Bacon: You Think Eating Yourself To Death Is A Nice Way To Go?

The other day I was at my favorite restaurant in L.A. and the chef was telling me that starting on Monday she's revamping the menu entirely. Maybe she saw how nervous I became but she reassured me by going over all the new dishes she had worked up. One caught my attention; it was something with "bacon." It's a raw, organic vegan place. No room at the inn for bacon. (In fact, as ex-cattle rancher Howard Lyman, told the East Bay Express last week, carnivores can't be environmentalists.

He wasn't just a cattle rancher. He was a diehard fourth-generation Montana cattle rancher with a thousand animals on the range and thousands more in feedlots. On more than 10,000 acres of cropland, he grew grain to feed his livestock, which also included pigs, chickens, and turkeys.

Thirty years later and 130 pounds lighter, Howard Lyman is a changed man. First and foremost, he's a staunch vegetarian. "I would love to see feedlots close and factory farming end," Lyman wrote in his book The Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth From the Cattle Rancher That Won't Eat Meat. "I would love to see more families return to the land, grow crops for our own species, and raise them organically. I would love to see farm communities revive. I would love to know that I've wandered into my nation's heartland by the sweet smell of grain and not the forbidding smell of excrement."

Now the "bacon" my chef friend Lisa was talking about was faux bacon made entirely from raw baby coconut meat. Not this kind of bacon-- you know, the kind that will kill you. Research from the Harvard School of Public Health concludes that "eating two rashers of bacon or a sausage every day can increase your risk of heart disease by nearly half, scientists claim. Their study found meat that has been cured, salted or processed in another way can also push up the likelihood of developing diabetes. It linked the salts and chemical preservatives used on processed meat to ill health if the products are eaten regularly." Add various cancers to the bowels and breasts-- and then there's the little obesity problem we were talking about with Rep. Jared Polis a couple weeks ago. Turns out Michelle Obama has made tackling that thorny subject-- solving the childhood obesity problem in a generation-- one of her top priorities in the White House.

But the goal is so ambitious only because the crisis of childhood obesity is so grave -- with the current generation of Americans is "on track to have a shorter lifespan than their parents." Obesity "is estimated to cause 112,000 deaths per year in the United States, and one third of all children born in the year 2000 are expected to develop diabetes during their lifetime." Each year, obese adults incur "an estimated $1,429 more in medical expenses than their normal-weight peers," and overall, the nation spent up to $147 billion on obesity-related costs in 2008.

...[T]he newly enacted comprehensive health reform law "contains a number of provisions to address childhood obesity in the context of health care and public health." Several studies have indicated that, when presented with calorie information and recommendations, people on average consumed meals with almost 100 fewer calories. The law improves nutrition labeling in fast food restaurants by requiring all chain restaurants "to provide clear labeling of the calorie counts by March 2011." By that date, restaurants must "display a succinct statement on the recommended number of calories individuals should consume each day as well as provide written nutrition information when requested." Vending machines will soon have to meet a similar requirement. The law also promotes breastfeeding by mandating that "employers with more than 50 employees must provide break time and place for breastfeeding mothers to express milk," gives grants to community based obesity intervention programs, invests in broader population-level obesity intervention efforts, and promotes primary care and coordination efforts that emphasize prevention. Still, none of this alone can significantly lower obesity rates. For that, policymakers must do much more to enact the Task Force's recommendations and look beyond health care into the nutrition of food in school cafeterias, the physical education programs, America's agricultural policies, and the food options in lower-income neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, some in the conservative media are using the Task Force to further the meme that the administration is undermining personal freedoms and liberties. Last week, for instance, Matt Drudge ran a headline saying, "White House seeks controls on food marketing." On the May 11 edition of his Fox News show, Sean Hannity said: "An Obama government obesity task force." "Does every American family need a dietitian appointed by the government to tell them that this food is going to make you fat and this food is not?" he asked. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin also turned the Task Force into a hit, saying that her "problem with the Obama administration is that it's more concerned with policing grocery aisles and our refrigerators than it is with our borders." "And we'd be heck a lot better off if they got their priorities in order." Only former Governor Mike Huckabee, who himself has struggled with obesity, warned conservatives against mischaracterizing the report. During a discussion in February about Obama's campaign to fight childhood obesity, Huckabee explained that the initiative is not a "nanny-state solution" or a "leftist position" and warned that conservatives would engage in reactionary attacks against the program. Speaking of Obama, he concluded, "She does not believe that it is a government solution and that government should dictate what size cheeseburger you eat."

How about a cheeseburger with no cheese, no burger and no bun, just stuff that's delicious and nutritious? and don't get me started on the California Department of Pesticide Regulation deciding to permit the systematic poisoning of the state's strawberry crop with methyl iodide, a potent carcinogenic gas which is certainly a neurotoxin and disruptor of thyroid function, particularly for fetuses.

Ever go to a Hollywood premiere? We've written about Bold Native in the past, while it was being filmed. Now it's completed and this spectacular film about about animal liberation, the nature of terrorism, and those who believe it is sometimes necessary to break the law in the pursuit of a higher good will have it's world premiere on Wednesday evening, June 16. I'm goin'. And the folks from Open Road Films gave me a pair of tickets to give away to a Blue America donor. Everyone who contributes in the next 24 hours-- to any Blue America candidate on this ActBlue page will be entered into a drawing for the pair of tickets. Now if you live in Maine, you'll have to figure out how to get to Hollywood yourself. Same if you like in Santa Monica. But there are 3 or 4 vegan restaurants real close by the theater.



UPDATE: Could Be Worse... Take The Fare At The Beijing Zoo For Example

The Chinese love eating rare game... the rarer and more exotic the animal, the more the Chinese seem to want it in their moo goo gai pan. And if the species is endangered and on the verge of extinction... yum, yum, yum.

Some zoos are not just for looking at animals. If you're going to Beijing, you can eat them as well.

Crocodile and kangaroo tail, as well as the webbed toes of a hippopotamus are all on the menu at the Beijing zoo's restaurant.

And if that doesn't sound exotic enough, there's always scorpion and deer's penis, with ant soup as a starter.

Republican Flesh-Eaters... Just Kidding

A few weeks ago we looked into the idea of how someone can be-- or, perhaps, can't be-- both a meat-eater and an environmentalist. I pointed to a movie that's coming out soon called Bold Native, a spectacularly insightful film that covers a great deal of ground, from activism, social protest and totalitarianism to compassion, ecology and... well, the survival of mankind. This is how the film's website describes it:

Bold Native is a fiction feature film. Charlie Cranehill, an animal liberator wanted by the United States government for domestic terrorism, emerges from the underground to coordinate a nationwide action as his estranged CEO father tries to find him before the FBI does. The film simultaneously follows a young woman who works for an animal welfare organization fighting within the system to establish more humane treatment of farmed animals. From abolitionists to welfarists, Bold Native takes on the issue of modern animal use and exploitation from several angles within the context of a road movie adventure story.

The filmmakers’ background in documentary informed the creative approach to Bold Native. Self-financed and shot with a four person team in real-world locations, sometimes using real activists, lawyers, and formerly imprisoned animal liberators, the film weaves an intricate tale of one of the most important issues facing America and the world morally and ecologically-- the impact and consequences of industrialized animal use. And with a character who faces prosecution and potential lifetime imprisonment under the recently passed Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) for property crimes currently considered terrorism, the film also illuminates the danger of corporate interests influencing the law in a post-9/11 world.

When I first brought it up, there was no real trailer for the film. I just stumbled across one and thought I'd share it:

Do You Eat Meat?

I grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island, eating meat three meals a day, bacon and eggs for breakfast, ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and, say, pot roast or meatloaf for dinner. It never occurred to me that there was an alternative until I went to college and settled down with a hippie chick from Manhattan who was a vegetarian and a GREAT cook. She never told me I was a vegetarian and I never gave it much thought beyond how delicious the meals she prepared were. But when I was traveling through Asia-- and especially Afghanistan-- I noticed all the meat eaters getting deathly sick and me becoming like the caregiver for half the hippie trail kids in Kabul. A lengthy stay in Goa, where I learned about how human-hog recycling worked-- i.e., the sewage "system" (humans eat them and they eat the sewage and we eat them some more)-- made me a vegan for decades.

As I mentioned a few times lately, I'm reading Thom Hartmann's newest book, Threshold. I want to quote a couple of short paragraphs that stuck with me the other day:

[W]hile there are more than six billion humans, there are more than twenty billion livestock mammals (pigs, cows, goats, sheep) and about sixteen billion chickens in the world, over 99 percent of them grown by humans as food for humans. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in a 2007 report noted that 37 percent of the world's total methane production (and 9 percent of all CO2 and 65 percent of all nitrous oxide emissions) comes from our livestock. Because nitrous oxide is 296 times stronger than CO2, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all our cars, trains, buses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets.

A sudden and worldwide shift to vegetarianism (or even close to vegetarianism-- most indigenous societies historically have used meat as a flavoring rather than a staple, eating less than a fifth of the meat and dairy products Americans do) would have more impact on global warming than if every jet plane and car in the world were to fall silent forever.

University of Chicago research found that simply going vegetarian would reduce the average American's carbon footprint by over 1.5 tons of carbon per year: That's half again more than doubling the gas mileage of your car by moving from a big sedan to a small hybrid (which typically saves about a ton of carbon per year).

Hartmann then goes on to explain how methane concentrations in the atmosphere will eventually-- actually, fairly soon-- probably end most life, certainly human life-- on earth. And then there's all the solid polution. I was speaking with North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall about the problem the other day. She reminded me that in 2007 her state, the #2 hog producer (over 10 million annually) after Iowa, became the first in the nation to ban the construction or expansion of lagoons and sprayfields on hog farms-- the Swine Farm Environmental Performance Standards Act. Marshall, who is running against reactionary Republican Richard Burr for the U.S. Senate has a long career working for environmentally sound hog farming operations. "Locally," she told me on the phone, "I've been helping a North Carolina inventor who has patients and EPA approval for a hog-farm operation that produces no waste, but in this economy it's been difficult for him to get funding for a demonstration project." She also mentioned that she's been eating a lot more environmentally herself. In fact, more and more candidates have mentioned that to me than I've ever heard before. And you know what? It's the one thing each and every one of us can do on a personal, nonpolitical level to help save our planet.

Last week and old friend of mine, Cheri Shankar, wrote a very provocative piece for HuffPo, Can You Be A Meat-Eating Environmentalist?. She has the most environmentally advanced, green-friendly home I've ever been in. She's very sweet and doesn't like hectoring people but she's come to the conclusion that it's difficult to talk the talk without walking the walk.

Probably the best thing we can do for the planet is abstain from meat, fish, and dairy. Our food choices have the most profound impact of all. More than driving a hybrid, recycling, solar panel installation or LEED architecture. So for all of our efforts, our carbon footprint is huge, thanks to our diet full of hamburgers, steaks, bacon and chicken salads. The energy it takes to produce a pound of meat versus a pound of vegetables is mind boggling. Meat eating is a biggie! It matters ... a lot.

Last year my friend Phil took me to the screening on a groundbreaking movie that is mostly filmed, Bold Native; they're still working on it. I still haven't gotten it out of my mind. There's an incongruous, almost random 14 second clip from the movie at the top of this post. Here's the blurb from the Bold Native website:

Bold Native is a fiction feature film. Charlie Cranehill, an animal liberator wanted by the United States government for domestic terrorism, emerges from the underground to coordinate a nationwide action as his estranged CEO father tries to find him before the FBI does. The film simultaneously follows a young woman who works for an animal welfare organization fighting within the system to establish more humane treatment of farmed animals. From abolitionists to welfarists, Bold Native takes on the issue of modern animal use and exploitation from several angles within the context of a road movie adventure story.

The filmmakers’ background in documentary informed the creative approach to Bold Native. Self-financed and shot with a four person team in real-world locations, sometimes using real activists, lawyers, and formerly imprisoned animal liberators, the film weaves an intricate tale of one of the most important issues facing America and the world morally and ecologically-- the impact and consequences of industrialized animal use. And with a character who faces prosecution and potential lifetime imprisonment under the recently passed Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) for property crimes currently considered terrorism, the film also illuminates the danger of corporate interests influencing the law in a post-9/11 world.

Meet Casanova and Sonny: