Ridgerunner;5524937:
: I just have to say this: You and I have been in many of the same threads. Obviously I don’t eat meat, obviously you produce it. But I have to say, despite our differences, I really appreciate your honesty and the truths that you bring to the discussions. I do get frustrated with people who spout off opinions based on air–who refuse to learn about how our food is produced, who refuse to learn about nutrition yet are very opinionated about it, who subscribe to myths rather than actively learning the realities… You have proven yourself in these threads to be a sincere contributor, your honesty shines through your words. I really do appreciate your (name removed by moderator)ut. If there is any way you can see that documentary film
Food Inc., I wish you would. I would really like your opinion/perspective on the piece.
Peace,
It was very kind of you to say these things. If the film comes around here, I will try to see it. However, given the kind of area I live in, and the familiarity so many people here have with farming and the food industries, I would question whether any of the theater owners would bother to run it.
Let me say again, that I have no problem with people who want to be vegetarians or vegans. That’s their choice, for whatever reasons they have. My only comment about it is that it is my impression that people who don’t know anything about nutrition shouldn’t just jump in and do it without really studying it, particularly if they give their children the same diet.
I do not want to create the impression that I approve, carte blanche, of all food industries. I don’t. I was particularly appalled, for example, by what I saw in a factory that processes spices from overseas (where most of them come from). As a consequence of that, my wife and I became very particular about the spices we buy and use.
But let me also add this “philosophical” note. I am of European descent. It’s just a fact that Indo-Europeans lived out on the Eurasian plains for tens of thousands of years, and were herders. It is to me then, no coincidence that Indo-Europeans are relatively tolerant to bovine lactose, whereas most of the other people in the world are not. It is also true that there are animal vector diseases of man, including cattle vector diseases. To some of the latter, Europeans are relatively immune or tolerant compared to some others of the world’s people. Quite likely, on the other hand, peoples of other origins have acquired tolerances and immunities to animal vector diseases which Europeans do not have.
Interestingly, the study in Germany examined the relative tolerance to the resistant varieties of e coli-the ones that cause the trouble for people. It disclosed that people who were raised on farms where there were cattle were relatively immune to the “killer e coli” varieties. The reason, the study concluded, was that children who played in cattle yards caught various varieties early in life and suffered little from it, and that the later in life one is exposed, the more serious it is. I used the comparison with polio, which is endemic in the third world, but was not the crippler that it was in the first world. The reason being that in the third world, where sanitation is bad, children actually contract polio very young when, for various reasons, full recovery is more likely. This will strike you as silly, perhaps, but I have made certain that my children and grandchildren have had ample opportunity to be exposed to cattle and cattle manure. Hopefully, then, if they eat a “bad burger” as adults, they will have acquired relative immunity. It may well be, then, that it is not so much the “filthiness” of meat production, but the sanitation of our urban and suburban lives that cause us to be susceptible to things we would have shrugged off as herders on the Eurasian plains or as ranchers on the American grasslands.
It is interesting, then, for me to speculate that we might have “bought our birthright” to survive certain animal vector diseases; further, that some of us may have a natural symbiosis with cattle; a symbiosis which our increasing isolation from animals can cause us to lose. As with lactose tolerance, there may be other adaptations our bodies have made over the millenia that could be helpful to us. Strange as it may seem to some, meat-eating might actually be better for Indo-Europeans than being vegetarians, for reasons we don’t even know, but which have been acquired over an immense period of time. Perhaps I am a fool, but I do feel as if my cattle and I do live in symbiosis, but a symbiosis that, on an individual basis, ends sooner than the maximum imaginable extent of their natural lives. And my cattle feed nutritious protein to many, many people, protein made from grass that is otherwise as useless to human nutrition as stones. I know a vegan won’t accept this, but I feel as if God made those animals for me and me for them. I do owe them decent treatment, and I know that.
I can’t address the contention that grain causes certain varieties of e coli to proliferate in a bovine digestive tract. Their digestive tracts certainly do change over time, and more than once. (Colostrum to milk, milk to grass, grass to grain if they’re fed grain) Others occur as well. This grass to that grass, grass to legumes, grass to grain, grain to grain, even grass to acorns…once a year I turn them into the woods for that, and they thrive on them) Certain “natural” foods, (e.g., heavily seeding grasses and legumes) are not dissimilar from grain, and you can see changes in digestion and weight gain.
I can appreciate a well-marbled steak as much as the next guy, but I do prefer grass-fed. Others would debate this, but my preference is for grass fed young bulls. Awfully lean, but in my mind, the most flavorful of all. Cattle have roughly the same number of male and female offspring. Yet, one dominant bull will be the sole breeder of around thirty cows, and will drive others away; perhaps injuring or killing them in the process.
Perhaps it’s my rationalization, but I think it’s just as well for a young bull to end its life feeding people than it is for him to die of peritonitis from being gored.
(If only I could pull THAT off…)
Just a quick glance wasn’t real appealing though-looks quite political.
