food and diet | Zoe Weil

Egg-Laying Hens in the News…At Last!

Posted on April 18, 2012 by zoeweil

Image courtesy of Farm Sanctuary via Creative Commons.

When Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times and co-author of Half the Sky, uses his platform to tell the world about institutionalized – and profoundly cruel – egg production, one realizes that things have changed. For the better.

Half the Sky, which documents the exploitation and abuse of women and girls around the world, is a fantastic and important book – one that’s required reading for the students in our graduate programs at the Institute for Humane Education. But one of my frustrations with the book was the dismissive tone that periodically crept into its pages regarding nonhuman animals. It saddened me that Kristof felt compelled to diminish the plight of animals in a book that was about the oppression of those without power.

But just a couple of years after writing Half the Sky, Kristof is now condemning the abuse of chickens in egg production. Compassion, it seems, can be extended when we acknowledge that pain and abuse is pain and abuse. Comparisons between humans and animals are not necessary. We can address all forms of cruelty and in doing so increase the overall measure of compassion and kindness in the world. Thank you Nicholas Kristof, and thank you to the anonymous worker at Kreider Farms who willingly endured your own hell to bring to light the unimaginable hell endured by those hens whose eggs millions of people eat.

For a humane world,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

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Filed under: animal protection, food and diet, humane education | Tagged: animal cruelty, battery hens, compassion, egg production, eggs, exploitation, factory farming, Most Good Least Harm, Nicholas Kristof, nonhuman animals, oppression, suffering | Comments Off

Banning “Pink Slime” Would Do More Harm

Posted on April 12, 2012 by zoeweil

When “pink slime” hit the media, outrage ensued. Many were disgusted and appalled that their meat was full of cow parts that were grosser than other cow parts, necessitating ammonia treatment to kill bacteria (a practice that has been occurring for over 40 years).

But now an analysis in the Washington Post of the effects of banning “pink slime” (could there be a grosser name?) reveals the negative impact such a ban would have both on cows (between 300,000 and 1.5 million more would be killed) and the environment (because of the impact raising cows for consumption has on the environment.)

Sometimes what seems obvious – that “pink slime” shouldn’t be in food – turns out not to be so obvious. When considering what does the most good and the least harm (the MOGO principle), “pink slime” comes out ahead of a ban; yet there’s another obvious choice (less encouraged in the media) that is MOGO. By reducing consumption of animals and animal products in general, there’s less pink slime, less slaughter of animals, less global warming, and less pollution.

For a humane world,

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Filed under: food and diet, food policy, MOGO (Most Good) | Tagged: animal cruelty, environmental protection, factory farming, food choices, global warming, Most Good Least Harm, pink slime | 1 Comment »

Challenging Our Fast Food Fixation

Posted on April 2, 2012 by zoeweil

Image courtesy of SteFou! via Creative Commons.

Ten years ago, Eric Schlosser’s seminal book, Fast Food Nation, was published, critiquing fast food corporations for their human rights, health, environmental and animal welfare violations. A decade later, what, if anything, has changed? Schlosser reflects in a recent essay.

In our two-tiered food society, with the slender, fit well-off people eating healthier, non-factory-farmed, organic and fresh food, and the poor living in food deserts where ill-health and obesity from fast food is epidemic, what can we do to earn the hope Schlosser feels for our food future? While I almost always argue that humane education is the key to systemic change, in this case there’s another equally important key: campaign finance and advertising reform and an end to big ag subsidies. As long as our tax dollars subsidize meat and dairy, fast food will remain cheap. As long as it is legal to advertise fast food (which may kill as many people annually as tobacco products), we’ll remain a brainwashed society addicted to its salty, fatty, inexpensive convenience. And as long as our school cafeterias fall under the purview of fast food giants, we will raise another generation with unhealthy eating habits that are hard to break.

It’s up to us humane educators to bring critical thinking and accurate information about our food choices to our students, and it’s up to all of us to take this knowledge and challenge the entrenched systems which perpetuate such an unhealthy, destructive, and cruel diet.

For a humane & healthy world,

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Filed under: food and diet, food policy, humane education | Tagged: accurate information, advertising, animal welfare, critical thinking, Eric Schlosser, factory farming, fast food, food deserts, human rights, public health, subsidies, systemic change | Comments Off

Normalizing Violence for Pleasure: Why a Political Scientist Stopped Eating Meat

Posted on March 21, 2012 by zoeweil

Image courtesy of
Watershed Post via Creative Commons.

For my blog today, I wanted to share Mark Bittman’s recent essay in The New York Times.

Bittman quotes political science doctoral candidate, Timothy Pachirat, who took a job in a slaughterhouse and worked there for five months: “’I didn’t get into this to focus on animal issues,’ he told me, ‘but my own relationship to eating meat has been transformed, and I now forgo it altogether. It’s just not worth the pleasure when you know the system.’”

I especially appreciate Pachirat’s use of the word “pleasure.” Words matter. With that simple word choice, Pachirat reminds us that we eat animals to please our tastebuds, not because we have to.

For a humane world,

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Filed under: critical thinking, Cultural Issues, food and diet | Tagged: animal agriculture, animal suffering, animal welfare, eating meat, industrial agriculture, Mark Bittman, slaughterhouses, violence | Comments Off

The True Cost of a Burger

Posted on February 24, 2012 by zoeweil

A recent UK study evaluating the carbon footprint of 61 categories of food reveals that a switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet would dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Here’s an excerpt from a Science Daily article about the study:

“The report ‘Relative greenhouse gas impacts of realistic dietary choices’ published in the journal Energy Policy says that if everyone in the UK swapped their current eating habits for a vegetarian or vegan diet, our greenhouse gas emissions savings would be the equivalent of a 50 per cent reduction in exhaust pipe emissions from the entire UK passenger car fleet or 40m tonnes.

“… Fresh meat had the highest emissions of all, but meat and cheese had generally high greenhouse gas costs. These emissions were largely caused by methane from rumination, slurry and farm yard manure and nitrous oxide from fertilizer.”

Why Are We Eating Less Meat?

Posted on January 13, 2012 by zoeweil

Mark Bittman, opinion columnist at the New York Times who writes about food, begins 2012 with a piece titled, “We’re Eating Less Meat. Why?” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meat consumption is declining and is predicted to continue its decline. While the livestock industry blames, among other things, the federal government’s supposed “war on meat protein consumption,” which is truly bizarre given that the federal government subsidizes animal agriculture with our tax dollars and buys massive quantities of meat for the school lunch program, Bittman posits that the primary decline in meat consumption is due to a growing population of educated consumers who are choosing to reduce and often eliminate animal products from their diet for three primary reasons: their health, the environment, and concerns about animals. Read his essay here.

For a humane world,

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Filed under: consumerism, food and diet | Tagged: American diet, animal protection, compassion, global warming, health, livestock production, Mark Bittman, meat consumption, vegan, vegetarian | 1 Comment »

Ode to My Garden

Posted on November 28, 2011 by zoeweil

Flying home to Maine from New York on Halloween was surreal. A few minutes after the plane ascended over Westchester County, the fall foliage was interspersed with huge swaths of snow. The snow was thick all through New England, until the descent into Bangor where, on one side of the plane the snow covered the fields, and on the other it was completely clear. Somehow, although downeast Maine apparently did get hit with the storm, the snow was minimal and melted quickly here. Thus I came home to my garden.

It’s hard to describe just how much food my 900 square foot garden has produced this year, or how much fruit I still have from the apple and pear trees and the kiwi vine. I’ve been juicing beets, carrots, apples and pears almost daily (the color is unreal), and still have a garbage-can-sized bucket of beets. I’ve only dug up 1/4 of the potatoes, but the pantry bin where I store them is already full. I’ve yet to eat all the melons that ripened during the Indian summer, and the crisp, crunchy and delicious kohlrabi (see photo) looks like it’s on steroids (it’s not; the garden is organic). I have two bins of delicata squash, and I’ll be picking kale leaves and brussels sprouts for some time. I just hope I manage to eat all the leeks before they succumb to the cold. Fortunately, I canned some of the tomatoes before the frost so no worries there. It’s a cornucopia.

Which is amazing to me. When the ground was bare in April and I planted tiny seeds, sometimes so small I could barely separate one from the other as I sowed them, I had to trust that each would sprout and grow into food. Sure enough, they did, the sun and rain having given them all they needed so that tonight, at the beginning of November, I can make a hearty soup oozing with flavor, color and nutrients. And tomorrow night another feast, and so on for months to come.

Having grown up in Manhattan, and having lived the first 35 years of my life in the east coast’s biggest cities, it is so gratifying to grow so much of our family’s food, to understand what it entails to do so, to marvel at the miracle that is life. Every spring and early summer, before the bounty is in, but when the time required to prepare and sow and weed seems endless, I wonder why I do this. Tonight I won’t be wondering.

Zoe

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Filed under: food and diet, gratitude | Tagged: food and diet, gardening, gratitude, resilience, wonder | Comments Off

The Ethical Dilemma Inherent in the Weekday Vegetarian Plan

Posted on September 26, 2011 by zoeweil

Image courtesy of Christina Hoheisel
via Creative Commons.

For my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent post I wrote for Care2.com, an online community for people passionate about creating a better world. Here’s an excerpt from The Ethical Dilemma Inherent in the Weekday Vegetarian Plan:

“At the recent TEDxDirigo conference, we watched a 4-minute TED talk, Why I’m a Weekday Vegetarian, by Treehugger.org founder Graham Hill. Hill explained why, despite everything he knows about the cruelty, health problems and environmental destruction associated with meat-eating, he wasn’t a vegetarian. ‘Why was I stalling?’ he asks in the face of the truth that ‘my common sense and good intentions were in conflict with my tastebuds.’

“Hill’s answer is to become what he calls a ‘weekday vegetarian,’ someone who is vegetarian during the week and chooses whatever he or she wants on the weekend ….

“… I began thinking about how we would all react if we heard a talk by an activist working to end slavery who said that during the week she avoided chocolate produced through slave labor, but on weekends ate any chocolate she felt like. Or an environmentalist who said that during the week he only drove a Prius but on the weekend would drive a Hummer. I even imagined a man who spanks his kids, but is unable to resist coming to the decision – surely positive – that he’d only do it on the weekends and become a ‘weekday good dad.’”

Read the complete essay.

For a humane world,

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Filed under: food and diet, MOGO (Most Good) | Tagged: animal welfare, changemakers, cognitive dissonance, consistency, cruelty, desires, environmental destruction, food, green living, responsibility, suffering, values, veganism, vegetariansim | Comments Off

Making MOGO (most good) Choices: The True Price of a Cheeseburger

Posted on August 29, 2011 by zoeweil

For my blog post today, I’m sharing a recent post I wrote for One Green Planet, a blog dedicated to ethical choices. Here’s an excerpt from “Making MOGO (most good) choices: The True Price of a Cheeseburger”:

“We eat many times each day, and there is no other daily choice that has a bigger impact on ourselves, other people, animals, and the environment than what foods we put into our bodies.

One of the staples of the western, industrialized diet is the ubiquitous cheeseburger. Many people know that cheeseburgers aren’t the healthiest of food choices. Some have heard that cheeseburgers take a hefty environmental toll. Animal protection advocates are aware of the cruelty in the beef and dairy industries. A few know about the human rights abuses that occur on industrial farms and in slaughterhouses. So what is the true price of a cheeseburger?

The effects on you

Let’s start with the positive effects of a cheeseburger. Most people eat cheeseburgers at fast food restaurants. They are convenient, tasty (at least to many people), inexpensive (because we pay for them through subsidies financed by our tax dollars), and filling.

The negative impacts on us occur over time, so we don’t notice them when we consume a burger, but eating a diet that regularly includes cheeseburgers can lead, over time, to heart disease, strokes, various cancers, weight gain and obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, and even impotence. Regular intake of high fat, high cholesterol foods such as cheeseburgers has been implicated in the major diseases of our time, killing around half a million people every year in the United States according to numerous epidemiological studies.”

Read the complete post.

For a humane world,

Image courtesy of Hotels in Eastbourne.

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Filed under: critical thinking, food and diet, humane education, MOGO (Most Good) | Tagged: cheeseburgers, ethical choices, factory farming, food and diet, humane education, MOGO principle, Most Good Least Harm, true price | Comments Off

Take the TEDx Manhattan Challenge

Posted on July 6, 2011 by zoeweil

For my blog post today, I wanted to share the TEDxManhattan Challenge. What’s the challenge? To work with a group of people in your community anywhere in the United States on a project related to sustainable food and farming. Start a garden at a senior center; start a farmers market; develop a cooking class at your child’s school; create a Food Policy Council in your city. Be creative!

Let them know what you’re doing to change the way you eat in your community. The project deemed to have the most impact will win the opportunity to speak live on the 2012 TEDxManhattan stage, January 21, 2012!

Good luck!

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Filed under: changemakers, food and diet, food policy, systemic change | Tagged: contests, food and diet, food systems, Sustainability, sustainable agriculture, systemic change, TEDx | Comments Off

Zoe Weil

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Egg-Laying Hens in the News…At Last!

Banning “Pink Slime” Would Do More Harm

Challenging Our Fast Food Fixation

Normalizing Violence for Pleasure: Why a Political Scientist Stopped Eating Meat

The True Cost of a Burger

Why Are We Eating Less Meat?

Ode to My Garden

The Ethical Dilemma Inherent in the Weekday Vegetarian Plan

Making MOGO (most good) Choices: The True Price of a Cheeseburger

Take the TEDx Manhattan Challenge

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