Tuesday, October 19, 2010

How much meat to eat?

You know what I'd like this morning. I'd like to know what Friends of the Earth and the Soiled Association think about eating meat. What's that? They think I should eat less? Wow, that's come out of left field. Let's go deeper shall we (dream within a dream within a dream).

I wonder if it will save an arbitrary amount of lives?
Cutting meat to 3 meals a week 'will save 45,000 lives'
Hurray, box ticked. What about an arbitrary amount of money pulled out of a researcher's arse?
...and save the NHS £1.2 billion each year
Sweet. Should pay for a whole bunch of middle managers. I'm excited now. But I do wonder if perhaps it's not better to eat more expensive meat, since the Soil Association do after all basically represent organic farmers?
The University of Oxford study said processed products, such as cheap burgers or sausages, were particularly bad for people’s health because of high levels of salt and fat.
Ah-hah, salt and fat. Shouldn't eat those. Bad. I know this because someone told me. Can't remember who. But it is true.

This would all be so much easier if I had some awesome celebrities to guide me. Perhaps that actress that had a cameo in Friends might have something to say?
Helen Baxendale, the Friends actress and mother of three, said she has already changed her family’s diet. She called for new legislation to encourage more people to cut down on meat and cut subsidies to ‘factory farmers’ in favour of farms where animals are put out to graze. “We’ve switched to less and better quality meat since we heard about the damaging impact factory farming is having on the planet – now I want the Government to play its part," she said.
Well done love. Reduce subsidies to cheaper food, and make expensive food slightly less expensive, thus fucking poorer people over. You thespians are so right-on.

One thing that's beyond doubt though. Those eeeeevil corporations actually enjoy raping the world's resources. Capitalism provides no incentive for big business to address these "issues".
PepsiCo, that produces Walker Crisps and Quaker Oats, is already bringing in a number of new farming techniques to cut carbon emissions by half over the next five years on the 350 farms they use around the UK.
Measures include using computer programmes known as ‘i-crop’ that mean only a certain amount of water and fertiliser is used.
I'll be damned. Helen Baxendale said we needed the Government to be involved, and yet it seems that large corporations are innovating all the time to make farming more efficient. I don't get it.

Who should I believe?

3 comments:

  1. Oh! Come on! Animal fat is bad. Science has proved it.

    Yeah, yeah, by force feeding rabbits – but there nothing wrong with that is there? I know they did the experiments again with dogs and couldn't budge their blood cholesterol levels no mater how much fatty meat they stuffed down the dogs. Ok, and rats too. But it's the rabbits that matter surely?

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  2. Joking aside, when they've finished hammering the smokers, and then the drinkers, the meat eaters are in for it. They'll never stop this game until the funding is cut off. That's the only hope for a return to some sanity. I'm still hoping that some real good will come of this recession. Oh, I'm a veggie, by the way, but that's not relevant. I do have my own chosen pleasures and vices.

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  3. @davidncl - yup, it's all about the rabbits, which are basically humans with bunny ears after all.

    @zaphod you are absolutely right. Cutting the funding is the only way to get any change effected, it would be amusing if the Labour-induced debt mountain were to destroy the nanny state, a certain irony there methinks.

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