Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD on the social behaviour of wasps. He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm [to the rest of the nest].” He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals....
[His] devotion to his beliefs led a judge to rule... that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010...Growing up in Catalonia in the 1960s under the rule of General Francisco Franco, he lived “in an oppressive state”. His parents were not allowed to write “Jordi” on his birth certificate; instead they had to use the Spanish spelling “Jorge”.
“Being oppressed was the root of my veganism,” he says. “It gave me empathy with those who are oppressed, and who is more oppressed than the animals? I found the world very hostile and animals seemed much nicer. From a very young age I just wanted to be close to them.”
That's from 2 years ago. I'm reading it this morning because it came up in the sidebar as I was reading something new: "Women who eat little meat and dairy put their health at risk, says scientist." Key message there: If you're vegan, you need to take special care to get enough iron, magnesium, iodine, calcium, and zinc.
Casamitjana's rule for living: “Everything I do is based on two things: minimising the damage I’m doing to others and maximising the help to those who need it the most. That’s it: that’s my entire life.”
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Casamitjana's rule for living: “Everything I do is based on two things: minimising the damage I’m doing to others and maximising the help to those who need it the most.
What's Jordi's views on abortion? inquiring minds, want to know
My mother adapted that kind of diet and stuck to it for about 10 years until she went into a nursing home. It ruined her health. Not enough protein and too much rabbit food.
His parents were not allowed to write “Jordi” on his birth certificate;
A lot of countries currently have similar laws.
I was hoping the relevent Franco was going to be James, perhaps the next madcap phase of his image rehabilitation campaign, but alas.
Nobody oppresses Vegans. Nobody bothers them.
Vegans that hold an actual philosophical belief are fine.
People that think a vegetable based diet is healthy are silly and should be mocked.
But we know that the real problem with vegans is that they can't leave it at that. And we are going to witness that as they try to ban meat and regulate the production such that it is unaffordable for normal people.
Vegans are natural oppressors. They do it with everything. Global warming is going to be their hammer,
That wasp was judging me. Man. People do find meaning in unusual places. I like his self-summarized philosophy as it closely resembles the Golden Rule. But dude needs to balance his diet to make up for denying his omnivorous nature.
There's a reason they call it "The Pathetic Fallacy," y'know.
He's gonna be pissed about the push to eat bugs.
"There's a reason they call it 'The Pathetic Fallacy,' y'know."
+1
Neural nets judge people all the time.
>He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. <
He flatters himself. The wasp's compound eyes were looking at him...and a few thousand other things.
My heart doesn't swell with good will when I encounter wasps. They're better than scorpions I suppose but not as endearing as kittens. It's good that he encountered such a tolerant, happy go lucky wasp in his youth, but many people have had a different experience in their encounters. I myself grew up in Connecticut and have been judged harshly by the wasps I encountered.
“Yes, my Queen.”
—- Trooper Casamitjana
"This tiny individual was judging me"
Anthropomorphism is the hubris of vegans.
Question for progs: if we can deny health care to the unvaxxed, since they choose wrong, can we also deny care to vegans, when their diet makes them sick and weak?
So...the wasp feels threatened (or whatever) and signals a mass attack.
Then what?
one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm
This is one of the experts I am always supposed to defer? A doctorate in? something?? Believes an insect is making rational decisions, rather than raw reaction to stimulus?
I am coming to the conclusion Walt Disney has done more harm to the world, than all the communists that ever lived. Anthropomorphism is evil.
If you don't believe you are at the top of the food chain, you aren't.
It baffles me how people can ignore human structure, and lecture me on the "science" of veganism.
Side note.
California passed a law that all chicken and eggs eaten in California had to originate in from chickens that are allowed so many square feet of living space. Eliminating cages. Iowa is the nations leading producer of Eggs. Not far from me is one of the states largest egg facilities. It started with the a row of 12 common layer units ~1M birds per house. Added to those on a regular basis. I notice several years ago a 5 story building and couldn't figure it out.
It's a chicken condo. 5 floors of chickens not in cages, Imaging what the inside looks like is not pleasant. But California to the rescue.
We evolved as hunter gatherers. After150,000 years some lazy Mesopotamian guys added ground up seeds the had planted and harvested to their diet. But we hunters are still as armed and dangerous meat eaters as ever.
The silly vegans are jealous of well fed free men. The #1 weapon of tyrants has always been siege to create mass starvation.
How are the grocery shelves looking in your area. And it ain’t the truckers fault.
And if the wasps had attacked him, he would have gotten a job at Orkin.
Vegans also need to take special care with their proteins. You need a variety of plant protein to get all the essential amino acids. There is a reason they called meat "high-quality protein" when I was growing up. It contained all essential amino acids.
"Judging me" Judging Seems like an odd word? Judging what virtue inner thoughts? Assessing movement more likely.
I think vegans have a problem with critical thinking. They fail to understand that for them to eat and thrive something must die. Clearing the ground to plant and harvest mono crops kills more critters than ranching. Vegans are focused on the last death for meat and not on the multiple deaths needed for plant based food.
I get do "the least harm". I agree with that. I also want to eat the most nutrient dense food and I can get. I try to buy free range animal products.
The problem with vaganism is the lack of B12 and Omega-3. The Omega-3 in vegetable matter (ALA) is not the beneficial form (EPA, DHA) found in fish and grass fed animal products.
Also, the overuse of seed oils in many vaganism foods and diets may be as bad or worst than table sugar.
Wasps aren't usually a problem, it's hornets that make one hate the entire class of insects.
Philosophical beliefs are a protected characteristic? Any philosophical beliefs? Why?
If he was fired for being a vegan and we want to stop employers from firing people for being vegans, isn't there a better way to do it than to rule that "people with stupid beliefs" is a protected class?
Alas, yellow jackets have lost their sting. But bulldogs still bite.
Ommatidia
Oh my only
Ommatidia
How I love your many eyes
Showing me how wise
You are in oh so many
Insect-y ways
So give me now
Your love, your love
With all your loving
Compound gaze
Are human infants that consume breast milk not vegans? Should they be immediately weaned and raised on soy milk or carrot juice?
Hornets and Wasps are mean S.O.B's who will hunt you down and sting you. Even when you run away.
And he was born under Franco and couldn't have his special name on the birth certificate. What oppression. I assume he's quite anti-Castro and anti-communist too. Right?
“ But bulldogs still bite.”
Boy howdy!
I don't understand the wasp story at all.
A bug visually assesses the guy, then runs a crude wasp-level-intelligence algorithm that outputs the command to not signal the rest of the bugs in the nest to viciously attack the guy. And he concludes from this that ... he loves bugs ... and all other animate beings???
Since there isn't the slightest attempt to lay out a logical connection here, it must be emotional ... or something ....
Not very persuasive.
"Vegans also need to take special care with their proteins. You need a variety of plant protein to get all the essential amino acids. There is a reason they called meat "high-quality protein" when I was growing up. It contained all essential amino acids."
Wasn't that "Diet for a Small Planet" notion debunked?
"Wasn't that "Diet for a Small Planet" notion debunked?"
I blogged about that, here, recently.
"Vegans also need to take special care with their proteins. You need a variety of plant protein to get all the essential amino acids. There is a reason they called meat "high-quality protein" when I was growing up. It contained all essential amino acids." Yes.
Megan McArdle was a vegan at one time, but due to health issues she returned to eating meat and eggs. The vegan diet was "killing her slowly".
Also, being a dedicated vegan is very expensive.
Jiminy Cricket.
Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD ... one of the insects turned and looked straight at him... And it decided ‘you’re fine’ ... He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals
Please, Lord, let my life-changing decisions be based not on irrational thoughts.
I was a vegetarian for a while — a few years — but I had some symptoms that went away when I experimentally ate some steak, and now I simply believe that I need some meat. I don't know why, but I need some.
A good digestive system is really valuable to your wellbeing.
Wasps are one thing, but vegans actually have a very complicated issue with bees. The point of veganism is that you're not supposed to exploit animals, but bee pollenation is an essential part of the production of so much produce that even vegans can't get by without depending on them heavily. Some vegans will eat honey, reasoning that they already live off of bees anyway.
"This tiny individual was judging me"
The tiny meat eating predator was sizing him up for dinner and found him wanting.
I recommend the Jordan Peterson diet. So much easier to decide dinner from what the menus offer. And then there is the Blood Type diet. Type Os unite and eat up all the beef and lamb as medicine. We outvote the Type B who love their veggies. And since only Hindus and yoga cult practitioners fear offending the Cow Spirit, we win.
Ann Althouse said...
I was a vegetarian for a while — a few years — but I had some symptoms that went away when I experimentally ate some steak, and now I simply believe that I need some meat. I don't know why, but I need some.
Actually you need mostly meat.
Our physiology is much much closer to that of a bear or wolf than it is to any herd animal.
Meat has orders of magnitude higher nutrient density than plant foods. You have to eat massive amounts of plant material to get the same nutritional value you do out of small amounts of meat.
Hence animals that eat plant based diets have much larger ratios of their energy put towards their gastrointestinal tract.
Animals that eat meat put that energy towards their brains instead.
Ruminants have multiple stomachs allowing them to go through all of the processes required to get nutrients out of material that is worthless to us. They are able to turn this worthless crap into tasty red meat.
This makes them honorable creatures.
I thank Vegans for all the humorously named meat substitutes in the store.
I eagerly await products like "Bug Bites" etc.
Ann Althouse said...
"Wasn't that "Diet for a Small Planet" notion debunked?"
I blogged about that, here, recently.
Went back through that thread too.
It is the same old thing.
Vegetable diet people are sad and unhealthy. Spew stupidity
Meat based diet people go on about their business and don't mind everyone doing whatever they want.
Vegans attack everyone who doesn't think like them and try to take choices from others.
I don't know if "Diet for a Small Planet" has been debunked, but I do know that in the late '70s I worked in a restaurant that served both regular food and vegetarian food, and I could spot a vegetarian by their sallow skin and whispy hair before they opened their mouth to order, it's not so easily done these days, so something has changed.
Blogger Achilles said...
People that think a vegetable based diet is healthy are silly and should be mocked.
While it certainly can be unhealthy, it doesn't need to be.
My son has been somewhat vegetarian all his life, fairly strict for the past 20 years or so. Wife and 2 teenage kids are also vegetarian.
Not only are they healthier than many, they are, especially 18 Y/o granddaughter fairly atheletic.
Lots of other people in our church and faith (SDA) are strict vegetarians and those that are not strict vegetarians, ie; no meat at all are somewhat vegetarian. Somewhat because they drink milk, eat eggs, fish and occasionally beef and poultry.
You have to do it right, though.
My big problem with vegans, as opposed to vegetarians, is that they treat veganism as a religion and try to get other people to buy in.
John LGBTQBNY Henry
My first question was how does a wasp look you in the eye? Don't they have like 50,000 eyeballs?
John Henry
The problem with modern industrial meat is that it is laden with omega-6 fatty acids from the grain feed. Grass fed produces more Omega-3. The highest Omega-3 commercial meat is grass fed lamb.
Blue zone diets of whole food vegetable fruit and fish with a little meat is the best well documented for long term health. The All animal diets are unproven for long term health. The keto people are strident true believers like the vagans. Former keto nutrition and health podcasters avoid criticizing keto because it would turn off a huge segment of their audience who have to be treated with kid gloves like the vagans.
I was judged by a wasp once. There were tons of them at the U of C. I - Iowa born and bred to a long line of peasants - was not worthy of her golden palace of the himalayas.
She wasn't a vegan so I'm not sure what to do with that.
Found her on social media a few years ago. Looks like I dodged a bullet. She's a work of art. Perhaps it is far better that I did not meet her (or likely her parents') quality standard.
She's still not a vegan. Based on her posts, she definitely likes all manner of meat.
The Diet From a Small Planet concept of “high quality protein” has not been debunked.
Archaeologist Stuart J. Fiedel writes about this critical topic, historically, in his intriguing Prehistory of the Americas, in the context of the Native American (Mesoamerican) adoption of agriculture many thousands of years ago (references omitted): [quoting…]
Maize alone could not have provided the ancient Mexicans with adequate nutrients; it lacks lysine, an amino acid that human beings require. However, if beans are eaten with maize, they supply the missing lysine, thus making maize a good source of protein.
It is astonishing, at first glance, that since 5000 BC Mexicans have been eating maize and beans together. Obviously, they were not aware of the biochemical processes that make this practice beneficial, so how did the complementary use of maize and beans develop? Perhaps farmers simply took advantage of the plants’ habits; bean vines are often found in fields of maize, clinging to the stalks. However, beans were evidently cultivated in some parts of Mesoamerica (e.g., Tamaulipas) and in Peru many centuries prior to the cultivation of maize in those areas; so it would be a mistake to conclude that beans were domesticated and eaten just because they happened to grow in the vicinity of maize. Perhaps the custom spread because those groups that did combine maize and beans in their diet enjoyed better health and a lower mortality rate than those that did not, and so held a competitive advantage over them.
Even when complemented by beans, maize does not provide enough protein for lactating women or young children. The early Mexican farmers obtained most of their high-quality protein from deer, rabbits, and other hunted game; but as the population grew and more land was put under cultivation, game must have become scarce. Unlike the farming peoples of the Old World, the farmers of Mesoamerica did not domesticate any large herbivores. There were few species native to the region that were potentially domesticable. Horse and camel had become extinct by 7000 BC, and the ranges of bison, antelope, and mountain sheep did not extend south into Mexico.
Deer, which were present, appear to have been unsuitable for domestication, since they were not domesticated in the Old World. Perhaps the piglike Mesoamerican peccary was also too difficult to tame. However the Mexicans did domesticate dogs, turkeys, and ducks. The famous ceramic Colima dogs seem to portray animals that were intentionally fattened prior to slaughter and consumption, and large numbers of burnt and split dog bones have been found at late prehistoric sites in Mexico.
[/unQuote]
____
(Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the Americas, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1992; pp. 180-182)
Fish Lives Matter!
I had to google SDA, John Henry:0)
Howie, that blue zone description sounds like Meditteranean.
No mention of grains/carbs.
So, fairly low carb, depending on the vegs and fruits. Not necessarily ketosis with a bunch of meat and fat, which some keto folks do to excess.
And he was born under Franco and couldn't have his special name on the birth certificate. What oppression.
Franco tried to eliminate Catalan culture. One way was by supressing the lanaguage. This guy's "special name" was a Catalan name that was officially denied to him, along with cultural expressions such as regional dancing, at least in public. He's got a point about being oppressed as a youngster. But how he got from that to veganism is something else.
Once again I find myself recommending the work of the first anthropologist, Julius Caesar, and his commentary on the Gallic War. Europeans were not eating a standardized diet at that time, each tribe he ran into ate differently, some emphasized grain, others eschewed it and stuck to hunting, some lived on the milk of horses at the time. There was even a tribe that only kept chickens and ducks as pets, and thought that it was wrong to eat them. Obviously some groups lived largely on fish, and the Greeks even described a race that lived on the eggs of seabirds. The first question that Odysseus would ask of new groups of people he would meet was "do they eat bread like us?"
The idea that there is one diet suitable for all people seems pretty suspect.
Darkisland said...
You have to do it right, though.
There is no perfect diet. There is no single solution for everyone. We all have some variation in the number of fat cells and body weights and other metabolic variances.
But to get all of the requisite nutrients any person needs to be healthy you have to eat more plants to get the same value compared to meat.
It is going to take more energy to extract those nutrients from plants than meat and you have to eat multiples more actual material.
In the end the most nutrient dense food in existence is whole eggs. 3-5 eggs a day and you can eat anything else you want really.
If you want to primarily eat plants you are going to have a bigger gut than if you eat primarily meat. You will spend more time eating and more energy digesting and you will share much of that energy with bacteria that actually get energy from the plant material.
You are also going to get all of the toxins that plants carry to keep people from eating them. People have this idea that plants just sit there and get eaten. They have one defense mechanism and they have been developing it for millions of years.
The super majority of people in the world will be healthier and have more energy on a meat based diet than on a plant based diet.
Wasn’t Hitler vegetarian? (Godwin forgive me.)
Anthony Bourdain was not nice about vegetarians - he hated the growing tendency of vegetarians in the developed world to try to present their diet as superior and to proselytize about it everywhere, including to those in the developing world. If a place in the developing world really was developing, he said, one of the first big changes was that people would add meat (or more meat) to their diets, because it's so efficient nutritionally but costly to produce in a subsistence culture.
Unrelated: I was interested to learn that the number of neurons in the human gut is only exceeded by the number in the brain. Of course, the 500,000,000 neurons in the gut constitute only half a percent or so of the number in the brain, but a wasp only has 4,600 neurons in its brain, so... make of that what you will. (I make of it absolutely nothing. I was vegetarian for a year but never vegan, didn't like it, got gastroenteritis, and went back to being an omnivore.)
Quinoa apparently does contain all 9 essential amino acids. At a concentration of 4g of protein per serving. Versus 25g in chicken, which also tastes much better than quinoa when the Maillard reaction is applied.
I like ancient grains, but they're expensive and you have to eat a lot of them.
S is for Swinburne, who, seeking the true, / the good, and the beautiful, visits the Zoo,
Oliver Herford
Darkisland said...My first question was how does a wasp look you in the eye? Don't they have like 50,000 eyeballs?
--
They do that looking at you bit pointing at their eyes and you.
Wasp Odornet Traffic
Sentry: Control, Main Access
Control: Go for Control
Sentry: That fucking guy's back.
Control: Oh Geez....alright. What's he doing?
Sentry: Fuck, who knows? Nothing. Just sitting there.
Control: I think he likes you.
Sentry: Hey, what's not to like?
Control: You know what I don't like? This fucking guy.
Sentry: Right?
Control: Dude needs to get a life.
Wasp: Want I should sting him?
Control: Kinda, yeah.
Wasp: Your call.
Control: Standby.
Sentry: Standing by.
Control: Main Access, Control.
Sentry: Main Access
Control: Negative on stinging the freak. Who knows what he might do? Defense Ops and QRF have been notified. Just keep an eye on him for now.
Sentry: Roger that.
but I had some symptoms that went away when I experimentally ate some steak, and now I simply believe that I need some meat. I don't know why, but I need some.
Grandma said, "all things in moderation"
My grandma was wise, I can't thing of a thing that woman got wrong.
Humans evolved to be omnivores. It is a highly successful adaptation.
He may have been looking at a wasp but really, he was looking into a reflecting pool.
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