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Let’s find the awesome together

by Jason on November 6, 2009

Darth Vader is not pleased with my post frequency

A thousand pardons for the lack of posts (and newsletters) over the past little while! Partly I’ve been crazy busy, but I’ve also been thinking about the format of the site and I want to make some changes.

You already know that factory farming is ridiculously wrong, that meat consumption has been linked to a ton of diseases, and that some people do horrible things to animals from time to time. Being reminded of that on a recurring basis might help maintain your commitment to a plant-based diet, but it’ll also bum you out, and let’s face it, as an individual you’re not going to be able to change most of this stuff. As a group, that’s a different story, and I’m working that part out still, but on the whole, the kinds of posts I’ve tended to write have come across as whining. Brilliantly witty whining, yes, but this isn’t a competition to see who can find the most things that are wrong with the universe. The major media outlets do a fine job at that already.

I’m still working out how this will affect the site, but I want to focus on the awesome, so I can help you be awesome. Now, you may have noticed that news outlets focus on the negative as well, so this might prove to be a bit of a challenge, but I guess we’ll have to make our own news if it comes to that.

Stay tuned, more posts coming soon…

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Environmental footprint stats aren’t messed up enough yet, but they’re getting there. In the latest round, a mid sized dog is being compared to an SUV. According to researchers, the dog will go through 164 kilograms of meat and 95 kilograms of cereals in a year, which is the carbonastical equivalent of driving a big-ass car for 10,000 kilometres.

Now, it should be mentioned that I’ve seen dogs thrive on a plant-based diet, but on the whole I’m not a fan of these metrics. Sure, it’s great to be proud of the reduced environmental impact of your diet, but now some nut just has to point at your dog and somehow that becomes an excuse for their meat-eating ways. In some ways it’s an extension of the “animal rights activists need to focus on ‘real issues’ like child labour” (or whatever Big Issue doesn’t require an immediate lifestyle change) nonsense, but how many of you have ever thought that you diet gives you “credit” to “spend” on other indulgences, like, OK, a dog?

Put another way, while environmental footprint calculations can be useful to put impact in terms relative to things we’re familiar with, they shouldn’t be seen as budget line-items in your life. What do you think about these calculations? Do they actually help, or do they give everyone something that they can use as a credit/excuse against something really nasty, like eating meat?

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Your quickie morning WTF

October 20, 2009

It’s not that I’m lazy; I simply can’t find a way to describe this viewpoint other than “agriculture can’t let people tell the public what’s going on because it’ll really hurt business.” Linkylink.

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Oysters to undergo treatment to make them more dead but less deadly

October 19, 2009

People die every year from eating live shellfish, but it looks like this might finally change as the FDA introduces rules to ban the sale of untreated oysters, at least in the hot summer months.
Whatever. Check out the lead: “Lovers of oysters on the half shell may want to indulge now, while they can. [...]

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Swine flu still holds some ground from H1N1

October 16, 2009

I haven’t posted very much stuff about swine flu, aka H1N1 but more amusingly bacon flu, but that’s largely because the mass media is doing a heck of a job. There are a few aspects that interest me, and one of them is how well the original, non-sanitized name is holding on.
I think we’ll [...]

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The beef recall system is either working or lucky

October 15, 2009

Here’s a quickie on beef safety: there was a 925 pound recall of ground beef this week, which isn’t huge by industry recall standards, but I though the wording of the news was interesting. According to this version, nobody’s gotten sick and the company involved says that their own tests didn’t find anything.
So why [...]

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Business Time: pig farming is crazy expensive

October 14, 2009

Q: When is Jason going to stop making jokes about Wednesday being Business Time?
A: Jason is NEVER going to stop making jokes about Wednesday being Business Time!
Seriously, everyone has to do a little work to understand the economics of animal agriculture, because frankly, the farmers aren’t doing their share. Take this recent report from [...]

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Pigs is wicked smart and can probably type gooder than me too

October 13, 2009

There was no story yesterday (and no newsletter either, sorry I forgot to warn y’all about that) due to the Thanksgiving holiday we had up here, but here’s how I’m going to make it right: I’ll write about two stories today, and since I know you’re busy, I’ll cram them into the same post so [...]

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They forgot to remind you to update your will

October 9, 2009

This Monday will be Thanksgiving up here in Canada, which is a month or so earlier than the American version because we’re further North so our growing season is shorter or something like that. Or because our calendar is metric. OK, probably the crops, which is worth noting because in the land of [...]

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Ground beef: same as it ever was

October 7, 2009

This week’s Business Time takes a look at the economics of ground cow, thanks to a link I found on the Twitter. The New York Times did a follow up on the state of the industry two years after a recall of over 800,000 pounds of hamburger patties. Despite the recall, almost a [...]

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