| Demi |
Sat, Oct-01-22 02:38 |
Meat versus Greens
Quote:
Meat versus Greens
The latest ploy to destroy our healthy diets
A sign of the times emerged from a most unexpected place recently – my local butcher. The oxtail I was after had disappeared, replaced by a new range of ‘Paleo’ sausages. A staffer helped me find the oxtail and explained that the new kinds of sausages contained liver, heart and other offal; they were provided for the mainly female vegetarians and vegans who had been diagnosed with nutritional deficiencies, but who found dealing with the actual organs just too yucky. So much for the so-called ‘healthy’ alternative of plant-based diets.
Liver is the ne plus ultra of superfoods, much richer in nutrients such as vitamins A, all B vitamins and iron than steak; lions usually ignore the muscle meat of their prey and go straight to the chest, to feast on the heart, liver, kidneys and other offal. Flesh meats simply don’t contain the range of vitamins, minerals and micronutrients found in organs, traditionally offered in Anglo cultures as crumbed brains, lamb’s fry, steak and kidney pie, tripe and others.
But organ meats have fallen off our menus of late, and most under-50s regard the idea with revulsion. Vegetarianism has won the trend wars, with red meats painted as cancer-inducing, eggs and other animal fats blamed for heart ailments, and plant-heavy diets framed as more sustainable for the planet and kinder to our animals.
But what passes for science in one era can be debunked in the next. An old friend who has been vegan for decades looks like a wraith; he survives on regular vitamin B12 injections. I have just watched my one-year-old granddaughter gobble down raw oysters and prawns. A relative and occasional vegetarian shared an oxtail dinner at my place recently, to surprising effect. After chewing on the collagen and fat-rich meat and gristle, she got a strange gleam in her eye and fell upon the pot with an almost clumsy haste, gobbling down her fill. That was a food deficiency visibly being met. I cannot claim any special cleverness here, but as a one-time vegan who developed a vitamin B12 deficiency I know something of which I speak. Any diet that fails to provide all of our required nutrients is defective.
Try telling that, however, to the growing numbers of Aussies who are abandoning meat altogether, never mind offal. Around 10 per cent of Australians are estimated to be vegetarians, and around half a million vegan, but both categories are rising, as the expanding tiers of plant-based foods in your supermarkets will tell you.
Political crusaders are entering the arena too. A German animal rights group has urged a sex ban on meat-eating men, as well as a 41 per cent meat tax, while UK anti-dairy activists recently blocked access to supermarket milk racks, and drilled truck tyres to disable milk deliveries (#plant-based future). The green controllers are forcing their emissions-curbing preferences on all of us, even as they sneak away for their Paleo sausages and B12 jabs.
The irony, of course, is that large-scale monocropping of grains and vegetables is notoriously toxic to natural ecosystems, dousing fields with chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, compacting soils with heavy machinery and leaving a lifeless wasteland behind. Grazing animals on pasture is positively Elysian by contrast.
And then there’s ‘ze bugs’. The 2013 post-apocalypse movie Snowpiercer had a horror reveal in which proles’ food was exposed as jellied black cockroaches, while the elites dined on luxury meats and greens. What was then a shock scene is now real life, with Silicon Valley ‘philanthropists’ shovelling money into the ‘cultivated meat’ industry and other lab-created and insect-derived foods, including, yes, a variety of cockroaches.
Cricket flour is becoming big as an additive, already being fed to Australian schoolchildren as chips. In July the World Economic Forum promoted ‘10 eco-friendly foods’, including Air Meat made from microbes, a fake avocado made from broad beans and oil, solein, a ‘protein-rich food made from electricity, air and water laced with bacteria’, fake eggs made from ‘pea protein, salt and algae-derived acids’, and lab-grown meats. A 3D-printed steak, looking like the real thing, recently trended on Twitter. Bloomberg predicted last year that the plant-based proteins market could hit $162 billion by 2030, up from $29 billion in 2020.The Washington-based global ‘alternative protein advocate’ the Good Food Institute reported rapid acceleration in 2021, with 107 new start-ups and an unprecedented jump in monies raised. The Aspire group says it’s building the world’s biggest cricket farm in Ontario, to produce 13 million kilograms of crickets annually for human and pet consumption.
Meanwhile existing food supplies are in jeopardy. We’ve seen the Dutch farm protests at savage, government-ordered livestock cuts, and the riot- and starvation-inducing Sri Lanka organic food mandates. Supply chain issues are looming. Some would add the string of mysterious fires destroying dozens of food plants across the US.
Should a food crisis manifest, globalists will use it to turbocharge their new era of Frankenstein foods. Cheap! Tasty (given the right chemicals)! Available! And above all, green, requiring less water, land and other inputs, and generating fewer emissions. These foods might look like steaks, wheat flour, eggs and avocados but what they will be made of and whether they will be good for you is anybody’s guess. Your health is not the priority here.
As the old saw goes, you are what you eat. Slapping ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ labels on industrial sludge won’t make it any healthier. The US pioneered denatured, factory foods, created for industry’s ease rather than consumer health. Alas, the US is now also a global leader in ill-health. The CDC says 6 out of 10 adults have a chronic disease, and 4 of 10 have multiple chronic diseases – the highest rates in the world, despite having the highest healthcare spend per capita. Their obesity is legendary. US life expectancy is now falling after peaking in 2015 and many nations now surpass it, including China. Correlation not causation, you say? Maybe. Whatever the US is doing, it ain’t working.
I’ll trust farmers and gardeners and unprocessed traditional foods over lab-coated technicians, zealous greenies, fake foods and industrialists every time.
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https://spectator.com.au/2022/10/meat-versus-greens/ |
