Dear Stanford
Students...
Of all the paid survey
sites I’ve found...Yougov has separate sites in other countries that operate by
other rules, but Yougov US is the best survey
site. They don’t collect personal information; they don’t use up your cell
phone minutes or allow anyone else to do; they don’t sell your contact
information to spammers; they don’t waste your time, as many sites do, loading
screen after screen of personal questions and then telling you you’re not in
the right demographic group to take the actual survey. Your Yougov demographic
information is stored and used to filter surveys so you only open surveys for
which you get points. They’re legitimate; if you don’t shop much it can take
months to earn a giftcard, but they do deliver those cards. (I took one to Michaels again last week.) If you’ve not
already joined Yougov, you can join all by yourself, but both you and I get
points if you join using this link.
Because they don’t
exploit and abuse respondents, or demand information that respondents are going
to falsify, Yougov is trusted by polling companies too. When I saw that
Stanford students were using a Yougov survey to do a research project, I was
chuffed. Yougov has arrived!
The actual project,
however, left me with more to say than a survey form has room for, and I think
it’s worth a post.
First of all, I don’t
know whether a confrontational, judgmental approach was what the students
intended. If it wasn’t, they must be awfully young students, and I recommend
that they read
Business Speak
before they next communicate with full-grown adults.
 |
| Fun fact: Elgin didn't like the original cover of Business Speak and reworked the second edition into (almost) a different book, to go with its different title. |
The survey began by
asking participants to watch a very icky live video of the slaughter of animals
for meat.
Fair disclosure: I’ve
never been the one who went out and killed the steer or the rooster, but many’s
the time I’ve cut up and cleaned his body. I know where meat comes from. If
it’s fit to eat, it comes from a young healthy animal who was enjoying life
before he was killed, probably by someone he’d always considered a friend. If
the animal was not killed by a close friend at his home, however, he probably
spent his last days in a filthy, crowded slaughterhouse, where he was
undoubtedly exposed to contagious diseases and probably overdosed with
antibiotics, may have been injured in a fight over crowded standing space, and
was probably fed hormones at doses that probably made him feel sick. He
wouldn’t be used for human food if he’d reached a stage where cancer became
visible, but he may have had cancer. Slaughterhouses use machines to kill
animals; they’re supposed to be humane and efficient, but if the animal wiggles
about they may be inefficient and disgusting. And, in another shocking disclosure, all babies are made by adults doing
things adults have told you not to do or think about.
After watching the
video the survey proceeded to ask how often respondents eat different kinds of
food, including the meat of which we’d just watched the ugliest moments of the
commercial production. Then it asked whether our plans to eat those meat
products had changed as a result of watching the video. If not, why not?
This is very similar to
the “How could you...” vap discussed in
Business
Speak
(new link for a newer edition). It’s a valid question, and since the questions pop up on a computer
screen there’s no obnoxious spoken intonation to identify the “How
could you” verbal attack. The words “how
could you” weren’t actually used. Nevertheless, the effect of the survey was a
lot closer to “How
could you do such
a horrible thing!” than to “If you (or ‘some people’) intended to do X, how
could you/they address or accomplish Y?”
Partly that was because
the survey included a few teenybopper questions like “Are you aware of the
concept of eating less meat as a way to protest the disgusting, unhealthy,
inhumane practices of the commercial slaughterhouses?”
Oh, children...I can’t
imagine a literate adult not being
aware of that concept. It’s older than I am; I’m only about fifty. When I was a
child we never bought chicken at the grocery store. We ate chicken at family
gatherings, where one of my older cousins would go out and call one of his tame
animals into the back yard and kill it. We didn’t buy chicken from people who
weren’t as kind to their fowl as we were. “Why Your Daddy Turned Down the Job
at the Commercial Chicken Farm” used to be a bedtime story my mother told my
brother and me.
I’ve phased in and out
of being vegan. My body does not absorb protein from wheat; some years it seems
to be getting enough protein from rice and beans and peanuts, some years not.
Currently I buy chicken, turkey, and sometimes fish, when I can afford them,
for the bonding ritual of Sharing My Own Food With the Cats. Often the cats eat
kibble and I eat beans or nuts. I don’t complicate my life with any commitment
to be a full-time vegan, but I have vegan days.
Because I’m one of
those who find it easier to follow a McDougall-type diet (more complex carbs,
less protein, minimal fat) than an Atkins-type diet (more protein, fewer carbs,
lots of fat), I could be tempted to agree with Dr.
John McDougall
that a plant-based
diet is The Way (for everyone) To Go. Research shows that either a McDougall
diet or an Atkins diet is better than the restaurant-food diet advertisers want
to sell us, either may work for some people, and neither works for all people.
Grandma Bonnie Peters has been happily “McDougalling” for many years but some
people say they become listless and depressed when they go vegan. I refer those
people to Dr. McDougall, who will tell them to go ahead and have a
fat-and-protein “feast” once or twice a month if they feel the need, but if I’ve learned one thing from the celiac gene it’s
that humans are diverse.
We are not all
designed to eat the same things.
 |
| These recipes will lure carnivores over to the vegan table. And I can tweak this diet, easily, into something that works for me--though it's not cheap. I feel no need to lay a guilt trip on those who say they can't. |
Human bodies run on
different types of fuel. A majority of humans can digest wheat efficiently, as
long as it’s natural wheat, not soaked in glyphosate, as most wheat sold today
has been. A majority of humans can digest cow’s milk efficiently only in early
childhood. The minority genes for the opposite of these traits occur
separately, but in an overlapping area, in Britain and Western Europe. The “strong
form” of the celiac gene fairly well proves descent from certain specific
families in Ireland. There are also genes for about half a dozen specific
patterns of alcohol intolerance, of which the most common is found in a
majority of both Irish and Native American populations, suggesting that those
ethnic groups weren’t separated as widely for as long as many people think.
Some people think there are genes for fat tolerance, too. Some have even found
correlations between food tolerance and blood type, and recommended four
different types of diet...Much remains to be learned. I feel perky on a low-fat
vegan diet, and so do all the people I’ve known well who’ve tried one. That’s
no guarantee that other people will.
However, what we know
about Stone Age cultures suggests that more humans are likely to have evolved
to live mostly on plant products than to need a high-protein, high-fat diet.
The explosion of “eating disorders” in the mid-twentieth century reflected several
things; one of them was that many bodies instinctively rejected the
high-protein, high-fat diet that had been “scientifically” recommended to
American families based on the proportion that worked best for rats. Most of
our metabolisms are not that much
like rats’.
What I believe is
really unhealthy is our cultural tolerance for Food Bullies who think everyone
should eat the same thing. If people want to make it their mission to change
the way Americans eat, I’d recommend that as the problem they should tackle.
How can we become a culture where a conversation like,
A: “No, thanks.”
B: “Why not? It’s good! It’s good for you! Much healthier than that stuff I’ve seen
you eat...”
—generates universal
agreement that B should not be allowed to eat at the same table with other
humans. People need to tune out this kind of obnoxious “peer pressure” and pay
attention to what works for their bodies.
I don’t like bacon.
I’ve observed living hogs and felt that, like possums, hogs are animals I don’t
care to touch, dead or alive. I’ll agree that pork fat, like cat urine, smells
yucky in its natural state but yummy when it just starts to burn, when some of
its chemical components carbonize. The rich aroma of sizzling bacon doesn’t
make me want to eat it, any more than the rich aroma of charring cat cage
liners makes me want to eat those. If you enjoy bacon, fine. You can have my
share of it. Just don’t ask me why I don’t want it, because I don’t want to
become the sort of person who talks about this kind of thing at the breakfast
table, and I will.
My body is my own. Your
body is your own. None of us should ever allow anybody to tell us what to eat.
Information about nutrients generally, and food contamination alerts, and
recipes, are fine...but don’t even think about telling me how bad something
that doesn’t make me sick is “for me,” and how I should be eating something
that does make me sick, instead, even if it works for you.
A primary reason why
I’m not a full-time vegan is that I do belong to one of those Irish families
that have the gene for full-blown celiac sprue, which is even yuckier than it
sounds. I can’t eat anything containing any form of wheat, or any kind of
cheese, without being sick. Any exposure to glyphosate makes me sick. As a
result the list of things I can safely eat has become very short, in recent
years, and I’m not about to add any optional
boycotts to a list of dietary restrictions that’s already unnecessarily,
and non-negotiably, very long.
Ask anyone who’s been
successfully living with the celiac gene during the past twenty years, and I’m
sure you’ll get the same answer. If the people who raise food we can eat, without immediate physical
distress, also run an abortion clinic so they can burn fetal tissue on their
backyard grill and dance around it howling “Hail Satan,” probably most of us
are going to continue buying from them. It would be nicer to buy more food from
a nice local farm, but since Big Government has handed Big Agriculture enough
regulations to strangle all the ones we used to know, we’ll probably continue
buying from the Satanists. That’s just a fact of life these days.
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| I liked this book. I recommend it...to non-celiacs. I also blame it for 90% of all the unhappiness in my childhood, which came from constantly trying to eat things I was not built to digest and consequently feeling sick. |
I first read Diet for a Small Planet in grade two. I
learned all about how, if everyone on Earth could eat bread and cheese, there’d
be enough for everyone who was alive in 1970 to eat bread and cheese every day.
Nice theoretical thought! The fact is that everyone on Earth can’t eat bread and cheese. The majority
of humans worldwide can’t eat dairy products, and celiacs can’t eat wheat
products. For me bread and cheese is poison. I might as well try making lunch
out of D-Con sprinkled with Sevin Dust. And I’m sure you food bullies
would just love to discuss how bread and cheese affect my body right at your lunch
table. Not.
I went to a Seventh-Day
Adventist college. They used to serve those Worthington and Loma Linda soybean
loaves and sausages and so on, at almost every meal. I ate those things. I
liked them. In those days the soy wasn’t saturated with glyphosate and I had no
idea that the wheat was what was making me so ill. It was the 1980s; we thought
minor illness was psychosomatic and the cure was to deny it and push yourself
to act perky. I denied, I pushed, I acted perky, I crashed and burned. I had
mononucleosis for most of two dang years and, having been in Michigan when I
got that disease, I hadn’t even kissed anybody. Mono is caused by a virus, and
the strain that contaminated a batch of vaccine (that I didn’t need) against a
trivial disease (that I’d already had) in Michigan was a particularly nasty
virus, but I’m sure that that “healthy” wheat-based diet contributed to my
“chronic mononucleosis, opportunistic hepatitis” experience.
I have lived through a lot of unnecessary pain that was caused
by allowing anyone outside my own body to tell me what I “should” eat. At least
I’ve learned, thoroughly, that there
is no single diet for the whole planet. People are different. People absorb
different protein in different ways. People have evolved to live in different
places where different foodstuffs grow. I can safely eat some things, like
(unpoisoned, non-GMO) peanuts, that are poisonous to some people. Some people
can safely eat some things, like wheat, that are poisonous to me.
North America has long
been, and is still, a place where delicious, nutritious vegetables grow well.
Our problem is that big industrial-model farms want to nurture pest species by
monocropping and try to control them by spraying poison on them. Possibly
Americans would eat more vegetables if we hadn’t had reactions to the poisons
humans have added to those vegetables. I like garbanzos, but since they’re
often planted in glyphosate-drenched soil in rotation with wheat, I can’t eat
very many garbanzos very often. I love strawberries, but since they have no
peel to speak of and soak up poisons sprayed into the air like little sponges,
I have to plan around the possibility of being sick for a few days after eating
strawberries. I like corn, but when it’s been genetically modified to be more like
wheat so that it can be saturated with glyphosate, I know better than to expect
corn to like me.
Animals eat poisoned
plant-derived food, so meat isn’t safe either...but generally the ratio of
glyphosate to food is still considerably lower in meat than it is in grains and
beans. In recent years, as farmers have been encouraged to spray this
particular poison right on food, Americans who like vegetables are being conditioned to avoid vegetables, and eat
more meat, by our own bodies.
I inherited the “strong”
form of the celiac gene. I have that in common with approximately one of every
ten thousand people of Irish descent and, for all practical purposes, nobody in
any other ethnic group. A “weak” form can be traced back to other parts of
western Europe, including Iceland and Italy, but it’s still a minority gene.
Since glyphosate spraying and GMO crops have become common, though, we’re
reading that one out of five, one out of four, even one out of three North
Americans, not necessarily even those of Western European descent, are having
celiac-like reactions to wheat, soy, and other glyphosate-soaked foodstuffs.
Those people don’t always have any idea what’s making them sick, nor are their
symptoms necessarily easy to identify as celiac-like. They just know they’re
chronically hungry, chronically malnourished, chronically dyspeptic, and if
they switch from eating more meat to eating more grain they’re much more of those things.
 |
| I do not like this diet plan at all, but it works for some people. |
So we have the
Atkins Diet. Reading an Atkins Diet menu makes me queasy but some people choke
down their turkey sandwich with mayonnaise and
milk for lunch and then their beef jerky for a snack and then their
porkchop for dinner, and they feel better than if they’d eaten a peanut butter
sandwich with strawberries, a V-8 for a snack, and a big salad full of
sunflower seeds for dinner. I imagine that that would not have been the case before 1990 but
it is the case today. Even people who enjoyed being vegans before 1990 are
getting sick after enjoying a delicious, comforting, vegan meal like Mother
used to make, today.
 |
| No doctor, Euell Gibbons didn't even follow the special diet he needed, didn't live very long...but his "wild foods" are what I eat a lot of these days. If you live in the country and can trust your neighbors, these are a few things it's still safe to eat while Irish. |
I don’t buy a lot of
supermarket vegetables these days. I eat what grows in my own garden, much of
which are not supermarket-type vegetables; they’re exotic native plants only
Euell Gibbons and fans used to eat, but my mother happened to be a Euell
Gibbons fan. I have a patch of violets in the not-a-lawn. When they bloom, I
think “How pretty!” and then I think “How tasty!”
I eat about half my violets. That’s my fresh vegetable for the day. Violets are so vitamin-rich that a whole bowlful would cause a Vitamin C overdose, which isn't dangerous, but people for whom I've cooked health food feasts have been alarmed by one.
I used to
enjoy all the vegetables in the supermarket, though. I do not have childish
tastes. I like raw or barely cooked veg; I like the different flavors, bitter,
earthy, watery, pungent, and the crunchy textures. I miss them, now. But the
last time I feasted on fresh corn, which was a big annual celebration for the
old-time Cherokee, I was sick. The last time a farmer gave me some fresh juicy
vine-ripened tomatoes, oh goodness gracious they were good, but I was sick. I
am a human not a vulture, but the last time I ate chicken, even if that chicken
led a miserable life, it passed through my body in peace and did not make me sick.
Stanford students...I
picture them with their fresh young faces, pearly teeth, long glossy black or blonde hair. Who knows what Isaiah meant by saying “
Ye are gods,” or what Jesus meant by
quoting him, but there
is something of what the ancient Roman
Empire called divinity, the goddess of youth, Juventas, about that splendor of
youth and health. Many of Earth’s population, past and even present, feel
something like worship when they look at you. Many people want to do anything
you ask them to. So
whyyy do so many
of us mean, grumpy older people not join your protest against the
meat packers?
I’ve not even
mentioned, nor do I want to go into, the political reasons some of my
correspondents would have put first. I don’t think they’re particularly worthy reasons.
Old Socialist drivel about separating people from family farms, homes, land,
and animals, does tend to mix into
some people’s embrace of a vegan diet; but not others’. I do notice some
vestiges of Old Socialist religious thinking in Stanford’s course
catalogue—home of the economics class titled “Love as a Force for Social
Justice”!—and suspect the students’ young minds-full-of-mush have been
corrupted a little bit, but wotthebleep, Stanford
minds can get over a little corruption once they’re exposed to reality. I do think the students need to
concentrate more on how individualism built the once-provincial United States
and collectivism destroyed the once-mighty Soviet Union.
That is, technically, a
separate issue. If Khrushchev or even Hitler said it was raining, that, by
itself, did not necessarily cause it to stop
raining. Even though socialism as a national policy is unsustainable, from
time to time a socialist does get something right. A vegetarian diet could be
one of those things. Many Americans eat far more meat than their bodies need,
and feel better if they eat a well balanced vegan diet for up to two years at a
time. (Vegetables don’t contain enough Vitamin B-12 for most humans’ needs but
healthy humans manufacture their own Vitamin B-12 in the process of digesting
grain.)
So here are my three
positive recommendations to the Stanford students:
1. All life thrives at
the expense of other life. Humans have the physical traits of animals that need
a mix of plant-based and animal-based food. When we slice into vegetables they
register an electrical shock that is probably more like pain than pleasure. So
a productive discussion of cruelty to other living things needs to accept that
we humans are predators. We kill other living creatures. The question is
whether we mistreat them before we kill them. Try a focus on restoring the
ideal of small communities made up of individuals who raise their own animals
and vegetables. Emphasize how much longer, healthier, and happier cows’ and
hens’ lives are on a small family farm than in a big commercial meat factory.
In the twentieth century we as a nation went considerably too far in the
direction of centralizing too many things. Your focus should consistently be on
decentralizing, on small, on independent, on well separated. Cows are miserable when hundreds of them are packed
into a barn or lot; they’re happy and healthy when two or ten of them are
browsing through a few acres of grass.
2. If you are less than
100% sure that someone else is 100% unaware that something he or she is about
to eat has been poisoned with something that’s 100% fatal, don’t question other
people’s food choices. Ever. Try not to look.
3. Naturally, even if a
totally socialist education had made you ashamed of it, you’d like to see
everyone eating California-fresh vegetables—beautiful California children that
you are. I do like that about you.
So, focus on getting those vegetables glyphosate-free, and otherwise
unpoisoned, so that everyone can safely enjoy eating them.
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| I've yet to read this one, but the evidence just keeps piling up--the title says it all. |
