Who Is Winning the Battle for Food Regime? Vegans or Carnivores? Dare To Know

By Dr. Steven Best, Negotiation Is Over

We often hear about the many “victories” the vegan movement is piling up with new products on the shelves, new restaurants, growing coverage with celebrities and talk show hosts, and evolving consciousness in general.

As this article shows, an expanding awareness that meat production is environmentally devastating means that vegans have grounds for hope and optimism.

But the big picture and full context brings sobering realities to light; the fact is that this is all too little and too late and, while we win some battles, we are badly losing the overall war to save the planet from ecological collapse. Consider just a few of many grim facts and narratives:

1) As Carl Boggs notes “Animal-food production in the United States alone has increased no less than four times since the 1950s, despite the more recent spread of popular knowledge concerning the harmful effects of meat consumption. At present there are an estimated 20 billion livestock on earth. In the United States more than 100,000 cows and calves are slaughtered every day, along with 14,000 chickens. The Tyson plant at Noel, Missouri kills some 300,000 chickens daily while the IBP slaughterhouse at Garden City, Kansas and the ConAgra complex at Greeley, Colorado both disassemble more than 6400 steers a day. All told 23 million animals are killed worldwide to satisfy human and food demands daily. In a McDonaldized society Americans now eat on average 30 pounds of beef yearly, with seemingly little concern for well-known health risks. Conditions of factory farming, said to be improved owing to reforms, are in fact worse by most standards — more crowded, more painful, more disease-ridden, more drug-saturated even than at the time of Upton Sinclair’s classic The Jungle (written in 1906).

Read more at Negotiation Is Over

Advertisement

5 Responses to “Who Is Winning the Battle for Food Regime? Vegans or Carnivores? Dare To Know”

  1. we must also resist industrial monocropping of grains, fruits and vegetables and instead support decentralized, relocalized, horizontal, permacultural, and bio-regionally sustainable modes of food “production” aquisition.

    we’re kidding ourselves if we think industrial agriculture and monocropping of plants is not inherently violent even towards our animal friends. industrial agriculture of any kind, let alone monocropping, means the totalitarian devastation and irradication of entire communities of diverse biotic life.

    we should foster the growth of favorable plants, and leave it at that minimum of agricultural activity, because as soon as you think you own the land and the plants and have the right to do what you want on the land and force everyone else off, you’re on the path that led us to where we are today.

    thanks Steve.

  2. drstevebest Says:

    Excellent comment b Irato, I agree wholeheartedly and will strive to incorporate these points in future writings; new means of “farming” and producing food must be linked to political principles and be approached as part of the revolutionary process, here and now, of building a new society in incubo, from within the cracking shell of capitalism, industrialism, “civilization,” and the viral spread of the human empire.

    Steve

  3. drstevebest Says:

    This goes some way to a sociopolitical concept of autonomous/community (vegan) food production:

    “Introducing “Deep Vegan Outreach”: The Time For Change Is Now,” December 19, 2009, Negotiation Is Over

    http://negotiationisover.com/2009/12/19/introducing-deep-vegan-outreach-the-time-for-change-is-now/

  4. […] not forget DIRECT ACTION… because they need it right now. Steve Best’s recent article Who Is Winning the Battle for Food Regime? Vegans or Carnivores? reminded me of the sober reality and facts. The tornado/tsunami of capitalist […]

  5. Who Is Winning the Battle for Food Regime? Vegans or Carnivores? Dare To Know | Guerrilla News

    […]Is homesteading nonetheless a possibility for those desiring a simpler, more natural life?[…]

Leave a Reply

Please log in using one of these methods to post your comment:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: