on matters of meat

I have just posted on Facebook about the recently released report, Meat Eater's Guide to Climate Change and Health.
Thanks to our friends at the Environmental Working Group, who have produced a very clever little chart which shows us which meats (and animal "products") have the most environmental impact.
Of course this somewhat misses the point, as there are matters of nutrition and ethics to consider. In that respect, any consumption of conventionally-produced food is going to have not just an environmental impact, but major impacts on human health and nutrition plus the attendant ethical issues relating to how these animals are treated.
You would think that it would be easier to simply switch to eating vegan wholefoods. But no. And then enter stage left, George Monbiot with a comment on this book which he read recently. Meat: a benign extravagance, by Simon Fairlie discusses the view that feedlot cattle, fed on grains is not the most effective and efficient way to raise cattle. We knew that. But then he goes on to explain that pigs raised for eating are also deprived of their natural diet (and a few other things that are natural to pigs). If we were to fix this, not only would we be better off in relation to our carbon footprint, but we could - as it were - have our meat and eat it. Not sure that i would want to pursue this path, but i can see how it must make my fellow meat-eaters feel 100% more comfortable about their food behaviours.

All of this is intertwixtedley implicated in how we approach permaculture design solutions. it is an ongoing conversation in the more enlightened of permaculture circles as to how an integrated permaculture design can meet human needs without compromising the needs of (exploiting) non-human animals. Simon Fairlie's view is clearly coloured by his experiences on a permaculture settlement. Interesting. I wonder why he won't name which permaculture community it was.

throw out your microwave!

This, from Dr Gabriel Cousens. I first wrote about him in an earlier post on diabetes.

"A microwave oven decays and changes the molecular structure of the food by the process of radiation, making it a "radiation oven". The Soviet Union banned the use of microwave ovens in 1976. Yet, more than 90 percent of American homes have microwave ovens. The general perception, even among health food professionals, is that whatever a microwave oven does to foods cooked in it doesn't have any negative effect on either the food or the consumer of the food. This is far from the truth."

Cousens goes on to give five pieces of documented evidence, including an article in The Lancet, citing the use of a microwave oven to heat baby formula.

There is a Cure For Diabetes: the Tree of Life 21-Day Program,
by Gabriel Cousens, MD

I have never owned a microwave and, when i ate cooked food, avoided wherever possible food that was heated in a microwave oven. I still cannot believe how many people still use them and in particular people whom i would consider to understand the risks. This includes my friends and colleagues in the so-called health industry.

Hidden Hazards of Microwave Cooking is an article originally published in Acres USA (1994), which cites a lawsuit in Oaklahoma and a study in Switzerland.
What is your microwave doing to your health? the article is sourced from the mercola.com site, but posted on Food Matters.
History of the microwave oven, invented by Dr Percy Spencer in 1946, according to what i could find out.
i wrote about Dr Gabriel Cousens in an earlier post on diabetes, and have just received a copy of his book, There is a Cure for Diabetes. when i opened it, this was the first thing i read.

eat food, not too much. mostly plants

Sounds like good advice. Words of the wise from Michael Pollan. A friend recently saw this article in The Age, spruiking Pollan's book In Defence of Food.

This is not news to me (about eating mostly plants). I first read about it in Colin Campbell’s book, The China Study, which contains the scientific evidence to support the benefits of eating a mostly plant-based diet. In his book, Campbell summarises the results of a longitudinal study providing clear evidence of the relationship between diet and chronic disease.

And this little ditty certainly resonates.

AN EATER'S MANIFESTO
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise.
Avoid foods with health claims.
Prepare, and if you can, grow your own food.
Don't get your food from the same place as your car gets its fuel.

it's a choice: you don't have to be sick

food does matter. this is the newly-released doco from australian filmakers, with the superb John Butler Trio soundtrack. i just watched the trailer online and can't wait to see the entire film.

i guess i've already understood the message through my own journey of becoming sick and then healing, without the use of drugs and pharmaceuticals. i don't need an expert to tell me that the pharmaceutical companies are in the business of making money, not healing people. however, there are still many people who choose not to listen. and it is a choice.

why is food so important to me? because i love the taste, i love the way the energy of food connects me with nature, i love to watch it growing, and i love to be healthy from eating nothing but whole, unadulterated foods.