Fri, Jan-03-20, 02:40
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Plan: Muscle Centric
Stats: 238/153/160
BF:
Progress: 109%
Location: UK
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The vegan craze is a self-serving corporate con
The vegan craze is a self-serving corporate con
Jamie Blackett
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...-corporate-con/
Quote:
While multinational companies make a fortune from meat-free products, livestock farmers are struggling
Spare a thought for our livestock farmers. Just as midwinter is bleakest (in the UK), when keeping animals alive can be a bare-knuckle fight against the weather, along comes the sanctimonious nonsense of “Veganuary”.
This assault on our livelihoods will have extra menace this year now that we know we are up against not just the usual suspects – Saint Greta, Chris Packham and all those anaemic-looking millennials – but the financial firepower of global agribusiness as well.
Veganism is the best thing that ever happened to the processed food industry and giants like Nestlé have generated huge margins from turning cheap vegetable oils, sugars and carbohydrates into fake meats and milk. Worryingly, it shows little sign of abating. Research released this week has shown a troubling decline in UK demand for beef and pork.
“Woke consumerism” probably started in university common rooms and student bars but its popularity has been very deliberately fuelled by the multinational conglomerates that control global food supplies. They see it as a way of shifting power from small, privately owned farms in the livestock sector to giant corporate food producers on arable prairies and in biotech labs.
The Monbiotists and the Packhamites still bear a grudge against farmers for the Enclosure Acts and think they are furthering the long march of the Left by espousing veganism. Yet the reality is that all these people are being gamed by the wickedest capitalists of them all.
The Left hate to be told this, as you can tell from the lurid reaction online whenever the issue is discussed. But you only need to follow the money to see the fingerprints of companies like Monsanto all over the promotion of science that suits their agenda, such as the controversial EAT-Lancet report on diet that recommended a 50 per cent reduction in the consumption of red meat.
The efforts of these global giants will secure far more column inches and radio minutes this January than puny meat industry bodies like the NFU can manage in response, and we will all be sold recipes that use the ingredients that they want us to buy. The nutritionists who warn against the dangers of giving up meat and dairy will be quietly sidelined.
We should be able to rely on our licence-fee-funded state broadcaster for some balance, but the BBC’s egregious institutional bias was revealed in November’s Panorama programme, Meat: A Threat to our Planet? Presenter Liz Bonnin travelled the globe (in a plane, presumably) to showcase the most polluting livestock farms before visiting an agri-tech laboratory in Silicon Valley that grows “meat” in Petri dishes.
Social media later revealed that a segment on the type of pasture-fed beef system we have in this country (UK) – which demonstrated the virtuous cycle of methane being reabsorbed by grass and explained how grazing herbivores are actually part of the solution to climate change – had been cut from the programme. The clear message was: give up meat.
I am fortunate that I can and do grow “plant-based foods” as well as beef on my farm, so I see both sides of the argument and I am bemused by the vegan agenda.
If I chose I could plough up all our grass to grow oats to turn into ersatz milk, for example. That I don’t is partly out of concern for the environment.
Put simply, livestock farming increases topsoil and therefore takes carbon out of the atmosphere. Arable farming does the opposite. When environmentalists bleat about there being only 100 harvests left on the planet, they are failing to understand the crucial role of livestock manure in restoring soils.
We can grow grass here better than probably anywhere else. And we can do it without needing the chemical sprays or artificial fertilisers that create nitrous oxide, a far more damaging greenhouse gas in the long term than methane.
So why is it that when cows turn grass into instantly digestible meat and milk the methane temporarily created is demonised, yet when soya is industrially processed into “meat” and “milk” we ignore the permanent greenhouse gases released in growing and processing it?
Could it possibly be because Monsanto and the others want us to think that way?
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Last edited by Demi : Fri, Jan-03-20 at 02:48.
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