Just as it is disconcerting to hear admired, talented\u00a0musicians and actors spouting on about politics or issues unrelated to their field of work, it’s disappointing to discover writers and other well known\/famous people,\u00a0doing the same.<\/p>\n
For many years I’ve read and listened to\u00a0the commonsense advice handed out by Dr James Wright.\u00a0 Then this ‘gem’ of ‘health advice’ turned up in ‘The medicine chest’ page in the August edition of our local newspaper’s magazine:<\/p>\n
Q:\u00a0 ‘We are constantly being admonished to be kind, don’t fight, do not kill.\u00a0 Yet every day million of sheep, cattle pigs, poultry are butchered just to satisfy our food needs and ravenous appetites.\u00a0 I find this double standard ethically hard to fathom.’<\/p>\n
A: ‘The million of hectares of grain we grow to feed the animals we then slaughter could much more cost effectively be converted into human food after harvesting, and not fed to animals.\u00a0 Grain in its multiple forms has fed the world for thousands of years.’<\/p>\n
And here was I thinking all these years that Doctor James Wright was a medical doctor, when in fact he is an ethicist by trade?\u00a0\u00a0Very surprising.\u00a0 A fairly oddly worded question.\u00a0 Surely someone who was asking a leading question regarding whether it was a good idea to eat meat, would trot out one of the usual vegetarian scaremonger furphies, such as ‘meat causes cancer’ and ‘meat causes blocked arteries’ etc.\u00a0 Why would a reader be asking Dr James Wright about the ethics<\/em>\u00a0of what they eat?\u00a0\u00a0 Did they ask about the over-fishing factory-ship ethics involved in the canned tuna they scoffed with their lunchtime salad?\u00a0 Or the ethics involved\u00a0in the child labour used to pick the cocoa beans used to make their chocolate?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Personally, I’m looking forward to letter writers burying fashion editors in questions\u00a0along the lines of ‘lots of my friends wear x brand runners, but I’ve heard that the\u00a0people who made them only get paid $1 a day and work in appalling working conditions –\u00a0I find this double standard of comparatively rich, white westerners wearing throw-away fashion produced by poorly paid employees in unhealthy working conditions, ethically hard to fathom.’ \u00a0<\/p>\n I’ve often wondered whether all or most of the supposed ‘questions’\u00a0in advice columns are\u00a0invented.\u00a0\u00a0 In this case,\u00a0‘ravenous appetites’ is more an old-woman way of describing the grandchildren’s eating habits after school, or something totally creepy that someone dodgy gets up to.\u00a0 And as if vegetarians are never ravenous?\u00a0\u00a0Most I know are permanently hungry.\u00a0 And, I seem to recall Dr Wright using the word ‘ravenous’ himself on numerous occasions; lending weight to the suspicion that he wrote this ‘medical’ question himself.<\/p>\n But the answer trotted out is the real gasper.\u00a0 Clearly Doctor James Wright is unaware that in Australia there’s plenty of grassfed beef that has never eaten a single farmed\u00a0grain between birth and the dinner plate.\u00a0\u00a0 Nor is he evidently aware that much of the grain fed to stock is not of a standard deemed suitable for Australian food production\u00a0– i.e. it’s grain that has been downgraded from the higher quality human-consumption grade, due to climatic interference (eg\u00a0insufficient rain)\u00a0to the lower priced stockfeed quality.<\/p>\n And what of the majority of the Australian continent, where it is not possible to grow grain crops, but it is possible to extensively graze cattle on native pastures, producing high-quality protein in harmony with the natural environment?<\/p>\n A quick poke around Dr Wright’s website unearthed this revealing piece of information,\u00a0March 2011:<\/p>\n Q:\u00a0 I am a vegetarian simply because I do not like meat, and to make it worse, can’t stand the smell or taste of fish either. I know I should eat plenty of protein, but what’s left?<\/p>\n A:\u00a0 Plenty.\u00a0 I have been a life long vegetarian by choice.\u00a0 Vegetable sources abound, and are claimed to be as high in protein as fish and animal.\u00a0 It is based on legumes. This includes beans (more than 150 varieties available), lentils, peas, peanuts.\u00a0 Also gluten, the protein part of grains (such as wheat) are protein rich….etc’<\/p>\n Dr James, what about the ethics of destroying the habitat of native animals, something unavoidably necessary for broadacre cropping (essential these days, in order to successfully\u00a0feed our highly urbanised population).\u00a0 Bearing in mind that if human beings aren’t receiving the protein they need from meat, they’ll obviously need to obtain more of it from grains, thus putting more pressure on the natural environment.<\/p>\n Why were people so angry about Cate Blanchett’s public support of the carbon tax?\u00a0 Droves of Cate-worshippers\u00a0wrote in reponse to her critics,\u00a0saying that Cate is entitled to her point of view, so why shouldn’t she voice it.\u00a0 Of course\u00a0Cate Blanchett\u00a0can voice her opinion.\u00a0 If it’s on anything to do with acting, we’re all ears.\u00a0 If she voices an opinion on\u00a0television in a big-budget Federal Government-funded national advertising campaign, and what she is talking about has nothing to do with her field of employment, then people will use their right to an opinion and suggest she should stick to publicly voicing opinions only on what she specialises in.\u00a0\u00a0The fact that she was on a national TV ad implied that because she is a great and well-respected actress, her opinion on topics outside of her line of work carries more weight than the views of the\u00a0average person in the street.\u00a0\u00a0Which is rubbish.\u00a0 The only reason Cate appeared on that ad was because she was famous, but what she was spouting on about had nothing to do with the talent that made her famous – acting – and everything to do with the environment, small business, etc – about which, for all we know, Cate knows diddly squat.\u00a0 She certainly would naturally have no understanding of what it is like to be the average suburban mother with a couple of kids, probably divorced, run ragged trying to run a household and earn enough to cover the basics of life, nor would she know what it is like to run a small business.\u00a0 Nor, as far as I know, does she have any above-average experience or understanding of the natural environment and sustainability.<\/p>\n Does Dr James Wright know anything about agriculture and the environment?\u00a0 He’s just demonstrated that he does not, yet he feels the need to barrow-push vegetarianism on the rest of us as a ‘better’ moral choice.\u00a0 He has just gone and shot the credibility he built up over decades, by doing the same thing as Cate\u00a0– using national media to push a personal opinion\u00a0unrelated to his specific field of talent – healthcare and medical matters.\u00a0 Worse, In Dr James Wright’s case, his vegetarian crusade has been poorly disguised as health advice, when in reality it is\u00a0personal choice.<\/p>\n The day’s advice for the rich and\/or famous, whatever their line of work?\u00a0 When speaking out in public, stick to what you know.\u00a0 Certainly, have\u00a0opinions on everything under the sun – the more the better – but when it comes to voicing\u00a0opinions on things outside your direct sphere of experience, only do it at the neighbour’s barbeque, not on national television, radio or in newspapers.\u00a0 If you start spouting on publicly about issues which do not relate to your particular field of endeavour, then you run the risk of permanently damaging your credibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just as it is disconcerting to hear admired, talented\u00a0musicians and actors spouting on about politics or issues unrelated to their field of work, it’s disappointing to discover writers and other well known\/famous people,\u00a0doing the same. For many years I’ve read and listened to\u00a0the commonsense advice handed out by Dr James Wright.\u00a0 Then this ‘gem’ of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,7,11],"tags":[160,176,179],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1742"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1749,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1742\/revisions\/1749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}