Paleo Diet: Raw Paleo Diet and Lifestyle Forum
Raw Paleo Diet Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: goodsamaritan on April 19, 2009, 12:15:50 am
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Mike Adams has a good website at http://www.naturalnews.com but I'm not happy with his getting pushy vegan stance.
In his recent article Five Ways to Make Your Food Help Save the Planet at http://www.naturalnews.com/026071.html he says:
3. Buy plants, not meats and animal products
This is the most important food purchasing strategy of all: Buy plants instead of animal products. This will drastically reduce your carbon footprint. Meats and animal products are extremely resource intensive, requiring enormous amounts of water, food and fossil fuels to produce. In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that the widespread consumption of meat is not ecologically sustainable.
This doesn't even consider the issues of animal factory waste runoff or the enormous amount of methane produced by cows (via cow farts). Methane is approximately twenty times worse at causing global warming than CO2, by the way.
This point isn't about vegetarianism or veganism from a health point of view. That's a different discussion. This is about reducing or eliminating meat consumption solely from an ecological perspective. And there's no debate about this issue, either. Factory-farmed animal products are extremely wasteful of Earth's resources. They have huge "overhead" that makes them a poor choice for eco-conscious individuals. It's no exaggeration to say that avoiding the consumption of factory-farmed meat does more to reduce your carbon footprint than driving a Prius!
I replied with:
Mike, it's time you dropped the VEGAN / VEGETARIAN utopian MYTH. Veganism DOES NOT WORK. People have tried. Even I have tried it. Humans are OMNIVORES. Shoving VEGANISM on all people and you kill majority of the population. Hell, the rest won't be able to reproduce in a short few generations. I've tried Veganism, I've tried Fruitarianism, it does not work. You must re-write this article humbly ADMITTING that humans are OMNIVORES. Always have been. Not one shred of evidence shows humans have ever been VEGAN. Give it a rest!
Maybe if others have the time can convince this guy to taste some raw animal foods so he can feel the difference in himself. I'm just waiting for Mike to hit the "wall" of veganism.
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Well, one thing I noticed is that a few raw vegans can go for as much as several decades(well 2-3) before experiencing issues. Most experience b12-deficiencies etc. well before that time. No point in evangelizing, though, and, anyway, most people who come to RAF diets are former Raw Vegans/Fruitarians, anyway/
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I think that you could have written a different letter that would be more likely to sway him. You could talk about ecological impact of grassfed and other non-factory farming methods, stuff like that.
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I think that you could have written a different letter that would be more likely to sway him. You could talk about ecological impact of grassfed and other non-factory farming methods, stuff like that.
I agree. Meat-eaters have put forward great arguments such as the fact that many areas on our planet simply cannot be used for grazing such as many mountainous areas/deserts etc.
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Not to mention things like the supplement industry and most pharmaceuticals could just disappear if people ate a flesh based diet, even a cooked one. This would save quite a bit of resources and cause billions of tons of pharmaceuticals, pharmaceutical waste, and other by products from being dumped in water ways and landfills. I've never heard an environmentalist look at health as a means towards environmental stewardship, but it really would be.