Loony Red Meat Yankee Wankers
So I posted a vaguely cautionary article about meat in Plastic and I get all these loony red meat yanks dissing me — most lacking even the vaguest hint of a sense of irony. Water, duck’s back. After years of Paul and his steak jokes, nothing really sticks. Paul knows irony like a master. Is that a Master Ironist? There’s a lot of iron in red meat.
What I always notice about the quality of responses to any anti-meat comments is their lack of direct argumentation. Instead, you get vitriol and personal attacks with most people ignoring any issues raised.
This is understandable… a lot of self-identified carnivores are repressing a good deal of subconscious guilt and using projective detoxificiation to try to rid themselves of these uncomfortable feelings of inadequacy and willful impotence. They ascribe qualities to vegans, to "others", that they are afraid live deep within themselves.
Why do carnivores get so easily upset? It reminds me of the denial smokers went through in the 1960s and 1970s, when they were pitifully desperate to believe in the fiction of caring, helpful corporations that would never knowlingly sell them a diseased product, especially when accompanied with images of kindly, smiling old men. And tough homoerotic cowboys, of course. Maybe Marlboro could lease their guy to Wendys now?
As for life expectancy, Veggie Adventist Men/Women get 9/5 and 6.1 extra years. Of course, if you join the Branch Davidians then all bets are off. But the Adventist study is peer reviewed and has shown that persons characterized by being either past smokers, diabetic, hypertensive, physically, non-vegetarian, or infrequent consumers of nuts often showed substantial differences in these survival outcomes. Non-vegetarians die younger. Why does this surprise people?. It gets restated again and again.
Cretans, largely vegetarian, have the highest life expectancy in the world. But that is a small population spread.
To fess up, I am not nor have I ever been a member of the Vegan Party, but I am vegetarian. Mainly for environmental and health reasons. Growing up in Ireland, watching first hundeds then thousands then millions of cattle being slaughtered because of BSE, and seeing the first cases of incurable CJD in people arrive despite the best blandishments of politicians and tame scientists, it was hard for any sensible person not to feel queasy about meat.
Nobody really knows squat about the average incubation period for CJD in people. It maybe as short as 5 years, it may be as long as 30 years. Fore tribespeople are still dying of CJD contracted in the 1950s. The difference between 5 and 30 for Britain could mean the difference between several hundred deaths, as at present, and several tens of millions in the worst scenarios. The real answer is probably somewhere in between, several hundred thousand. Of course, the US FDA assures everyone the risk in from US beef is minimal. Maybe they should lease the Msrlboro Man as well?
This really is the century of slow plagues.