{"id":195,"date":"2010-06-18T20:06:49","date_gmt":"2010-06-18T10:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=195"},"modified":"2015-02-23T16:04:56","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T06:04:56","slug":"abc-life-matters-a-vegetarian-love-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/abc-life-matters-a-vegetarian-love-in\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Aedy’s ABC Life Matters, A vegetarian love-in"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone feel like reading a couple of hundred posts by a pack of white middle-class professional holier-than-though people convinced they are morally superior because they choose to not eat meat; engaging in a session of mutual back-scratching?\u00a0 If so, check out the vegetarian\u00a0diatribe on ABC Life Matters<\/a>\u00a0with Presenter Richard Aedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was going to call it a ‘discussion’ but that would be entirely misleading.\u00a0 It’s actually just one big mutual ego-massaging session full of dull people obsessed with\u00a0themselves and bagging anyone\u00a0who has the temerity to admit they eat meat.\u00a0 Inevitably, there’s also a slice\u00a0who bang on about spirituality, morality etc, but without any in-depth discussion.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s about as deep as a Bedourie puddle.\u00a0 There’s\u00a0not even the slightest mention of\u00a0related issues such as sustainability, recycling, native plant gardens, weed control, water quality & quantity management or population control.\u00a0 No, it’s simply ‘I don’t eat meat so the planet will be a fabulous place as a result.’\u00a0 And there’s no mention of\u00a0how ‘mustn’t harm a creature on the planet’ disciples deal with such realities as\u00a0rat infestations.\u00a0 (Rats are very smart creatures and make great pets.\u00a0 But feral rats are a disease-carrying scourge.\u00a0 Do vegans believe in ratsack, or do they share their homes with vermin?)<\/p>\n

And do any of these people produce any food themselves?\u00a0 Well I couldn’t find a single person on the forum that mentioned growing their own food.\u00a0 Only endless talk (and whining) about what they eat\u00a0that others have slaved to produce for them\u00a0(and packed, transported, retailed, etc). \u00a0I doubt any have ever patted a cow or seen possum abodes bulldozed to make way for a soya bean crop to produce their tofu.\u00a0 Let alone thought about the ethical dilemmas of what to do about\u00a0such problems as domestic and feral\u00a0cats – which of course\u00a0eat native animals, from birds to reptiles; and the issue of ‘if you are a vegan and one of your children gets an illness that can only be treated successfully by using animal-derived products, would you do\u00a0go ahead with treatment\u00a0or not?’\u00a0 And what about the reality that if all the world’s food was grown organically, many more thousands of people would die of starvation each year?\u00a0 And that if no-one ate meat, many more millions of hectares of native vegetation would have to be clearfelled, annually, in order to produce sufficient protein to feed the world? \u00a0But no, those big complicated ethical dilemmas are all\u00a0a bit too tricky to consider; and anyway when you’re busy trotting off to the local lab to get\u00a0your iron levels tested every five minutes (at taxpayer’s expense), and there’s dinner to think about, there’s no time.<\/p>\n

At a guess, more than 90% of these contributors would live in particular suburbs in southern capital cities; 90% plus\u00a0would be uni educated; and the vast majority would never have met a farmer – let alone spent enough time working on a farm to have obtained a solid understanding of at least one form of agriculture and the realities of the essentials of life.\u00a0 Let alone have the slightest grasp of the balance of the web of life and the term ‘everything in moderation’ (including self-obsession).\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have enormous respect for anyone producing a serious quantity of food for themselves to eat – whether they are vegan, vegetarian or omnivores.\u00a0 But for a pack of pen pushers who’d be flat out\u00a0fitting an orange tree into their\u00a0Paddington Terrace\u00a0courtyard\u00a0to go banging on about a topic they clearly know absolutely nothing about, as if they are experts with superior food production knowledge when they actually wouldn’t\u00a0recognise a food producer if they fell over one, \u00a0is utterly exasperating.\u00a0 Where do you start educating such people?!\u00a0 Hmmm I guess first they have to extract their heads, so they can at least see and hear.\u00a0 Those they mix with all agree with them, so their one-eyed views are just consolidated by their mates – it seems like\u00a0absolute gospel\u00a0to them (‘everyone knows that…’ becomes an absolute truth for them).\u00a0 On the rare occasions they meet anyone who dares to disagree with them, they write these dissenting comments off as ‘defensiveness’ and ‘guilt’ for eating ‘poor defenceless animals’. \u00a0Yet these vegetarian prophets, yapping on about how many years they’ve been vegan and how they’ve got\u00a0iron levels now higher than they had when they ate meat, are under the illusion that they’re actually having a discussion.\u00a0 When in fact it’s just a massive monologue.<\/p>\n

It is all summed up by someone called Chris, who wrote:\u00a0\u00a0‘…and Sir Robert Hutchinson said “Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to\u00a0fill a man with wind and self righteousness.” (Address to the BMA, 1930).\u00a0 Spot on, Chris, but I’d add massive hypocrisy to the list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone feel like reading a couple of hundred posts by a pack of white middle-class professional holier-than-though people convinced they are morally superior because they choose to not eat meat; engaging in a session of mutual back-scratching?\u00a0 If so, check out the vegetarian\u00a0diatribe on ABC Life Matters\u00a0with Presenter Richard Aedy.\u00a0 I was going to call […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,7],"tags":[147,179,227],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195"}],"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=195"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4425,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195\/revisions\/4425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}