Why driving a Prius is really not enough

How about a nice juicy venison tenderloin! mmmmmhhh.....tenderloin!

If I happen to hunt, and process my own venison (which I do), I cause far less ecological damage than eating carrots farmed in CA, or South America...Total cost, 1 bullet and a little electricity for the freezer.
transport - none. Fert/Pesticide use - none. Irrigation usage - none. Deer present on 8 acre plot - plentiful and sustainable.

(just trying to play devils advocate here).
A proper small farm is a closed loop cycle and involves livestock as part of the crop rotation. But the massive migration to cities caused small farms to be replaced by factory farming. That's the real problem. Also, freshfruits and vegetables are not a year round crop, they need to be moved as well, so they are not immune to the criticisms of global warming. And NO ONE wants to eat what our grandmothers ate at 12. You're talking about a staple of canned beens and etc. and salted fish/pork. Bacon was quite popular in my grandmother's time due to its storage ability.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Aug 29 2007, 03:22 PM) [snapback]503904[/snapback]</div>

Darwood, I agree 100%. Since MAN removed the Lynx and the Wolf, there aren't any more predators (in general). Up here in Québec it's required to keep the deer population in proportion. Not hunting them is worse for the species. When in too large numbers they get into trouble, and the spread of disease is an ever present danger. Overpopulation would be bad for that environment too.

However you still represent a scant, what, best guess 2% of the NA population? About the same if we count all the vegatarians & vegans. All I can add, is don't make them suffer on purpose, that would be sad.
Not like factory raised food animals, in cruelty from birth to slaughter (unless stated otherwise - free reign, Calgary cattle, small bio-farm, etc).

What I mean by Grandma when she was 12, is homemade stew, apple pie, etc. Things made by hand, from raw source materials. Hot dogs were sausages, not processed various animal leftovers (ears, eyes, tongues, brains...).

* Very good devil's advocate

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mark Derail @ Aug 29 2007, 02:01 PM) [snapback]503926[/snapback]</div>

OK, I have to ask... What do you think Sausage is? :blink:

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Aug 29 2007, 03:29 PM) [snapback]503907[/snapback]</div>

Yep he did...let's see him turn around with intelligent dialogue. After all he IS on this forum, 44 posts (so not a troll), and...I'm sure I can come up with positive things to say about him if I search his posts.

What I mean to say is that when we question personal convictions, we expose ourselves to personal attacks, even though we / you / I weren't attacking him directly.

I think we need a new term for our canivorous friends - how about Eco-Conscious? Like Darwood...
Much easier to explain to people, to reduce, than to upset their morals and changing cold turkey (pun intended)


Sir Paul McCartney - as for him, I respect his music, his diet choice. However I don't condone for anyone to have more than a million pounds in the bank (2.2 US million).
With no mortage to pay and no debts, you can live quite well on interest alone. He should have donated / invested in NPO's all that extra money, intelligently. Now his ex-wife gets half his assets, she could have gotten half of a much much smaller amount.
He can still do that, but won't. At some point in life, especially at his age, what's the point?
Anyways, way off topic there.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tripp @ Aug 29 2007, 04:07 PM) [snapback]503930[/snapback]</div>

Go try some German Authentic Sausage. Compare that to the very best money can buy hot dog sitting in your supermarket. Check online the contents.

That's what I mean. Real sausage, that you buy from a butcher shop, is what Grandma ate at the Fair when she was 12. Not today's 100% pure beef (which body parts? :blink: ) hot dogs.

Your local butcher will even show you with pride how he makes them, give it a try. I'll stop now talking about this now :wacko:

 

"What I mean by Grandma when she was 12, is homemade stew, apple pie, etc. Things made by hand, from raw source materials. Hot dogs were sausages, not processed various animal leftovers (ears, eyes, tongues, brains...)."

I would bet they did mix in tongue, heart, liver etc (probly not eyes) into the sausage they made way back when. And why not? I have a problem with wasteful people who deer hunt, remove the back straps and throw the rest away. Of course I do NOT use the tongue/liver/etc myself, but my dad would kill me if I didn't save the heart. He loves fried ven heart and used to bring it to his 6 grade class as a biology demonstration and would fry it up for those brave enough to try it. I'm not sure that would still fly in today's public schools....(/Interesting tangent)

Anyways....my earlier point was that a return to food of the early 1900's is an admirable thought, but I think you are over romaticizing the quality of the food they ate. They ate a LOT of canned food, including canned beef, and they ate a LOT of salted meat products. Mostly due to problems of food preservation. They had root cellars and home grown produce, but the quality declined over the year until the next crop. They also relied heavily on the daily milk deliveries, and milk has also been chastised in this thread.

It might be better for the environment for everyone to eat locally canned food all year, but the nutritional value of food is reduced in canning, and the taste is much more bland. I would argue that the obesity problems of our country are a result of how much really tasty food is available to us at such a low cost. But I don't fret on the subject, since I know food costs will rise substantially and availability will be reduced in the coming decades.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Darwood @ Aug 29 2007, 12:22 PM) [snapback]503904[/snapback]</div>

All correct, but "plentiful" is a matter of scale. I am totally in favor of all meat consumption to be limited to what we can hunt in the wild on land or fish from a rowboat. However that wouldn't go over real well, since it would enforce that everyone, on average, become 99.9% vegetarians.

As you point out, it is the energy, water, and land-intensive factory farming required to support our remarkable rate of meat consumption that is at the root of discussing vegetarianism along with Prius driving. The reason that meat is singled out as opposed to the factory approaches to, say, corn, is that the meat is vastly more inefficient in resources than the corn. E.g. more than a factor of 50 in energy to produce the same amount of protein in beef vs. corn. (References in previous post.)

It's only a factor of four for chicken in the same study, so shifting from beef to chicken can make a big difference in resource consumption, as can many other changes in diet well short of vegetarianism.

Someone made the suggestion that meat be a small side dish instead of the bulk of the meal, which sounds like a really good idea to me, not just for conservation of resources, but also lowering what I pay for health insurance.

 

LOL Darwood - I meant Grandma, not great great . . . just teasing.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Aug 29 2007, 03:29 PM) [snapback]503907[/snapback]</div>

The not breathing part goes out to everybody who wants to make a true and absolute zero CO2 impact on the environment. If you interpreted my post as an "attack" well I apologize. You (presumably) pasted in an article with a title that I think is an attack on me personally as well as all people who consume meat.

Your title, "Why driving a Prius is really not enough" goes to show that the right-wing environmentalists are so discontent with people trying to "do the right thing," maybe not 24/7 but sure more than 0/0 like other people, is just not good enough, and nothing will EVER be good enough.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Fred S @ Aug 31 2007, 10:56 AM) [snapback]504970[/snapback]</div>

Respiration can be carbon neutral, so it's irrelevant.

 

"goes to show that the right-wing environmentalists are so discontent with people trying to "do the right thing," maybe not 24/7 but sure more than 0/0 like other people, is just not good enough, and nothing will EVER be good enough."

That bugs the crap out of me too. But I wouldn't say it is strictly a right wing phenomenon. There are plenty of left wingers that fall into the same trap of thinking.

 

Fred S - Nice reply

Darwood - I call them extreme Militants, that dislike the common person, and yet is so counterproductive to their cause.

I preach moderation and practice it.

However there are hidden costs to everything that need to be recognized. The site www.ILoveMountains.org and how the coal mining / stripping is having adverse affects, is well presented.

More people, consuming more, are driving big corporations to higher profits, and consequently, bribes & lobbying, to make even more profit.

So just educating people through example, peaceful demonstrations, should be enough.

However PETA, GreenPeace & others, that have been doing this for decades, are getting desperate for media attention. The war, Hilton/Spears/Lohan, get more coverage.

I think the media - most likely controlled through politics - aren't doing their job properly.
So the militants go to extremes for attention, and end up turning people away, and that's a shame.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Mark Derail @ 2007 Aug 29 1:24 PM) [snapback]503936[/snapback]</div>

All the body parts. Isn't that what 100% means?
No, I don't eat hot dogs.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Fred S @ Aug 31 2007, 11:56 AM) [snapback]504970[/snapback]</div>

For an environmental forum, the posting of this article is very appropriate. There are those that may not be aware of the degree to which their dietary choices affect the overall environment and they may care enough about the environment to amend their choices in order to facilitate positive changes. It's all about personal choices and in order to make educated personal choices, the more information one can obtain the better. The OP topic, and the tangential topics, provide a lot of useful information. It's clear that going meatless is not an option for you but maybe buying local is, or does the thought of that make you cranky too???

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Jul 18 2007, 10:36 AM) [snapback]481004[/snapback]</div>

Bah! Vegans, I'm an ultra-vegan. We eschew clothing because we believe that plants are harmed in the process of making clothing. We are breatharians and draw nourishment from the air. It is a relatively new movement, but I have great hopes.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Fred S @ Aug 31 2007, 11:56 AM) [snapback]504970[/snapback]</div>

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "right-wing environmentalists." Speaking as a right-winger who is concerned about the environment--primarily due to its remarkable ability to kill me at a moments notice, I wonder about the OP's original intent with the posting of this article. I managed (please, please note the PAST tense) to be a vegetarian for nearly twenty years without telling a single person that what I was doing was; to quote the OP's article:

"(to) live the most environmentally positive life styles on the planet..."

In fact, I spent a great deal of time apologizing and trying to make my hosts and others more comfortable with my weird behavior. But then, that was back in the quaint 20th Century.

The balance of the screed seems to be a double jointed effort to convince all you fish-eaters out there that fisho-vegetarianism ain't good enough because fishies are our buddies too and do you have any idea what's in that hot-dog you just ate. Combined, of course, with a healthy dose of unless you do what I'M doing, you simply are raping the planet and you therefore are not worthy of planting a kiss on the lips of any self-respecting women from Marin County, CA. (An actual statement made to me by an actual woman from Marin Country, CA in response to a similar discussion over 10 years ago)

Where do you stop? Are we going to start killing off the meat eaters who have health problems that the Central Committee can attribute to the consumption of meat? How about the obese? Let's include them, by all means, whether they are vegans or not, because THEIR footprint--Carbon and Actual is much larger that it has to be.

Of course all you vegans out there know that unless you are eating REAL organic produce (and maybe even if you are), including tofu (which I've fed my family twice this week, thank you) you may want to get a analysis of your blood for heavy metals and pesticides--You HAVE done that, right?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Rae Vynn @ Aug 31 2007, 03:35 PM) [snapback]505128[/snapback]</div>

Nice last line, I saw what you did there, I used to play on this team, remember?

Actually, I'd just quit being a vego. The discussion revolved around tuna fishing and dolphins. I showed the lady a button that was given to me by a punk-rocker type I worked with that said "I'd KILL Flipper for a Tuna fish Sandwitch." I thought it was funny. I mean who decided Dolphins were MORE important than Tuna? The Tuna is really a remarkable fish, I responded. I know, I'd just come back from Cabo, where I'd line-caught a big ol' tuna. My God it was yummy, I can still taste it after all these years.

I'm nearly sixty years old, have two kids IN DIAPERS that are mine. My love life is fine, thanks for insinuating. The major environmental risk I put these two kids at is either placing them in a small car (the Prius) and driving them around, or taking them for a walk in my neighborhood where everyone seems to think having a Pit Bull is an essential part of Urban Life. I would like to improve the environment by getting all the FOUR legged mongrels in my 'hood to become vegans.

Eating meats from factory farms is teh suck, period. I TRY to avoid it. If asked, I would discourage others from doing it. People who do should get blood work done, then go see Mr. Kellogg's clinic.

I'm delighted to hear that being a vegan is doing such wonderful things for you and the environment. My Prius is nearly six-months old and has less than 1700 miles, do I get a pass? How many miles equal a Chicken Breast? (Chopped, sauteed with sweet onions and fresh vegtables seasoned with a Teriyaki sauce and served over a bed of Basmadi rice). Can I have a Corn Dog when I go to the State Fair?

All I'm saying is glass houses, what.

 

Am I making a processing error in interpreting a lot of replies as an "it's all or nothing" philosophy? Why do few heed the message that slight reductions in animal intake can make an enormous collective difference?

Heavy metals, pesticides and insecticides will be present in any conventionally produced diet. From what I know, the fattier substances are going to bind to these unwanted chemicals/metals more readily. In keeping with this, ingesting animal is probably more detrimental than most vegetables and fruits.