Our Food Industry Which Includes Our Dairy Industry is Killing Us

That is also true of the Skotidakis farm, but their main production is goat cheese and yoghurt, which doesn't come under supply management.

My parents were born in the 1920s and grew up on farms. they were not dairy farmers, but every farm had at least one dairy cow for personal use.

both my parents as children had to get up at 4:00 am and milk the cows and many other jobs before breakfast.

when I was little, my mother asked my dad for a cute little dairy calf that she could bond with as a baby so that she could milk it. (My mother always had to milk cows but she was afraid of them and felt intimidated by them).

Dad bought mom a little jersey black angus cross heifer named Dinah. She was a very beautiful cow but she had the attitude of a black angus which wasn't good. And mom was too busy to find the time to bond with her. Before mom knew it Dinah was ready for milking.

it was never mom who determined how much milk she needed, it was always Dinah letting mom know how much she was willing to allow mom to have.

Dinah liked to jump the fence and get into mom's garden. One day mom saw Dinah's ears sneaking through the trees and heading straight for the cabbage patch. Mom ran outside with a broom to chase Dinah out of the garden. Well, Dinah turned around and chased mom right back into the house.

Dad built the fence higher so that Dinah could not jump over it. Dinah just jumped higher. After three expansions to the height of the fence, Dad had no other recourse, he put hobbles on Dinah to stop her from jumping. Even with hobbles and a rediculously high fence, Dinah would get a rocking motion going and make a running jump and rock her way over the fence and into our garden and after that into all the neighbour's gardens in the community.

Dinah really loved cabbage. Mom said that we always knew when Dinah had raided another farm's garden because the cream was so rich.

Those were the days. 

Eating meat and dairy products contributes greatly to wasteful use of agricultural land which could feed a lot more people. It is the same as the environmental question. What is more important? Telling people what they should do, or directly undercutting the perpetrators using the revenge of your own wallet? 

Quote:

Eating meat and dairy products contributes greatly to wasteful use of agricultural land which could feed a lot more people.

Is the real problem that we're actually out of agricultural land?

I think I've seen it suggested that raising animals for food also uses more water than raising vegetables for food.  But at the same time, we take water, filter and purify it, then defecate into it (Don't lie, bro.  You totally know you did!). 

So it doesn't really make any sense to say that a soybean crop uses 48% less water than chickens, so we can't have chicken any more, because "water".

progressive17 wrote:

Eating meat and dairy products contributes greatly to wasteful use of agricultural land which could feed a lot more people. It is the same as the environmental question. What is more important? Telling people what they should do, or directly undercutting the perpetrators using the revenge of your own wallet? 

We produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Nobody today is starving because there isn't enough food. They starve because of imperfect distribution systems, neglect (eg. kids neglected by parents or poor neglected by society), or deliberate deprivation due to political reasons (eg. North Korea).

And even considering the few remaining above causes of starvation, having too much food kills more people globally than not having enough. Producing more food is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Well, no, not exactly.

It really depends on the land. If, for example, you're talking about land that has plenty of water and isn't rocky, sure. But if you're talking arid or semi-arid conditions, cold climate with a very short growing season, or very rocky, scrub conditions, then no, it's not practical to farm that land. However, that land *is* suited to pasture ruminants on - they can eat the kinds of tough, cellulose-heavy plants that tend to grow in less arable lands that we can't, and then we eat them (thereby turning the resources from unusable to usable as a food source). It's actually highly inefficient to try to produce crops in those places, and much better to raise meat.

That's not to say that you need to live on an all-beef diet - but there is a case to be made for cattle over crops in the right set of circumstances.

I like raw asparagus but hey look like little snakes, yuck!

Mr. Magoo wrote:

It's certainly true that we humans cannot digest a great deal of cellulose that herbivores have little trouble with.

And really, we kind of dodged a bullet there.  Because if we COULD eat grass, or the leaves off trees, you can bet that someone would be urging us to.  It's bad enough that we CAN digest kale.

I'm not entirely convinced as yet!

Chickens and pigs are also popular food sources because they eat what we don't or can't and become edible. Resources are cycled into usable resources.

I also find it interesting that people who are concerned about being green and sustainable don't acknowledge the damage farming does to ecosystems. The prairies have largely gone to farms, and the remaining prairie ecosystems are in danger of dying out - an ecosystem, btw, that depends on having ruminants on it for its survival. Before reintroduction of bison in an area of southwest Saskatchewan, the native prairie would have died had it not been for cattle farmers pasturing on it.

I can see why kale is so popular in smoothies, though:  let the blades of the blender do the work your teeth cannot.  :)

But lacinato (black) kale is pretty good stuff.  Like a very sturdy chard, rather than the "land kelp" that regular kale is.

Yes, I like lacinato. But still, I stick it in the freezer after washing it. And I detest most smoothies; moreover I LOATHE that word.

An exception was one made from fresh local raspberries just spinned in a blender. This was at the Jean-Talon market, where the café owners obviously had access to day-old berries that had gone a bit mushy - usually sold for making jam. That was delicious.

Cody87 wrote:

progressive17 wrote:

Eating meat and dairy products contributes greatly to wasteful use of agricultural land which could feed a lot more people. It is the same as the environmental question. What is more important? Telling people what they should do, or directly undercutting the perpetrators using the revenge of your own wallet? 

We produce more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet. Nobody today is starving because there isn't enough food. They starve because of imperfect distribution systems, neglect (eg. kids neglected by parents or poor neglected by society), or deliberate deprivation due to political reasons (eg. North Korea).

And even considering the few remaining above causes of starvation, having too much food kills more people globally than not having enough. Producing more food is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

What a load of garbage!

People who live in different regions of the world should not have to rely on people from other regions of the globe to feed them! How the fuck much will it cost to get a balanced diet to 2M people in east Africa when they have a draught?

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-report-food-crises-2018

Quote:

People who live in different regions of the world should not have to rely on people from other regions of the globe to feed them! How the fuck much will it cost to get a balanced diet to 2M people in east Africa when they have a draught?

The first sentence seems to suggest that people elsewhere shouldn't rely on others to feed them, but the second sentence seems to ask why those others haven't.

Quote:

And I have mentioned this solution before here on babble, but it fell on deaf ears!

Everyone was too busy gagging.

Though, for what it's worth, I did see, the other day, at "Independent City Market" (basically a Loblaw affiliate) some powdered cricket.  I doubt it'll catch on in a big way (particularly when it's more expensive than meat) but I guess for now it's the new Acai Berry, or whatever.

Here's just a random thought for anyone who'd like me to try eating meat substitutes (including insect protein):  make them cheaper than meat. 

Aren't they supposed to be more efficient?  I don't want to hear any chin music about "pork subsidies" or whatever if meat substitutes are easily two to three times the price of what they inadequately mimic.  The day I can buy Tofurkey for less than turkey is the day I might try it.  Meanwhile, I was unaware that SOYBEANS were just so expensive!  Funny that soy protein is used as a "stretcher" in cheap meat products when it's more expensive than meat.

WWWT wrote: "I’ve read crickets termites and maggots are real good to eat!"

bon appetite! 

And please don't share that with us. I personally will restrict my protein to peanut butter, dairy products, beef, pork, fish, shrimp, poultry, bison and lamb.

Pondering wrote

The point being made here is my not throwing out a half can of peas is not going to help starving people in Africa. 

There is no overall food shortage in the world. The problem is distribution. Eating insects in Canada will not help starving people in Africa. 

Never thought that you were implying that throwing some food out would hurt anyone.

However this food distribution thing is partially a myth. Food always has to be grown localy no matter where on the Earth you may live? Be it in Canada, Sudan Australia Venezeula etc etc. It makes no difference where. To ship food halway across the globe is way too expensive and is doomed with logistic problems from the word go! It is only an emergency solution.

Furthermore, relying on other distant regions to supply your nutritional needs is actually a form of control/suppression of people! Or at least has been in the past and possibly right now as we speak!

Eating insects and deriving nutrition from untraditional albeit very good sources is actually a way for people to empower themselves! I grow my own garden, I have my own fruit trees. Now they don't supply all my needs, but I really do get a thrill from knowing that I don't always have to rely on someone else for an necessity.

Oh and by the way Misfit, please don't close your mind to the possibility of entomophagy. Diet is part of cultures and many peoples around the world include insects into their diet.

When I was a kid, I would eat an ant, if you dared me.  And if you didn't care, I'd dare you to dare me because I kind of liked eating ants.

Not a whole serving, mind you.  Just one or two.  Red preferred over black.  Thanks to the formic acid in them, they were teeny tiny little "Sour Warheads".

I had lunch today with a friend who works in the Dept of Ag. Unfortunately he was in town for only a short time and the conversation on stayed on dairy for a few minutes and he has not worked there recently.  He started out with pointing out that he would attend the national meetings of the different farm groups.  The grain growers met at a Travelodge, the cattlemen met at the Sheraton and the dairy farmers met at the Chateau Laurier, which I guess was to point out the different economic status of the various groups.

Within government supply management has many critics. Even among food security advocates. The barriers to entry of course is a big thing, but also the lack of encouragement to change. The European trade deal did create a number of cracks in the armour, though mostly for premium products.

When I am in farm country pretty well anywhere I can always tell the dairy farms.  They have the new buildings.

Supply management disproportionately hurts the poor. This means we must support supply management, because making the poor suffer is public policy.

Making the poor pay more hurts them, no matter how hard you try to weasel out of it. They are doing badly enough for all the reasons you listed, and you want to punish them more.

I don't know Parksville, but  Armstrong is VERY different from good Belgian cheeses, good Québécois cheeses, and some good eastern Ontario cheeses such as Forfar that I liked very much - hope they still exist. And I've never seen a non-cow cheese from Armstrong.

Um, I set up a new thread on supply management because I don't think that this is what NR had this thread in mind to be. And now it seems to be about eating bugs.

I say Armstrong as in general area where there are a bunch of  "farm gate" cheese shops.  I could easily have said Salmon Arm just as easily.  Very nice on the basics (edam etc...), perhaps not up to European standards on tradition ("this cheeese recipe dates back some monks who made cheese when they weren't beating themselves with whips & chains").  They also tend to have some creative flavour creations..