Writes Elizabeth Barber, in "What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly? Each year, billions of animals die for human ends. In two new books, Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer insist that we stop the suffering" (The New Yorker).
December 16, 2023
"The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical."
"The problem is particularly acute in animal-rights activism. Ending wild-animal suffering is laughably hard (our efforts at ending human suffering don’t exactly recommend us to the task); obviously, so is changing the landscape of factory farms.... In 2014, the British sociologist Richard Twine suggested that the vegan isn’t unlike the feminist of yore, in that both come across as killjoys whose 'resistance against routinized norms of commodification and violence' repels those who prefer the comforts of the status quo...."
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76 comments:
isn't THAT, what those animals are FOR?
I’m way more concerned about human suffering; like child mutilation in the US, child trafficking and slaves in China.
The way to stop the suffering of animals is to bring a bunch of friends and stop traffic on the 405 at rush hour. Chain yourselves together. Proven to work.
Thought experiment: If humans are just animals and the majority of animals on earth (especially the oceanic ecosystem) kill and eat other animals to survive, than why is the human animal ethically excluded from the same right?
Conversely, if the human animal is somehow better or distinct from other animal life on earth, how does that not confer exo-ecological rights to humans to use/have stewardship (yes...'stewardship' is a form of domination) over other lifeforms, especially ones which we have domesticated and genetically engineered over thousands of years?
For some animals, the best biological/diversification deal they ever made (or the worst depending on your perspective) was being domesticated by humans. Dogs and cats aside, the cow, pig, chicken, goat, and hundreds of other organisms would be nowhere near as diverse or as widespread across the planet without their close relationship with us, a relationship that was in its earliest stages most definitely two-way....some ancient wolf still had to make a choice to get close to the campfire.
I genuinely don't think the dear and turkeys I hunt each year would begrudge my harvesting them anymore than they'd begrudge the coyote that would devour them alive when they're dying of sickness each March.
I've always wondered; are any of these vegans diabetic? Do they not understand that a very large number of people risk disease and death if they try and live on their precious carbohydrates? Or do they just not give a shit?
I will point out that most of the violence against animals occurs in the oceans. Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer could start by interposing their bodies between some great white sharks and the orcas that have discovered how tasty their livers are.
How many of them are insects?
Each year, billions of animals die for human ends. In two new books, Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer insist that we stop the suffering" (The New Yorker).
"How many more must die, Mr. Speaker? How many more?"
This obsession with 'fairness' and 'justice'. It's never about that, really - I think it's just man's use of intellectual camouflage, a means to further ends. Like nature, it's all about power and force and control, at the bottom of it.
And 'suffering' - what is 'suffering', who defines it? Only the perverted want to savor another creature's suffering. Human carnivores don't like to see suffering, because it damages the quality of the food. And really, now: If God didn't want us to eat the animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
What do we about how some animals treat each other?
Let's not forget the suffering of our green brothers and sisters of the plant kingdom.
Is there anyone more detrimental to the wellbeing of people as an "activist"? From where do they get their moral superiority?
"Insist"? In that case, I'll get right on it.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
It's not like we have animals redoing our roofs.
"What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly? Each year, billions of animals die for human ends. In two new books, Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer insist that we stop the suffering"
As soon as sharks stop eating fish, and lions stop eating baby antilope, and snakes stop eating mice, i.e., as soon as other animals start treating each other fairly, we'll talk, if only to find out what animals will do to reciprocate our fairness.
What's that, you say? They have no notion of fairness, and they couldn't reciprocate, and that is not how nature works? You mean, the demand to treat animals fairly is just another prog ploy to enable some humans to impose their will on other humans?
a relationship that was in its earliest stages most definitely two-way....some ancient wolf still had to make a choice to get close to the campfire.
It was probably a stolen or found wolf pup. Might be more accurate to say, some ancient wolf still had to make a choice to stay close to the campfire.
You think the world is crowded now?
My moral grandeur is such that I frequently buy eggs that are laid by free range chickens. I do my bit to make the world a better place for those further down the evolutionary chain. But, looking at the big picture, here's my problem with veganism: All of us without exception are looking for our two to three thousand calories a day. (Well, not models or female movie stars. They get by on six hundred.) If we don't get these calories from animals, we'll get those calories from plants. I put it to the concerned vegan: who has a better opportunity to appreciate the gift of life: a plant or an animal. By eating meat, we are giving billions of creatures a chance to enjoy life. I agree that a caged chicken doesn't have much of a life, but it's a better life than the average corn stalk. And I'll spare you the horrific details of how baby cabbages are torn from their beds and slaughtered to feed the insatiable craw of vegans. You can call them Brussel sprouts, but we all know that they're tender little baby cabbages that have not been allowed their full allotment of life on earth.....There is a kind of mammalian supremacy subtext to the protest of vegans. If everything that lives is holy, where do you draw the line?....I'm not sure but I think fungi are the highest form of life on earth. In any event, they've been here the longest and they're the life form that will exist when every other living thing has perished. Fungi don't seem to mind our existence and, indeed, in some cases, have learned to profit from it.
Ms. Barber's piece echoes the admission yesterday by Michelle Goldberg that progressives know what they hate, but haven't a clue what better systems could possibly replace the ones that they are so committed to destroy. Barber, like Goldberg, seems to have no idea that there are things called unintended consequences. And people like Barber and Goldberg reject a priori the notion that a society's habits, customs, and traditions are entitled to deference because they are the products of people's adaptations over centuries to the physical and moral structures of their world.
If only Edmund Burke weren't so dead, white, and male.
I belong to PETA - People Eating Tasty Animals. My Traeger BBQ is used year round to make sure I have Tasty Animals to eat. Costco is a great source for those Tasty Animals, as is Safeway and my local butcher. Not to mention all the dairy products I consume from those lovely dairy cows, mostly located in Tillamook, OR.
If near Tillamook, visit the dairy visitor center and the Tillamook Air Museum. Dress warmly for the museum during cold weather - it's unheated.
“Thought experiment: If humans are just animals and the majority of animals on earth (especially the oceanic ecosystem) kill and eat other animals to survive, than why is the human animal ethically excluded from the same right?”
Actually, that can’t be true, at least for land animals, because there is a steep pyramid of predation. Each carnivore must eat multiple prey over its lifetime to survive. Often, very many. We aren’t talking ethical hunters here, who take a couple elk every year to supplement their diet, to get through the winter, but for many large predators, killing a couple times a week. Or, if they survive off of smaller prey, they have to kill a lot of them. I remember how surprised Farley Mowat (Never Cry Wolf) was at the efficiency of the wolves he was following in killing mice. Shake of their head, breaking their necks, and gulping them down in a bite or two.
As noted above, humans didn’t evolve to eat grains. It wears down our teeth (which don’t regrow), we don’t have the right enzymes to properly metabolize such, and there significant missing nutrients that humans need in such a diet. Archaeologists can immediately identify skeletons of those raised on a grain diet because they are shorter, have weak bones, and bad teeth. I think that many were surprised at how quickly first the Japanese, then Chinese, Vietnamese, etc, went from being much smaller than westerners, to parity, over the last 80 or so years, with the introduction of adequate meat into their diets. We do better with meat, but not as well as obligate carnivores, like cats, or preferential ones like dogs. They have enzymes to break down red meat that we don’t. It turns out, apparently, that it is fish that we have the best enzymes for digesting, which is just more indicia that we spent quite a few (likely a million or two) years in a semiaquatic existence, eating fish, swimming, etc, as we evolved away from our nearest living relatives - chimps and bonobos.
"Thought experiment: If humans are just animals and the majority of animals on earth (especially the oceanic ecosystem) kill and eat other animals to survive, than why is the human animal ethically excluded from the same right?"
That's my view.
"Another COP, another call to have meat removed from our diet. The further we depart from what we evolved to do, as individuals and as a society, the less efficient we become. We didn’t evolve to be vegetarian. Quite the contrary, humans are one of the most carnivorous animals on the planet, surprisingly so."
Yeah, yeah. "Each year billions of animals die for human ends." The corollary is that billions of animals LIVE for human ends. If we didn't kill them and eat them, they would not ever have existed. Ask any animal whether it preferred not to live, knowing that it would eventually die.
The paradox of vegetarianism is that it consigns food animals to non-existence. No death, but also no life.
Eat all the free-range eggs you want. But man's dietary needs are not going to be met by backyard chickens, and poor people can't afford those eggs. "Factory" farming feeds the world.
I am now enjoying imagining attempts to mitigate animal suffering in the natural world.
A great number of spray bottles for predatory cats.
Treating animals fairly does not exclude eating them. Life, and all that it entails...
Since both Singer and Nussbaum, phiolosophically and bloodlessly, hold the view that abortion is permissible until the "fetus" is no longer dependent upon the mother to survive (ie. at birth, though it is hard for newborns to open those strained peas jars), perhaps they can do their part to minimize animal suffering by busking up on late-term abortions for lions and stamping out Praying Mantis eggs.
Temple Grandin, the noted autistic woman who, among other things, designs better cattle slaughterhouse equipment, often gets asked how she justifies what she does; her answer - at least on the occasion I was personally present in the audience - was that those cattle on their way to the killing floor would have never existed had humans not been using them for food.
Nature is waay more cruel than man...
Mr. Owl...how many nips does it take to kill the heron you just caught? A one, a two-hoo, a thuree...
Forget about dumb animals for the time being. What about ordinary working people today? Here is my unimaginable dream that I hope someday will be turned into a living reality: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
“I think using animals for food is an ethical thing to do, but we've got to do it right. We've got to give those animals a decent life and we've got to give them a painless death. We owe the animal respect.”
― Temple Grandin
“Unfortunately, most people never observe the natural cycle of birth and death. They do not realize that for one living thing to survive, another living thing must die.”
― Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism
Plus, the less stress an animal has before it is slaughtered, the better the meat tastes.
I have a Cooper's Hawk feeder on my property. Other people call it a bird feeder, but the Cooper's hawks that feed on the dove and quail would beg to differ.
I immediately thought of Tyrannosaurs. Apparently the teenagers were big on drumsticks. Some things never change.
Unimaginable justice struck me as a really odd phrase. Usually the just way to act is very easily imaginable in any situation or series of situations, which is part of the reason why witnessing injustice feels so strongly negatively for most people, because it is very easy to imagine what should have been done in a situation. The phrase made little sense to me. Then I saw the person was talking about animal cruelty and it made a bit more sense. I personally, and I suspect most other people never think about animal cruelty in terms of justice. When it comes to bad behavior regarding animals I think of words like mean, cruel, or inhumane, not unjust. I think of justice in terms of how humans ought to treat one another, both at the personal level and at the societal level. If an animal rights activist truly feels each act of animal cruelty is an act of injustice, it is a wonder more of them haven't turned to complete nihilism.
"It was probably a stolen or found wolf pup. Might be more accurate to say, some ancient wolf still had to make a choice to stay close to the campfire"
Yeah you're probably right, but we'll honestly never know. The thing is I'm often baffled by people who imply some animals don't 'make choices'. Do fish make choices? Do insects? There is ample evidence that higher order organisms do make anti-instictual choices. Some higher order primates and cetaceans can indeed make value judgements and the science has begun proving that.
What I'm getting at is I've seen wild animals do things in the wild that will leave you scratching your head. I've seen them do things that they instinctually have to know are more dangerous than the alternative for far less reward. I believe it could've happened.
One of the greatest animal trainers in America, Joseph Carter (look up Minkman on youtube), routinely touches on topics related to wild animal domestication and has not only captured adult wild animals and tamed them but even had some approach him on more than one occasion sufficient to allow him to take them home. You never know what might happen if you get a really smart person and a really smart animal spending time together under ideal conditions.
I tried to find the percentage of animals that are carnivores and was surprised to find that I was not able to in a dew minutes of searching. I learned that all cats are obligate carnivores, but many animals like humans eat both animal and plant protein.
What I do know is that humans are the only meat eaters that actually do anything to minimize the suffering of the animals they eat. This goes back at least to Old Testament times- the Jewish kosher laws are very strict in how animals are to be slaughtered in a humane way that minimizes suffering.
I don't think PETA gives us credit for that. Or anything else, for that matter.
@Bruce Hayden
Precisely what I was getting at. I'm aiming at the legal and philosophical challenge, not a biological one.
It's an either/or problem. In this particular problem, I don't believe humans get to play both sides of the fence. A human can't be an animal and something that's not an animal at the same time. If we're an animal we get the same rights as they do across the board...killing and eating other animals is not unethical
If we are 'better' than the animals, two more splinter problems occur. A) We are better than they are and are provided by providence with the power to do what we wish with them and it is all ethical or B) we are better than them which comes with moral obligations that we would apply to ourselves in how we treat the other non-human life forms on earth. Interestingly, neither A or B dispute human power (aka stewardship) over non-human life on earth. In either case our power is implied as absolute, so any moral high ground of 'animal equality' can be dismissed out of hand.
None of these animal rights activist are willing to emancipate their cat...not in the true sense that means anyway. The PETA lawyer representing a chimpanzee in court is as much putting their moral worldview on the chimp as the medical testing facility is putting its views on it. The cows being liberated from the slaughter house to graze grass on human farm somewhere with fences and largely free of predators (because of humans) isn't the liberation these idiots think it is...at no time is the cow truly free of human control, and the Coe wouldn't want it or live long without it anyway. The cow itself in its present form wouldn't even exist without our genetic fiddling over thousands of years.
The whole movement is adolescent and foolish. These people watched too much Disney growing up.
I've been listening to animal rights advocates since at least 1977, when I was a freshman at my small South Carolina undergrad college and a noted Harvard prof gave a lecture on sentience in animals. I recall him using maternal behavior in cows as an example of sentience - momma cows get anxious when calves aren't in sight. And because cows could feel emotions and thus were sentient, we must not eat them. Ditto for most all other animals. He did not get into eating bugs, as that was not yet a big thing back then.
The first question at the end of the lecture came from a religion prof from our school, a notorious fundamentalist, who stood up and asked simply, "Why is their sentience a reason not to eat an animal?" Then a Bio prof stood up and asked him about the well known chemical responses of plants to being cut, which she equated to sentience in plants, and asked, "As plants do indeed feel and respond to pain, for example, how can we in good conscience eat them?" The third question came from a student, who asked, "How retarded would we have to make cattle to eat them ethically?" All in all, not a good audience for the animal rights activist.
Humans. Us. You and me are basically scavengers. Our digestive systems were evolved to be able to breakdown proteins in the shape of red meat. Rotting meat at that. We aren't really designed to process carbohydrates efficiently. Trend are what you accidentally pick up on your fork while going after a piece of steak. Steak is good.
Vegans are science deniers. Humans are THE apex predator.
The also deny Anthropology. Man domesticated animals to survive.
Most eco nuts really only have the goal of reducing the population of the globe by vastly reducing energy and food.
"And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter, kill, and eat." (Acts 10;13)
If we treat them fairly, that means a murder trial when one animal eats another?
obviously, so is changing the landscape of factory farms.
I seriously got queasy trying to take serious any person that wants to eliminate the production of animal protein, but strive to make it even easier to kill babies. Killing and dismembering babies is the ultimate of "routinized norms of commodification and violence'" What disgusting and blind people.
Animal-rights activists stubbornly disagree with natural laws. There is no universal morality, compassion, or kindness in natural life, merely successful reproduction and survivable niches. Activists confuse personal feelings wishes with a universal "ought-to-be".
Plants are "hostile" with each other. Some poison the soil so others can't grow (e.g., black walnuts and creosote bush), while many plants use thorns to blindly damage animals or harm plant neighbors. Trees use height to outcompete other plants for essential sunlight, where little can grow beneath them. What oh what are the activists going to do about common tuna, as they eat other fish? What about chickens, as they eat insects?
Nature involves constant battles and give-and-take. Humans have learned a lot over the last few hundred years (e.g., since causing mass extinctions during the Age of Exploration; introduced rats everywhere, etc.). We've come a very long way from the Romans -- who routinely killed lions, tigers, bears, elephants, etc. for gladiatorial shows.
Stop while you are ahead. Manage human predation, but don't try to eliminate it or human predators will rapidly eliminate you.
The bio & movie about Temple Grandin has more, and more effective, and more real, animal rights activism in it than that produced by all animal rights activists combined.
We can treat animals no better than they treat themselves
The bigger challenge of activists is accepting victory and moving on. Activists will often have a success or two because what they ask for is reasonable and doable, but this never seems to sate them. We get more and more and more outrageous demands to the point that it is clear that the activists have not thought things out at all and if we gave in it would have a massive body count, a massive reduction in living standards, or both. When you are so obsessed with your beliefs that you can see nothing else, mass murder starts to be perfectly reasonable.
Note that this is self-correcting as if they get what they want, they will end up dead one way or the other. It is just a matter of how many other people they take with them.
Two new books??? If they had collaborated, they could have saved some trees.
How about you insane people just live your own, quiet, life and leave all the other people alone. You are NOT morally superior to anyone, in any way. Get over your narcissistic self.
For us eat to something has to die. Plant based does not stop the deaths. Big agriculture kills more animals than ranching ever could. Big agricultural clears the habitat, plants crops, and then kills the animals that try to eat the crops before the are harvested. Factory farming is awful too. Please read the book vegetarian myth.
Maybe one of those activists can track down and chastise the fox that left rabbit hair after murdering that poor rabbit during the night. I did not hear the rabbit's screams. I sometimes hear a rabbit being murdered during the night when windows are open in the summer. I would tell hubby that I heard a rabbit get murdered. He just gives me the stink eye.
Plus, the less stress an animal has before it is slaughtered, the better the meat tastes.
When we raised steers, we had a red Holstein that liked to jump the fence. Locked him up in the barn to ship him because he was wrecking spring crops. He broke the top board jumping over the enclosure, went out in the pasture, jumped the fence and came back to my garden. (What the heck??) I told my hubby Red was out. He came down to look, walked back to the house, got the dispatch device, and took care of Red. Hubby never said a word. That was the worst beef I have ever eaten. We think it was all that running around he did.
I can't vouch for factory farms, but I grew up on a small farm. My dad treated his animals well. They were our source of income; you needed to make sure they thrived and received a good price at market. (And this without all the modern drugs, etc., that may be used these days.)
If the vegan diet is so great, why may they become deficient in vitamin B12, omega-3, calcium, zinc, iron, magnesium, and high-quality protein. (Found in meat.) I want to know how many vegans live to be 100 years old.
https://www.saintlukeskc.org/about/news/research-shows-vegan-diet-leads-nutritional-deficiencies-health-problems-plant-forward
Nussbaum......ya' know...that's a German name that translates into English as Nut-tree.
"The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical."
Religion, albeit in a selective frame of reference.
... viable and profitable. Throw another baby... bambi on the barbie. It's Roe... roe... doe, a deer, a female deer, for dinner.
Hey... At least my prey has a chance to escape.
Animals kill each other by the trillions every year... so where are their 'rights'??
Not for purely ethical reasons, but for practical reasons, I would like to rollback the factory meat industry.
The obesity rate where I live, central PA, is fueled by the cheap pork. I know people who literally will not eat a green vegetable. It's just pork, some beef, potatoes, and sauerkraut for special occasions. Plus anything a gas station can keep on the shelf. And pizza (which is about the best they'll do, but always extra cheese.)
The health affects are abysmal: immobile bodies waddling to their doom, cancer, heart disease, a painkiller OD. Their in bad shape at 20, and there's not a god damn thing anyone can do about it once they're past 25 or 30.
As Cato would say, what good are they to the state. They are clearly no good at all to our welfare state, and the army can't use them either.
The only good development I've seen in this area is what amounts to free food at school. At the local school there is a very simple free breakfast available (juice, a couple cookies, and fruit available), lunches are free and reasonably nutritious: some of these kids are hardly fed at home, those who are get the diet above. The school does introduce them to real food (of the bland institutional persuasion.)
There's no way anyone will persuade the adults to clean up their acts, but may be there's hope for the next generation.
Speaking of cleanups, everytime a hurricane hits North Carolina, Smithfield's pig shot lagoons flood out and go right down to Pamlico sound. Sometimes shuts down the fisheries for a year.
If I could wave a magic wand for Peter Singer I would make Smithfield, etc disappear. But, I would still buy meat (occasionally) at the local farm/abattoir.
They want us to eat bugs instead of animals (are insects not animals?), which leads to an observation:
All the bugs alive right now are part of the environment, eating them instead of allowing them to live and die in whatever manner they currently are would certainly screw things up somehow. Therefore, in order to be used as food, there'd need to be more bugs raised for that purpose. Unless they require significantly less resources than cows/pigs/etc. in order to provide the same digestible calorie content, how is feeding those bugs any sort of improvement over the way things are now?
Rusty said...
Humans. Us. You and me are basically scavengers. Our digestive systems were evolved to be able to breakdown proteins in the shape of red meat. Rotting meat at that. We aren't really designed to process carbohydrates efficiently. Trend are what you accidentally pick up on your fork while going after a piece of steak. Steak is good.
**********
I had an enormous 3" thick ribeye in Buenos Aires last week.
Mmmmmmmmmmm....
Jim said: The only good development I've seen in this area is what amounts to free food at school. At the local school there is a very simple free breakfast available (juice, a couple cookies, and fruit available), lunches are free and reasonably nutritious: some of these kids are hardly fed at home, those who are get the diet above. The school does introduce them to real food (of the bland institutional persuasion.)
***************
Do you actually believe all that sugar and starches are good for children?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nai76P7eA0c
I dare you to watch 3 minutes of Baxter Black tell his version of vegetarians nightmare
(it a Johny Carson clip)
Peter Singer advocates killing disabled newborns and advocates sex with animals. So why should we listen to a person who would approve of the Nazi T4 program? Oh I know: Because Hitler, despite his faults, was a vegetarian and had some good ideas.
/s
"some of these kids are hardly fed at home..."
I see two types of kids when I'm out and around- normal looking ones and fat ones. Way more fat ones than when I was a kid. From grade school, there's one kid I remember as being considered fat, he wouldn't even get a second glance today. I don't see any kids now who look like they're missing meals. I'm sure they must be out there somewhere, but clearly, not in numbers large enough to be obvious.
Plant based does not stop the deaths. Big agriculture kills more animals than ranching ever could. Big agricultural clears the habitat, plants crops, and then kills the animals that try to eat the crops before the are harvested. Factory farming is awful too.
You understanding of agriculture is extremely juvenile. You just are ignorant about something you just don't know.
In central Iowa an acre of ground can support 3, cow-calf units. Out west, it will take 6 to 10 acres to support 1 cow calf unit. Which is better for the environment?
"The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical."
Nope. The real challenge is for the activist to accept it when everyone tells them "No."
The obesity rate where I live, central PA, is fueled by the cheap pork.
You know less about nutrition than Animal husbandry.
Carbohydrates are the problem,(do I have to explain to you, sugar is a carbohydrate?) not protein, not fat. You sound like somebody coming out of coma after 40 years. Every culture that has added/increased animal protein in their diet has seen improvement of overall health.
If we didn't kill and eat them, they wouldn't exist. It's not like they make good pets or anything.
"The problem is particularly acute for eugenics activists. Ending unregulated human breeding is laughably hard; obviously, so is overcoming the lingering bad publicity and unfortunate visuals of the Germans' experimental programs of the mid-Twentieth Century."
“The obesity rate where I live, central PA, is fueled by the cheap pork.”
This may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in the comments section here, and remember, Inga is a regular commenter.
- Rafe
"Each year billions of animals die for human ends..."
Each year billions of animals die for other than human ends, as food for non-humans.
Question for all these vegan and anti-animal killing: Are you religious? Do you follow the Bible, Torah, or Koran? Do believe in the God in these books? If so, then that God asked you to sacrifice animals on an alter. God says it is OK to kill animals for human needs. If you are against killing animals in general (as opposed to cruelty), then don't tell me you are a practicing Christian, Jew, or Muslim.
Jim: dream on. Most poor children are overweight and many are obese. Here it's rice and lard fried beans and fried everything. In the last city I lived in, it was fast food. Everything fried, and all the soda and fruit drinks are pure sugar.
In the summer, the schools here actually deliver food to the childrens' houses using school buses. In the city there were feeding centers in every school, and kids were sent home with knapsacks of additional food for dinner and breakfast.
And none of this extra food was deducted from WIC or food stamps. Why? So they were being fed every meal twice, every day. Yet I never entered a client's house where they didn't have the latest electronics, better cars than I could afford, etc.
We've been doing this for fifty years now and such people just grow more and more dependent on the government to feed and raise their kids, not less. And the kids grow fatter. And nobody is eating those apples or drinking less soda.
A lot of people mocked Michelle Obama's healthy eating and exercise program. I thought it was the most reasonable thing she's ever done, and she was just the right messenger for it, coming from a family very involved in sports -- her brother is a great guy. I hate the Obamas' politics, but she did popularize small improvements in diet and exercise for poor kids. She should get off her designer tush and keep doing that.
The only kids I ever saw who were either fed appropriately or underfed were in foster homes. Now there's one hellish crapshoot: some kids get lucky and get into a great family; so many others are so neglected they aren't even allowed to eat with the family's children at the same table. How anyone survives that, I don't know.
“The obesity rate where I live, central PA, is fueled by the cheap pork. I know people who literally will not eat a green vegetable. It's just pork, some beef, potatoes, and sauerkraut for special occasions. Plus anything a gas station can keep on the shelf. And pizza (which is about the best they'll do, but always extra cheese.)”
Sorry. It isn’t the pork, but the carbs. The pizza, sodas, cookies, fruit juice, etc. The problem with fried chicken is that it is breaded.
“The only good development I've seen in this area is what amounts to free food at school. At the local school there is a very simple free breakfast available (juice, a couple cookies, and fruit available), lunches are free and reasonably nutritious: some of these kids are hardly fed at home, those who are get the diet above. The school does introduce them to real food (of the bland institutional persuasion.)”
Your juice, couple cookies, and fruit could hardly be a worse breakfast. Of all of it, the fruit is maybe the least bad, because the sugar in it is more complex. But still, the major component to that breakfast of yours is sugar. Sugar, sugar, and sugar. Most of it burned through by mid morning, the rest going to fat. Then what? Are you trying to give those kids Type II Diabetes before they graduate from HS? Sugar is addictive. The simpler the sugar, the worse it is.
“The only kids I ever saw who were either fed appropriately or underfed were in foster homes. Now there's one hellish crapshoot: some kids get lucky and get into a great family; so many others are so neglected they aren't even allowed to eat with the family's children at the same table. How anyone survives that, I don't know.”
I think that much of it is socioeconomic. When I went to my daughter’s HS graduation, from a private school, there wasn’t a single fat kid in the graduating class of 100. Most were athletically thin. Mandatory athletics and a good diet does that. And parents worried enough about the future of their children to pay the tuition. At my grandson’s graduation, from a decent public school, the bulk of the kids could best be described as chubby, with some already having progressed to being fat, if not obese.
If the world went vegan there wouldn't be any ongoing cruelty to farmed animals because there would not be any farm animals. These calls are effectively a call for the animal equivalent of genocide.
Plows turn the soil exposing tasty morsels for birds. Farms (yes the industrial size needed to feed us all) spray poisons that kill insects by the trillions.
Do not crickets suffer pain? Do not worms bleed?
Don't tell me vegetarianism is not cruel.
And, for God's sake, spare me the morality until you condemn the eat bugs movement.
Every popular cause since World War II is about meaning, and people's search for it.
Climate change, animal rights, the feminist movement, Free Tibet/Palestine/wherever, gay rights, etc.
Some young people can't find meaning in their lives, and just finding someone to love, raising a family, and earning an honest living isn't enough for them, because they want something great and grand. And the national unity of the United States (and the UK, France, the rest of Europe conquered by the Nazis) and the titanic effort to defeat obviously evil aggressors set the bar too high.
And so young people who can't find meaning take up causes that attract them emotionally and are hardly achievable. That cause is best where most people are against you, because your struggle (and your meaning) will last your entire life. Dozens of bureaucracies are grinding away at this right now, sucking up money that could really be used to help people. Instead they're providing people with meaning for otherwise pointless lives.
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