This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
Melissa McEwen
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My Diet: Good, local, whole foods. Mostly meat, fish, and vegetables with some traditional whole grains and legumes.
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animal rights
09/20/2011 - 21:35
Today I got a spate of seemingly random animal rights trolls. Fly by night nonsense? Nope, apparently I was featured on the Freakonomics blog. Normally this would be an honor, since I was a fan of Freakonomics when I was an economics major in college, but nope, they let James McWilliams write another animal rights nonsense piece on their blog, one that references a post I made over a year ago. What does that have to do with economics? Hilariously enough, one of the major objections I have to magazines and blogs billing McWilliams as an agricultural writer is that he doesn't seem to know anything about agricultural economics. He is a historian who ruffles feathers because he condemns the locavore movement. Some troglo-free marketers only see the latter and are just happy to have someone pulling the hippies down to Earth, while forgetting that animals play an essential and irreplaceable role in our agricultural economy. When I saw McWilliams speak on a panel with real farmers, I saw him ignoring what they said, cherry picking quotes to rationalize his fantasy-future utopia of magic robot vegetable farms where they is no death (hilariously, growing mechanization of agriculture often leads to more deaths).
According to McWilliams, I am rationalizing unnecessary death. This is untrue. There is no way to rationalize any kind of death. The idea that some deaths are necessary and others are not is a quasi-religious way to look at the world. I was thrilled to see an animal rights philosopher, Joel Marks, admit that in the New York Times a few weeks ago:
In my case the plight of nonhuman animals at human hands became the great preoccupation. I could think of no greater atrocity than the confinement and slaughter of untold billions of innocent creatures for sustenance that can be provided through other, more humane diets.
In my most recent published book, I defended a particular moral theory – my own version of deontological ethics – and then “applied” that theory to defend a particular moral claim: that other animals have an inherent right not to be eaten or otherwise used by humans. Oddly enough, it was as I crossed the final “t” and dotted the final “i” of that monograph, that I underwent what I call my anti-epiphany.
A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in her relation to the sunset. I thought to myself: “Ah, if that is what she means, then I could believe in that kind of God. For when I think about the universe, I am filled with awe and wonder; if that feeling is God, then I am a believer.”
But then it hit me: is not morality like this God? In other words, could I believe that, say, the wrongness of a lie was any more intrinsic to an intentionally deceptive utterance than beauty was to a sunset or wonderfulness to the universe? Does it not make far more sense to suppose that all of these phenomena arise in my breast, that they are the responses of a particular sensibility to otherwise valueless events and entities?
So someone else might respond completely differently from me, such that for him or her, the lie was permissible, the sunset banal, the universe nothing but atoms and the void. Yet that prospect was so alien to my conception of morality that it was tantamount to there being no morality at all. For essential to morality is that its norms apply with equal legitimacy to everyone; moral relativism, it has always seemed to me, is an oxymoron. Hence I saw no escape from moral nihilism.
The dominoes continued to fall. I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.
Unfortunately, complete moral relativism is just as silly as believing that it's immoral to kill animals. Morality does come from somewhere, and the evidence is that it comes our ancient tribal past where we evolved a moral sense in order to be able to cooperate with other humans beings as a community. Morality is about making our lives together better.
James McWilliams totally misses the point I was making in that post and in later posts that animal husbandry is something we have a tough time with because it's not part of our evolutionary heritage. I've been watching Human Planet, the gorgeous documentary about diverse human lifeways around the globe, and one of the most striking scenes is of a South American Indian woman breastfeeding a baby monkey. They ate that monkey's mother for dinner, but this baby monkey is a treasured pet. They don't eat the animals they raise, those animals are part of their tribe. The idea that eating meat is wrong because eating babies (argument from marginal cases) and our pet dogs is wrong is the kind of idea that only someone totally detached from innate human morals would put forth. We don't ban eating/killing babies because babies are sentient!
I was also making a point in that post that I didn't agree with how that farm was raising their animals, since they were perpetuating a breed that doesn't even have a sense of life and would die young even if you brought them to some kind of farm sanctuary. That's an industrial system dressed up in free-range clothing.
I never considered myself part of the "compassionate carnivore" movement. There is nothing special about my engagement with my food. My desire to slaughter my own animals doesn't have to do with reducing harm, but achieving independence from a dying industrial food system. And yes, that means using and eating animals. Fertilizers based on mining un-renewable resources aren't going to last forever.
If you are a visitor interested in learning more why I gave up veganism and debating animal rights, I suggest you head over to let them eat meat, a truly excellent site on the subject.
Comment?: 0
09/13/2011 - 12:13
After reading James McWilliam's idiotic piece on backyard slaughter, I found myself immersed in reading more about Oakland's effort to allow backyard slaughter. For those of us who are thinking in the long run, towards an economy with greater scarcity of natural resources, being able to have food independence is truly important. True food independence involves both plants and animals. The animals provide the plants with valuable fertilizer, among other things.
Unfortunately, bleeding hearts have hi-jacked the movement and turned it into some kind of plant fetishism, dedicated to growing plants that can provide only a trivial contribution to the diet of a healthy normal human. Sure, spinach is great, but it doesn't have very many calories, you cannot survive on spinach. I've written on this delusion before, in my post The Produce Delusion. Focusing on trivial plant gardening is not food independence and I wonder if the lip service in the government towards it serves to distract people from real issues. Michelle Obama is growing some tomatoes in her back yard, maybe she hopes it will help us forget the massive amounts of subsidies that go towards unhealthy food.
This image from the Oakland anti-slaughter group, was so hilarious I couldn't resist posting it. It's the perfect example of the triviality of most urban gardening. The idea that animals aren't part of any type agriculture is really quite strange. They can't just admit that they don't like the idea of animals getting killed. It's about controlling other people in order to make them comply with their personal preferences.
From the outset, the Planning Department has had its heart set on bundling animal breeding and backyard slaughter into its urban agriculture policy. Its eagerness to be in the limelight alongside bestselling locovore authors singularly obsessed with “knowing their meat” has blinded it to the mandate that Oakland set forth for creating food policy.
To provide low-income people in food deserts with the foods that they most lack access to, which are — according to luminaries such as Michelle Obama and public health advocates the world over — healthful fruits and vegetables.
Unfortuantely, as I outlined in my original Produce Delusion post, giving people access to fruits and vegetables DOES NOT have an impact on preventing obesity. It sure does seem nice though. But I hope the decision makers of Oakland realize that you shouldn't get agriculture advice from people who run animal sanctuaries.
And it's highly amusing that they are using the argument that meat is for the elite.
The people profiled are not continuing the family farm out of economic necessity. Nor are they killing animals because they lack protein in their diet. They are educated, published and politically connected, and they choose to slaughter and eat their backyard animals because of a personal preference to consume a culinary delicacy: locally raised organic meat. Food empowerment this is not.
Um, it's for the elite partially because regulations make it expensive! NYC has slaughterhouses in the city and I'll tell you it's not rich bankers who use them, it's immigrants, many of them low-income. Furthermore, many people in those communities already possess the skills to slaughter animals well. I've often thought of organizing a workshop where immigrants who grew up slaughtering animals could help teach backyard farmers about how to do it right.
Someone commenting on the McWilliams article said it had something to do with serving delicacies in fancy restaurants. Haha, you are not allowed to serve home-slaughtered animals in restaurants.
Anyone know any pro-slaughter groups? I'd love to feature them here. I admire people willing to put up with the crazy urban weirdos in their effort to achieve food independence. Me? I'm heading to the country.
Comment?: 0
09/13/2011 - 08:44
I've written before about the animal rights-locavore cold war. In some people's eyes, they are two types of liberal food movements, but the truth is that the locavore movement has its true roots in conservatism, as exemplified by the agrarian pillars of the movement such as Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin. Animal rights is just plain radical modernism, a pathology of alienation from nature. Being so different in core philosophy, it makes sense that animal rights would want to make life difficult for agrarians, who use integrated systems of plants and domesticated animals on their farms.
Joel Salatin has been speaking out about this:
Believe it or not, there's a food issue lurking out there beyond food rights and food safety. Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer-author-activist is worried that that next issue is animal rights.
He's already seeing evidence of it at Polyface Farm, his own farm in the Shenandoah foothills. During a tour of his farm Saturday for 150 attendees as part of a fundraiser for the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, Salatin said he's been reported to his local animal control officials by area residents who have had concerns about the treatment of his cattle.
In one case, someone reported him because one of his steers was limping. In another case, he was reported because his cattle were "mobbing"--hanging out close to each other as a herd in a new pasture.
In each instance, "We had to spend two days with local vets explaining what we do"...and he was off the hook.
His view of animal rights as an emerging issue for owners of sustainable farms rates a chapter in his upcoming book, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World. It's due out in early October.
During the Saturday farm tour, Salatin wondered aloud what other problems the animal rights people might find at his farm. He pointed out how, during recent heavy rains, the chickens (who stay outside in mobile structures) got pretty wet, which isn't unusual. "We have days when our chickens are out here in the rain and cold and shivering. I know there are people who would like to go out and buy them L.L. Bean dog pillows."
Might the animal rights folks be better off focusing their attention more on CAFO's and other factory farm practices? They already have, of course, but Salatin speaks to a more ideological tendency.
The problem is a theme of his book: "We live in extremely abnormal times..." And one expression: "In our communities, we have more and more animal rightists."
Of course the animal rightists love regulation, the better to make it tough enough that the small farmers get out of business, just leaving the industrial CAFOs, which are easier to malign in the public's eye. Animal rights mouthpiece Jame McWililams consistently is on the side of big government. Sorry Philpott, they aren't on our side.
Comment?: 0
04/02/2011 - 16:41
Great blog post by a local farmer. Some of you may have heard about GoDaddy CEO's canned elephant hunt. On one hand the dude is clearly an asshole (with company whose web interface sucks) and elephants are very intelligent. On the other hand this is a single elephant. How many companies have policies that destroy the environment for millions of animals? Where is the outrage for that?
And it also highlights a problem. You see, first world folks like us want to protect elephants. And several conservation efforts have done just that, which has created the issue that in some areas the elephant population pressure is very high, which leads elephants to raid croplands of the local people, who are often impoverished. In my opinion we need to learn to live in balance with animals and part of living in balance is hunting. Electrified fences and birth control for elephants sound nice, but they are not practical in such a situation. Ecotourism is an option, but it's not practical in every area. As a humanist, I believe the needs of the local population come first, particularly since the elephants in question are not endangered. I don't have a very high option of people who hunt for fun, but either way, the CEO donated the meat to local Africans, who quickly swarmed the carcass.
That highlights another issue: I often hear people say "blah blah blah vegetarianism is the diet of most of the world." Well, no. The world's poor eat very little meat (or so say the statistics), but they eat whatever they can. I've read about North Koreans keeping a single prized soup bone for months and Africans eating dangerous bushmeat because they so desire the animal protein for their children. Development projects that focus on giving people what we think they should want instead of what they actually want will never curb things like the bushmeat trade. Luckily, more and more people are realizing this and several great development projects focus on livestock.
This isn't the first or last we'll hear from Westerners decrying the right of African's to manage their own wildlife resources for their own benefit instead of for the interests of bleeding heart animal lovers.
The ultimate pinnacle of this sort of attitude are animal rights terrorists. A scary blog post discusses the problem of animal rights terrorists intimidating undergraduate researchers with threats of violence. I have many friends and family members who are scientists and this frightens me. Don't let anyone lie to you and tell you that scientific research on animals doesn't save lives or isn't necessary. Some day, but not now.
Trivial perhaps, but I would not be able to blog about many topics that are on here without animal research elucidating facts about biology.
Some of the most important research is in the development of antibiotics. The situation here is quite frightening, as this article about the antibiotic crisis outlines. Misuse of antibiotics, but also just the general evolution of bacteria, has created a huge need for new antibiotics. Antibiotic resistant infections could put infectious death disease rates back to 19th century levels.
Besides research, I feel we do need to ban the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Antibiotic effectiveness is the common property of humanity and allowing single entities to destroy it is a huge problem. This excellent article, Our Big Pig Problem, discusses agricultural antibiotics and how they are endangering our health. Arguably, we need to stop worrying about some elephant a rich dude killed and start worrying about the antibiotics in the food millions of Americans consume.
Comment?: 0
03/24/2011 - 07:35
Tom Phillpott proposes an omnivore/vegan alliance against animal factories. I think a lot of vegans who believe in animal rights would reject that. And I'm going to be the rare sustainable farming advocate omnivore to reject it.
First of all...what is an animal factory and what makes them bad? Is is bad management or is all mass production of meat inherently bad?
In the US it's usually bad management, because for some reason it's totally legal here to destroy things you don't even own like nearby wetlands and our ability to use antibiotics in humans effectively.
But while living in Europe I toured some animal facilities that were dare-I-say quite nice. And it's a myth that letting animals do their own thing outside is always the best thing for them. It's also spit in the face of people like Temple Grandin that have worked to make mass meat production better.
It is also quite regressive to suggest that all meat production besides free-range should be banned. It's easy for us rich folks to advocate for, but tell everyman that chicken is now $14 a lb and you might not get much support. I do think free-range meat production could be ramped up, but once you start asking for infrastructural reforms with regards to slaughterhouses, the vegan side of the coalition won't be much help.
I'd like to see greater transparency and accountability in meat production, but people who want to destroy people's food choices are not our allies.
This vegan quote on the article says it best
"as vegans we would be banding together with the owners of slaves kept in relative comfort against the concentration-camp style slave-owners."
Sorry, I'm allying myself with people who believe animals can be slaves and it's skirting the issue to call these people merely "vegans". They are animal rights activists plain and simple. I'll continue to ally myself with people who call on humans to be good stewards and to be conscious of our consumer decisions.
As an aside, I find it very amusing that anti-locavore James McWilliams has come out of the animal rights closet and said the reason he thinks pastured meat is bad is because it's "killing" now that his fake economics arguments have been refuted. If you want to see him attack local farming live, he'll be debating local chefs and farmers in NYC on Friday. I'll be there.
Comment?: 0
02/09/2011 - 17:26
Do you have a paleo or real food blog? Ever noticed how exciting it is when your favorite blog gets attacked by trolls? Jealous that your blog doesn't get that kind of exciting attention? Fret no more, because I have an offer that will spice up your blog forever.
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Here is just one out of thousands of comments that our generator can bring you!
Becoming an ex-vegan is somewhat like becoming an ex-antiracist or an ex-antisexist -- you have to wonder just how unprejudiced the person was to begin with. I haven't read it, but the report Livestock's Long Shadow says that meat causes most of the world's problems. Don't tell me that there are different production methods, I can only think simplistically and can only consider one perfect diet, which is vegan. I am pretty sure this blog post and all things mentioned in it must have been sponsored by the nefarious Weston A. Price Foundation, an organization funded by wealthy zebra-ranching cabels.
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The way paleolithic people lived has to do with this story about how men who liked flank steak had the biggest left pectoral muscles and because of some famines that I think happened because life seemed really hard, the men with the big left pectoral muscles were more attractive to cavewomen. The Bellevue experiment, despite being one short experiment, totally showed us that we can maintain perfect health indefinitely on an all-meat diet. Only non-paleo plants contain toxins. Maybe you feel fine eating these non-paleo foods now, but you never know when you might erupt tiny panda-shaped cysts on your face. It could take decades. You'll suffer and you won't be able to go back and undo the damage.
Edit: Haha, Dr. Kurt Harris gave me a new one "I don't eat plants because Owsley Stanley told me not to. He made 5 million hits of acid, so he knows more about chemistry than you do."
Comment?: 0
11/27/2010 - 20:46
People often ask me why I'm still so rankled by veganism despite having given it up long ago. Unfortunately it's not veganism that gets me fired up, but more troubling political issues at the animal rights heart of the vegan movement. Not long after I stopped being vegan, I got involved with agriculture. I saw the makings of a cold war between the locavores and the animal rights groups and became troubled by it. Animal rights groups like the Humane Society of the United States and PETA pull in substantial amounts of donations and therefore exert some political clout. They get these donations by pretending to go after factory farms, but in reality small farms are also in the crosshairs. They don't admit this much and publicly don't want to admit it because the general public tends to be sympathetic to small farms.
This year, a history professor, James McWilliams, came out with an anti-locavore book called Just Food. Laughably, I saw some "conservative" outlets endorse the book, probably because of the anti-elite sentiment so tragically beloved by Palinites and their ilk. They probably didn't read it, since the ultimate point of that book is that locavores are stupid because really it's not Chilean strawberries, but meat, that is at the root of all problems. Despite not being an economist*, McWilliams frames his arguments as being all about economic rationality. But I saw right through it from the beginning and it's quite obvious from his recent animal rights posts at the Atlantic that his real beef with locavores is their use of animals. Notice that's not on the jacket of his book.
Can one be locavore and disavow all use of domestic animals? Yes, there are a few small farms practicing veganic agriculture (it's telling that one of this method's main advocates has written a book now called Meat: A Benign Extravagance), but they are few and far between. Because they are so unusual, there is little data on how productive they actually are. Much of the fertilizer used on farms comes from animals and if you want low-impact pest control, hunting is a good way to do it. Not to mention the dietary challenge of being vegan and local in very cold climates.
Animal rights groups also rely on videos of cruelty on farms to win converts. These become less effective on people who have actually been to farms. Animal rights groups rely on people being disconnected from farming and from agrarian traditions. But unfortunately for them, these are being revived. Things have been coming to a head recently with animal rights groups attacking backyard chicken-keepers and DIY turkey slaughter. I love it when people show their true colors— that it's not Smithfield farms they are after, but all farms that use animals**. Often the strategy is to divert: when you talk about soy, parrot back that most soy goes into livestock feed. It isn't until activists are cornered that they admit their true agenda, which is to eliminate all domesticated animal use from lab rats to riding horses to pet dogs to the turkey on your table.
It scares me because I feel that agrarian traditions are beset on both sides by conservatives*** who want their right to munch on their McTroglodyte burgers without worrying about what that means and the leftist movement to make such traditions difficult/illegal, either intentionally in the case of animal-rights activists or unintentionally in the case of the average land-alienated urban liberal.
Why should we care? In my view it's because every good farm is so valuable in preserving the health of humans, animals, and the land holistically. What does it take to make people understand this?
I've been interested in following the reaction towards A Vegan No More, a post by a woman who left veganism for health reasons:
While my original choice to be a vegan stemmed from the always noble impulse to do the right thing and be as compassionate as possible, it was a mistake and a choice I should never have made. If I had done my research and actually asked the hard questions from the beginning instead of letting the graphic images of factory farms guide me, I would have saved myself 3 years of misguided efforts as well as the deterioration of my physical and emotional health.
What can we do to prevent this? I think engaging people in producing food is the answer. It's a real threat for animal rightists and they know it.
Danish backyard chickens
*nearly every Animal Rightist on the internet fancies themselves an agricultural economist and parrots the simplistic and de-localized idea that animal agriculture is inefficient.
**This isn't to omit the outright terrorism that animal rightists inflict on scientists
*** I shudder to use that word to describe people who obviously care very little for conserving anything
Comment?: 12
09/28/2010 - 17:40
Isn't ironic that the very same animal rights vegans who say it's arrogant to view humans as special engage in some very human ignorance of their own? Yes, I'm talking the assertion that the vegan diet can be just as healthy as an omnivorous one. But the truth is that nutrition science is young and there is SO MUCH we don't know. A good example is taurine, a nutrient found only in animal products. Scientists are just getting started determining its true effects, but Robb Wolf posted this excellent new paper that has some great updates on taurine's role in preventing stokes, heart disease, and hypertension.
Free The Animal has also been posting about animal rights vegans who like to mock paleo. Notice I say animal rights vegans. There are a handful of vegans who just eat the diet and don't go on a campaign about it. But let's be clear: animal rights vegans want EVERYONE to follow their diet even if it results in sub-optimal health. Paleo doesn't work for you? I could care less if you follow it or not, paleo is about YOU. AR veganism is definitely not about you, it's about animals.
We aren't just chasing windmills here. AR organizations regularly engage in changing laws to make animal-product consumption more expensive (and to ban lifesaving medical research). And those are the relatively reputable groups. Other AR groups engage in outright terrorism.
I do enjoy eating at some vegan restaurants myself and occasionally eat vegan meals. I do appreciate the trend in veganism towards gluten-free in particular. In NYC it's possible to get a delicious "paleo" vegan meal.
*though Masterjohn has certainly made some great contribs to this as well
Comment?: 4
09/21/2010 - 11:12
A few people sent me this opinion piece from the NYTimes called The Meat Eaters. It's a very interesting piece and I suggest reading it. It's very much the logical conclusion of based a moral system on pain. Luckily, real-world morality is not based on pain. Morals are the invention of humans and they were created to improve the human condition. They were not created to decrease overall suffering in the world.
Animal rights philosophies are morality gone haywire and the conclusions they lead to are fairly suspect. Normally when you bring wild carnivores up to animal rightests they will insist that humans, unlike lions, have a moral responsibility not to cause pain to animals. But then they just admitted that animals are fundamentally different as beings unable to participate in a moral system. Then the animal rightest will bring up human non-moral beings like babies or comatose people. If you think the reason we don't eat babies is because they feel pain...I think we have some basic problems going on here. Either way, we have very good reasons to include babies and comatose people in our moral community for the good of human welfare. There are plenty of arguments about what is human welfare, but I estimate that not ever using animals for any purpose whatsoever is not a good way to improve it.
But I applaud Jeff McMahan for exposing the logical absurdity underpinning animal rights philosophy. If decisions are based on utilitarian calculations including all sentient beings, ridiculous conclusions are a given. Animal rightests who don't support the reduction of predator populations are inconsistent. If animal pain and suffering is bad, then it's bad no matter who causes it. If it's possible to reduce it, even if it means toying with nature, you should do it. Otherwise they are falling prey to the ethical naturalism that paleos are often accused of- "it's OK because it's natural."
One thing I'll agree with Jaff McHahan:
If I had been in a position to design and create a world, I would have tried to arrange for all conscious individuals to be able to survive without tormenting and killing other conscious individuals.
Duh? But really in my self-designed world I'm too busy with my seventeen extremely handsome husbands, who spend the day bringing me delights from the Krispy Kreme doughnut tree (doughnuts are healthy in the world I've created), to worry about all that.
Nature suckz!1111!!!
Comment?: 18
05/17/2010 - 16:41
Let's get this clear: The Humane Society of The United States is an organization devoted to animal rights. Animal rights does not mean being nice to animals, it means eliminating ALL animal use from pets, to pork, to scientific animal testing that saves millions of lives. Unfortunately, many people associate The Humane Society with being nice to kittens rather than outlawing all meat consumption. While I don't agree with everything they post, Humane Watch has done a great job demystifying HSUS's true intentions.
But many people are still fleeced. Maybe it's just me, but if you want to support small family cattle or other meat farms, why would you ally with a group whose ultimate goal is their elimination? HSUS is being rather sneaky, much to the ire of more honest AR groups, and has participated in "animal welfare" campaigns, but that doesn't change their animal rights agenda.
That was clear last week in NYC when AR groups confronted a backyard chicken keeper at a food event. It's hard to peg an organization that has "sanctuary" or "mercy" in its name. Unlike PETA, such organizations do have a generally positive reputation. But they showed their true colors by bashing small scale farmers and advocating world veganism. I love on the blog post how the Mercy For Animals guy says he is concerned about male chicks and the transportation of laying hens. Get real, even if those things stopped, these organizations would campaign against eggs. The truth is that these organizations and their agenda are very much threatened by nice small farms. When consumers visit these farms they know that not all animal product consumption is anything like what's portrayed in AR propaganda videos.
I think it is kind of silly how people think egg production is better than meat production though. In my experience, grassfed meat production is more respectful of an animal's true nature than egg production is. Chicken farmers typically order their chickens from these factory hatcheries and slaughter their layers at the end of the season. Most free-range chickens don't really range that much. Contrast that with cattle, who are often bred on-farm and often range over several acres. The benefit with chickens is that they are cheap, easy to keep, and are quite efficient at feed converters, though for us paleos they aren't the greatest food because they are almost always fed grain.
As everyone knows, I am a passionate advocate for small farms, but I think allying with organizations like HSUS to punish factory farms is NOT the way. I think that improving the infrastructure for local meat farmers and educating people about the health benefits of grassfed meat is the way to go. I'm pretty disappointed with Chipotle for supporting HSUS's efforts in Ohio for more food fascism. I sometimes used to eat there, as it's a pretty decent and consistent paleo option, but I think I will boycott. Whole Foods got a lot of hate from the local meat movement for pushing a vegan agenda in their stores, but at least they weren't trying to push for laws. Stocking your shelves with The China Study is distasteful, but on a different level than passing regulations that make life hard for your opponents.
Comment?: 8
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