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Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2007 15:16:56 -0500
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: Dave Morris <thecat &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: Re: more reasons to be vegetarian
Status: O

Fun conversation! I'm getting to it late because Danny's efforts got me 
to autosort this entire group into a sub-folder that I now look at only 
rarely.

I think that there's a very wide range of metabolisms amongst humanity 
and that your diet should be catered to your specific metabolism. We 
don't really understand it yet, but some people will do far better or 
worse than others with more or less meat, more or less vegan, etc. Thus 
the unexpected weight gain/loss. And yes, french fries are vegan too, 
so that hurts. :-) I think everyone should optimize their diet as a 
necessary balance between what's healthiest for them, what's ethical 
for the source of their food, what's best for the world, etc. which 
means not being perfect for any of those criteria, nor, for most 
people, perfectly vegan or carnivorous, or any of those things 100%.  
I'm a fan of "mostly". :-)

In my ideal world- all food we eat would come from factories where we 
poured in generic algae and chemicals on one side, and things that 
tasted to me equivalent to hamburgers, pickles, ice cream, (no, I'm not 
pregnant :-)), fondu cheese, etc., would come out the other side. No 
living creatures would be contained in the plant other than the factory 
workers who would not normally be consumed in the process (I'm okay 
with soylent green too.)   So while I tend to support organic farms, 
it's for the ethical not-torturing of animals aspect, certainly not 
long term viability of that solution for feeding the world. I thought 
that was a good point too- we as a species indeed desperately need to 
use high tech high efficiency in our food production or the world will 
be destroyed in the ensuing global warfare far more quickly than the 
environmental damage of factory farms will destroy it. I can afford the 
luxury of expensive pampered meat as a rare delicacy in my diet, and 
I'm okay with that. But if I invest money for global social change and 
improvement- I'll invest in people trying to get that factory up and 
running sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, I think that the damage to the environment by agriculture- 
while non-trivial- is and will be dwarfed by the power needs of 
industrializing third world nations. We could all become vegan right 
now and still be doomed. We lose the ecological diversity of the rain 
forests and other locations, which is very sad and worth fighting, but 
as far as having oxygen left to breath in the future- agriculture won't 
be the problem- the lack of clean power will be the issue.

I hope we ramp down farm subsidies and focus on supply and demand- 
shifting jobs to what's needed etc. This works pretty well. I'm okay 
with short term disaster relief, but supporting a way of life that's 
not viable isn't efficient. Unfortunately soon I think corn will be the 
most popular commodity in the country- as a substitute source for 
gasoline- which is going to damage our ecology from both ends in a way 
that gets worse and worse even though noones eating any of it.  Not 
sure what to do about that.

In regards to Danny's idea about starting a charity, and paying a guilt 
tax on unethical things we do, I'm not so much in favor of that. I'll 
be as vegan as I can afford to be time/$/lifeenergy wise. 
Simultaneously I'll donate as much money as I can to the causes I think 
will have the best/most efficient impact on the world (usually 
education). I'll balance these things continually to optimize good as 
well as I can calculate, and adding another criteria solely based on me 
doesn't seem efficient.

Dave


On Jan 26, 2007, at 7:00 PM, bethany soule wrote:

> on that note, I've been wanting to brush up on my history re: gov't
> subsidies and find out what the current state of affairs is as well.
>
> here are a two resources I've found so far that are useful:
> www.fee.org/pdf/the-freeman/0604Folsom.pdf
> (short bit about the how farm subsidies started)
> http://www.ewg.org/farm/whatstheplan.php
> (more detailed info about current farm subsidies)
>
> Clare, I weighed more when I was a vegetarian, though that was mostly
> other lifestyle factors. Still, I think it's pretty easy to be a lazy
> vegetarian. For example, it's really easy to use dairy as a main
> source of protein in your diet, but that's usually tied to a lot of
> fat too. And there are lots things (like kraft dinner jumps to mind)
> that are cheap and easy to make and vegetarian and calorie dense and
> not so healthy. That probably also contributed.
>
> B
>
> On 1/26/07, Daniel Reeves <dreeves &AElig umich.edu> wrote:
>> The efficiency argument doesn't cut it on its own though.  You 
>> wouldn't
>> take a moral stance against live theatre because of how much more
>> efficient movies are.
>>
>> I think it's really important to have a sense of the true cost of 
>> eating
>> meat, and unconscionable that we're not paying it.  The government
>> subsidies are the first thing that has to go!
>>
>>
>> --- \/   FROM Joshua J Estelle AT 07.01.25 18:34 (Yesterday)   \/ ---
>>
>> >> The text of this article is about how mass farming of meat is bad 
>> for the
>> >> environment, not that eating meat is bad for the environment. If 
>> eating
>> >> meat alone was bad for the environment, then eradicating all 
>> carnivores
>> >> would solve our global warming problem, no?
>> >
>> > It is true that locally raised meet likely has negligible negative 
>> impact and
>> > that the real problem is mass farming of meat, but I think even very
>> > environmentally conscious meat eaters are unlikely to always eat 
>> "good" meat.
>> >
>> >> To change the topic slightly, your article reminded me of a very
>> >> interesting essay by Jared Diamond (the "Guns, Germs, and Steel" 
>> guy)
>> >> claiming that farming was the worst mistake humanity ever made:
>> >
>> > While farming may not also be perfect, it is by far the lesser evil 
>> to eating
>> > meat.  Consider we have to feed 10 people for 1 year.  Then think 
>> about how
>> > much land and resources you would need to feed them a meat eating 
>> diet.  Each
>> > animal they eat will need a tremendous amount of resources to raise 
>> that
>> > animal to be eaten.  Then consider if those 10 people were 
>> vegetarians.  The
>> > amount of land and resources needed to feed them would be 
>> drastically
>> > smaller.
>> >
>> > It's just more efficient to be vegetarian.
>> >
>> > I think I just discovered my short answer to when people ask me why 
>> I'm
>> > vegetarian, "It's just more efficient."
>> >
>> > Best,
>> > Josh
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >> On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Robert Felty wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> Really great article about how eating meat is bad for the 
>> environment.
>> >>> Thanks to Clare for pointing it out to me.
>> >>> You can read it at:
>> >>> http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0120-20.htm
>> >
>>
>> --
>> http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  search://"Daniel Reeves"
>>
>>     "The best way to accelerate a windows machine is at 9.8 m/s^2."
>>
>>
>
>
>
David P. Morris, PhD
Operations Manager and Senior Engineer
ElectroDynamic Applications, Inc.
morris &AElig edapplications.com, (734) 786-1434, fax: (734) 786-3235