Well some are wacko's so to speak. I think it's a news media thing, we see the extremists. Most people don't fit into that.
One thing that does bother me though is how many are out there using vegetarianism and veganism to promote false religions. Some people's teaching is just filled with New Age mysticism. And I get worried because I often hear Christians parroting the New Age teachings.
One big area of that is for instance the word Organic. Agriculture is what I do, I'm intimately involved in it as the basic level. I have spent a lot of time studying it. You know why Organic makes a distinction with man made fertilizers and chemicals? It's because it is believed that things as found in nature have a life force that is lacking in man made things and this life force is really what nourishes your life force and so you can take two foods, which will test exactly the same nutritionally and the one nourishes your life force and the other doesn't depending on what was used to produce it.
You of course can't measure that life force, that is unless you go and have your aura read by a New Age mystic.
You get a lot of other things mixed in by a lot of people, a heavy streak of anti-establishment by some for instance. This is the only explanation why many antibiotics which are organic under every definition of the word are prohibited from use in animal agriculture by the Organic movement. You know what the latest is? It's been approved for organic animal production to grow mold cultures and feed them to your animals. Know what that is? That's growing the fungi that produce antibiotics and feeding them to the animals to get the increased performance of feeding animals anitbiotics. It's actually exactly what organic agriculture has complained about people doing in what they would call chemical agriculture, only you get rid of much of the quality control. You don't have a good handle on dosage or strength or even which antibiotics are being produced. If it was bad to feed antibiotics why did they now approve doing just exactly that in organic production. Get's back to what man does is bad as the basic philosophy. Antibiotics given in a controlled dosage with a syringe or orally-bad, antibiotics fed as a product of molds-good.
It's pretty dangerous because get contamination in your culture or change the conditions and you move from getting the antibiotics to getting some rather powerful carcinogens. We've been really reducing those fungal carcinogens and people's exposure to them over the years so we see a significant drop in throat and stomach cancers were those types of carcinogens have their strongest effects. Now organic is going to bring them back.
But anyway, many people misunderstand, they think organic means no pesticides, it does not, and they think organic means no fertilizers it does not. Or they confuse it with other things like the social movements that seem to have latched on to organic, such as local production, but those are not the foundational teachings. You can't get certified organic by selling your produce locally, or by not using chemicals, you get it by following a New Age philosophy. For the roots you need to go back to biodynamic farming. Now many of the agencies that certify you organic will also certify you biodynamic, and the theories was that you could make composts that acted as medicine to heal the sick earth. It's interesting stuff, mix a with b put it in a cow's horn and bury it for several months. Anyway
http://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/biodynamic.html#the is a government website that gives background on biodynamic farming and tells a bit of it's links to organic.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that nonorganic or nonbiodynamic agriculture is perfect or couldn't be better or doesn't have people who are just flat out a danger to society and the world. I'm not saying that at all. But I have a real problem with people telling me that the fix to agriculture is to adopt a New Age religion and it's philosophies. I really find it strange that separation of church and state doesn't apply when it's New Age. We see the government pouring money into it. If you were a Christian out there telling people to be good stewards of the Earth you won't get a dime.
There are just so many out there that concerning agriculture present half truths at best. I will use an example that I'm sure you as vegetarians have all heard. That is the assumption that if you just didn't eat meat there would be so much more food in the world.
Well, it's a simple thing that is the foundation of that. If you take a cow in a feedlot and feed it grain, it takes quite a few lbs of grain to produce a lb of beef. So if we stop there, we can conclude that eating beef means there isn't as much food.
But it's more complicated than that. On a world basis, there are 4 acres that can be grazed for every acre that can be farmed for crops. If we eliminate meat, or meat and milk, then those acres will produce nothing. How much grain on a world basis goes into the average lb of beef on a world basis, well we know it's about 3/10th of a lb of grain used for feeding cattle for each 1 lb of beef produced. A lb of beef has a lot more nutrition in it for people than 3/10th of a lb of grain. So people are using a special case, and trying to extend it to a general truth.
The most food in the world would be eat meat, and use less grain produced from cropland to feed it. Though that too can get to be more complicated than it would seem.
Or you hear things that sound like cattle are destroying the world, how much water is used or whatever. Well probably the most wasteful food you can find anywhere is lettuce. It uses huge quantities of resources and is almost devoid of nutrition other than giving you some fiber. Even the so called better lettuces make cattle look extremely efficient on a resource basis compared to nutritional value.
Do many people eat more meat than they should, yep, I can't really imagine arguing against that at least in the US, there are areas of the world where the biggest step up in health would be to include more meat in the diet, but here in the US people have no real need to eat so much, and in general they would be helped with eating more fruits and vegetables.
Though that is somewhat of a problem because the most common cause of food poisoning is fruits and vegetables. It's a problem that they are subject to contamination, and water, especially around the world, is not fit in many cases to eat or drink.
Marv
). Though I think that maybe she would get scared I was heading in an animal rights extremist direction if I told her that my dislike for deceased animals extends further than my diet.
