Letters to the Editor
6th December 2020
Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant Based Meat”.
Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps.
Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, deer, bison, rabbits, turkeys and kangaroos have a long history of providing meat for our ancestral hunters and farmers. In tough times the gatherers and gardeners collected and cultivated survival foods like wild onions, seasonal fruit, cabbages, tubers and grass seeds. But there was always a celebratory feast when the hunters returned with high-nutrition meat.
Fake “meat” is usually made from denatured soy beans, peas and wheat, all grown using diesel fuel for cultivation, planting, harvesting and transport – a huge carbon footprint. Then they add meat glue, binders and fillers to hold it together, and artificial flavouring and colouring to make it look and taste right. It is not natural, not green, and less healthy than the worst feed-lot meat.
Sustainable plant-based meat is made when cattle, sheep, goats, camels, deer and pigs graze natural free-range pasture which gathers solar energy via their green-leaf solar collectors. These grazing animals harvest plant biomass without using diesel and they also spread valuable plant fertiliser onto the ground and into the air.
Real meat is greener and healthier than any fake “meat” manufactured by green alchemists.
Viv Forbes
Washpool Qld, Australia.
vforbes [at] bigpond [dot] com
Interesting Reading:
Do We Really Need Fake Meat:
https://theconsciousfarmer.com.au/do-we-really-need-fake-meat/
All Sheep are Green:
http://www.damaras.com/newsletters/200805.pdf
The Battle for our Livestock:
https://clexit.net/2016/11/04/grasslands/
Views: 16
Meat comes from animal tissue, mostly muscle. It’s not sold as meat until the animal is butchered.
About 80% agricultural land produces 18% protein consumed from meat. That’s the argument.
Of course you can define “meat” in other ways, eg a sexy woman, but let’s stick to common sense and proper usage.
What an extraordinary comment, Jenny. Meat doesn’t come from animal tissue, it IS animal tissue, and of course it’s not sold as meat until the animal dies.
What do you mean by “18% protein consumed from meat”?
I don’t define meat in any other way; I’m certainly unfamiliar with the example you give.
I meant to say 18% of protein consumed by humans comes from meat, but growing that utilises 80% of agricultural land. My apologies.
Muscle tissue is not normally labelled meat until it’s butchered for sale. Definitions are not the point, the explanation.
Apart from substitutes, meat is now grown in vats, and sold.
I have no objection to anyone eating synthetic ‘Plant Based Meat’ if they want to. But I have yet to see anyone put forward a rational and truthful argument which purports to show that all humanity should stop eating meat and start eating non-meat products instead.
I’m sorry Jenny – but “meat” can only be described as the flesh of an animal, so to say it can be grown in vats is utterly wrong & whatever substitutes you put in means it can no longer be called “meat”.
What i find curious are the many people who lambast us carnivores for doing what our ancestors did for centuries, telling us to eat ‘meat’ alternatives, so when i looked into some of these vegetarian alternatives i find many use soybean protein in the blends, i don’t have a problem with soy bean per-se – but i do find it ironic that most soy bean has been GMO’d, so would be an an anathema to vegans or vegetarian folk!!
I will continue to do my bit for the planet – converting CH4 & CO2 into real meat!!
Sorry, new to this site and interested in all the topics, so this is a very late post. The problems with the vegetarian/meat-eater debate is that it always seems to come down to protein. This is quite short-sighted and really does not take in the full picture.
To take just one of a number of other aspects, the one related to fatty acids: people who have been vegetarian for generations have developed a mutation of the FADS gene (Fatty Acid Desaturase). This allows them to process fatty acids more effectively from vegetable sources – the fatty acids responsible for brain function and anti-inflammatory responses. Many non-vegetarians can “adequately” process these fatty acids from a vegetarian diet, but others will really struggle, particularly those whose ancestry is decidedly carnivorous, getting these Omega oils from meat and fish.
A vegetarian diet is just not possible for everybody. As an example, a very well-thought-out vegetarian diet from a proper nutritionist made my brother really ill. He only came right again when he went back to eating meat. Subsequent gene mapping has shown that he is very much a Celt and not really genetically capable of being vegetarian.
When you look outside the “protein-only” debate there are many other factors. In a research paper from Cornell University, they have shown that this FADS mutation for vegetarians may have a down side. For example, where the diet has foods high in Omega-6 there appears to be a significant increase in the risk of heart disease and colon cancer — the very diseases that a vegetarian diet is supposed to protect us from.
No problem with tardiness, Tricky Dicky. What you say is deeply interesting and illustrates how liberal policy proposals can leave out important elements that would caution against universal adoption. Caution, I might say, that is a natural element of a conservative approach. Thank you. — RT.
Hi Richard, thanks for the comments. Recently I was talking to a Dr of nutritional science. She even lectured at one of our tertiary education establishments. The conversation inevitably came round to vegetarian/vegan diets and why I was an ill informed neanderthal as I still eat meat and it has been proven that people can get a good balance of protein from vegetable sources. I agreed with her, so her question was- “Why did I still eat meat given the proven health benefits of a vegetarian/vegan diet?” When I brought up the omega oils issue, she looked at me blank. She had never even considered it a problem because her total focus was on protein. Whilst I conceded that certain Indians can thrive on a vegetarian diet especially given the FADS mutation, I asked her how she thought an Iniut would cope, given their long history of getting omega oils from fish and seal blubber and the adaptation of the FADS gene to accommodate this. More blank looks. I then brought up the study from Oxford University that showed vegetarians/vegans had a significantly increased risk of stroke due to an internal or external brain bleed. The current thinking is that this may be due to cholesterol blood levels being too low and consequent weakening of the blood vessel walls. This is also in light of new studies showing that cholesterol is not quite the evil villain it was once thought to be, but this was all new to our Dr of nutritional science. Talk about being a slave to conventional thinking. As we all know, so called expert advice on nutrition changes every other week. What was good advice last year is what you must steer clear of at all costs this year. And we think we can figure out the climate!!! Yeah right.
Good afternoon Richard ,
I have looked in now and then but I have not passed comments since I gave up arguing with camebrigegon or some name like that, and there is a saying about arguing with a fool is that it becomes a waste of time and then the fool drags you down to his level .
There is so much misinformation about farming animals for food and straight out lies from even government communications .
Enteric Methane from farmed animals is a NON problem and should never have been included in any countries emissions profile .
I have asked many people why enteric methane was included and the only reason is that methane is 60 to 80 times more potent than CO2 so it has to be eliminated.
Methane from livestock will never raise the temperature of the earth as the process is a cycle .
That is a fact as all fodder that animals consume has absorbed CO2 to grow and the very small amount of methane released during digestion due to methode microbes breaking down cellulose and reproducing and are then consumed as food by the animals .
The methane that is released into the atmosphere is broken down into CO2 and water vapour in 8 to 10 years .
There is no problem whatsoever and I have shown graphs of world atmospheric methane levels and from 1999 til 2008 the levels flat-lined and farmed animals throughout the world were constant over that time. From 2009 to 2018 methane levels rose and that was nothing to do with farmed animals .
COAL mining surged over this time increasing from a steady 4.7 billion tonnes per year to exceed 8 billion tonnes.
No one wants to know this fact and the crazy Climate Change Commission is hell bent on putting restrictions on farmed livestock numbers so that Asian countries can mine and burn coal at up to 3.5 billion tonnes more than 12 years ago.
We have a situation where the inmates are in charge of the asylum ,James Shaw and his merry men.
Federated Farmers are not to worried about the 15% cut in livestock numbers as they believe that a lot of land will be converted to orchards ,kiwi fruit and vineyards over the next 15 years .
The most stupid thing is that the government are enforcing these policies as part of their Paris Treaty Accord obligations ,yet as it has been pointed out to them New Zealand dairy produce and meat can be shipped to the other side of the world and it has a lower carbon footprint that locally produced products in those countries.
Then we have the conundrum of green plants and the missing sources in the methane budget. Many scientific institutions are quick to promote even the most tenuous anecdotal evidence of CO2 and methane in climate change. It fits the narrative. So when the Max Planck Institute suggested that plants produce methane, the usual global warming suspects just dismissed this. The metabolic pathways had not been identified and, therefore it could not happen. Not to mention that this would be a pretty bad setback for the global warmists. Whilst the evidence was anecdotal at the time, it was far more compelling than some of the so called global warming “facts”. However, most of the uncertainty had been pretty much removed in the 2017 Keppler and Lenhart paper – Formation of Methane and Nitrous Oxide in Plants. The usual suspects are still scrambling to try and divert attention from this, or just dismiss it out of hand. Turns out plants, trees and fungi all contribute significant amounts. So, what are we supposed to eat that doesn’t destroy the planet? We can’t eat meat and it seems we can’t eat plants or mushrooms either. Laboratory printed meat and veg it is then. Or is it that the climate and natural cycles are just way more complex and self regulating. It will be a pointless exercise, but I think it might be fun to collectively inform James Shaw and the climate commission just what a bunch of scientifically illiterate dilettantes they really are. Scientific American, – green plants produce methane and quite a lot of it. Yale, 2019, scientists zero in on trees as a surprisingly large source of methane and many, many more.
Tricky Dicky said “a surprisingly large source of methane and many, many more.”
Has anyone got recent measurements of the contributions of methane from the gut-biota of termites, and from the anaerobics at the bottom of most rice paddies and possibly the carp ponds ? Fair scattering of these sources in the “developing” countries.
Which may never have been included in their Climate Change Commitment discussions.
Enteric Methane also from locusts, perhaps ?
cheers, W
Hi Juglans Nigra,
Nah, I think the only natural methane source according to these clowns would be amoeba farts. Although, some nights, I do think my dog is making a single handed attempt to destroy the planet.