Bryce Dallas Howard first hit the scene in my world when she played Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man 3. Yes, I am a nerd. No, I don’t care. But little did I know at that time that she was the daughter of Ron Howard (awesome) and a vegan (gross).
Once upon a time there was a group of people called vegans. Among other things, these people claimed that their diet was better for the environment than eating meat. Had they been right, the world would be a much different place, but luckily for us, they were wrong. In fact, they eventually learned that their diet was actually worse for the environment than eating meat.
What do you get when you mix a huge dose of recovering vegan with liberalism and some over the top feminism? No, not Roseanne Barr on Atkins. You get The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith. Flashpoint Press was nice enough to send me a copy of this eye-opening book and although it took me a few months to get through, it has been an enlightening read. In it, Keith combines her own personal experiences with some good hard data to help debunk the vegetarian myth as we know it.
Recently, a jury in Georgia had a most interesting case. According the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, some vegans were protesting outside of a HoneyBaked Ham store. A poorly trained undercover police officer was taking pictures of the protest and the vegans noticed him. They wrote down his license plate number. The officer was worried since it was his own car and could be linked back to his home, so he tried to get the paper with his license plate number back.
Not quite, but it’s definitely a fun idea to toy with. One aspect of veganism that I have always found entertaining is the general discord among vegans. From whether they can eat honey to whether they agree with radical PETA’s tactics, they seem to almost have as many schisms as Christianity. But I digress. Today I read an article, entitled “Vegans Against Veganism,” that blew my mind about vegans. Perhaps they aren’t the holier than thou radicals I have always thought.
Horton Hears a Who!, by Dr. Seuss is a beloved children’s book that was recently developed into a major film. Anti-abortion people commandeered this book as a sort of anti-abortion manifesto and used the movie to stage protests. After all, how could you misinterpret the line, “a person’s a person, no matter how small”? Well, none of the characters in the book are technically “people,” so the logic kind of gets skewed. Instead, I would like to offer up an interpretation of this book as an anti-vegan manifesto and re-interpret the main line as “an animal’s an animal, no matter how small.”
Confused?
Barry Groves is a man who knows a lot about health. And he’s not just some know-it-all with a blog (read: me), he has a PhD to back it up. So when he decided to write about the diet of some important mammals, as compared to humans, I took notice. In his article, “Should all animals eat a high-fat, low-carb diet?” he debunks some common theories that vegans cling to in order to justify their unnatural lifestyles.
Charles Washington has an interesting way of eating right. Originally posted in his blog, Zeroing in on Health, he has some rules for eating that put even an unvegan like myself to shame. The rules are as follows:
1) Eat only from the animal world (eggs, fish, redmeat and fowl and some dairy are all animal sourced foods, i.e.: meat).
2) Eat nothing from the vegetable world whatsoever. (Very small amounts of flavourings such as garlic/chillies/spices/herbs which may be added, are not food).
From The Wizard of Oz to The Lord of the Rings, talking trees have been a part of fantasy for a long time. Well, perhaps these thoughts should finally be freed from the land of myth. I recently discovered an old article thanks to this article in The Huffington Post.
It is entitled “Do Trees Communicate for Mutual Defense?” by Larry Gedney and although it’s from way back in 1986, the article cites a lot of research I had never heard of before. According to the research, trees under attack are able to communicate to each other to warn them about the danger. Once warned, the other trees can then defend themselves, such as by producing a chemical to ward off attacking insects.
A recent joint Australian-Vietnamese study found that people who eat meat have stronger bones, and who are we to question the Australians and Vietnamese?
According to the study, “vegetarians had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters.” It was even worse for vegans.