Writing in the Washington Post, Professor James E. McWilliams, author of “Just Food”, recounts giving a speech in Texas on the “environmental virtues” of a vegetarian diet. It was not well-received. One man told him, during the Q&A, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”
McWilliams:
I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?
We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.
So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political…
Watch out – he’s making a move for your fork:
We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.
Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.
(emph. mine)
I spot a “real tool” in there but it isn’t the same one he’s talking about! Whatta loser. Someone who wants to create a weak, malnurished species. Get outta here!! They can pry the steak from my cold, dead hands. LOL
until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing,
Best of luck with that…
“Genuine sacrifice”. That’s right – what counts is not human costs and benefits, or even the net outcome.
What counts is sacrifice, more or less for its own sake.
He’s pushing religion, not science or ethics or even plain politics.
I have a short response to every proposal he’s mentioned, and to him, and it involves a short Anglo-Saxon word as a prefix.
Professor of “Agrarian Studies”, indeed.
Great, this idiot socialist would do for food what they’ve done for health care — rationing, shortages, line ups. If it weren’t for the market economies and their food production, starvation in the world would be even more widespread. The socialists did such a great job in the Ukraine, and in China during the “Great Leap Forward” It seems there are just never enough graves to keep socialists happy.
“We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests.”
Seems like another marxist dressed up in environmentalist clothing.
If they can ban peanut butter from schools, they can do anything.
What an a$$hole. This guy talks about “sacrifice”, but once again he’s demanding that others do the sacrificing because this sacrifice conveniently won’t effect him.
I’m willing to bet this h0m0 takes great umbrage to the fact that social conservatives wish to dicktate who can and can’t be married while at the same time he chastises you for eating a renewable resource.
Furthermore, I’m waiting for the suggestion that a “meat tax” is the only way to promote such a necessary sacrifice. Fck poor families, let them eat KD!
If I had 24hrs to live, I would go on a tirade of minor assaults on every leftard I could find that presumes to manipulate my lifestyle to meet their standards. Then they truly would have something to b*tch about.
Long day, rant over.
We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests.
Save me from these commies that think things always have to be saved…by Big Government.
Note to the commies: It isn’t the corporate interests that cause famines, it’s command economies and state control that lead to crop failures and starvation on a massive scale.
This twit should go to India where most of the world’s vegetarians are, people are starving there and cows are walking around with nobody to eat them.
I’ll stop eating meat when my body gives up it’s mechanisms for tearing it apart and digesting it.
DrD and Woodporter, you are absolutely right. These eco watermelon wing-nuts would have us go back to the caveman days and that without delicious mammoth steaks.
What and how I choose to eat, drive, sleep etc. affects everyone else to some degree including how much I breathe.
But no one else should get to play god and decide which acts are wrong and which are right. Sticking ones nose into how someoneelse lives their life is one of those things that I think is wrong. Perhaps we should punish this guy for doing it.
When it come down to individual freedom versus collective good I come down on the side of the individual because defending the individual is in the collectives very best interest.
I pushed a Pompous Preaching Pansy while uttering an expletive in a Ralphs Grocery Store in California when he physically stopped my cart and lectured me on the ratio of meat to vegetables in my groceries.
The world has just about pushed the average person to snap with all the finger-wagging and “behavior modifiers” buzzing around your life like a bunch of black flies, all just taking little bites out of you, your wallet, and your time for what they feel is wrong with your choices. Time to start crotch kicking these lifestyle advocates again like we used to drop the PC crap and start treating them like the parasites they are sucking on veins of guilt that seem to define todays culture, go start a commune of sheeple all like you and leave regular folks alone.
Oh ya and no tax money or special status for your little exercise in utopia.
But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine human sacrifice.
Fixed it for him.
Here’s a question.
I wonder how well Professor James E. McWilliams would eat corn-on-the-cob if somebody would punch him in the mouth and knock his teeth out?
In the “Reap What You Sow” category:
http://algorelied.com/?p=3114
Eat Vegetarians!!
Yeah, buddy, I’ve got your apology …
Right.
Here.
What’s that old saying?
“If God didn’t want us to eat cows, why did he make them out of steak?”
Another “tenured” professor spouting statist control over our lives on the pretext of enviro-junk science. Until we replace liberal arts colleges with library cards (kudos to the late, great Les Bewley), it’s only going to get worse.
I couldn’t conceive of a more pompus idiot or figure out how he got that way, until I saw the word “Professor” before his name. I’ll tell you what I will volunteer to do at my 70 years: I will knock out that idiot’s canines and incisors and force him to eat nothing but grains and vegetables. Maybe, if he ever has children and he raises them that way, they will be 100 pound weakiings.
I would like to see that idiot do a real professoral research, instead of his charlatanary by comparing the environmental destruction of range grazing cattle and sheep to the environmental destruction of wheat, oats, barley, beets, carrots, cabbages, etc. The open field runoff, pesticides, diesal tractor usage, tilling. Gah, you overeducated POSs disgust me.
He can bite me.
So every time he passes McDonalds and sees the xx billions served he realizes he is wrong?
Save the Planet… eat Greens!
I should SO put this on a T-shirt.
Goreacle Report: WUWT?’s Arts Report.
…-
“Reading this you might think I am an evil horrible woman.”
urlm.in/dnxw
What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me.
Especially when it’s beans.
How about Obama eating humble pie.
Just desserts
If we were meant to be vegetarians we would have eyes in the side of our head.
Isn’t that the truth.
Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing
In other words until they can force us by gun or police, what we can & cannot eat by Elitists. Ideologues with just the Kapo’s, those folks who like to bully people by pretending moral superiority. De-Normalize as Ezra Say’s the eating of Protein in meat. All for a fringe group of fanatics who think themselves pure of heart. While most of the World has a problem finding enough food. Insanity from the moral degenerates disguised as good progressives. Liberals are a stain on thinking if not a immoral disease.
JMO
Vegetables ain’t food.
Vegetables are what food eats
Fascists make me sick
It probably won’t surprise the readers here that I encounter more than my share of this (it would be even worse if I lived in, say, San Francisco, Berkeley, or Santa Cruz). What I now say to those who want to convert me to vegetarianism is, “I tried it, but the diet seemed to fill me with an uncontrollable urge to preach to people about things that are none of my business.”
This pretty much sums up the green agenda;
Spin Assassin said, “green is all about power and control over YOU!”
“… making a move for your fork” They’d better be quick, because I won’t hesitate… and as a bit of a side note, I’m certain my kids wouldn’t either, having heard the stories from the Ukraine (in particular) of how government was the problem.
I think they may be overlooking the fact that much of southern Alberta and anywhere else where large scale animal raising is ongoing, doesn’t really support much in the way of grain agra business. I speak with southern ranchers here in Alberta on a nearly daily basis, I don’t ever hear them complain that they need more direction from the government, or environmentalists. Once the global warming folks catch on that their agenda isn’t going anywhere, will they all bail out in order to support the next cause?
hmmm, why did grocery stores in Canada stop selling “soy burger”?
*agrees with much of what Illiquid Assets said… Behavior modifiers and black flies.
Really, it’s the left’s cause of the day, anything to control you, to dominate your behavior to suit their agenda. Leftism = Loss of your humanity.
a short historical view of “meat riots” … Chile 1905.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat_riots
“I tried it, but the (vegetarian) diet seemed to fill me with an uncontrollable urge to preach to people about things that are none of my business.” (6:41 pm)
*Perfect*.
You can have my steak knife when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Of course I regard this as moronic.
However, let me use this opportunity to make a broader point.
Everything that becomes the province of the public sphere simply becomes another part of the common banality. Once its domain has transferred from the private sphere to the public sphere it is simply one more issue for ravenous wolves to endlessly argue about and tear apart.
Used to, a lot of things were in the private sphere. They were nobody’s business but your own.
Today almost everything has become part of the public sphere. Very little is left that is universally understood to be your own business and no one else’s.
What you eat, what you kind of light bulbs you use, your medical records, your credit reports, how much you have in the bank, possibly your sexual practices, your philosophy of life probably needs to be corrected. Even religion is now just one long argument by politicians, reformers, sociologists, scientists, policy makers and on and on about how you should feel about God or the lack of God.
The exaggerated public sphere is one of the qualities of postmodernism. And it is turning everything about us into something socially reconstructed by idiots who have some pathology for insisting that others follow their rules. Soon there will be nothing left of our lives that is truly our own.
Damn fool he is
I want to live, not just exist
Meat eating is illogical and irrational: it simply makes no sense. You eat a cow but not a horse, you eat a pig but not a dog or cat…it’s all a matter of cultural traditions and mores that you have blindly accepted at face value – i.e. – as a result of not being able to think for yourselves.
Vegetarianism, however, has been recognized as the single most important thing a person can do to combat global poverty and global warming (sorry, I know here at the Flat Earth Society such talk is verboten).
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2234585
Seal meat to be served at Hill restaurant
‘Good Opportunity’
Tom Spears, Canwest News Service
The Parliamentar y Restaurant will soon serve seal meat to anyone with a taste for game — and controversy.
Hull-Aylmer MP Marcel Proulx confirmed the addition to the menu is just awaiting hunting season, and should arrive in the new year.
This is the second time the restaurant has tried to carry seal meat, he said.
“In 2008 there had been a request [for seal] from a couple of senators. The problem was they could not find a supplier.
“Now the chef, I understand, has found a supplier in the Magdalen Islands. I think, because of the hunting season, they will be able to get some meat in the early part of 2010. Then they will be able to offer it in the Parliamentary Restaurant.”
Mr. Proulx brushed off any question of possible protests.
“To start with, seal hunting is legal in Canada. Seal meat is therefore legal. There are processes to be followed according to the law, rules and regulations.
“This is a good opportunity for the industry. More often than not, you try to sell a product and the first thing people ask you is, ‘Is your government using your product?’ In this case they’ll be able to say, ‘Yes.'”
“It’s good for the restaurant, it’s good for the [hunting] industry, good for the fishermen, good for the entire picture of what the seal hunt is all about.”
Cheers
Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
How does the Food Professor feel about cannibalism? Can humans be considered meat if they are raised on a vegan diet? Just don’t eat the organs, very bad karma. Bon Appetiit!
I’ve spent time around someone with anorexia nervosa,
It was all about obsession with, and denial of, food. A lot of Vegetarians I’ve met have the same mindset.The ranting about eating things with faces seems to cover a deep need for bloody gobbets of meat.
Maybe it’s time to treat Demonstrative Vegetarianism as a mental health issue.
.
bleet
Shhhh, adults are talking.
But keep chewing your cud, it’s really all your opinion is good for…….
ConAgra, Cargill, Tyson and the rest aint grampa’s farm. So El Dorko gets it part right. Just because a loon holds some beliefs which are utterly stupid doesn’t men there isn’t some merit to his concerns about industrializing food production. if one believes in free markets I would hope you would accept that as fewer player come to dominate a field choice becomes limited and prices tend to go up. It’s called price fixing. I don’t know about you guys, but i NEED to eat, it’s not a hobby or a choice.
So the thinking goes…
“If you do something that – directly or indirectly – effects all of us then the state has the right, nay the duty, to control it.”
Pretty much a recipe for totalitarianism.
I think cannibalism is going become more fashionable in the near future . . . what could be more environmentally friendly than soylent green?
bleet, I have eaten cow, horse (tastes like moose), pig, dog (in Korea, tastes a little like beef) and cat (a lynx trapped in Northern Ontario, tastes like and had the texture of a pork chop). By your logic, I can think for myself. Does this mean I do not have to become a vegetarian?
So the perfessor goes to Texas, the home of the Longhorns, and Bar-be-cue and wonders why his granola speech didn’t go over well? The term “Stuck on Stupid” comes to mind.
Damn, an overpowering urge for some Texas brisket from Goode’s (Houston) or Stubb’s (Austin) just swept over me.
He can kiss my ass if he doesn’t want to bite it.
“you are what you eat”
well, tonight that means I’m a plate full of green beans I grew in my own garden this year and 2 BBQ spiced sausages.
and a couple swigs of diet cola.
BUURRRRRRPP. I still wish you could get wild venison on the menu or supermarket.
what a freakin’ wuss.
Living in a Northern climate, I’m darned well going to EAT MEAT.
Besides, beef, chicken, pork, and lamb taste great — especially in curries.
Now, my dad would strenuously disagree. He always said when you put a roast beef on the table, dripping with dish gravy, aka blood, “Good beef needs no decoration.”
RIP, Daddy! And pass the beef.
My 90 yr old (now)friend became a vegetarian over 10 yrs ago. Her son had become one several years before that and had graduated to a vegan diet.
Not to make light of any of this, you understand. But, last year he died of a massive heart attack the evening of his 65th birthday.
He might just as well have had a steak for dinner, or at least an egg.
I always keep Dr. Atkin in mind. You might remember, after years of dieting he fell on an icy step and died shortly afterwards, many years younger than I am. What’s the use of being a healthy corpse?