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Animal-based High Protein Diets Increase Mortality Rate September 8th, 2010

A CNN report on the dangers of low-carb, high-protein diets says that “you may live longer if that protein is vegetable-based rather than animal-based.”

Now, if I can be brutally honest here (and since it’s my blog, I’m going to be), I find it extremely irritating and even a bit infuriating that people honestly believe that they can eat all the beef, pork, cheese, and eggs they want and remain healthy! And the fact that it’s reported as “breaking news” that chowing down on steaks & eggs for every meal can give you cancer and heart disease is just silly. I guess the silver lining is that this IS being reported. Hopefully people will start to realize that they need to cut back!

[Video]

From CNN.com:

Not all proteins are equal when it comes to the health of dieters eating low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets. Animal-based proteins and fats are associated with increased mortality rates, including increased cardiovascular mortality and increased cancer mortality, a new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine concludes. But low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets composed mostly of plant-based proteins and fats were associated with lower mortality rates overall and lower cardiovascular mortality rates.

The study followed more than 85,000 women and 44,500 men for a period of 20 to 26 years. Results of the study confirmed a “direct association” between animal-based low-carbohydrate food intake in men and increased cancer deaths, particularly from colorectal and lung cancer. That association aligns with previous studies that have confirmed a link between red meat, processed meat, and those two types of cancers.

“The protein you get from combining rice and beans is the same quality as what you get from eggs and steak. You just don’t get all the other stuff that’s bad for you, ” says Dr. Dean Ornish, founder and president, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, who is not affiliated with this study. “This is the diet that I’ve been advocating for for 30 years.”

Dieters interested in eating more plant and vegetable-based proteins should consider adding tofu, beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds in to their diet. Sunflower oil, olive oil, canola oil, soy oil, and peanut oil are also great sources of plant-based fats.

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Breakfast: Smoothie with peach, pear, frozen pineapple and water
Lunch: This weekend our friends invited us over for a Labor Day BBQ and they made an amazing vegan meal of stuffed peppers (with rice, beans, okra, and seasoning), vinegar-based potato salad (no mayo here!), and a cabbage salad. I ate some of the leftovers for lunch. I love leftovers!
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Dinner: I headed down to San Antonio last night and cooked my family an easy vegan meal: Pasta with spinach, tomato, garlic, and artichoke hearts. It was a hit!
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Official FDA Inspection Reports Released August 31st, 2010

Just a quick update on the salmonella outbreak in eggs.  Here’s some excerpts from a New York Times article:

Inspection reports released by the Food and Drug Administration described — often in nose-pinching detail — possible ways that salmonella could have been spread undetected through the vast complexes of two companies. Barns infested with flies, maggots and scurrying rodents, and overflowing manure pits were among the widespread food safety problems that federal inspectors found at a group of Iowa egg farms at the heart of a nationwide recall and salmonella outbreak.

The recall, which began Aug. 13, involves more than half a billion eggs from the Iowa operations of two leading egg producers, Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms. About 1,500 reported cases of Salmonella enteritidis have been linked to tainted eggs since the spring — the largest known outbreak associated with that strain of salmonella.

It was difficult to gauge from the report how extensive the problems were. Both companies operate vast facilities housing seven million hens.

The report on Wright County Egg also described pits beneath laying houses where chicken manure was piled four to eight feet high. It also described hens that had escaped from laying cages tracking through the manure.

Officials last week said that they were taking a close look at a feed mill operated by Wright County Egg, after tests found salmonella in bone meal, a feed ingredient, and in feed given to young birds, known as pullets. On Monday, officials said for the first time that they had also found salmonella at a Hillandale facility. The bacteria was found in water that had been used to wash eggs.

Wright County Egg is owned by Jack DeCoster, who has a long history of environmental, labor and immigration violations at egg operations in Maine, Iowa and elsewhere.

Both companies have stopped selling shell eggs to consumers from their Iowa facilities and instead are sending all their eggs to breaking plants where they are pasteurized, which kills the bacteria. The eggs would then most likely be sold in liquid form, possibly to food manufacturers.

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The website Animal Visuals has created a graphic regarding the salmonella outbreak. Here is a small section of it:

salmonella-risk

You can see the full image here.

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Breakfast: Toast with cashew butter. I didn’t especially like the cashew butter – it’s too sticky and doesn’t have as much flavor as peanut butter.
Lunch: Vegetarian chili and a salad from The Garden Spot
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Dinner: Taco salad

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8 Reasons to Beware of Eggs August 24th, 2010

Half a Billion Eggs Recalled, And Counting…

eggs

Over 500 million eggs have been recalled due to an outbreak of Salmonella that sickened thousands of people across the country (and many cases go unreported because Salmonella infections, which cause diarrhea and stomach cramps, often go undiagnosed). This is one of the country’s worst food safety recalls, stemming from only two farms in Iowa. These two gigantic producers distribute their eggs under brand names such as Lucerne, Albertson’s, Mountain Dairy, Ralph’s, Boomsma, Sunshine, Hillandale, Trafficanda, Farm Fresh, Shoreland, Lund, Dutch Farms and Kemp (this list might not be comprehensive as the recall seems to expand daily).

The American egg industry was already battling a movement to outlaw its methods as cruel and unsafe, and was adapting to the Obama administration’s drive to bolster health rules and inspections. According to the FDA, the cause of the infections has not been pinpointed, but it is likely that lax safety procedures and animal overcrowding are to blame. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) wrote in a letter to the Iowa Egg Council, “Confining birds in cages means increased salmonella infection in the birds, their eggs and the consumers of caged eggs.”  A single barn may house more than 150,000 birds in tight proximity, allowing infections to spread quickly and widely.

This month, the HSUS released a new white paper addressing the threat that cage confinement of laying hens can pose to food safety, as well as assessing the probabilities of Salmonella contamination among different housing systems:

salmonella_egg

Egg producers have watched in dismay as the political winds seemed to turn, largely because of growing concern about animal rights. The European Union will bar small cages for egg hens as of 2012. By public referendum, California will ban small cages in 2015, and the state will not allow the sale of eggs produced in other states in small cages. Michigan, Ohio and other states have also placed limits on future caging of hens.

But even with new legislation, there are still plenty of reasons to be concerned about eggs. Here are eight:

1. Petri Dishes for Disease

Joel Salatin, a farmer whose farm Polyface is featured in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Food, Inc., tells why conditions in factory farms are ideal for the spread of infection: “The propensity for a problem is magnified under the fecal particulate air in these industrial egg farms. What it does is it breaks down the immune system and creates openings for pathogens. If you were trying to design a pathogen-friendly system, you would go to a single species, crowd that species together, deny it fresh air, exercise, and sunshine, never give it a rest time—have it there 365 days a year, and feed it a diet that maximizes a minimal standard of performance, rather than maximizes nutrition or feed that is nutritionally superior. What I’ve just described is Egg Factory Farming 101. This is just symptomatic of the pathogen-friendly nature of industrial agriculture.”

2. Massive Farms Magnify Any Disease

Further compounding the risk is the tremendous centralization of the factory farm system. As Marion Nestle, author of What to Eat, points out, “these large industrial producers where if there’s a problem, it’s going to get magnified over many states and many people.” Salatin agrees, saying that “Whereas a problem in the local food system only affects a few people, a problem in a factory farm can infect, for instance, hundreds of millions of eggs and tens of thousands of people.”

3. Infection Is More Common Than We Think

When you have such massive farms, each distributing its eggs to dozens of grocery chains, any problem gets compounded. In the case of the current outbreak, William Marler, a prominent foodborne-illness litigator, points out that the CDC’s rule of thumb is that 38 people are sickened by salmonella for every case that’s reported, so the number of people infected by the current outbreak could potentially number in the tens of thousands.

4. Free-Range Eggs Are No Healthier

Many people think that free-range eggs are healthier, and they provide more peace of mind, than factory-farmed eggs. But, the U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t even have a definition of “free-range” for laying hens. Factory-farmed chickens are often labeled as free-range. In the end, no one knows exactly what they’re eating. As Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals, “I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.”

5. Companies Avoid What Little Regulation Exists

According to Marion Nestle, legislation would help, but companies are determined to skirt regulation and the FDA lacks the clout to enforce what rules it has: “We’re dealing here with a company that’s not very interested in following rules, and they cut corners in lots and lots of ways. One of the ways they cut corners is safety. The other part is the FDA still doesn’t have the tools it needs to enforce the rules it has.” William Marler points out that legislation that might have prevented this outbreak languished for eight years during the Bush administration before being implemented on July 8, just as the outbreak began. Even then, Marler says, most of the “Egg Rule,” known officially as “Federal Register Final Rule: Prevention of Salmonella Enteritidis in Shell Eggs During Production, Storage, and Transportation,” is common-sense testing and should have been followed voluntarily.

6. Healthy Eggs Are Expensive & Cheap Eggs Sell Better

Marion Nestle, Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, and other food activists agree that the consumers must start demanding healthier eggs, even if it means paying more. Says Nestle, “The rules that are in the FDA’s egg legislation will require producers to do things differently, with some hope that they’ll move into more sustainable, reasonable practices. But as long as this country insists on cheap food, as long as that pressure is there, it’s understood that we value food for how little it costs, as opposed to how it’s produced or how it tastes, and there isn’t going to be a lot of pressure on producers to change things.”

But for those of you hoping that voting with your dollar will encourage producers to be cleaner and more humane, the polls bode ill: According to recent data from Information Resources Inc, which tracks checkout scanner transactions from 34,000 grocery stores in the U.S., we’re still buying eggs from cage housing systems 92% of the time.

7. Farms Lack Transparency

According to Michael Pollan, industrial egg farms are the worst sort of factory farms. So bad, in fact, that journalists are rarely allowed inside them. When Carole Morison let a camera crew in for Food Inc., she lost her contract and went on to co-found the Delmarva Poultry Justice Alliance.

8. Cruel Farm Conditions

Jonathan Safran Foer, in his book Eating Animals, writes of an often-overlooked trend in factory farming: food and light deprivation. One farmer described it to Foer this way: “As soon as females mature—in the turkey industry at 23 to 26 weeks and with chickens 16 to 20—they’re put into barns and they lower the light; sometimes it’s total darkness 24/7. And then they put them on a very low-protein diet, almost a starvation diet.” The result: Birds lay up to three or four times as many eggs as in nature. “After that first year, they are killed because they won’t lay as many the second year,” the farmer said. “The industry figured out it’s cheaper to slaughter them and start over than it is feed and house birds that lay fewer eggs.” Foer’s conclusion: “After learning about it, I didn’t want to eat a conventional egg ever again.”

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Breakfast: Bagel with Tofutti vegan cream cheese
Lunch: Salad with cucumber, red and yellow cherry tomatoes, hearts of palm, avocado, and vinegar and oil
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Dinner: Black bean tacos from Taco Cabana (there’s no cheese on these)

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Colbert with The American Meat Institute August 20th, 2010

I love Colbert.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Better Know a Lobby – American Meat Institute
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

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Breakfast: Smoothie with a banana, frozen cherries, spinach, and almond milk
Lunch: Veggie sub from Thundercloud, with hummus, guacamole, sprouts, tomato, cucumber, olives
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Dinner: Large baked potato with olive oil (instead of butter), garlic salt, and rosemary flakes

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Washington, DC Joins The Meatless Monday Movement! July 2nd, 2010

The City Council of the District of Columbia passed a ceremonial resolution encouraging city residents to “abstain from animal products on Mondays.” Not just meat, but all animal products. Nice. This victory for farmed animals was helped along by the fine people at Compassion Over Killing.

And because I like this resolution so much, here it is in all its glory (bold text was added by me):

DC Meat Free Monday

Councilmember Yvette M. Alexander

A CEREMONIAL RESOLUTION

IN THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

To acknowledge the obesity epidemic in the District of Columbia, to highlight the benefits of diets high in fruits and vegetables, to encourage residents to abstain from animal products on Mondays, and to celebrate the abundance of produce grown in community gardens and in neighboring regions.

WHEREAS, the rate of adolescent obesity in the District of Columbia is the highest in the nation and nearly half of the children in some wards are overweight. Obese children and adolescents are at greater risk for cardiovascular disease, such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure, bone and joint problems, sleep apnea, and social and psychological problems, such as stigmatization and poor self-esteem, and Type-2 diabetes.

WHEREAS, childhood obesity disproportionately affects low-income and minority children, and half of all minority children will develop diabetes by their eighteenth birthday.

WHEREAS, 81% of the District of Columbia’s high school students do not eat the recommended five daily servings of fruits and vegetables.

WHEREAS, the meat served to school children via the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s School Lunch Program is tested less frequently for food-borne pathogens than the meat in fast food restaurants and subject to lower safety standards.

WHEREAS, the rate of adult obesity in the District of Columbia exceeds 50 percent. Obesity is associated with an increased risk of numerous health problems, including heart disease, type-2 diabetes, stroke, several types of cancer, and osteoarthritis.

WHEREAS, overweight college applicants are significantly less likely to be accepted to college despite comparable academic records, and overweight employees are more likely to experience workplace bias, including hiring and salary discrimination.

WHEREAS, more than 20% of District residents ages 65 and older are obese. Overweight and obese elderly are more likely to have hypertension, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lung disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

WHEREAS, the environmental impacts of abstaining from meat are significant. Each time an individual goes meat free, s/he saves 890 gallons of water and nearly a gallon of gasoline.The UN has found that current meat production methods cause nearly half of all stream and river pollution. Indeed, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Nobel Peace Prize winner and chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has stated that the easiest way to reduce one’s carbon footprint is to make one day a week meat-free.

WHEREAS, a growing number of people are reducing their consumption of animal products in order to prevent animal cruelty. Approximately one billion animals would be spared if animal consumption was reduced by only 10%, a figure that would be achieved by a national Meat Free Monday.

WHEREAS, foregoing meat has the potential to impact world hunger. Each year, 756 million tons of grain is fed to farmed animals. If that grain was provided to the 1.4 billion people who are living in abject poverty, each of them would be provided twice the grain they would need to survive.

WHEREAS, the American Dietetic Association has stated that vegetarians have “lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease…lower blood cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer” and that vegetarians are less likely than meat-eaters to be obese. Accordingly, experts recommend going vegetarian, or at least increasing plant foods and eating fewer animal products, to help weight control. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture in their Dietary Guidelines for Americans, advised that Americans eat more dark green vegetables, orange vegetables, legumes and fruits.

WHEREAS, today, the average person consumes nearly 200 pounds more meat per annum than the average person consumed in the 1950s.

WHEREAS, America’s per capita fruit consumption is “woefully low” and limited to a small range of fruit options, and vegetable consumption “tells the same story,” according to a 2003 USDA report.

WHEREAS, community experts have said that enough fresh, local, produce exists to feed every District student. Such farm fresh products taste better, are healthy, and research has shown that children prefer them to non-local produce.

WHEREAS, a weekly reminder to restart healthy habits encourages success, and we are more likely to maintain behaviors begun on Monday throughout the week.

WHEREAS, Meat Free Mondays have been advocated by more than 20 schools of public health, numerous organizations including the American Association of Retired Persons, and experts in various fields including Michael Pollan and former Vice President Al Gore.

WHEREAS, in response to First Lady Michelle Obama’s call to combat childhood obesity and to set an example for the rest of the country, people, schools, businesses and other organizations within the District have adopted this healthy tradition which has existed since World War I.

BE IT RESOLVED, BY THE COUNCIL OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, that Mondays are hereby designated as “Meat Free Mondays”. This resolution may be cited as the “Meat Free Mondays Recognition Resolution of 2010”.

Sec. 4. This resolution shall take effect immediately upon the first date of publication in the District of Columbia Register.

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Breakfast: Smoothie with mixed berries (strawberry, raspberry, blackberry), pineapple, and spinach
Lunch: Black bean & guacamole burrito (that’s a bean and cheese, minus the cheese, plus guac) from Baja Fresh
Dinner: Chinese takeout – Sesame TVP (textured vegetable protein), a meat subsitute that most Chinese takeout places here have now!

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I Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself: Ellen DeGeneres June 29th, 2010

Here’s a transcript for those that are at work without headphones (or whatever reason you can’t play the video):

Katie Couric: I know that you’re a vegan now and so you eat no meat, right? No eggs, no dairy products. You had a vegan wedding when you and Portia got married. Why did you decide to become a vegan and when did you decide? I know you care deeply about animal rights, and what changed in  you?

Ellen: Animal rights sounds like they’re about to get the right to vote (laughs).

Katie Couric: How should I say it? Animal welfare?

Ellen: Yes, animal welfare. The welfare of animals. I always hear ‘animal rights’ and I just think it’s a crazy thing ’cause it’s really just the right to be left alone.

Years ago, I read Diet for a New Americawhich is a book about, uh, his last name is Robbins, his father owned Baskin Robbins. He wrote this book about factory farming and I read it and was horrified and was a vegetarian, I still ate cheese and stuff, but I was a vegetarian for about 8 months or so. And then I just went back to eating meat. I used to love cheeseburgers and steak and I just did what most people do, I just had a disconnect. I just decided it’s more important for me to taste a cheeseburger and have a steak or have a turkey sandwich, and it’s easier and I just put it out of my mind.

And recently I read, not recently, it’s been about a year and 8 months or so that we’ve been vegan, but I read Skinny Bitch, first. And then, I forced myself to watch a documentary called Earthlings and it’s inside footage of factory farms and dairy farms. You just see that and you go, ‘I can’t participate in that. I can’t be a part of something that is suffering.’

It’s 50 billion animals a year that are killed. And I think we all fool ourselves that there is some kind of happy cow and that it’s a quick death and they just hit ‘em in the head and they’re out and they go through the whole… And it’s a very disturbing reality. And it happens every minute of the day and every commercial on the air has some kind of food product in it. Every mini-mall, every store. And you think about the consumption, and how fast they have to mass produce, and you can’t possibly put together in your head one healthy, happy animal. They’re all in pain. They’re all treated badly. They’re all diseased. And they’re all pumped with antibiotics.

I do it because I love animals and I saw the reality and I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. But a lot of people do it for other reasons and there’s many reasons to do it. I’m healthier for it, I’m happier for it. I really truly believe that we take in energy and our thoughts are important, and all that stuff. I believe in that kind of positive thinking and I can’t imagine that if you’re putting something in your body that’s filled with fear or anxiety or pain, that that isn’t going to somehow be inside of you. And I used to be a more anxious person and more edgy and everything was a little more jumpy and sad. And I think not putting that stuff in my body is…

And it’s hard to kinda live your life and know that that exists and watch people do it all around you and just go [shrug]. You gotta hope that one day that shift will happen.

Katie Couric: Did you see the documentary Food, Inc.? [Ellen nods.] So that probably just reinforced everything that you were feeling.

Ellen: Ya. Food, Inc. is a Disney movie compared to Earthlings. Food Inc. is nothing. I would like people to look at that, but it’s hard. It takes a lot. It takes a major shift in your life ’cause it’s easy to grab for something and it’s just there. But every time you think about what’s on your plate and what it was, you know, you just can’t do it.

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Breakfast: English muffin with margarine
Lunch: Amy’s black bean burrito and grapes
Dinner: Subway Veggie Max sandwich (by the way, I kind of love the Veggie Max sandwich. Mmm.)

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The Onion News Network June 23rd, 2010

Great video on The Onion News Network today!


USDA Recalls 96,000 Pounds Of Tainted Beef From One Family

For those of you who live under a rock, The Onion is satirical fake news.

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Belgian City does “Meatless Thursday” April 14th, 2010

Thursdays were declared “Veggie Day” in the city of Ghent!  The Belgian city has decided to go veg for one day a week in an effort to highlight the environmental and health costs of eating meat.

The city authorities in Ghent, some 30 miles west of Brussels, are asking residents to get involved and opt for vegetarian meals at least one day a week.  Ghent is the first city in Europe to try such a scheme.

According to the city’s campaign publicity (and as we all know from reading this blog!), eating less meat can help to minimize the ecological footprint of your food because stock breeding has a detrimental impact on the environment. It points to data from the United Nations which says livestock is responsible for generating around 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

It is also hoped that Veggie Day will have a positive health impact in the fight against diet-related illnesses such as obesity, cancer and diabetes.

Organizers provided residents with meat-free recipes and a list of vegetarian restaurants at a “launch party” in the center of the city. (Ghent claims to have more vegetarian eateries per inhabitant than Paris, London and Berlin.) Demonstrations were also on offer to people looking for green cooking tips.

 Kudos to Ghent for being so progressive and I hope other cities will soon follow suit!

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Breakfast: Cranberry walnut toast with margarine
Lunch: Grilled cheese sandwich and tater tots from Sonic (and a Limeade, of course)
Dinner: Made a huge pot of Vegetarian Chili for my family. (They loved it!)

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Food Revolution March 30th, 2010

British chef Jamie Oliver is on a mission to inform people about how our eating habits are killing us. He’s made quite an impression in England, including convincing the British government to add $1 billion to their school lunch program to transform it from processed foods to real foods.

Now he’s taking on the US, starting in Huntington, WV which, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), is the unhealthiest city in the US.  Jamie is spending 3 months in Huntington to try and transform the way people think about what they eat. 

This is not an easy feat. Not only is he up against habit, which is a very hard thing to break in humans, but he’s also up against some big egos. People do not like to be told that what they are doing is wrong, even when the thing they are doing is literally killing them. 

The first episode of Jamie Oliver’s Rood Revolution highlights the extreme resistance Jamie receives from the people of Huntington, especially the school cafeteria’s cooks. (At one point Jamie calls them “lunch ladies.” I thought the show might end right then and there because of a lunch lady riot.)

Episode 2 focuses more on our complete and utter ignorance about what we are eating. Two things in this episode made me very very sad for the state of our country.

1) Jamie enters a first grade classroom with a bunch of vegetables and asks the students to identify them.  They could not correctly name a single vegetable.  Not one single one. Honestly. (Which is exactly why I think food knowledge must be taught in schools.)

Watch for yourself:

2) Jamie runs his “guaranteed no-fail experiment” (which he as run many many times in Britain) to try to make children of Huntington realize that chicken nuggets are gross and they should not eat them.  After showing the children what is actually in their chicken nuggets, Jamie then asks the kids, “Who wants one?” 

In Britain, the children are all so grossed out about what they just saw go into the nuggets that they groan, “Ewwww!”  However, in the US, the kids all immediately pop their hands into the air and respond with an eager, “Me! Me!” 

Check out this clip (but be aware that you might lose your own appetite):

This generation of children has been marked as possibly being the first generation in 200 years to have a shorter life expectancy then their parents.  The prevalence and severity of obesity is so great, especially in children, that the associated diseases and complications (Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, cancer) are striking people at younger and younger ages. 

The average life expectancy of today’s adults is roughly 77 years, but that is at least 4-9 months shorter than it would be if there were no obesity. Obesity is already shortening average life spans by a greater rate than accidents, homicides, and suicides combined.

Because of obesity, the children of today could wind up living two to five years less than they otherwise would – a negative effect on life span that could be greater than that caused by cancer or coronary heart disease.

We should not only be appaled by what is happening, we should be ashamed.  We are literally killing our children with processed food.

Make responsible food choices and demand a change. Our children deserve better.
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Breakfast: Apple and banana
Lunch: Tofurkey sandwich
Dinner: Veggie burger with baked beans and homemade mashed potatoes (with soy milk, olive oil, garlic, and chives)
veggie burger

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Eating Animals March 18th, 2010

Jonathan Safran Foer, author of the book Eating Animals, talks with Ellen DeGeneres about vegetarianism. I love the points that he makes.  Watch for yourself:

My favorite things about this interview:

1) Foer mentions a lady who, while reading the book, is constantly saying to her husband, “I can’t believe this!  You have got to read this. And we’ve got to start eating differently.”  Foer himself says that as he was researching the book, he thought, “This is insane. This is crazy.”  That is exactly how I felt when I started reading about our food system.

2) Foer says, “When we are exposed to the facts, we really all agree,” to which Ellen replies, “And that’s the hard part; getting people to look at the facts and look at things they really don’t want to look at.” This is the reason I started this blog: to expose people to the facts and make them look at things they really don’t want to look at because I believe that if people just knew what was happening, they would demand a change.

3) He mentions the environmental destruction caused by our farming industry and he talks about the health benefits of vegetarianism, such as the proven fact that on average, vegetarians live longer than omnivores.

4) Ellen notes that not one factory farm or anyone from the food industry has contacted Foer about the book.  Foer attributes this to, “either every fact in the book [which has about 70 pages of footnotes] is correct and unassailable, or they don’t want this conversation to expand because the more people talk about this and think about this, the less likely they will be to eat factory-farmed products.”  

5) Ellen asks Foer why he thinks that non-vegetarians become defensive when vegetarians starts talking about the reasons not to eat meat (a  question I’ve pondered many times myself: here and here, for example).  Foer replies that we need to realize that there are not just 2 extremes: strict vegetarian vs. strict carnivore (who only and always eats meat).  I love his comparison to the environment: just because you fly on an airplane (about the worst thing for the environment in terms of transporation) doesn’t mean that you should now also leave all your lights on and your car idling in the driveway. There is an in-between and every step in the good direction is a very powerful thing.

6) Foer says that if every American removed 1 serving of meat from their diet every week (that’s like 1/3 of a Meatless Monday), it would be the equivalent of taking 5 million cars off the road. “I believe people, I respect people, I understand people who say ‘I’m not going to become a vegetarian tomorrow.’  Somone who says, ‘I can’t remove 1 serving of meat a week, I have a very hard time understanding.”

This is not the first time Foer was on Ellen’s show.  See what he had to say on his first visit:

 

And watch Foer address questions from the audience:

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Breakfast: Bagel with jelly
Lunch: Chipotle veggie burrito bowl (no meat = free guac!)
Dinner: Vegan chicken ranch wrap (with gardein “chicken” and non-dairy ranch) from Sticky Fingers vegan bakery

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