An article by Natascha Mirosch in the Brisbane Courier Mail on ‘National Vegetarian Week’, is filled with subjective steering such as: ‘most Australians… still have a heavy, meat-based diet’. Heavy? Does she mean like a lead weight? And another beauty: ‘while vegetarians such as…found their way to a meatless diet purely because of a distaste for eating animal flesh…’ Hmmm anyone else pick up on the cannibal inference here? It makes me think of turtles, who are rather partial to snacking on the rotting flesh of animals that have died in boggy watercourses (of course the turtles are just doing what they do to survive, with the side benefit of recycling and cleaning up the environment, but I wonder what Natascha and Sarah would make of the sight of turtles ripping of hunks of rotting flesh – it isn’t what you’d call pretty. I guess they’d tell the turtles to go and tuck into some grass instead?).
Environmental Scientist Sarah Clements ‘comes from a family of environmentalists’ and claims that ‘not eating all that processed food saves a lot of money’. Meat is a processed food? Eggs are a processed food? Perhaps you could call pasteurised milk a processed food, however soy milk – or whatever calcium source vegans obtain in order to avoid dental problems and osteoporosis – is likely to at least as ‘processed’, if not more so. Her claim is backed up by a quoted Sanitarium-commissioned report that estimates ‘”the traditional meat diet costs $127 a person each week” while a vegetarian diet comes in at just over $98 a person’. A grains/cereal company would be a completely objective source of information for a survey like that, of course, wouldn’t they? On average our household of 5 eats meat 6-7 days a week. It’s good quality meat, too. Right now our total grocery bill is $300/week on average, so at $60/head, we’re actually way under the cost of her vegetarian diet (and on $300/week we managed to tuck into a few Sanitarium Weetbix, as well, but we have rethought that after reading about their anti-meating stance).
Sarah Clement is quoted as being an ‘informed’ source due to her consultancy work on U.S. factory farms. Perhaps Sarah would be better advised to educate herself more thoroughly on the differences between agriculture here and in the U.S., and better advised to rail against intensive farming practices (from battery hens, to intensive piggeries and feedlots) rather than tell everyone not to eat meat? And encourage people to stick to free-range eggs, chooks, pork and beef? Surely this would be more effective? She talks of antibiotics running off into our water – sorry but the largest producers of beef in Australia, extensive cattle stations, rarely use antibiotics (or chemical treatments of any kind), so she’s barking up the wrong tree here. As for manure – farmers and gardeners call that fertiliser – free range livestock distribute it throughout their paddocks, and it actually helps improve the fertility and structure of the soil (I recommend Sarah does a bit of reading up on dung beetles, both Australian natives and imported – beetles even do a great job of digging in suburban dog poo). Australia is a relatively flat, low rainfall country with just over 20 million people rather than 300 million so we don’t have the runoff and watercourse issues that the U.S. may have. She also mentions ‘a whole heap of phosphorous’ “polluting” the land. Well most Australian soils are phosphorous deficient – severely so in parts of northern Australia – so hey if cattle increase the level of phosphorous in the environment, then that’s a good thing not bad.
‘Agriculture is a huge user of water’ – yes some agricultural industries do use a lot of water. After air and water, food is the third most essential things human beings need to stay alive. Yes you’d save a lot of water if there was no agriculture, but we’d all be dead. And the agricultural sector that uses the most water is…wait for it…NOT livestock industries, but irrigated farming enterprises. The places that grow the soya beans and lentils that Sarah recommends we base our diets on, plus fruit growing enterprises, plus vineyards (she probably is partial to wine), and of course the largest users of water – rice farms and cotton farms (no doubt she’d wear cotton clothes). Growing linen and hemp for clothes is an option, just as bamboo is, but all these crops require a huge amount of water, and fertile soil. Leather is obviously out of the question and no doubt Sarah doesn’t approve of woolgrowing either, so it looks like she’ll have to wear clothing made from petrochemicals. I don’t suppose the mining industry uses much water, or causes much pollution? And what about all the other industries that use a lot of water, I guess we have to ditch them as well?
Mark Berriman, director of the Australian Vegetarian Society (NSW), is quoted as saying the vegetarian diet is ‘triple-A rated in terms of Earth friendliness’. Oh well I suppose he’s a good independent source of information then, isn’t he. There’s no detail provided, so I guess we’ll just have to believe him without question?
All this is more poorly thought out drivel exhorting us to be ‘environmentally responsible’, when really it’s just yet another pro-vegetarian barrow push. Sarah Clements claims that most of us know meat-eating is damaging the environment but ‘would prefer to continue believing in the free-range and organic myths, and that ‘this head-in-the-sand approach, or conscious ignorance, is used by most of us at some time during our lives.’ Sounds to me like it’s Sarah who has a very large dose of ‘conscious ignorance’ – believing the vegan holier-than-thou mantra that vegetarians/vegans are ‘better’ for the environment than the rest of us who eat a balanced diet from all 5 food groups.