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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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

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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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,

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“

Like my blog? Please share it with others, comment, and/or subscribe to the RSS feed.

“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,

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“

Image courtesy of Hotels in Eastbourne.

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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!

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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As politicians continue to argue in Washington over budget cuts, perhaps a bit of sanity, perspective, and solutionary thinking is in order. Thanks to Bittman, we have a great article to share with our legislators, school administrators and teachers, hospital cafeteria food purveyors, and everyone else who might be in a position to create meaningful change around what we eat.

Bon appetit,

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind: Raising a Humane Child in Challenging Times
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

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Eating Animals is a beautifully written book. It is both personal and painstakingly researched. There is no proselytism in its pages, though it would be difficult not to want to make more conscientious and compassionate food choices after reading it. It is a book that digs deep and wide where most popular authors about our food system problems fall short. It also offers a voice to different approaches to an ethical diet so that the reader can choose for her/himself.

This is a book everyone should read, and that two major universities have chosen it as summer reading is a testament to both its importance and to the changes that have taken place in our society. We are finally seriously talking within our universities about what we eat and how our food is produced, and with that conversation comes both the recognition that the complex and far-reaching effects of food choices are important for our students to learn about and provides hope for changes in our food system.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDx talk

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The word carnism could, at first glance, seem like academic jargon, a way to name something that simply goes by another name. But this isn’t so. A carnist may be a meat-eater, just as a vegetarian is a plant-eater, but carnism is the hidden belief system that leads people to eat meat, whether consciously or simply habitually. Just as vegetarianism describes a philosophy underpinning a plant-based diet, so does carnism describe a philosophy underpinning a meat-based diet. And a very specific meat-based diet, one that excludes, at least in our culture, dogs, and includes cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and turkeys. In other carnistic cultures, the animals may differ (excluding cows by Hindus or pigs by Jews and Muslims for example). A carnist is also not synonymous with a carnivore or an omnivore. A person might be a vegetarian but he will never be a biological herbivore like a cow. Another might be a carnist, but she will never be a biological carnivore like a cat.

Why do we need a word such as carnist? Because without it, our dominant dietary ideology, which causes unimaginable cruelty, suffering and violence to billions of animals every year, is never seen as an actual philosophy or ethical choice. The 3 Ns that Melanie Joy identifies, normal, natural, and necessary, simply become the mantra of a philosophy most never bother to unwrap or consider.

Melanie begins her book brilliantly:

Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario: You are a guest at an elegant dinner party…. Mouthwatering smells of rich foods emanate from the kitchen. You haven’t eaten all day, and your stomach is growling.

At last, after what feels like hours, your friend who is hosting the party emerges from the kitchen with a steaming pot of savory stew. The aromas of meat, seasonings, and vegetables fill the room. You serve yourself a generous portion, and after eating several mouthfuls of tender meat, you ask your friend for the recipe.

“I’d be happy to tell you,” she replies, “You begin with five pounds of Golden Retriever meat, well marinated, and then…” Golden Retriever? You probably freeze mid-bite as you consider her words: the meat in your mouth is from a dog.

What now? Do you continue eating? Or are you revolted by the fact that there’s golden retriever on your plate, and you’ve just eaten some?

What now indeed? And so begins an exploration into our nonsensical, irrational beliefs systems and treatment of other species. Believe it or not, this book is a page turner. I read it over three sittings in a weekend, and wanted to get a copy for everyone I know.

Zoe Weil
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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I agree with the author, Roland Duong, that “in our modern era, which tends to emphasize drama and complaint, the miracle of the supermarket goes unnoticed.” This is undoubtedly true. Many of us take the incredible quantity and variety of food in our supermarkets for granted, and few of us would want to return to the days in which every family had to grind their own wheat or corn and rely solely on what was available locally and in season, or pickled and stored, in harsh climates. Few of us would want to spend almost our entire day procuring food, often feeling insecure about our ability to do so and to feed our children, and often at risk of foodborne infection from, for example, unpasteurized milk. But Duong is just wrong when he says that these days “it is nearly impossible to get old-fashioned food poisoning.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates 76 million cases of food poisoning every year in the U.S. alone. For Campylobacter and Salmonella the estimates (assumed to be significantly underestimated because people with food poisoning often think they have the “stomach flu”) are 2.5 million and 1.4 million cases, respectively. Why so much food poisoning? Because of our modern agricultural systems, which cram billions of animals into tightly confined, excrement-covered spaces for the duration of their lives.

Duong writes: “Take the miracle of milk, a perfectly ordinary beverage we guzzle down without care or thought,” as an example of our great bounty. Let’s deconstruct this sentence for a minute. First, as suggested, let’s take “the miracle of milk.” Milk is indeed rather miraculous. That mammals evolved to produce food from our own bodies to feed our young is truly amazing. Most of what comes out of our body is waste, so it is incredible that we evolved to also produce the nutritionally perfect food for our babies for the perfect amount of time.

Moving on to Duong’s phrase “perfectly ordinary beverage” we might pause for a moment to reflect upon the ordinariness of dairy consumption. If we give it some thought we might wonder why many of us humans (actually a very small global percentage) have chosen to continue nursing long after weaning, and have chosen to nurse on another species. No other mammal does this (unless we feed them dairy products). There is nothing ordinary about nursing beyond weaning or nursing on another species. In fact, it is quite strange. It only seems ordinary to us because in modern times we’ve made a habit of it.

As for guzzling it down “without care or thought,” on this point I agree with Duong, but for different reasons. Few people think about the impact of their choice to consume dairy products. There have been books written on the problems associated with cow’s milk from a health perspective, from an environmental perspective, and from an animal protection perspective. Dr. Spock, the famous pediatrician, discouraged people from giving their children cow’s milk and avoided it himself for health reasons.

But the inherent cruelty to animals in the dairy industry goes almost entirely unnoticed. The only way that we are able to get cow’s milk is by impregnating cows and taking their young away so that we may drink the milk ourselves. Although those cows produce milk for the sole purpose of feeding their own offspring, we remove those calves – usually at a day old – and hook their mothers to milking machines. We force them to produce 5-12 times the amount of milk they would normally produce for their calf, often resulting in mastitis, a painful udder infection requiring antibiotic treatment and resulting in pus in their milk. These mothers bellow out for days when their young are, for all intents and purposes, kidnapped from them. If their calves are male (and therefore of no use to the dairy industry), they will likely be sold for veal. Many are aware of the horrors of the specialty veal industry, in which calves are chained at the neck in tiny stalls, unable to walk (to keep their flesh tender) and fed an iron-deficient diet (to keep their flesh pale) until they are forced to climb onto the slaughter trucks on their atrophied legs. Few realize that the dairy and veal industries are inextricably linked.

We ought to be grateful for the bounty of food available to us, but we ought not to laud it as an unqualified miracle. Our food choices have a profound and enormous impact not only on ourselves, but on other people across the globe, on the environment, and on animals. I believe that instead of giving “our full attention to enjoying this incredible opulence” as Duong suggests at the end of the article, we should give instead our full attention to assessing the impact of our food choices and trying to eat foods that do the most good and the least harm to ourselves, other people, animals and the environment.

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind

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In his introduction, Moby writes about growing up and hearing the golden rule to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

“When I was young this made a lot of sense to me in an uncluttered and beautifully self-evident way. But it then begged a follow up question: who are these ‘others’ referred to in the golden rule? Should this rule only apply to me and my family? Should it extend to friends? Strangers? And what about animals? To my young mind, it seemed inconceivable that I would extend the golden rule to strangers, but not to the animals in my house…. I loved the animals in my house, so I decided that I should extend the golden rule to them. Which then begged another follow-up question: If I don’t want the animals in my house to suffer, well, then what about the animals who don’t live in my house? Shouldn’t the golden rule apply to them as well? So, at an early age, I decide that the golden rule should probably extend to all animals who seem to have the capacity to suffer.”

And so Moby, like so many of us who don’t want to cause suffering and harm to other sentient beings, became vegan.

I’ve had people tell me that they need to eat meat, and so I was interested to read the first essay in the book, written by an ironman triathlete, who presented the case that not only is meat unnecessary, but that for peak athletic performance a vegan diet is preferable. But perhaps the more powerful commentary in this essay came in the form of a question and a graph. The question? “Which is cleaner, the kitchen sink or the toilet? And the answer is the toilet. That surprising finding comes from University of Arizona researchers who discovered ‘more fecal bacteria in the kitchen – on sponges, dish towels, and the sink drain – than they found swabbing the toilet, even after washing everything with bleach not once, but twice, in a house with omnivores. It is safer to lick the rim of their toilet seat than the kitchen countertop… because people aren’t preparing chickens in the toilet.’” All that excrement on meat, courtesy of today’s (lack of) animal husbandry and slaughterhouses, means excrement in our kitchens. Yuck.

Bon appetit,

Zoe Weil, author of Most Good, Least Harm

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