It’s an Odd World Out There

The other day a friend of mine pointed out that we humans spend most of our lives trying to make sense out of things that defy rationalization. It's our little way of trying to assert some control over our inherently uncontrollable lives. I'd never thought about it that way before, but I guess I have to agree. The need to make sense of things would seem to explain everything from science to Hollywood's happy endings.

Of course nothing makes less sense, and defies rationalization more, than the world of animal agriculture and meat eating. The craziness of it, and the way we vegetarians relate to it, never ceases to amaze me. Here are some of the things I've seen in the last few weeks that have left me dumbfounded.

If we call it "organic" it's sure to sell

In a move that is sure to take the motoring world by storm, the automaker Audi has announced that all the leather they use in their cars is "organically tanned." But what does that mean, exactly? Do they just put their leather seats out in the sun? Is "organically-tanned" leather supposed to be safer or more environmentally-friendly than the pesticide-laden leather other car makers presumably use? Wouldn't Audi's efforts be better spent just making cars that get decent gas mileage? If automobiles are going "organic," will microwave ovens and toilet paper be next?

If we call it "free-range" it's sure to sell

In North Carolina, money from the tobacco settlement is funding the raising of "free range pork." I'm not sure what the connection is between tobacco and meat (other than they are both unhealthy and addictive as all get out), but I suppose one good vice always supports another. In any event, farmers say that consumers prefer the taste of this meat because of greater "intramuscular fat" than on factory-farmed animals.

It should be noted that these are rich farmers. Supposedly, demand for the "free range pork" is so strong they can make a profit of $2,200 per hog. (Wow! I somehow don't think their primary motivation here is ethical.) There's a lot more money to be made in meat than in tobacco these days.

Just in time for the summer barbecue season

Ingrid Newkirk, the president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, has drawn up a most unusual will. Upon her death she asks that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products, all in protest of the way humans treat animals. She also wants her liver to be vacuum-packed and sent to France as a foie gras protest, and her feet to be removed and made into umbrella stands in a mockery of what we do to elephants.

I personally think Ms. Newkirk's plan is incredibly imaginative and fun. (While I'll pass on the barbecue, I'd be proud to have one of her feet next to my front door!) But I just can't imagine stuffy meat-eaters and other animal abusers appreciating the humor in this. I can just see Mr. Meat-Eater now, rolling his eyes when he reads about this at breakfast. ("Look at this Marge…another one of those animal rights fanatics wants to be an umbrella stand.")

Maybe we should all have wills like this. I'm sure Hormel would be delighted to get into the human "foie gras" business—especially if it's as profitable as "free range pork."

Mad dogs and Canadians

Canada's discovery of its first cow infected with mad cow disease made big headlines, got plenty of TV news coverage, and sent many US stocks tumbling. The Canadian government made extraordinary efforts to ensure that the public's food supply wouldn't be tainted. Unfortunately, the governmental bureaucracy was no match for the profit-hungry meat industry. Would this "downer of all downer" cows go to waste instead of profit? No! The cow was "processed" into dog food that was subsequently shipped to the United States.

Things we don't need science to explain

Signaling a major step forward in the advancement of human knowledge, a study at Edinburgh University and the neighboring Roslin Institute subjected fish to bee stings on their lips and concluded that fish can experience pain. While animal rights supporters found this conclusion to be rather obvious (Well, duh!), fisherpersons "carped" at the idea. A biologist for Britain's National Angling Alliance expressed the opinion that fish "literally do not have the brains" to feel pain. (A spokesfish for the test subjects countered that anyone who thinks it's fun to stand for hours waist-deep in a freezing stream doesn't have the brains a fish is born with.)

It's what we say, not what we do, that counts

Yogurt and ice cream maker Stonyfield Farm advertises that it "celebrates strong women." Next fall it is sponsoring the "Strong Woman Summit" with celebrities like Erin Brockovich. When the irony was pointed out to the Stonyfield farmers that their products only exist because of the rape of females of another species, they declined to comment. Surprise, surprise.

It's a strange world out there, and nobody's explaining it.

Conversations with Uncle Danny

Last weekend I went to visit my fictitious, totally made up Uncle Danny at the retirement home where he now lives. Uncle Danny is older than most rocks, and has spent his long life as a soldier, radio newsman, pilot, and international Don Juan. (He claims to have single-handedly liberated the French Riviera in World War II and come home with five French women on an Algerian freighter.)

Did I mention that Uncle Danny is also a vegetarian? Well he is—perhaps as a result of his stint as the spiritual leader of Thailand, or maybe from the years he spent teaching auto mechanics to natives of the Amazon rainforest. Uncle Danny loves being a vegetarian, and knows everything there is to know about the subject. He's the guy I go to whenever I need inspiration.

And so it was that I found myself on Sunday afternoon meeting my uncle in the lobby of his building.

"Whacha got in the bag, kid?" he asked me right away.

"Pistachios."

His eyes lit up and he grabbed the paper bag out of my hands. Uncle Danny loves pistachios. Then I followed him outside into the sunshine, and we sat on a park bench while he pulled apart nuts with his thin, curled fingers.

"Why the long face?" he asked. "You got problems?"

"The world has problems," I answered. "I get depressed every time I pick up a paper. Have you read the news lately?"

"No." He shook his head. "I've found it's usually a bad idea."

"Well, your generation left us the world in reasonably good shape, and we're messing it up big time."

My uncle smiled. "You shouldn't get so upset. Try to live by the words I once discovered excavating the tomb of an ancient Egyptian king: 'Leave your worry on the doorstep and direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.'"

"No Uncle Danny, I believe that was from a popular American song of the 1920s."

He shrugged. "Whatever."

"But Uncle Danny," I persisted. "Have you been hearing all that stuff about the oceans dying, and the grain shortages that have sprung up in Asia because they're raising more cattle? And now the animal waste problem has gotten so bad that even Congress can't ignore it. One of the big food conglomerates is building a hog farm in Utah that will generate as much waste as the entire city of Los Angeles!"

Uncle Danny didn't seem to care. "We're both vegetarians, aren't we?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Well, then. When everyone else decides to follow us—and they will—those problems will go away like magic!"

"You make it sound so easy."

"It is." He tossed a pistachio to a squirrel who had been waiting patiently a few yards away. "Just remember what Winston Churchill said when he consulted me about covert operations during the war: 'What, me worry?'"

"No, I believe it was actually Alfred E. Neuman who said that, in Mad magazine."

"Yes, that's a possibility, too."

"But Uncle Danny, maybe you haven't heard about 'Mad Cow' disease, and all the new strains of E. coli bacteria, and the deadly bird and swine flues from Hong Kong that could wipe us all out any minute. Humankind is only holding on by a thread!"

Uncle Danny dismissed that notion with a wave of his hand. "Aren't you listening, boy? Vegetarianism will solve all those problems too!"

"Sure it will. But how are we ever going to get everyone to be vegetarian?" I asked. "In this crazy world if a person goes on television and says she'll never eat a hamburger again, she gets dragged into court in Texas."

"You're talking about Opera Windows?"

"Oprah Winfrey," I corrected him.

"And the cattlemen who are out to get her?"

"Cattlepersons."

Uncle Danny laughed. "Now, don't you think a smart woman like that is going to make mincemeat out of those 'beef' heads?"

"Well…. You know, you may be right."

"Of course I am. It's just like that ridiculous McLiberal litigation—"

"McLibel."

"—Win or lose, the vegetarian cause gets loads of free publicity."

I'd never thought about it that way. But looking at my uncle, a guy who'd seen just about everything and still viewed the world through the rosiest of lenses, I knew his kind of optimism was not only perfectly sensible, but just what I needed. That was why I was here.

"I hope you didn't want any of these nuts," Uncle Danny said, popping the last pistachio into his mouth. Then his gaze went across the street to the park where some children were playing soccer. "You know, the Mahatma Gandhi once gave me some good advice when we were traveling by train across India. He said: 'Don't worry—be happy.'"

I couldn't stand it any longer. "Uncle Danny, you never met Gandhi in your life, and that line was from a popular song by Bobby McFerrin."

He turned back to me and shrugged, the smile refusing to leave his face.

"Whatever," he said.

Assorted Weird Diseases Part II—The Dumb Things We Do

Some people believe that the dinosaurs, proud inhabitants of this earth for 165 million years, were finally driven to extinction not by meteorites or floods, but by the spread of some contagious disease. A tiny bacterium and his buddies bringing down the mighty T-Rex? Well, I don't know if that happened or not. But I would give you odds that when the human race finally hangs up its Reeboks it won't be because of nuclear weapons, global warming, or even Jerry Springer. No, the biggest threats to our species, by far, are all microscopic.

Of course, biological threats have been around forever, and will always be with us. The real question is how we are managing them. Unfortunately, not very well. And in that respect, nothing is speeding the journey to our eventual rendezvous with microorgasmic disaster faster than our animal agriculture and animal research practices. Just look at some of the dumb things we do:

• We raise billions of farm animals under conditions of horrible confinement and stress, to make sure that diseases spread as easily and rapidly as possible. (Remember how sick you got last winter when you were on the elevator with that guy who had TB? Same thing.)
  
• We use huge quantities of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals, creating a perfect environment for the development of antibiotic-resistant organisms. (Roughly half of the 25,000 tons of antibiotics produced in the United States each year are used on farm animals.)
  
• We take new antibiotics that are in development and use them on farm animals, to make sure that antibiotic resistance keeps up with antibiotic development. (Example: Since July of this year every intensively-raised chicken in the UK has been fed an antibiotic growth promoter that is cross-resistant to a new, vitally-important medical drug on trial in British hospitals.)
  
• We do medical research on animals, creating the perfect opportunity for cross-species transmission of disease. (Example: The vast majority, if not all, of our existing lines of stem cells were cultured with mouse cells. This will present a real problem if they are ever used in human treatment.)
  
• We intentionally feed diseased animals to other animals…
  
• …and to ourselves! (The next time you're at a fancy cocktail party remember that "Foie gras" is liver from geese with the painful disease hepatic lipidosis.)
  
• We have slaughterhouse and food inspection procedures that we know will allow a certain number of diseased and contaminated animals to pass into the food supply, because it's just too expensive to test every carcass.
  
• We blindly accept the fact that millions of people get food poisoning from eating meat (and other foods contaminated by meat) every year. (My meat-eating friends are getting sick all the time.)
  
• We transplant animal organs into humans ("xenotransplantation"), creating the risk that we might contract diseases from these animals in the process. (When asked if this could cause an outbreak of new infectious disease, Phil Nogouchi, M.D., a pathologist and director of the FDA's division of cellular and gene therapies said frankly, "We don't know.")
  
• We create genetically modified organisms using viruses and bacteria (precisely because they have the ability to break down barriers between species), and introduce these organisms into the environment.
  
• And if all of this isn't enough, last summer some Bozo stole three research pigs from a lab at the University of Florida and had them ground into sausage for human consumption. (Mmmmm… doesn't that sound tasty?!)
  

  
   

  Of course the dumbness doesn't stop there. We see it around us all the time. On the evening news the other day I saw a doctor interviewed about Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and the possibility of contracting it from eating cows infected with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ("Mad Cow" disease). The doctor agreed that this is a serious problem that we should all be worried about. There was a somber moment in the studio, until the commentator asked: "Doctor, do you eat beef?"
  

  "Oh yes!" the doctor answered, and there were smiles all around. I guess as long as a doctor is still eating meat nobody has to be worried about anything, much less think for him/herself.
  

  Speaking of mad cows and humans, a recent article that appeared on WebMD downplayed the risks of Mad Cow disease in the United States, citing the effectiveness of the FDA's feed separation rule to prevent the spread of the disease by banning the feeding of cows to cows. (It is widely believed that cows become infected through eating feed containing infected bone meal.) The article noted with approval the FDA's finding that "about 90%" of the animal rendering plants inspected are in compliance with the rule.
  

  Hmmm…. Doesn't that mean that "about 10%" of the inspected plants are out of compliance? Isn't that a problem?
  

  In September Japan reported its first case of Mad Cow disease. By the time it was discovered, the cow in question, a five-year-old Holstein milk cow (name apparently withheld pending notification of kin), had already been "processed" into the week's batch of meat and bone meal. ("Hey guys, this cow we're grinding up looks kind of funny. Why don't we test her for Mad Cow disease?" "Good idea, Yokomo. Let's eat some hamburgers while we're waiting for the test results.")
  

  Humans have been around, in one form or another, for only a few million years. It's looking like we'll be extinct long before we reach the longevity of the dinosaurs.
  

  They had walnut-sized brains. We aren't that smart.

Assorted Weird Diseases Part I—There’s Plenty More to Fear than Fear Itself

The other morning I woke up to the radio, and before I even had my eyes open I was hearing the saga of Dawn Becerra. Wow, what an eye-opening story! It seems that poor Dawn was vacationing in Mexico a few years ago when she made the mistake of eating a "pork" taco. It made her sick for 3 weeks. But that was just the beginning of Dawn's woes. Sometime later she began suffering seizures and more illness, and eventually the doctors at the Mayo Clinic found that a worm from the taco had made its way into her skull and was happily chewing away on brain tissue. The doctors eventually removed the worm (it was already dead—probably from years of eating fatty foods) in a 6-hour operation, and fortunately Dawn is okay today.

Think she's given up eating "pork"?

Just a few years ago things like brain-eating worms crawling out of tacos would have been seen only in Japanese (no, make that Mexican) horror movies. Today, though, it doesn't seem so strange. Just look at some of the assorted weird diseases that have been in the news lately.

• E. coli Contamination—E. coli, the bacteria found in animal excrement, has been big news ever since four people died and another 700 got sick from eating at the now-infamous Jack-In-The-Box restaurant chain. (New corporate slogan: "We're cookin' the sh*t out of our burgers.")
  In the years since then major outbreaks, meat recalls, and other newsworthy E. coli disasters have come around just about every hour. My own personal favorite was the "Cornstock" party, where guests got sick after some hearty partying (they apparently consumed a steer, a hog, and an ostrich along the way!) in a farmer's field in Illinois. Embarrassed party organizers swore that the field was cleaned of manure in advance of the event, but they probably couldn't say the same for the steer, hog and ostrich.
  
• Mad Cow Disease—Let me see if I've got this straight… There's this renegade protein running around that even modern sterilization procedures can't destroy. Everyone in Europe is terrified of it, but here in the Colonies we've been a bit slow to catch on. Anyway, it turns cows' brains to mush, and will do the same thing to people if they eat the cows. Since nearly everyone eats cows, and since this disease can take years to manifest itself, this is an accident waiting to happen. We could wake up tomorrow and find that the people left alive on earth are a few vegetarians. (We'd all be very rich and enjoy the last laugh, but heck, we'd probably get bored.) Is that pretty much it?
  
• Foot-and-Mouth Disease—Nobody seems to understand this disease, but it too appears to be driving the Europeans loony—causing them to kill all their farm animals and light large fires with them. This, in turn, causes major depression to spread among us animal-rights types. This may be the most frustrating and distressing disease of all.
  

  I could go on. In addition to the above, people are getting sick every day from Pfiesteria piscicida streptococcus, giardia, salmonella, Listeria Monocytogenes, Campylobacter jejuni, chlamydia and even toxic algae. And there seem to be new things that could be turned into Japanese horror movies appearing all the time.
  

  What all these assorted weird diseases have in common, of course, is that they are all intrinsically linked to the raising and eating of animals. So, does anyone ever suggest that vegetarianism is an answer to the problem? No, that would be too easy. Instead, we promote irradiation, quarantine the boots of people who have been traipsing around the European countryside, and generally do a lot of worrying. And of course the most common advice given by our medical community is to "make sure your meat is well-cooked."
  

  Well-cooked meat? That may be a partial answer, but it seems ironic that, as I write this, well-done meats have just joined cigarettes, asbestos, DDT and arsenic on the federal government's official list of substances suspected of causing cancer.
  

  Would you rather be afflicted by assorted weird diseases or by good old-fashioned cancer? It's a heck of a choice for meat-eaters.
  

  
   

  [Next time, in exciting Part II, we'll look at some of the dumb things we humans do to make sure new assorted weird diseases keep coming, and get shared by everyone!]