In the light of the Australian bush fires and the devestation caused there, we need to ensure a similar situation doesn’t happen here in New Zealand. While on the face of it, the appalling fires seem to be hard to understand, the links between them and climate change are there. How do we forge a new future?
The good news is that we already have the solutions to climate change, deforestation and ocean dead zones. It is a simple solution – one that few like to admit. The inconvenient truth is that animal agriculture is a huge driver of all of these. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, going vegan will drop at least 1 tonne of CO2 per annum compared to the average meat eater.
The human body was never designed to eat the copious quantities of meat that we averagly consume. During our evolution, we would be lucky to get 5 kg.p.a; now we consume on average 76 kg.p.a! The resource cost of raising 70 billion land animals to feed less than 6 billion people, delivering only 18% of their calorific needs is completely unsustainable. We have 10 years to make the required changes to turn climate change around. It CAN be done, we all must take the time to think about what we can do to reduce our climate impacts.
What is really required is a change of consciousness. We need a more compassionate world, where we consider the needs of others. We need to look at how empathic we are to the suffering of others. We have all been affected by the plight of those caught in the fires. People and animals alike have lost lives and land. Pictures of burned koalas have torn our heart strings. Many Kiwis have loved ones who have lost everything. Changes we make today will help prevent these events in the future.
Bring in those feelings of loss and sadness from the Australian bush fires and turn them into positive action for you and your family.
What are those changes?
An easy way to reduce your carbon footprint by up to 73% is to reduce your meat intake, ideally to zero.
There are few things that we need as new. Second hand and used items are ideal ways to reduce unnecessary consumption. Spending money on experiences rather than things; spending time with loved ones, rather than at work.
As we spend time in nature, we can feel the healing energies of fresh air rejuvenating us and filling our minds with the stillness of the forest. We look up at the trees, hear the birdsong and feel a sense of peace and tranquility. Being in nature fills our soul in a way that buying stuff from Amazon doesn’t.
The issue is that a lot of vegans are smug, sanctimonious, self-righteous, holier-than-thou members of the “Meat is murder” community.
If animal protein represents a small percentage of the diet of great apes, it is merely because they are limited in their access to it and ability to process it for consumption. If fishing ants out of nests was more cost effective in terms of protein input, it seems likely that they would roll with that, but the limitations of apes as tool users restricts their dietary options in ways humans no longer have to handle.
That wont make homo sapien herbivores. If it doesn’t work then there’s no plan besides the one that will save you by killing you so we can save all the animals.
Processed foods are not what our ancestors lived on and we will have better health without them.
Many Kiwis are eating plant based whole foods and doing well. There is no need to import food.
The switch from omnivore to plant based is a matter of dealing with addictions.
JohnW: “Processed foods are not what our ancestors lived on and we will have better health without them.”
Cooking, fermenting, cheese-, wine- and yoghurt-making are all forms of processing, with a very deep history in the human species. Europeans have been preserving meat and making salami and the like for millennia.
Indeed, some foods are inedible without processing – usually cooking. Taro, most grains, including rice, karaka berries here in NZ. Both taro and karaka berries are poisonous unless they’re cooked, I believe.
“There is no need to import food.”
I’m sceptical about this claim. In the first instance, the capriciousness of the climate here militates against our being self-sufficient in the cultivars that currently grow here.
In the second instance, NZ is too cold to grow many fruits and vegetables that NZers like to eat. And of those that will grow here, it’s doubtful whether enough could be produced to feed even the current population, let alone projected numbers.
I would like to see the GST removed completely from all NZ Grown fruit and veggies. That would include grains, nuts, seeds, herbs, legumes, shrooms, etc. Also honey, and possibly other foods.
This would benefit our health, our environment, our agricultural and horticultural growers, orchardists, and farmers wanting to diversify, and it would help in adapting to some of the changes already on us from the altering climate.
The resource cost of raising 70 billion land animals to feed less than 6 billion people, delivering only 18% of their calorific needs is completely unsustainable.
We are being strongly encouraged to eat a more plant-based diet (locally sourced where possible), for health reasons, for improvements in our immediate environment, and to reduce our wider ‘climate footprint’. So, to me it seems a no-brainer: Remove the GST from plant based foods! The benefits resulting from that would far outweigh any costs incurred in making the change.
Remove the GST from plant based foods!
Specifically, remove it from all plant based foods that are grown here in Aotearoa NZ.
That would help so many people, so many Kiwis.
+1
Recidivism rates in california corrections dropped from 70% to 25% among those inmates who adopted a vegan lifestyle, facilitated by Californian Seventh Day Adventists. The program was discontinued.
Better marriages, better health, better sex, hotter bodies, longer life
BobJob: “Recidivism rates in california corrections dropped from 70% to 25% among those inmates who adopted a vegan lifestyle, facilitated by Californian Seventh Day Adventists.”
Got a link as evidence for that?
An aside: many years ago, I worked with a SDA group. They were vegetarian, not vegan.
Change will only happen when Kiwis manage their food demands by firstly sorting out myths from reality.
Dairy and beef NZ have a powerful lobby promoting ignorance and lies included in the school health curriculum, dietary advice and old wives tales now widely held.
Much of that bullshit is all most Kiwis have to go on.
For example ” Milk builds healthy bones” where in fact countries with high dairy consumption have the highest rate of osteoporosis. Cow’s milk actually damages your bones.
Cheese is highly addictive and not because it is good for you as it is not.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/nation-now/2017/03/07/cheese-so-addictive-one-doctor-calls-dairy-crack/98877844/
https://plantbasedgal.com/why-is-cheese-so-addictive/
Cheese is a part of the dairy trap.
Extinction Rebellion is a movement that is not in denial about how humans need to change lifestyles.
Animal Rebellion addresses one of those changes needed.
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/AK1910/S00227/the-time-for-the-animal-rebellion-is-here.htm
Anyone who thinks lentil burgers are too boring or too complicated or whatever, here is a link to fifteen different lentil burger recipes. 🙂
high-protein-lentil-burgers
It’s not the taste, texture or increased labour that goes into veganism it’s the ethics and ropes ion of sentient beings that meat lovers don’t respect. To 95% of the population commercial meat products is just a function, not a right or responsibility to protect.
Agreed Sam.
I was brought up on meat, dairy and veggies but my parents didn’t know better having both come from several generation of Kiwi tucker.
I am grateful my mother had plenty of milk and breast fed me.
It took some time as an adult for me to take notice of the information around about lifestyle and heart disease.
Kim Hill helped but it wasn’t till some months after a friend switched to plant based food and threw away his diabetes medication, had his blood pressure drop and several other positive changes in his health, that I really took notice.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/2437606/caldwell-esselstyn-plant-based-diet
Loads of research amounting to hundreds of hours and I changed my diet. My addictions no longer attract me as plants can more than adequately satisfy my tastes and foibles.
Cancer is another demon that stalks Kiwis. Another lifestyle disease.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018700314/the-sheep-farmer-turned-vegan-activist
Well the original Vegan Society from back in the 50’s had a publication of their definition of veganism (before the Internet) which was to stop the oppression of all animals, that’s the definition I go by because by now veganism means what ever people need it to mean.
It’s too hard to get proper nutrition from veganism for everyone.
Yes, it can be done expensively and takes a lot of work and planning. While meat is delicious and has lots of protein and essential amino acids, is affordable and easy to get and prepare. Remember you’ll have to accomobate below 90 IQ individuals and foreigners.
5% vegan population can not pull 95% of the human population to its side. Vat grown meat will be a thing eventually, and that will eliminate the ethical concerns and perhaps make “meat is murder” a niche product IF, there are no side effects that turn a significant percentage of the human population into incredibly smug (ahem, I’m holding back back brother, I want to be a lover, not a fighter) who can’t help but project their superiority around them.
Humans are designed to eat meat. We have meat tearing teeth and produce enzymes and vitamin D to digest meat. We aren’t going to stop with out a viable alternative.
I used to look for reasons to carry on eating meat but the more I researched the less I could hold onto arguments for consuming meat.
It was “common knowledge” that heme iron from meat was an important source of iron.
That was a myth as the gut bacteria is adversely affected by meat and a secondary effect of this is now recognised as being a barrier to iron absorption.
My iron level went up after dropping meat.
https://www.celestialhealing.net/physicalveg3.htm
https://www.celestialhealing.net/physicalveg3.htm
https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/05/19/478645426/humans-are-meathooked-but-not-designed-for-meat-eating
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2019/12/11/humans-are-not-designed-to-eat-meat-leading-microbiome-scientist-explains/
There are many myths about diet and many industries that promote them.
It is quite a challenge to sort out hard evidence based information separated from hearsay and memes.
When settlers from the UK cities came to NZ they were suprised to see families eating meat regularly and sometimes even once a week. They left behind a culture where poorer people and workers may have had meat once a year.
Well there are unaccounted for variables in your research like price, availability and absorption and so on and so on. No one has the time to go through any of this so the can decide what item on the menu they’ll choose and the vegan items are always was don’t the bottom.
The arguments for and against vegan are very simple.
The argument against veganism: I like stabbing cows in the neck for burgers.
The argument against veganism: I don’t like stabbing cows in the neck for burgers.
And I like stabbing cows.
Lol.
“The human body was never designed to eat the copious quantities of meat that we averagly consume. During our evolution, we would be lucky to get 5 kg.p.a; now we consume on average 76 kg.p.a!”
While it’s true that many first-world humans eat too much in general, it of course doesn’t follow that we were never intended to be meat-eaters.
Humans are omnivores: our dentition is proof of that. Evolutionary pressures have meant that humans are adapted to eating whatever we can get our hands on that is edible.
Meat-eating is thought to have driven human brain development. Evidence from places such as the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania suggests that our evolutionary ancestors were actively hunting and eating meat at least a million years ago. So: the eating of meat has a deep history in the human lineage.
Moreover, humans living in the circumpolar regions traditionally ate animal protein almost exclusively, because there was no plant food source regularly available.
People who wish to adopt a vegan diet are doing so for ideological, not biological, reasons. And they need to be extremely careful with what they eat, to avoid protein, vitamin and mineral deficiency.
Children – especially infants and toddlers – should not be fed a vegan diet. It simply isn’t nutritionally adequate for the growing body.
Almond milk for example has about a third less calcium than regale milk and a fraction the energy, fats but that doesn’t mean with the correct additives and nutrients that a vegan formula couldn’t be whipped up it would just be less nutritious so you’d have to feed the baby more of it. As some one who has children I couldn’t imagine being arsed but that dosnt rule rule out vegan formula all together. Yknow there are already synthetic formulas on the market where no cow was harmed in the making like the “impossible milk” brand.
One day synthetic meats are just going to appear in Pak n Save out of nowhere at a lower price than meat-is-for-murder and over night all fears and panic will disappear as fast as people’s hunger is satisfied.
Sam: “Almond milk for example has about a third less calcium than regale milk…”
Some years ago, I gave soy milk a try. God, the taste was AWFUL! I’d take a bit of convincing that almond milk tasted any better, whatever its nutritional characteristics.
More for me then. If you don’t enjoy pungent earthy flavours then hemp milk probably isn’t for you. This is all predicated on the desire to halve the number of dairy cows to a level that the environment can deal with.
Sam: “If you don’t enjoy pungent earthy flavours then hemp milk probably isn’t for you.”
Urgh! That’d play merry hell with the taste of one’s coffee, wouldn’t it? Not to mention my morning cuppa, the weetbix. And the porridge… You’re welcome to it.
“….halve the number of dairy cows to a level that the environment can deal with.”
Who says that the environment will be able to deal with that? Whose confident prediction was that?
No, no, no. Putting vegan milk in coffe would be letting your Iwi down. It’s would be a total revaluation of the food sector. No Butter!!! No cakes! No cheese cakes! I would die in pain and agony. No seriously I would cease being a savage.
And that’s my prediction, others have made the same prediction but I never heard it before I bagan saying BBQ all the dairy cows.
So when I read in stuff that scientists was tracking effluent that took 30 years to reach New Zealand water ways I checked to see how many cows we had 30 years ago and it’s about half what it is now.
The consequences are well known. If we do not BBQ 3 million diary cows over the next 10 years our water ways will be unswimable, feaster and eventually dry up.
Hmmmm! I won’t bother to counter your statements as you appear to have your mind made up.
But
“People who wish to adopt a vegan diet are doing so for ideological, not biological, reasons. And they need to be extremely careful with what they eat, to avoid protein, vitamin and mineral deficiency.”
Most of the vegetarians and vegans I know eat for health not “ideological” reasons. Among them are some who wish to lower their GHG footprint as well.
The protein myth is that we need lots of it. We don’t.
If you tried to live on animal protein alone you would get very sick in a short time.
We need mainly carbohydrates.
The Human brain uses a lot of energy which it gets from blood glucose coming from from plant based carbs.
The increase in Human brain size is attributed to a better supply of carbs from plants when early humans became more efficient in their dietary needs. The old myth that meat was what promoted larger brains is still promulgated but not what recent science show. Old ideas seem to be slow to change.
“The Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. Karen Hardy and her team bring together archaeological, anthropological, genetic, physiological and anatomical data to argue that carbohydrate consumption, particularly in the form of starch, was critical for the accelerated expansion of the human brain over the last million years, and co-evolved both with copy number variation of the salivary amylase genes and controlled fire use for cooking.”
There is plenty of protein in plant food and all the essential nutrients a human needs including vitamins, except vitamin B12 which is made by algae. We have changed our lifestyle to eliminate the B12 algae sources from our diet. We filter and chlorinate our water, don’t drink from streams and wash our vegetables. Our lower colon flora produce B12 but we gave little access to it with present day hygiene. We only need a tiny amount of B12.
Chimpanzees can eat a small amount of their faces for the B12. I have witness this and countered it by providing brewers yeast extract with B12.
Many cultures with millions of people are strictly vegetarian and follow a vegan diet. There are top athletes and sports people who have been dietary Vegans for many years.
But confirmation bias for some tends to rely on old information. A recognised way to handle confirmation bias is to explore evidence across a range of view points.
We only need a tiny amount of B12.
And, eating a high meat diet does not automatically ensure that the person will not need extra B12. Both my brothers were big meat-eaters and both were prescribed B12 by their doctors. (I was mainly veg, but never prescribed it. However I choose to take it as a supplement these days – I feel better for it.)
Kheala: “Both my brothers were big meat-eaters and both were prescribed B12 by their doctors.”
This is doubtless due to individual variation in the body’s ability to absorb B vitamins, possibly mediated by prescription medicines.
In this household – where we eat meat (though I have had episodes of vegetarianism) – one individual some years ago had low B12 levels. They’re ok now, though.
JohnW: “Most of the vegetarians and vegans I know eat for health not “ideological” reasons. Among them are some who wish to lower their GHG footprint as well.”
So. As I observed: ideological reasons. There is no in-principle reason why a diet including meat, fish and dairy products isn’t healthy. Provided that people don’t overeat. We have for years been adjured to eat the “Mediterranean diet”: it’s neither vegetarian nor vegan.
“The protein myth is that we need lots of it. We don’t.”
I said no such thing. Nor do I think it. The problem afflicting much of modern society is over-nutrition, along with the malnutrition that is a consequence of the inability of parts of our society to afford a nutritious diet.
The malnourished in our society and elsewhere – most notoriously, but not exclusively, the US – aren’t emaciated. They’re often enormously fat. And it isn’t from too much animal protein.
Anyone who’s worked in the health system will be aware that health problems of various sorts differentially affect the poorest in our society. And much of that is down to undernutrition at the least, malnutrition at worst.
“If you tried to live on animal protein alone you would get very sick in a short time.”
Ha! Tell that to the circumpolar populations. These peoples traditionally ate fish and animal protein, because that was all there was in the environment for most of the year. Their eating patterns provided them with the requisite nutrients.
“We need mainly carbohydrates.
The Human brain uses a lot of energy which it gets from blood glucose coming from from plant based carbs.”
Humans are adapted to be omnivores. And as far as environmental constraints allow, we’re better off healthwise being omnivores. And not overeating.
“The increase in Human brain size is attributed to a better supply of carbs from plants when early humans became more efficient in their dietary needs. ”
No. It isn’t. Brain growth was spurred by meat-eating very deep in prehuman history. Our hominin ancestors were hunting and eating meat millennia before the rise of agriculture. To be sure, our distant ancestors ate fruit, fern roots, wild grains and the like. But such food sources could not provide the calories or the B vitamins needed for the sort of explosion in brain development that we can see in the archaeological evidence.
People can be vegan if they wish. But it’s disingenuous for them to argue that such a diet is “natural” for humans. It isn’t.
And no infants or children should be fed a vegan diet: it’s dangerously inadequate for the growing body.
In this country, we have a sector of society which cannot afford to feed themselves and their children adequately. For most of them, veganism would doubtless sound like a first-world preoccupation: the very least of their worries.
How did you get as strong as an ox without eating meat?
Have you ever seen an ox eating meat?
MedChok: “Have you ever seen an ox eating meat?”
Pretty much all mammals can be optional carnivores: they take food where they can find it. Deer, for instance, have been captured on camera eating birds. No in-principle reason why oxen can’t eat meat. And in the wild, they may well do so when necessary.
Some mammals are obligate carnivores: the cat family, for instance. Others are carnivores, but will eat fruit and the like when they have to: wolves are an example, as are bears.
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