2. on eating produce Will Tuttle in his World Peace Diet, and the China Study, among many, are fervently advocating vegetarian and even vegan diets. The two main arguments are that the industrial meat industry's carbon foot print, in combination with continually increasing demand for animal protein due to a still growing (and ever more affluent) world population, is disastrous to our environmental health (which it is), and that meat eating contributes to, or causes, cancer and other civilization diseases (which it only does under certain conditions, some of which I mentioned in my last post).

Yet, the fact that the vegetarian/vegan movement is becoming so prominent points to a shift in awareness (of the abominable industrial meat industry, its contribution to global warming, and of the unhealthiness of industrial meat and cornfed beef). Michael Pollan's famous advice to "eat food, not too much, mostly plants" is good advice for most of us, indeed.

On another vegetably note, the basis for our existence is light, water and soil. Produce is closer to light energy than meat is. As we all know, plants grow through direct conversion of sunlight to energy. When we eat plants we take in sun energy just one step removed. When we consume meat, we are one step further removed from that light energy because we eat the animal that fed on plants that fed on sunlight. And incidentally, humans don't usually eat predator meat because that is yet one step further removed from sun energy than meat from vegan animals.

However, as long as we keep subjecting our crops and soil to synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides (and killing the bees along with the birds in the process), and monoculturing our produce crops, and not demanding GMO labeling (which has already happened in Europe, Japan, Russia and many other industrialized countries), we are not achieving that much with vegetarianism/veganism. We'll keep subjecting farm workers to the health dangers of working in chemically laced fields, big-ag will keep doing its thing with produce, Monsanto & Co. are still on the loose, and we are still ingesting mineral poor and poison sprayed food grown in depleted soil that had to be artificially enriched. So, going vegetably must mean going organic/sustainable/biodynamic to have meaningful impact on body and environment.

to be continued...