In These Times

Petersmith

The dictatorships you're mentioning do not care about the local population's well-being - they are notorious for it and examples are numerous. Why, then, the US foreign policy traditionally supports, even installs, such unscrupulous political systems in foreign countries? Why is US policy so hysterically against Hugo Chavez' social programs and programs for Venezuela's national emancipation, for instance? And, mind you, Venezuela is blessed with oil unlike scores of other poor countries but still has to cope with the problem of nation-wide poverty. Why??

Your understanding of the problem of global poverty is at the level of blaming …

Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex

Yes,

Peter

, it appears I misunderstood your post and was hasty to reply on top of it. My apologies.

The most recent example of multinational corporations destroying food production in foreign countries is Monsanto bringing GM, patent protected, wheat into Iraq and forbidding local farmers to use their own seed - they have to buy it from Monsanto for each new crop. It's not even economy anymore - it's bullying. I just wanted to illustrate what cabdriver exposed as a general, global, phenomenon.

Did you see documentary Darwin's Nightmare? It's another horrifying example of the mechanisms and consequences of …

Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex

I must offer my little help to a democrat farmer/rancher: University of Nebraska - Lincoln's Department of Animal Science has a web site which many a rancher had found useful: Beef Cattle Production at http://beef.unl.edu. I'm sure you'll find their web site to be a contents rich one.

In this context, I would particularly like to attract your attention to a proceeding from the most recent Nebraska Beef Feedlot Roundtable. The proceeding's titled Rendering Industry Changes and Implications, at http://beef.unl.edu/beefreports/roundtable200606.shtml. There you can see factory farming from inside: what and why they feed the cattle, and at what extent USA …

Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex

Before my heart attack five years ago, I loved to sink my teeth into meat. Now I realize we can live quite a comfortable life without it. I crave meat once in two or three months, with no dairy products consumption whatsoever. It occurred to me that our olds would have meat on a rare occasion.

Meat eating nowadays is a cultural, not a nutritional, thing. Meat industry built the cult of meat eating as a symbol of good life and wealth, so much so, that factory farming corporations talk today about "value added" meat: better cut, better marbled beef, …

Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex

nyvegan,

Thank you so much for an avalanche of useful information! I was out of town these days so I couldn't respond earlier, as a civilized person would be supposed to.

Now buckle up: my first meal in hospital after my angioplasty was mashed potatoes (starch) with a generously sized pork chop! Nutritionists in our rehab program told us we could consume up to 30% of average daily fat consumption. Our exercising was reduced to 15 mins of treadmill plus ten to fifteen mins of sluggish stretching. When I look back now, from a five years distance, I suspect …

Posted to Meat-Industrial Complex