If soil is of middling or poor vitality, is devoid of organic-matter, exhibits dilute concentrations or is devoid of the essential dietary elements, it is virtually unsupportable to human health to consume anything that is cultivated in it. The substances to which I allude are not few but MANY; that is to say, they do not merely consist of potash and lime .... Even so, biogeochemistry is not a recondite fairytale cult. You can, if you undertake the initiative, read all about it in numerous scientific and scholarly journals composed in dozens of different human languages. Were you speculating that perhaps because the extreme manifestation of titularly vegan ethea seems to predicate necessarily that ZERO animal-life be involved in our subsistence-practice that you had found us out ? Do I personally subscribe to the notion that earthworms and the things they secrete into the O-horizon, because such things are of animal origin, are contraband, taboo, verboten, off-limits ? Well, I, for one, neither find earthworms and their discharge offensive, nor do I mistake either one for something that every farmer everywhere should try to eradicate. I also am discerning enough not to eat the earthworms themselves. Am I nevertheless able to enjoy the full sanction of calling myself a VEGAN even though I utilize earthworm castings in my soils at home? YOU TELL ME, MR. SMART GUY. Cattle do not prevent erosion, in their own right, or otherwise. Their spoor is viscid, and they eat those plants * to death* whose roots comprise a network of solid sod which makes up turf. Fish and other aquatic vertebrates are not the only organisms from whom we are able to obtain long-chain fatty-acids. Poultry eggs are not the metabolic equivalent of oxygen to our most essential (aerobic) life-function, nor are they the only sources of ATP, or E, D, or A vitamins, or phospholipds, or ANY of such as their proponents blithely profess they are (except for essential, dietary cholesterol). Whats more? Higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations actually SLOW plant growth. How much oxygen does the average cow consume per day? Do you know? As for harming plants: if you really cared, would you eat something that required you to feed it more plant-matter than you yourself could comfortably ingest? Let us not automatically discredit the supposition that food-quality decline and insufficiency ARE driving factors in the decision people make to eat the foods that are produced and provided for them or not, nor that what effects those foods have on their behaviors do include the psychological. It is an established fact that a disproportionately high percentage of commercially-available imported, refrigerated, pre-processed, branded i.e. value-added foods, are nutrient-desolate. Aside from this, the very problem that mega-farms and industrial agro(eco)nomy pose to us is the volume at which they operate, and the homogeneity of their product. Those who own and maintain these operations are directly responsible not strictly for manufacturing demand for their product, but creating bottlenecks in the supply-chain of things we all need for our survival. Industrialized farming, if it is not geared towards replenishing adequate amounts of elemental substances to the growing-medium, brings to bear a malevolent influence on human-environment-interaction, and is a ravage to finite material resources. Now. Inferring from the dietetically vacuous nature of the token industrially-manufactured and processed soy-ice-cream sandwich that Veganism is a quack is a bit like taking your drunk friends word for it that his doctor wrote him a prescription for the whiskey on which he is getting high as a kite every evening. If you want to fulfill your destiny as a dyed-in-the-wool naturalist environmentalist progressive new-earth anthroposophist, then you should recycle your own feces and make dirt. You are NEVER going to get away with having your prize pet goat take care of for you what only your lower colon will, in this or any lifetime. And its not as if grass doesnt compost into mulch all on its own if not eaten by ungulate mammals. Equating time-tested methods of preventive lifestyle medicine with obsolete flat-earth ideologies is, in more books than mine alone, incomprehensibly daft. That you value it at that rate is abhorrent to someone like myself, who has perused a highly exacting but by no means restrictive diet-practice for over a decade which incorporates close to zero overtly animal-derived substances. What *else* might one forget to consider in his/her analysis of any food-system? There is such a thing as nutrient attrition. There is also such a thing as bioaccumulation of noxious naturally-occurring organic and inorganic compounds in the tissues of terrestrial vertebrate-animals. There is such a thing as the development of noxious microbial cultures in ones alimentary canal as a direct consequence of ingesting substances of animal-origin. There are the endogenous carcinogens present in *all* animal meat, including poultry eggs, shellfish, insects. Then there is the matter of carrying capacity. The upkeep required by any and all animal-husbandry. Then, the relevance to your life of having subservient commodified pets under your dominion whose lives you extend only to guillotine them once they have milled about in enclosed pastures for a sufficiently long period of time to fatten them to your liking -- what kind of piss-poor reprieve is that sh8te anyhow?. Is it somewhat *puritanical* to eschew all forms of animal-derived substances in favor of plant-derived ones to eat? Yes, when contrasted to current world-market-trends in meat-consumption. Is it my putative cultural myopia in light of the state-space of earthly possibilities to harbor an unwillingness to consume animal-flesh? You wish everyone to think it is, in spite of certain consummately unalterable facts of nature. Perhaps your own low-level chronic inflammation is having the better of your thought-process. If you want clean water, you can remove impurities, salt, or what-have-you by distillation. If you want clean water that you dont have to evaporate in a beaker to be able to drink, what do you do then? Am I a sea-lion, a penguin, an insectivorous choropterid, or an echinoderm? Are you an evolutionary-biologist, a biochemist, a geneticist, an anthropologist, a paleontolgist, an ethologist, or a behaviorist? OH ! Heres the study -- relating to Capuchin Monkey populations -- suggesting that lean season (that is to say, winter, in English) diets supplemented with insects assisted that particular species in not utterly dying off (which is a different phenomenon completely than proves beyond reasonable doubt that bug-guts are the X-factor in the cerebral development over thousands of generations of proto-hominid populations distributed throughout the Earth): news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/27058.aspx If meat were the only thing to cause thumbs, long-field binocular vision, and large brains to develop, lions would be much smarter and more dexterous, and we would find eels, stingrays and jellyfish with PhDs *simply because* their kind has been eating meat for millions of years. in sum: To posit the viewpoint that selective encouragement of earthworm castings, bat guano, and natural predators like praying mantids, ladybugs, and lacewings to exist on my year-round farm somehow disqualifies me from laying rightful claim to the title of Vegan still does not refute the point at-issue in this dialogue viz. is eating just plants (and fungi, and clay, etc., and the things that grow in and on them) a competent means to preserving human health and life on Earth in general and in what way/s if any might doing so inhibit our capacity to better ourselves.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 13:25:02 +0000
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