you are short of funds, they have a 'pay what you can' bowl that you must ask for, as it's not on the menu. Locations | Caf Gratitude (https://www.cafegratitude.com/locations)

Another Vegan, Raw restaurant is Seed, in Santa Rosa. They have just remodeled and revamped their menu.
Seed Restaurant - Indulgently Healthy Vegan Cuisine (https://www.seedrestaurant.com/)

Other Vegan options are the two vegan potlucks held in the county:
Farm Animal Protection Project puts on a monthly potluck at the Sonoma County Humane Society on the third Saturday of the month. Their site has a partial listing of other 'vegan friendly' restaurants in the area.
Farm Animal Protection Project (https://farmanimalprotection.org/fapp/calendar.htm)

Petaluma also has a monthly vegan potluck on the fourth Friday of the month. The next one will be held in January due to the holidays falling on the regular date. Information will be posted on the following blog:
Caring for Creatures (https://caring4creatures.blogspot.com/)

There are a few raw food potlucks also:
Raw Glow: Petaluma Raw Food Potluck. (https://www.rawglow.com/potluck.htm) (Petaluma)

The other raw food potlucks can be accessed through the web group called Meetup. (www.meetup.com (https://www.meetup.com))

Finally, check out: Vegetarian Restaurants Guide and Directory of Natural Health Food Stores by HappyCow (https://www.happycow.net/)
They are a great resource for vegetarian and vegan restaurants, especially when you are traveling.

Hope that this helps!

Janis


Hi, I am looking for a good vegan, raw,if possible, and hopefully organic restaurant, in Sonoma county. I live in Sebastopol. Where is Govinda's?
All help appreciated..
Sincerely,
deborah

[Thad]

It comes to this, my brother is fundamental christian before he was that he was an arrogant alcoholic. I have arguments that could decimate his faith. I would not want him to not have faith in something. Let it be, to each his own but if the argument continues here's for the Vegan side and not eating things that have a face. Don't read " The secret life of Plants" or " Parable of the beast" Everything has soul... There is no one to speak against the quantity of memory held in DNA


Sonoma County has two Vegan, Raw restaurants. Cafe Gratitude is in Healdsburg and is amazing. Note: If you are short of funds, they have a 'pay what you can' bowl that you must ask for, as it's not on the menu. Locations | Caf Gratitude (https://www.cafegratitude.com/locations)

Another Vegan, Raw restaurant is Seed, in Santa Rosa. They have just remodeled and revamped their menu.
Seed Restaurant - Indulgently Healthy Vegan Cuisine (https://www.seedrestaurant.com/)

Other Vegan options are the two vegan potlucks held in the county:
Farm Animal Protection Project puts on a monthly potluck at the Sonoma County Humane Society on the third Saturday of the month. Their site has a partial listing of other 'vegan friendly' restaurants in the area.
Farm Animal Protection Project (https://farmanimalprotection.org/fapp/calendar.htm)

Petaluma also has a monthly vegan potluck on the fourth Friday of the month. The next one will be held in January due to the holidays falling on the regular date. Information will be posted on the following blog:
Caring for Creatures (https://caring4creatures.blogspot.com/)

There are a few raw food potlucks also:
Raw Glow: Petaluma Raw Food Potluck. (https://www.rawglow.com/potluck.htm) (Petaluma)

The other raw food potlucks can be accessed through the web group called Meetup. (www.meetup.com (https://www.meetup.com))

Finally, check out: Vegetarian Restaurants Guide and Directory of Natural Health Food Stores by HappyCow (https://www.happycow.net/)
They are a great resource for vegetarian and vegan restaurants, especially when you are traveling.

Hope that this helps!

Janis

[kandis]

Actually, yeast is classified as a fungus


Most vegans accept yeast, for example, which is classified as an animal.
So I can't explain Nina's line on olive oil. But I am curious about the issue in this particular case.

[podfish]

... So before you make wild claims about what is and is not "conducive to rational argument," I suggest you take some classes on the topic.

sn4rky, eh...

[DuCharme]

A person cannot eat food without something dying either directly or indirectly. There is nothing more natural than one thing dying so that another may eat. If a person wants to float through nature, picking and eating leaves as you soar then maybe nothing would die as a result, but if you step on the ground during your forage then you will crush millions or even billions of life forms under your feet. These deaths are a direct result of your hunger. If you till soil to plant you vegetables then you will kill trillions of life forms and these deaths will be a direct result of your hunger. To be able to eat with out anything dying on your behalf is an urban fantasy. To decide that the value of this living creature is greater than the value of that living creature is purely self serving on the part of the eater. I guess it wouldn't carry much weight to mention that plants are every bit as much alive as your dog, your children, your lover, the cows in the slaughter house and the mold in for refridgerator.

[n4rky]

A person cannot eat food without something dying either directly or indirectly.

I don't doubt it. The line that vegans attempt to draw is on avoidable suffering. We don't have much choice but to walk on the ground. We don't have much choice but to drive. These are largely unavoidable.

And indeed a plant is as alive as an animal.

But does the plant suffer? Do the insects who fly in the way of speeding trucks suffer? At some point, it becomes doubtful that there is enough of a nervous system functioning to experience that.

We do have a choice about eating meat. We can live longer, healthier lives for making the right choice. We can do better for the environment by making the right choice.

So please, no more of these silly rationalizations. The real argument you're making is that since we can't avoid killing, it is okay to be cruel with abandon.

[feltonius]

You're completely missing the point here. There is a limited amount of arable land on planet earth. And there is a growing population. And climate change will increase food insecurity in developing countries, where population is growing fastest.

It takes sixteen times as much land to feed a given number of people with meat as it does to raise crops and feed the same number of people. We can't afford to allocate land to meat production that can be used to raise crops that can feed more people.

I got your point, and I failed to properly explain why I think that a simple mathematical model about how many calories people need with this type of production vs that type is the wrong approach, and doesn't yield useful information. Its based on the wrong kind of farming in the first place. There's potential to do much much better in how we produce food. There's lots and lots of land but its fertility needs to be increased to grow vegetables in the quantity and quality that makes the labor worthwhile to actually harvest and market them. I think that livestock and vegetable crops grown in harmony on small family farms with a farmer who can really comprehend the management of his or her full ecosystem is possible. Farming livestock and vegatable crops can be beneficial for the ills of today's environment in the same way that industrial farming of any kind is bad for that same environment. Things that are beneficial to climate change AND produce food are really good and the new understanding is that the methods are the problem not the meat.

This thread, that started with someone trying to connect to their community, was the wrong place to make my point. Next time, I think the right approach would have been to paste the comments I objected to in a new thread in a different section of this bulletin board. I will strive to learn the ethics of bulletin boards.



But your case falls into neither of those dichotomous poles. My suggestion is that what would be best is to let animals reproduce as they will--it is not they who overpopulate this earth--and to let them live their lives. This of course is quite different from the fate of male animals in the dairy and egg industries.

What's fundamental here is a vegan conviction that humans do not have a right to dictate the lives of animals, that we are not superior to them, that we are not superior to nature. We must live with nature rather than control it.

But ultimately, your position remains firmly in the "control" paradigm. These animals, you posit, should be grateful to us for even allowing them to live. Never mind the multitudes of species throughout the planet who manage this just fine without our interference (and suffer only as we deprive them of habitat).


OK, there you have laid out the difference between our passionately environmentalist viewpoints. You think its possible to avoid meddling with nature. But we are part of nature and modify it like crazy right now, by our very existence, on tons of different topics, especially by our shortcomings in agriculture. Its both plant and animal right now; plant because the fertility comes from oil, tillage issues, chemical use and ecosystem destruction to name a few, animal many of the same). We have to take all those negatives and turn them into positives, and we actually know how to do that. Some perhaps would be satisfied with reducing CAFO meat production by some small percentage and converting vegetable farming to industrial organic, but I think that's not going to cut it.

Your point about suffering is undeniable, except the part about not suffering in the wild. How come you live in a house instead of backpacking all the time? Life has a potential for suffering, and as you have pointed out, the more sentient you are the more you try to avoid it. I am making a utilitarian argument around the suffering. Yes I am saying its a compromise in exchange for existence, for both sides. We cannot let modern livestock live in the wild, and we cannot sustainably produce food without them. They cannot survive in the wild, but with us they can lead a life in which they didn't ever have to suffer things like hunger, fear, pain, or the lack of medical care. You suggest they suffer even during a quick and humane on-site harvest, and by extension wouldn't choose small, outdoor farm life with a such a humane slaughter vs. life in the "wild" as you imagine it. I disagree.

We need to sustainably feed our growing population on that much we _can_ agree. I'm personally learning some of the ins and outs of food production and I am claiming the necessity of livestock as part of the system of food production that will achieve this goal. I simply believe that a system without managed land animals based on organic vegetable farming alone would have a fertility crisis and fail to feed the population. No, human and companion animal manure management will not solve that fertility source problem and I wont go into what's wrong with that. *yuck!*
We need to harness the power of natural semi-complex systems involving more than one living organism (both plant and animal) to convert the sun's energy into fertility instead of just burning oil, period. Its not going to happen scraping bat guano off a few rocks.

I see no reason btw to hold the suffering at the hands of lack of food, shelter, habitat, or predators as funtamentally different than suffering caused by a human who quickly ends your life while you are already getting kinda sleepy cause you are upside-down and you are a chicken. Growing a little lamb and a few grassfed eggs and roaster chickens in an existing apple orchard produces more food than the apple orchard alone, not 16 times less. Did the long shadow book include extensive farming models or just intensive ones? Did it include permaculture models with stacked functions, forest gardens, and urban gardens? A symbiotic managed relationship between plants and animals makes the plants and animals thrive and the land literally sparkle says my hands on experience.

We cannot eschew the suffering of animals because we exist. We can only strive to minimize it in total over the big picture. We have to nurture the non-developed ecosystems we have left based on an ever increasing intimate understanding of them and the complex systems by which they function. Non-action is also a management decision, and we can destroy that which we thought most precious by leaving it alone and failing to understand what it needed to survive. By arguing that keeping livestock is controlling nature which we think is bad, suggests people may still think there's a way we can live in nature without controlling it. Let it run loose, even if by our very existence we can never do it completely, it will be good to at least be "hands off" when it comes to charismatic mega-fauna, that will be a sustainable model. To me that just does not comprehend the totality of humanity's current impact on the environment. We need to make that impact sustainable, not simply completely avoid one impact because it both involves the suffering of the sentient and also we have a statistic from an expert who says the answer to sustainable agriculture is, simply, 16, while other impacts involving non-sentient beings are allowed to destroy our climate.

I think we have distilled this to the fundamental belief point that we will not change in ourselves so we can let this go. I will do so and not continue this thing I shouldn't have started in the first place. I should have let you dis the livestock raising blanket fashion. Its only coincedence that I've recently been thinking about these things a lot, as someone trying to start a second career in sustainable food production, I couldn't help myself.



Yes, livestock raising continues to be my target, for all of the reasons I have previously stated.

OK, that's probably fine then. Time will tell which of us has forseen the future of food production...

[n4rky]

There's lots and lots of land but its fertility needs to be increased to grow vegetables in the quantity and quality that makes the labor worthwhile to actually harvest and market them. I think that livestock and vegetable crops grown in harmony on small family farms with a farmer who can really comprehend the management of his or her full ecosystem is possible.

Oh yes, there's lots of land. And an increasing amount of it is desert land, partly because of past mismanagement, partly because of climate change. But livestock is the biggest driver of climate change, and not just by a little. So you want to turn some of this desert land into farmland, but you haven't explained where the water is coming from. And you haven't explained how you're going to reverse the desertification that is partly a consequence of livestock-rearing that you advocate.


Your point about suffering is undeniable, except the part about not suffering in the wild. How come you live in a house instead of backpacking all the time? Life has a potential for suffering, and as you have pointed out, the more sentient you are the more you try to avoid it.

If living in a house meant I would be sent to a slaughterhouse, I'm guessing I'd pick the backpacking lifestyle. Just guessing.


We cannot let modern livestock live in the wild,

Why not?


and we cannot sustainably produce food without them.

Nonsense.


They cannot survive in the wild,

Really? It isn't like they spend their lives in climate-controlled settings. Even in your less abusive setting, they're out in the elements. All the time. They seem better prepared for the backpacking trip than I am.


but with us they can lead a life in which they didn't ever have to suffer things like hunger, fear, pain, or the lack of medical care.

Emphasis on the word "can." If only most factory farms permitted it. But they don't. The videos are pretty horrifying and I had to stop watching them a while ago. But one point I remember was castration without anesthesia.


You suggest they suffer even during a quick and humane on-site harvest, and by extension wouldn't choose small, outdoor farm life with a such a humane slaughter vs. life in the "wild" as you imagine it. I disagree.

So now you deny that you cause suffering. There was, some time ago, a story in, I think it was the New York Times, written by someone who as a boy had to slaughter a swan (if memory serves). He told how the birds all crowded in a corner, backing away from him. He picked one and took it away from the others. One would timidly follow; it was the mate of the bird he was about to slaughter, clearly knowing something awful was about to happen, but not wanting to abandon its mate.

I think you're not seeing the fear. I think you're not feeling the pain. But I think your animals feel it nonetheless.


I simply believe that a system without managed land animals based on organic vegetable farming alone would have a fertility crisis and fail to feed the population.

I'm under the impression that once upon a time, we used crop rotation to get around this problem. That solved lots of problems--monoculture vulnerability to various plagues being not the least.


No, human and companion animal manure management will not solve that fertility source problem and I wont go into what's wrong with that. *yuck!*

Why do you prefer dealing with livestock manure to human and companion animal waste? It's all pretty disgusting to me. But I gather it can be composted quite effectively.


Growing a little lamb and a few grassfed eggs and roaster chickens in an existing apple orchard produces more food than the apple orchard alone, not 16 times less. Did the long shadow book include extensive farming models or just intensive ones? Did it include permaculture models with stacked functions, forest gardens, and urban gardens?

Livestock's Long Shadow is a report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. I'm guessing they know what they're talking about.


Non-action is also a management decision, and we can destroy that which we thought most precious by leaving it alone and failing to understand what it needed to survive. By arguing that keeping livestock is controlling nature which we think is bad, suggests people may still think there's a way we can live in nature without controlling it.

Hunter-gatherers did it for millenia. Probably we can't go back to that. But your assumption that nature can't take care of itself is breathtaking.


Let it run loose, even if by our very existence we can never do it completely, it will be good to at least be "hands off" when it comes to charismatic mega-fauna, that will be a sustainable model. To me that just does not comprehend the totality of humanity's current impact on the environment.

Your sole rationalization for livestock-rearing and meat eating boils down to fertilizing crops. You don't imagine there is any other way of managing the land that doesn't entail the use of livestock manure. You mysteriously treat livestock manure as somehow more holy than human and companion animal waste.

You'll have to forgive me if I find your paradigm less than compelling.

[feltonius]

Oh yes, there's lots of land. And an increasing amount of it is desert land, partly because of past mismanagement, partly because of climate change. But livestock is the biggest driver of climate change, and not just by a little. So you want to turn some of this desert land into farmland, but you haven't explained where the water is coming from. And you haven't explained how you're going to reverse the desertification that is partly a consequence of livestock-rearing that you advocate.

Right, I skipped explaining how the problem with water, like so many things in our complex environment, is not a simple numerical comparison between gallons used for this type of production vs. gallons used for that type of production. Water use is bad relative to when it is used and from whence it comes. Much more water used from underground aquifers in winter and/or captured rainwater used anytime for small amounts of desertification reversal ("Dune" baby! yeah!) based on rotational grazing is much better than fractions of that amount used in summer pumped from rivers to irrigate plants that aren't adapted to a particular climate. Which is also necessary to feed our population btw I'm not ready for the Inuit/Eskimo diet just yet. If you pump water out of the Sacramento river in the summer to farm a vegetable, you are doing much worse things to the environment water-wise than someone using ten times the water you are using but getting her water by preventing some of it running to the sea when it rains in winter. I thought I had explained where the water could come from. Yes water in CA is a complicated issue, but not that complicated. Conserve like crazy and minimize waste. Get it when its abundant, save it for when you need it. Move it around minimally with minimal environmental impact.

Livestock can help drive climate change in either direction depending on how its done! I advocate keeping livestock in low densities outdoors in a way that allows them to express their natures and also benefits the land itself. I know that livestock and plant farming is currently causing major environmental impact. I know there's a better way. Some think as long as there's meat there will be CAFO. I think its possible for humanity to do incredible even miraculous things when crystallized by something. I'm hoping the new buzz around food is a start.



If living in a house meant I would be sent to a slaughterhouse, I'm guessing I'd pick the backpacking lifestyle. Just guessing.


You would not jump in a tank with a large great white shark. Because you know it would immediately eat you, and that method of death is more terrifying to you than, say, expiring at your home in your sleep. I think you'd choose the sleep option over the shark option.

Prey animals instinctively understand what they face outside the gate. They stay nearby whenever the gate is open. Spending time with them I've come to understand how the fear of being eaten coupled with obtaining adequate caloric intake is really all encompassing for them. You haven't provided for either of these in your version of their survival on their own in our current world as it stands now. For example, you perhaps are not aware of how vulnerable a chicken is at night, considering that the racoon and skunk exist. A sleeping chicken is like a hibernating animal, it is under a form of paralysis and they cannot even run or fly away. You might choose a reasonable length life with a quick death at home over certain death during the first week of your trip, if you had this handicap especially.

Some of my chickens have chosen the backpacking life, and its part of the costs of outside extensive farming style vs. intensive farming style: you farm outdoors and suffer some loss due to animals leaving and predators.



Why not?


because their DNA now leaves them ill-equipped to deal with life in the wild. In order to produce at profitable levels with the quality needed to sell the food in the marketplaces, these animals over the ages have had to be selected for breeding to physically perform in a way that lends itself to becoming food, not to dodging coyotes and Toyotas, and gleaning enough nutrients to support their bodily requirements. There really isn't much left that's truly wild, and we do not want invasive species there. They either go extinct or they succeed and neither is nearly as good for either them or us as the big picture bargain their DNA has chosen for survival on this planet, being the perfect symbionts with a very successful organism.




Nonsense.


nope. I really believe it. I have seen the improvements take place over neglect or intensive methods farming. Like really big and noticeable. On a large scale, over many generations of our current species trying to survive, its really got a better chance than industrial organic. I'm not asserting that organic is as bad for the planet as non-organic, just that its not as good as going beyond that on a large scale, and using permaculture methods to obtain food instead of the factory farming models that simply hide the negative externalities. The best crop rotations include animals in the rotation, to put back some of the resources that the farmer extracts to share with you and your kin, like wheat/cows/corn, vegi1/vegi2/chickens/vegi3, etc. You get so many benefits in fertility and pest management by rotating small-scale livestock production into a given plot of farmland.




Really? It isn't like they spend their lives in climate-controlled settings. Even in your less abusive setting, they're out in the elements. All the time. They seem better prepared for the backpacking trip than I am.


It takes an significant amount of effort for any of us to be prepared for even a small duration of survival in the wild. First you have to find some wild. You have to be fairly well endowed to benefit from the available resources in this piece of wild if you don't pack in all your food. You just can't extrapolate infinitely across many matings the apparent hardiness of someone's sheep herd in a few days' time. As you pointed out, water is critical, using natural water sources would have a nasty tendency to get you killed. Modern livestock do need a pretty tame pasture in many cases, and a certain amount of effort in environmental adjustment on the part of the farmer. They are outdoors, but not in the worst weather or at night when they would get killed, they eat pasture, but get frequent alfalfa hay hunks as treats, chickens get the high calcium and protein feed they need to lay like they have been bred to do. Allowing chickens to lay healthy eggs for our table is a good use of soy! While they are at it, they additionally do an amazing job of revitalizing an over-disked, nutrient depleted piece of orchard.



Emphasis on the word "can." If only most factory farms permitted it. But they don't. The videos are pretty horrifying and I had to stop watching them a while ago. But one point I remember was castration without anesthesia.


I say ditch that model and go with the stacked functions on a widespread scale. You wont shock me into giving up actually solving problems because the way that other people do it is bad. That just motivates me more to replace them, not to turn my face away.



So now you deny that you cause suffering. There was, some time ago, a story in, I think it was the New York Times, written by someone who as a boy had to slaughter a swan (if memory serves). He told how the birds all crowded in a corner, backing away from him. He picked one and took it away from the others. One would timidly follow; it was the mate of the bird he was about to slaughter, clearly knowing something awful was about to happen, but not wanting to abandon its mate.

I think you're not seeing the fear. I think you're not feeling the pain. But I think your animals feel it nonetheless.


I have had bury several chicken bodies because she failed to go inside at night and instead chose to sleep on the branch of an apple tree. I deny that I cause _more_ suffering than the other options. Suffering is inevitable for all animals, and people too. I minimize it for the livestock and my own family. I do not say that unlimited suffering is OK because some amount is inevitable. Its the other way around. Its inevitable, so lets do what we can to minimize it. They trade a millisecond of fear and pain and a long life for a much longer, more painful, scarier, so much more horrible death experience the first night of their life on their own.

Because I free range, I do allow them to choose, in a way, whether or not to live at my place. I do not clip wings. They are free to come and go during the daytime as they please. Those that go backbacking, they just always get buried by me, headless or sometimes just missing one leg. That must be what you meant by "they only suffer as we deny them habitat?" That was also done without anesthesia. I hate to think of _their_ suffering. I can handle doing it quickly myself for those that stuck with me. They have earned their civilized lives and civilized deaths. They did their part. Concluding their individual lives with a minimum of the fear that we agree is detrimental for a variety of reasons is one part of my obligations to them.



I'm under the impression that once upon a time, we used crop rotation to get around this problem. That solved lots of problems--monoculture vulnerability to various plagues being not the least.


OK, once again, I think you lack the credentials or experience to make this claim. Its very very difficult to do it with legumes alone. Go for it. You try it. Even with Gold Ridge soil, favored by the likes of Luther Burbank, try to grow you a marketable crop of some food on land that you improved with added plant material alone, in a way that pays more than minimum wage for your labor input. If you had a really really good source of plant only compost (there are not enough of these to feed humanity, d'oh) it would still be very difficult. with crop rotation alone, you do not have a chance with most crops. If you did it with human and companion animal compost you could not sell it while simultaneously disclosing that to your customers. Sorry kids, millet gruel again today.



Why do you prefer dealing with livestock manure to human and companion animal waste? It's all pretty disgusting to me. But I gather it can be composted quite effectively.


that is dangerous to the level of hubris. on a risk to human health level that method of food production, hoping that people on a large scale could deal with the risk of micro-organismal contamination would be unacceptable compared to the composted waste of ruminants. I mean the risks around stuff like e-coli and the like are just not there with the grass fed animals these days. Digestive systems are so different between the four-stomach set and the carnivores and omnivores that its probably a whole separate debate. A moot one though, because as I said, you could not be upfront with your customers and do it that way. You'd have to hide your practices like an evil corporation has to.



Livestock's Long Shadow is a report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. I'm guessing they know what they're talking about.


experts have been wrong on just about every topic upon which they have ever opined. First they start out being all wrong, then someone finally figures it out, then they all agree on that one and everyone goes on to being wrong about the next topic. Placing blind faith in the opinions of third party experts is not good critical thinking, especially if there's a risk of applying their conclusions to questions they weren't asking or trying to answer. Likely the report's authors would contend that they were confined by certain assumptions around what is a feasible livestock production model, such as farms have to be large to be viable. Perhaps they would contend that their report was mandated to focus on the livestock production that currently takes place, rather than a report on what is possible if reduced our per-capita intake of meat and changed way we farmed it to be beneficial instead of detrimental. They probably didn't run any hypothetical models around this. They most certainly oversimplified our super complex earth systems if they thought they could compare all livestock farming to all plant farming and assert that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 16.



Hunter-gatherers did it for millenia. Probably we can't go back to that. But your assumption that nature can't take care of itself is breathtaking.


I would suggest a book called "1497" regarding our expanding knowledge of how hunter gatherers modified the environment for their sustainable food production programs. ritual annual pasture burns. Much of the rainforest may have actually been cultivated into edible perrennials. Amazing systems of reservoirs and irrigation supported the Mayans on the Yucatan peninsula until they took their fingers off the environmental dials so they could go fight with their neighbors, who had some different beliefs than them.

You are misquoting me to say I assert that nature can't take care of itself without us. Certainly it can. But the tiny little pockets of it that we have left NOW, impacted by the existence of us all around them now, need our attention for their survival, both in how we attend to our own affairs and how we directly attend to the affairs of the wild-ish-lands, that's the state we have found ourselves in and we cannot turn away now from our responsibility to solve the problems we have ourselves caused. I'm all for hugging trees, as long as its not the ONLY approach to reversing the dramatic speed of current climate change or actually protecting the tree from something like acid rain. The tree cannot protect itself from acid rain, the fact that people think a tree can take care of itself in the face of acid rain is astonishing. Even our native oak trees are impacted by our desire to plant things like Camllias and Rhododendrons which host a pathogen we now call sudden oak death. Yes, I'd suggest we all take a breath, comprehend our current population and its distribution and the current sustainability problems we are facing, and decide whether or not nature can really take care of itself anymore. Likely, on any given management issue related to wildlands, you and I would agree on the right course of action given perfect information. When we can do nothing and get a desirable result, then GREAT! Often we do that, not realizing something else we are doing is having an effect we need to mitigate, and thus get in trouble. Its a form of naivete that most larger environmental groups, like the Nature Conservancy, have moved away from decades ago.



Your sole rationalization for livestock-rearing and meat eating boils down to fertilizing crops. You don't imagine there is any other way of managing the land that doesn't entail the use of livestock manure. You mysteriously treat livestock manure as somehow more holy than human and companion animal waste.

You'll have to forgive me if I find your paradigm less than compelling.

We can sustainably get free energy for our survival by utilizing the sun's energy when we set up systems of food production that mimic successful natural systems. That model can also make a big dent in reversing climate trends that we do not like the more we convert our meat and vegetable production to it. It has a chance to feed us.

Yes, ruminant manure is fundamentally more holy than human and companion animal waste. It is fundamentally different and much more feasible as a model going forward. The type of stomach they have, the type of bacteria that reside in their manure vs. the stomach of the omnivore or the carnivore is the main problem. Perfectly done composting can solve a lot of the problem, but the precautionary principle plus the need for financial efficiency would incentivize us to use the more readily available sustainable form of fertility for our food production.

My rationalization is about the sustainable survival of humanity as a species (and by extension the rest of life as we know it, since we all live on the same planet). It is about changing our food production system so that much if it can be produced in local soils which are just getting better and better every year instead of the other way around. Its about finding solutions that will work, testing them, proving them, then sharing them with others so humanity can continue to ratchet up our knowledge and thus chance at making it long haul. If we can produce food while sinking carbon and actually adding resources to the land instead of just extracting them, we also get climate mitigation in addition to wholesome local food.

Healthier, greener grass stays green longer in the summer, and holds more water. Land that has this fertility infusion does much better than land without it, and this likely means that much more carbon is sunk into that pasture as annually fertility improves. I think crop rotation with legumes and based on a couple of other things like plant family or susceptibility to the same pests is a necessary skill for a farmer to have in her toolkit despite being not the whole answer it is important. But when you think about environmental problems like climate chaos or ocean acidification you gotta go for the big numbers, that's why farming based on a thriving community of soil micro-organisms seems like the way to go to me. If you can get several orders of magnitude more organic matter into our local soils, well, you have just sunk a climatalogically significant amount of carbon. We can let plants and animals do this for us working together in ways that mimic the wisdom of nature, or we can continue to try the tractor/bags of stuff approach. I'm betting the latter method sequesters orders of magnitude less carbon/sq ft than the former.

I'm not interested in other justifications for meat eating for the purpose of this thread. I only attacked the falsehood that all livestock are bad for the planet. The personal health and happiness issues are up to people to decide for themselves, but the environment is all of our responsibility to understand.

[Thad]

Reading through this I find it amazing you can string this together on the fly, my first thought was this must be a thesis paper with critiques thrown in by your own alter egos, and then perhaps you were god.

Would you make a new thread for I do not have you wordsmith talent nor patience to not just toss one liner synopsis's in frustration

particularly to reference "things that could work" as to using human and companion waste after successfully handling the bacterial/pathogen problem

for instance

Here we are in an advanced nation with our own waste and water problems. Is this over simplistic thinking that two problems can be resolved by the inclusion of one new element, a solar evaporation treatment that simultaneously returned water through flash evaporation, killed off biological activity and left the remaining materials to be separated by centrifuge?




Right, I skipped explaining how the problem with water, like so many things in our complex environment, is not a simple numerical comparison between gallons used for this type of production vs. gallons used for that type of production. Water use is bad relative to when it is used and from whence it comes. Much more water used from underground aquifers in winter and/or captured rainwater used anytime for small amounts of desertification reversal ("Dune" baby! yeah!) based on rotational grazing is much better than fractions of that amount used in summer pumped from rivers to irrigate plants that aren't adapted to a particular climate. Which is also necessary to feed our population btw I'm not ready for the Inuit/Eskimo diet just yet. If you pump water out of the Sacramento river in the summer to farm a vegetable, you are doing much worse things to the environment water-wise than someone using ten times the water you are using but getting her water by preventing some of it running to the sea when it rains in winter. I thought I had explained where the water could come from. Yes water in CA is a complicated issue, but not that complicated. Conserve like crazy and minimize waste. Get it when its abundant, save it for when you need it. Move it around minimally with minimal environmental impact.

...

[edie]

A person cannot eat food without something dying either directly or indirectly. There is nothing more natural than one thing dying so that another may eat. If a person wants to float through nature, picking and eating leaves as you soar then maybe nothing would die as a result, but if you step on the ground during your forage then you will crush millions or even billions of life forms under your feet. These deaths are a direct result of your hunger. If you till soil to plant you vegetables then you will kill trillions of life forms and these deaths will be a direct result of your hunger. To be able to eat with out anything dying on your behalf is an urban fantasy. To decide that the value of this living creature is greater than the value of that living creature is purely self serving on the part of the eater. I guess it wouldn't carry much weight to mention that plants are every bit as much alive as your dog, your children, your lover, the cows in the slaughter house and the mold in for refridgerator.
*****perfect! right on....talking about cruel: Humans make wars like no other animal... and kill for what... Talking about farming: Estimated 75% of Sonoma County's farmland are grapes- any old farmer would tell you that's completely out of proportion... Water for grapes seems to be more important than for people....etc, etc etc... How about balance? A little bit of everything available?

[n4rky]

Feltonius,

Two things strike me about your post. First, conceptually you shift from holy livestock manure to a mysterious composting process for human waste. In fact, there is nothing terribly mysterious about a composting toilet.

Human waste must be composted separately because it composts at a higher temperature (ten degrees, if memory serves). Otherwise, there's no magic to it.

Second, you appear to have an interesting concept of ecology which includes humans and includes livestock and includes plants but excludes predators such as wolves and mountain lions. It saddens me that such species must prey on others but I accept their right to exist and thrive as much as I do any other animal species. They do not have a choice.

Humans, on the other hand, do have a choice. We can, as I've written before, make a choice that's better for our health, better for the earth, and better for other animals.

[n4rky]

*****perfect! right on....talking about cruel: Humans make wars like no other animal... and kill for what... Talking about farming: Estimated 75% of Sonoma County's farmland are grapes- any old farmer would tell you that's completely out of proportion... Water for grapes seems to be more important than for people....etc, etc etc... How about balance? A little bit of everything available?

This is a topic for another thread. I agree however that Sonoma County is growing way too many wine grapes. I understand that grape growers can reliably make ten times as much per acre as apple growers in their best years (I don't know how accurate that is). This is an excess resulting from capitalism, in which some production is valued more highly than other production, not for rational reasons but for arbitrary reasons.

As for the wars, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the expanding influence of the military industrial complex in his Farewell Address. C. Wright Mills, in 1958, warned of the common social and economic interests of the elites of three main hierarchies in U.S. society: the military, the economic, and political. Mills warned that these elites would direct their hierarchies to serve similar ends. Now, with the revolving doors between these elite positions, we can say that they have merged into a single elite, which as is apparent from failings of the Obama administration (https://benfell.livejournal.com/291110.html), has little interest in what people want.

Humans eating animals, irrational capitalist preference, and the detachment of the elite are all problems I associate with hierarchy. We have--as a species--gotten ourselves into quite a mess and our elites are incapable of even conceiving a way out of that mess. We need to make some changes (https://benfell.livejournal.com/246558.html) if we are to survive.

[feltonius]

Feltonius,

Two things strike me about your post. First, conceptually you shift from holy livestock manure to a mysterious composting process for human waste. In fact, there is nothing terribly mysterious about a composting toilet.

Human waste must be composted separately because it composts at a higher temperature (ten degrees, if memory serves). Otherwise, there's no magic to it.


sure, for any given particular composting toilet, it can be made to work. Would I bet my kids' future on setting up a food system based on millions of farmers all doing that just right? No. It seems preposterous to me personally.



Second, you appear to have an interesting concept of ecology which includes humans and includes livestock and includes plants but excludes predators such as wolves and mountain lions. It saddens me that such species must prey on others but I accept their right to exist and thrive as much as I do any other animal species. They do not have a choice.

I dont feel that way at all. I think its great that there are noble predators out there. They have an important role to play. Do they play that role best when we all achieve such enlightenment as we decide to free all of our livestock, that evolved in our tame pastures protected by us, who cannot survive against them? No, let predators eat the prey that co-evolved with them.



Humans, on the other hand, do have a choice. We can, as I've written before, make a choice that's better for our health, better for the earth, and better for other animals.

Right. Set up closed fertility loop agricultural systems involving plants and livestock. We have no choice but to feed our population as is required for our survival. I want a nice climate for my kids to live in and I have yet to hear a compelling argument that comprehends food production intimately and provides a viable solution that does not involve livestock. I just can't get over that I can't prove that a lack of livestock would not be better for the earth, unless it came with a lack of people also. That would undeniably be better for the earth and the other animals. I think that imagining you can do more for the planet by not eating meat than you can by eating less meat but grown in a climate friendly way is urban myth. Its easier to be reactive than proactive. But my kids deserve a proactive response to the problems of our environment.

[theindependenteye]

>>> The line that vegans attempt to draw is on avoidable suffering. We don't have much choice but to walk on the ground. We don't have much choice but to drive. These are largely unavoidable.
>>>And indeed a plant is as alive as an animal.
>>>But does the plant suffer? Do the insects who fly in the way of speeding trucks suffer? At some point, it becomes doubtful that there is enough of a nervous system functioning to experience that.

Nice thing about Wacco discussions: few mind how far off-topic things go.
That said, I have nothing to say about the experience of vegans, as I'm not one, or to take sides on a pro-cheese or anti-cheese debate. Just an query about the above:

What constitutes "suffering"? Physical pain? If that's the criterion, then possibly coming up behind a chicken or cow and blowing its head off would reduce the suffering down to a micro-milli-second and offer it less suffering than allowing it to die at an advanced age from natural causes. Or is it the "anticipation" of suffering, which probably reduces the number of species involved to those we humans regard as more "sentient."

But if we try to de-anthromorphize our interpretation, overcoming our propensity to understand animals' emotional expressions in terms of our own, then "suffering" starts to depend on the signs of presence or absence of a survival instinct.

So how far down the ladder do we need to go to find an organism without a survival instinct? Can anything survive without one? Most individual ants will run the other way if confronted by a giant finger, and while bees may sacrifice themselves individually, they're certainly defending the hive, which we could say, in this case, *is* the actual organism. Plants evolve self-protective mechanisms, and trees will grow toward the sunlight; basic evolutionary theory posits that survival is at the very core of all life forms. So where's the dividing line, or is there one, aside from our own individual feelings?

Again, I'm not arguing that there is none, or that vegan or vegetarians are spinning fantasies: I'm really, honestly, asking opinions about your own criteria (across all spectra of menu plans) for what defines the line of acceptable violation of another organism's lifestyle.

Peace & joy--
Conrad

[n4rky]

What constitutes "suffering"? Physical pain? If that's the criterion, then possibly coming up behind a chicken or cow and blowing its head off would reduce the suffering down to a micro-milli-second and offer it less suffering than allowing it to die at an advanced age from natural causes. Or is it the "anticipation" of suffering, which probably reduces the number of species involved to those we humans regard as more "sentient."

But if we try to de-anthromorphize our interpretation, overcoming our propensity to understand animals' emotional expressions in terms of our own, then "suffering" starts to depend on the signs of presence or absence of a survival instinct.

So how far down the ladder do we need to go to find an organism without a survival instinct? Can anything survive without one? Most individual ants will run the other way if confronted by a giant finger, and while bees may sacrifice themselves individually, they're certainly defending the hive, which we could say, in this case, *is* the actual organism. Plants evolve self-protective mechanisms, and trees will grow toward the sunlight; basic evolutionary theory posits that survival is at the very core of all life forms. So where's the dividing line, or is there one, aside from our own individual feelings?

Those are fair questions. Vegans are hardly unanimous as to the answers. I think most vegans do anthropomorphize animals to some degree; we are functioning from a sense of empathy which is, by definition, a claim that we can feel as another (in this case, non-human) does.

Empathy is a virtue but an accusation of anthropomorphism is an argument that humans cannot empathize with non-humans, that our ways of knowing and of experiencing are too different.

My response is an extension of feminist epistemology, which I'm reading about in Lorraine Code's What Can She Know? Code very effectively skewers the idea that anyone knows anything as an individual. Somehow, we know it as part of a group. Yet we have some very weird ideas about knowers worthy of the name and about knowledge worthy of the name, based in part on a concept ethicists might recognize as the autonomous man. I'm plodding through all this in Code's book. I don't have anything like the background in philosophy needed to give it a proper analysis, but I recognize a number of highlights.

If we extend our community beyond humans, to include non-humans, it follows that we know with them as well as with other humans. And so I think empathy becomes possible and would be recognized as such by anyone with a companion animal. From our perspective, it becomes arrogant to claim otherwise. (Which is quite a turn on the usual understanding of anthropomorphism as human arrogance.)

With this analysis, I think I bypass the need to address your question about survival instinct. If we can empathize with a creature, then we can assume a survival instinct without worrying about how far down (what is, by the way) an arbitrary order of animals it extends. And I think this has much to do with many vegans' decision to draw their lines at anything with a face.

[Barry]

You folks might be interested in this: https://www.waccobb.net/forums/waccoreader/61660-nyt-sorry-vegans-brussels-sprouts-like-live-too.html#post103610

[seanpfister]

> I'm really, honestly, asking opinions about your own criteria (across all
> spectra of menu plans) for what defines the line of acceptable violation of
> another organism's lifestyle.

In the middle ages, it was thought that animals couldn't feel pain--cows, goats, dogs, horses--because they didn't have souls. So there was no problem with beating, abusing them or eating them. It's the position taken by Thomas Aquinas (and Aristotle)--it says that because we're rational, nature (or God) has made all of creation for us. In other words, there's a hierarchy, and humans are at the top; everything else is subordinate. These questions about whether animals feel pain are echos of this same position. So those of us who eat animal flesh are essentially taking the position of the medieval Church or that of Aristotle, which is "I have more right to the chicken's own flesh than it does."

[edie]

Mongoles in Russia lived and still live mostly on meat, vegies don't grow in the snow, it's wintertime all year round- or most of the time. Should they start eating snow? I don't know how many trees they have. Perhaps they have to wait for more global warming to be able to grow vegies. E

[n4rky]

Mongoles in Russia lived and still live mostly on meat, vegies don't grow in the snow, it's wintertime all year round- or most of the time. Should they start eating snow? I don't know how many trees they have. Perhaps they have to wait for more global warming to be able to grow vegies. E

I'm trying very hard to be polite about questions like this.

But I've got one guy arguing that composting human waste is too complicated and at the same time arguing for a segregated ecology. Now I've got somebody arguing that the Mongols "in Russia" can't do it.

The polite thing to do is to simply ignore questions like this. Because these aren't questions seeking answers. These are questions desperately grasping for excuses. You guys are getting pretty desperate.

[Thad]

No comment as to Barry's post? Are questions that are only answerable by your position valid?

Try this out.

Rape is an acceptable and daily occurrence in the barnyard by the Rooster. Do the hens have the same rights as human females to not be molested?

In answering that, what other rights might they 'not' have in common with humans?


I'm trying very hard to be polite about questions like this.

But I've got one guy arguing that composting human waste is too complicated and at the same time arguing for a segregated ecology. Now I've got somebody arguing that the Mongols "in Russia" can't do it.

The polite thing to do is to simply ignore questions like this. Because these aren't questions seeking answers. These are questions desperately grasping for excuses. You guys are getting pretty desperate.

[seanpfister]

Rape is an acceptable and daily occurrence in the barnyard by the Rooster. Do the hens have the same rights as human females to not be molested?

In answering that, what other rights might they 'not' have in common with humans?


Yes Thad. The next time a hen refuses the advances of a rooster, you should explain to the rooster that "no means no". I should think this would be obvious. Unless you don't actually know what the roosters and the hens are communicating to each other. How exactly do you go about distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual chicken couplings?.

[edie]

Yes Thad. The next time a hen refuses the advances of a rooster, you should explain to the rooster that "no means no". I should think this would be obvious. Unless you don't actually know what the roosters and the hens are communicating to each other. How exactly do you go about distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual chicken couplings?.
******put a sign "NO RAPING CHICKS" around his neck... but, it doesn't always work with human roosters, why should it work with barnyard roosters?

[C Tut]

This thread that started off talking about veganism has digressed to Chicken rape! LMAO! Y'all are hysterical!

[djmama]

Chicken rape. Really. Yes, it is a stressful time. Hoping to bring the thread back close to where it began, I invite one and all to Gaia's Garden (formerly Govindas) for a free Breathetarian lunch on Christmas Eve. We will bring you a bowl, you can breathe in deeply and leave refreshed and free of all bad karma. Or, if you prefer, have a cheap vegan lunch. In any case, best wishes to one and all.

Susan