Year: 2013

Readers revive a recent thread:

Okay, I know it’s been a little while since you discussed this topic, but you might want to pay more attention to what you feed Eddy and Bowie. I’ve been a vegetarian since college and thought I didn’t really have to worry about “cruelty free” beyond buying the occasional cage-free eggs. However, this thread has forced me to admit that the dog food and cat food I’m dishing out to my pets is probably coming straight from the worst of the factory farms. Searches for cruelty-free dog food on the web only come up with pet food that hasn’t been tested on animals, or vegan dog food that doesn’t seem to be a realistic option for carnivores. My local pet store has some frozen food that comes directly from local farms, so I might end up going with that (incredibly expensive) route. Still, it could be worth putting it out to other Dishheads – any humane dog or cat food that doesn’t need to be cooked and is only moderately expensive?

Update from a reader:

We have been feeding our critters Sojos and they freaking love it. Sojos original mix is a blend of dried grains and veggies. You add your own meat and water to the dry mix. This way you can choose ground meat from locally sourced, humane producers. Hate to do a plug for a product in general, but this stuff is great.

Another:

I feed my dog a dry food called Orijen, which is made by a Canadian company and uses only free-range protein sources. It’s a little more expensive than other dog foods (I pay around $70 for a 28.6 pound bag) but it feeds my 65-pound dog for almost two months, and he loves loves loves it.

Another shifts gears:

I am concerned that your reader who gave up eating meat solely to reduce his carbon impact is missing a holistic understanding of how necessary animals are to the healthy functioning of an ecosystem. This TED talk by Allan Savory explains it far more powerfully than I ever could, but I will summarize by saying that healthy ecosystems require grazing animals. Healthy ecosystems also happen to be huge carbon sinks. Conversely, desertification in particular, and ecosystem destruction in general, may well contribute more to global warming than the burning of fossil fuels.

Your reader is certainly correct that, from a carbon standpoint, as measured in grain consumption, eating unprocessed, industrially produced plant foods is far preferable to eating industrial meat, especially cattle (I am not so certain about all processed, plant-based foods). However, that we are even measuring their relative efficiencies in terms of grain consumption illustrates the false dichotomy presented. Cattle did not evolve to eat grain. Feeding cattle grains, which is difficult for them to digest, is the cause of the virulent strains of E. coli bacteria, rampant abuse of antibiotics, and a host of other problems. Cattle evolved to eat pasture, which humans are unable to digest. Thus, properly employed, cattle are a method of making the energy and nutrients contained in pasture bioavailable to humans.

Cattle is fed grain because it is cheap (due to mass subsidization by taxpayers), because it makes cattle fat, and because it is easily transported. To the last point, when you mass animals together in industrial feedlots, not only do you create serious knock-on problems with disease and excrement, but you require external feed inputs. You also have serious knock-on problems on the land the cattle leave behind, in terms of a broken nutrient cycle and the loss of the beneficial disturbance which results from well managed rotational grazing.

More to the point, even plant-based industrial agriculture is causing us to strip-mine the fertility of the soil. We do this, year after year, with mono-cropping, stripped bare soil, and broken nutrient cycles leading to corresponding pest and disease infestations, top soil loss, nitrogen run off (leading to ever expanding dead zones in the ocean), and lost soil fertility.

Another continues that line of discussion:

Your reader cited that NYT story quoting that it takes 2-5x (and up to 10x in the USA) more grain to produce the same amount of calories of beef than were available in the original feed.  You also tied this to the amount of arable land in the USA, with the implied conclusion that if we just stopped raising cattle and used the land to grow grain for human consumption, then we would actually have more food.

I’m neither a farmer nor a rancher, but I’m skeptical of this simple analysis.  For starters, not all cattle are raised on grain; many are grazed on public lands, eating scrub and natural grasses.  Putting aside the fact that humans cannot consume those things (meaning that the cattle are essentially eating “free” calories), the last thing we’d want to do would be to convert those lands to farming.  The Bureau of Land Management lands that they are grazed on are often scenic forest or grasslands that hunters, campers, hikers, etc. use for recreation, and at least in states like Colorado they are often high mountain areas that with climates inappropriate to growing grains.  I don’t know the proportion of cattle raised in this way, but a quick Google search leads to this page, which claims that 40% are.  That’s a huge proportion.  The Wikipedia page on cattle feeding states:

In fact most beef cattle are raised on pasture from birth in the spring until autumn (7 to 9 months). Then for pasture-fed animals, grass is the forage that composes all or at least the great majority of their diet.

Moreover, though I’m sure some cattle are fed only grain, my (admittedly limited) experience with western ranchers has been that the cattle are generally pastured and then only switched to grain as the final fattening step in feedlots before being slaughtered.  Of course, feedlots are an entire story of cruelty in and of themselves, but my point is that the “calories from grain” story is leaving that part out and thereby overestimating how much benefit we’d gain from switching to eating the grain ourselves instead of first converting it into beef.

Finally, there’s the issue of the kind of grain that we’re talking about.  Corn makes up a lot of that, but the corn raised and fed to cattle is not something you’re going to be enjoying on your dinner plate anytime soon; it’s been specifically developed over years for hardiness in the climates where it is grown and high yields, among other things, not for taste.  In fact, it tastes pretty bland and starchy.  Now, you might ask, could we grow things that humans might like, instead of that starchy corn?  Probably.  But now we’re comparing apples to oranges: yields would be different (and not necessarily higher), cultivation methods might have to be changed, storage methods would undoubtedly be different, etc.

So like anything else, the full story is more nuanced than the one implied by those simple quotes. Nevertheless, I’m 100% in favor of reducing cruelty to animals, myself.  Although not a vegetarian, I only eat fish when I do eat meat, and only fish from sustainable wild fisheries.  It gives me some cheer to see via your blog posts that other people are thinking about these things and considering the ethics of meat consumption.

In the above video, Charles Camosy addresses how Christians should approach the carnivorous nature of humans. In the following video, he extends that line of thought to evolution:

Watch all of his videos here.

Benjamin Soskis explores an escalating debate:

[New York state senator Daniel Squadron’s bill proposed this summer] targeted the city’s best-endowed park conservancies, the private nonprofit organizations formed to manage and raise funds for public parks. Those with operating budgets greater than five million dollars—the Central Park Conservancy (fifty-eight million dollars) and the Prospect Park Alliance (nine million dollars) were in his sights—would be required to donate twenty per cent of their budgets to a Neighborhood Parks Alliance, which would redistribute the money to the city’s underfunded parks. … [S]ome within the philanthropic community worried that de Blasio’s support for Squadron’s bill would have a “chilling” effect on major benefactions. It represented a dire threat to the voluntarist premises of American philanthropy: the idea that donors can do whatever they wish with their money, and that this freedom is precisely what makes philanthropy so vital to American democracy. …

Others grew concerned that the private funding of certain flagship parks would sanction the erosion of public stewardship, leading to a two-tiered system in which certain green spaces flourish while the majority of the city’s nearly two thousand parks languish. These concerns were roused again last year, when the hedge-fund manager John Paulson pledged a hundred million dollars to the Central Park Conservancy—the largest-ever gift to a public park. Paulson often ran or biked in the Park (which his Fifth Avenue apartment overlooks) and said that he wanted to make sure it would be preserved as an “urban oasis.” His gift won its share of plaudits, but it also provided an exceptionally large target for those who sought to highlight the associations between philanthropy and inequality.

Last spring, Alex Ulam reported at length on the role of philanthropy and its discontents:

In extreme cases, some city parks can become privatized to the point where the public is shut out for most the year.

Damrosch Park, for example, a New York City park run by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, is closed off for seven to ten months every year for private events, such as Big Apple Circus and New York City’s Fashion Week. In addition to being regularly closed to the public, Damrosch Park has had 57 trees cut down and its distinctive granite benches removed to accommodate such events, which help raise money for Lincoln Center. Park closings have also had a significant impact on the public experience in other cities. In Chicago, the Lollapalooza Festival takes over Grant Park during summer every year, and although the festival only lasts a few days, it often results in damage and extended delays to reopening sections of the park. One factor driving the increasing privatization of new state-of-the-art parks is their stratospheric maintenance costs. The pressure to pay for the upkeep of the High Line, which is considered to have the highest per-square foot maintenance costs in the city, has forced the Friends of the High Line into taking positions supporting commercial developments that create the very types of conditions that public space is supposed to mitigate. …

According to [director of New Yorkers for Parks Holly] Leicht, high-profile gifts such as Paulson’s have prompted discussion in New York City between park advocacy groups and city officials about putting donors on notice that in the future, a certain percentage of their gifts will be have to be allocated to a fund that would provide aid to less affluent areas. “It raises the question: Are parks somehow inherently different than other cultural institutions?” Leicht says. “I would argue that as public space they are, and that this probably is a model that should be piloted and tested. And let’s see if donors are truly frozen in their actions.”

Patrick Radden Keefe profiles (paywalled) the remarkable Eliot Higgins, a 34-year-old college dropout and autodidact who transformed himself into an expert on Syrian arms – thanks to YouTube:

Unlike the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, the war in Syria has not produced a huge body of journalism by international reporters on the ground. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Syria is currently the most dangerous dateline in the world; the regime of Bashar al-Assad has effectively banned the international press. More than fifty reporters have been killed while covering the conflict, and dozens more are missing, presumably detained by the authorities. Yet Syrians have managed to access the Internet, and all the factions in the ongoing civil war have uploaded videos onto YouTube.

They film their own military offensives and release propagandistic recruitment videos. They document civilian casualties and the ritualized speeches of regime officials who have defected to the opposition. They present evidence of war crimes, including torture, mutilations, and executions. And they show weaponry: rifles, bombs, and rockets.

Although Higgins has never been to Syria, and until recently had no connection to the country, he has become perhaps the foremost expert on the munitions used in the war. On YouTube, he scans as many as 300 new videos a day, with the patience of an ornithologist. Even when a rocket has largely been destroyed, he can often identify it by whatever scraps survive. When he doesn’t recognize a weapon, he researches it, soliciting information from his many followers on Facebook and Twitter. In June 2012, he revealed on his blog that the Free Syrian Army, the leading armed opposition group, had obtained anti-aircraft guns. The next month, he presented video evidence that Assad’s regime had deployed cluster bombs. “It’s very incongruous, this high-intensity conflict being monitored by a guy in Leicester,” Stuart Hughes, a BBC News producer in London, told me. “He’s probably broken more stories than most journalists do in a career.”

Follow Higgins at his blog here.

More readers join the intimate thread:

I had two miscarriages before we tried IVF. The first one occurred on the same day I got a positive on the home pregnancy test. Both were physically quite painful and emotionally draining. My third miscarriage was my daughter’s twin. They were IVF babies, so I was being monitored via ultrasound through the first trimester. I lost the twin around nine weeks. I saw on them both during the ultrasound, my daughter blinking brightly and the sibling a dark silent mass.

I remember exactly the due dates of what would have been my first and second child’s births, and I am very aware that had they lived, I would not have had my awesome mini-me daughter. Every year on her birthday, I remember that there should be two cakes for two children. But now, as then, I am supposed to simply be grateful for her alone. I could have lost them both after all. Count your blessings and all of that.

I haven’t told my daughter she had a twin. Perhaps when she is older. I have mixed feelings about sharing this grief with her. Why should she grieve for someone who was never more than a possibility? Of course that begs the question – why do I?

Another reader:

This thread has meant a lot to me. I will not tell you another miscarriage story, but I would like to share something that might help your readers. After my first miscarriage, what helped me most was giving my lost baby a name. It didn’t occur to me until a week after I was in the hospital to do so, but it made such a difference in my recovery. I did the same with my second miscarriage. Although I am politically pro-choice, I am also an observant Catholic and I think of myself as having five children (two in Heaven). Just that decision to acknowledge what I had lost as real, a person to be named, made the pain easier to bear.

Another:

My first child – a daughter, Lola – was stillborn on Christmas Day, 2008. It was completely unexpected. We went to the hospital as scheduled, planning to bring home our healthy child. Instead, we brought home a box containing a photograph of a dead baby and a pamphlet about grief.

It sent me down a spiral of rage and despair. The tiniest little setback was debilitating for a while. I’d fly into a rage at not being able to find my keys in the morning. Many nights I’d wind up on the floor in my closet, exhausted at having spent the night shouting in anger and frustration because we hadn’t cooked the rice properly or something equally trivial. I hope that it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever have to go through.

All of it – her death, my rage, the sadness that utterly consumed us for a while – was something I was totally unprepared for. The masculine side of grief wasn’t something we understood at all and it took us several years to get past it. We have a beautiful two-year-old boy now who is like a healing balm. We’re just scarred now, no longer wounded.

I want to let your readers know about HAND, an amazing organization that helped us. They are nothing short of amazing, providing space and counseling for us to heal. Imagine what it would be like to “hold grief support group meetings for parents who have experienced the death of their baby through miscarriage, stillbirth, interruption of a wanted pregnancy after prenatal diagnosis, or death in the first year of life,” week in and week out. Friends and family often can’t really understand what you’re going through after something like that happens to you, and groups like this can provide space to come to terms with grief and despair. I’m an atheist, but I know that Chris Lehr, who runs the program, is a saint.

Thanks for shining light on this dark place.

Another:

I know you must have been slammed with responses to your miscarriage thread. I’m so glad it came up. I want to respond with my own experience to the woman who commented on the insensitive comments that people make when they find out about a miscarriage. She said, “For a time I felt like the tainted one. Friends who were getting pregnant for the first time didn’t want me around because I was living proof of what can go wrong.” For me, it wasn’t about taint at all. I still wanted to share with my friend, and give her as much support as I could. For me, it was about feeling guilty at accidentally making someone’s grief worse simply by being in the same room.

A friend and I got pregnant around the same time, myself a month ahead. It was a complete surprise to her. She could not have been happier. She announced her pregnancy well before she was even eight weeks along, absolutely glowing – much happier than I was, since I had aggressive morning sickness that didn’t seem to touch her. She gushed to me about how our babies would bond us closer together.

You can guess the rest.

She lost hers at 10 weeks and was absolutely devastated. I did my best to say I was sorry, and to continue communicating with her, but I can’t describe to you the look on her face the first time she saw me after her miscarriage, with my pregnancy clearly showing. Our other friends there were clearly a comfort to her. I was not. I felt like my pregnancy – the visibility of it, the reality of it – were a knife in her. It clearly upset her greatly, and just as clearly she was trying not to let it, or at least not to let it show. I tried to avoid platitudes, tried to pick up the tone she seemed to want while her grief was still fresh, as I would for any grieving friend – but it seemed to me that the best thing I could do was to step back and not act as a reminder every time she saw me.

I don’t blame her for her reaction. She was trying to be happy for me while dealing with massive grief. My sister-in-law’s reaction (having gone through several miscarriages herself) was nearly identical when I told my brother I was pregnant – happy for me, but sad, with an immediate new emotional distancing from me. I don’t know what the answers are – if there was even anything I could have done better to make it easier. Grief is always tricky, since everyone experiences it differently. But what exactly can be said to a grieving family, except, “I’m sorry”?

Another:

I’m not sure that my miscarriage story fits the thread because although I certainly empathize with all the people who have written, my miscarriage experience was a little different.  My husband and I had been trying for two and a half years to get pregnant.  We tried most everything and finally discovered that he had a problem.  The doctor prescribed some medication for him and a couple of months later, I thought I was pregnant.

We had no time to take it in because all of a sudden, I miscarried.  My husband took me off to the emergency room and the young resident was so nice.  When I started to cry, he reassured me that just because I had had one miscarriage, the odds of having another were no different – if I remember correctly, 1 in 15 or so.  I smiled through my tears and said, “I’m not crying because I miscarried. I’m crying because I know now that I can get pregnant!”  He looked a little surprised but smiled back and took me off to have a DNC.

Two months later I got pregnant with our first child, a daughter whom we both celebrated and are so pleased that she is in our life.  She was followed by our son, who after a few trials and tribulations, we feel exactly the same way about.  There are times when I wonder what that other child would have been like, but would I trade either of my children for that unknown one? Absolutely not.

A reader writes:

In light of the discussion of Alec Baldwin’s homophobic rants and your insistence that his use of the phrase “cocksucking fag” reveals much about his deeply-held views on homosexuality (a point I agree with, whole-heartedly!), I’d like to push the discussion in the direction of considering the use of the word “sucks” in general. It is remarkable to me, a heterosexual man, that people in America use the word “sucks” in a pejorative way. Here we have reference to a sexual act that is generally acknowledged as being particularly enjoyable by most men – gay or straight and anywhere in between. And yet, we use the term “sucks” pejoratively. Why?

I believe that the connotations are nothing more than homophobia and sexism in their plainest, ugliest forms. Now, maybe “sucks” is meant metaphorically in some other way. For example, “Broccoli sucks!” could mean that broccoli metaphorically sucks all the enjoyment out of dining. Maybe. But my gut says, no, that’s not what is meant at all.

Something sucks. Sure. But what does that something suck? The answer is often given: it sucks dick! Or, in a few cases that I’ve heard, it sucks ass. I think the answer is plain, that when something sucks, we’re referring to fellatio (or the sexual act of “rimming”, which carries many/most of the same connotations in this particular usage). Something sucks because it is not powerful; it is not manly; it is less than.

I know I sound like an earnest “queer studies” student in my email above. I don’t mean to be. I don’t want to police language, and I don’t want the world to be a sterile place where the use of a particular word can destroy a person. But, as I try to become more understanding of how my privilege as a white-looking heterosexual male affects my life, I can’t help but consider the use of the word “sucks” as being ultimately destructive. And, so, I have stopped using it. I hope you’ll do the same.