The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu

Review of the book The Omnivore’s Deception By John Sanbonmatsu:

The global destruction of other animals at the hands of the meat industry is absolutely staggering: Humans kill more than 80 billion land animals and nearly 3 trillion marine animals every year, reports Professor Sanbonmatsu. Half of the planet’s land surface is dedicated to agriculture, with 80% of that devoted to either rearing animals for slaughter or growing monocrops to feed them. Tragically, almost all of Earth’s animals are captives, observes Professor Sanbonmatsu, with just a teensy 4% of all mammals (excluding humans) living freely in nature whilst their captive brethren are confined, awaiting slaughter. Seventy percent of all birds on Earth are our prisoners too, living out their flightless lives in brief, abject misery, thanks to the poultry industry.

Professor Sanbonmatsu discusses the well-known cognitive dissonance where most people think that hurting animals is wrong, but strangely, they are not bothered by killing and eating the very same animals. This paradoxical moral blindness makes meat-eaters view vegans and veganism as threats to their moral self-image and to the core of their group identity. Such human narcissism (as Freud referred to it) also leads to open contempt for vegans and vegetarians because people see themselves as superior to other animals. Such global, systemic abuses underlie and normalize the frequent recrimination that anyone or anything that is different from their oppressors is “an animal.” In short, to be born a non-human animal in today’s world is to be viewed as being unworthy of life. And yet, “[o]mnivorism is not a license to kill; it’s an invitation to improve our moral character, to act in accordance with our better natures,” Professor Sanbonmatsu asserts.

Amongst the many arguments that Professor Sanbonmatsu makes is a discussion of Aristotle’s bizarre ideas that social inequality and hierarchy are aspects of nature, “embedded in a Great Chain of Being”. Thus, according to Aristotle, it was natural for men to dominate and to victimize women (Aristotle viewed women as “incomplete” men), for masters to dominate and victimize slaves, for stronger city-states to destroy or enslave weaker ones, and for humans to dominate and victimize other animals. Despite Aristotle’s permission to abuse and kill other animals, it has been shown, repeatedly and in numerous different ways, that raising and eating other animals is devastating for the environment and a waste of natural resources, is dangerous to human health, provides an inferior source of nutrition, is a leading cause of food insecurity for our fellow humans, and is unspeakably abusive and cruel to the other animals trapped within this system.

One argument made by Professor Sanbonmatsu that especially resonated with me is that by waging war on other animals, we are continuing the war on women, on formerly enslaved peoples and on peoples with different skin colors or ethnicities. Professor Sanbonmatsu also agrees with my personal assessment that the problem with raising and killing animals for food isn’t just bad for the animals nor for the environment, but this practice actually damages our very souls.

This is not only the best book I’ve read this year but it’s the best book I’ve ever read about the morality of ethical veganism and of animal rights. It is so compelling, so coherent, and so crammed full of relevant information that even I, as a widely-read vegan and zoologist, learned so much. It eloquently presents a well-researched, thorough, nuanced and powerful argument for ending the near-universal human habit of exploiting animals for food and for entertainment.

 

What We Still Get Wrong About Psychopaths

While the idea of psychopathy as a “brain disorder” has a long history and has been studied using various technologies, it wasn’t until the year 2000 that scientists began to rigorously test it using structural and functional MRI methods. Since then, dozens of MRI studies have been published, yet the most reasonable conclusion to draw from this research is that no reliable evidence has emerged to corroborate the idea that psychopathy—as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL)—is correlated with brain abnormalities of any kind.

Overall, the experimental results are predominantly nulls with a few statistically significant but inconsistent effects (often in opposing directions), which might be better explained as a byproduct of confounding variables unrelated to psychopathy, such as substance misuse, medication, or head trauma.

This conclusion raises an important question: If there has never been any clear evidence of brain abnormalities in psychopathic persons, why do so many scientists keep portraying psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder?

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Of course, it is inherently difficult to determine whether the systematic omission of null effects from the review literature is an act of scientific spin or simply an honest mistake of overlooking null effects, or a mixture of both. And perhaps it does not matter what the reason is because, whether the problem boils down to an issue with scientific spin or honest mistakes, the reality is the same: For the past two decades forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers would have been misled if they had followed due diligence and relied on the review literature when seeking information about neuroimaging research about psychopathy. The good news is that in the past years, we have seen the publication of high-quality review studies, where authors are now paying more attention to the extent of nulls.

However, even as the review literature is slowly correcting, readers should be aware that spin about the brain-disorder view of psychopathy is not a problem limited to the scientific peer-reviewed literature. It is arguably more rampant in public media, including op-eds and journalistic interviews, as well as in popular books about psychopathy, sometimes written by leading scientists. A search on YouTube and TikTok will readily yield hundreds of videos (amassing millions of views) where experts are explaining how psychopathy is caused by a brain abnormality, and it is not uncommon for TV documentaries about psychopathy to include a segment with MRI research.

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Similarly, the book The Psychopath Inside by James Fallon (from 2013) conveys an admittedly absorbing story about how Fallon himself, a neuroscientist, accidentally discovered that he was a psychopath by studying his own MRIs. Lastly, in The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl (from 2014), the narrative centers around neuroimaging research on psychopathic persons, of which the author, a leading expert, writes that the “consistency of their [psychopathic persons’] brain abnormalities never ceased to amaze me.”

The ideas conveyed in these popular books are, of course, scientifically untenable, and they arguably border on sheer make-believe. While they are undoubtedly entertaining, they come across as a form of spin that ends up doing a disservice to forensic practitioners and legal decision-makers as they perpetuate scientifically misleading views. 

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This is how science works - constantly correcting the past wrongs. 

This is from 2014, I was fascinated by James Fallon's work that I posted on this blog too. Plus, I shared this story with so many people.  I was wrong. Science is correcting it now. 

There is a new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser which is making a serious impact now. 

I have theory brewing inside me for a few years now and I will post it soon. 

Don't Eat Honey

There are lots of people who say of themselves “I’m vegan except for honey.” This is a bit like someone saying “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never violating the law, except sometimes I’ll bring a young boy to the woods and slay him.” These people abstain from all the animal products except honey, even though honey is by far the worst of the commonly eaten animal products.

Now, this claim sounds outrageous. Why do I think it’s worse to eat honey than beef, eggs, chicken, dairy, and even foie gras? Don’t I know about the months-long torture process needed to fatten up ducks sold for foie gras? Don’t I know about the fact that they grind up baby male chicks in the egg industry and keep the females in tiny cages too small to turn around in? Don’t I know, don’t I know, don’t I know?

Indeed I do. I am no fan of these animal products. I fastidiously avoid eating them. In fact, I think that factory farming is a horror of unprecedented proportions, a crime, a tragedy, an embarrassment, a work of Satan himself that induces both cruelty and wickedness in those involved and perpetrates suffering on a scale so vast it can scarcely be fathomed. I can be accused of many things, but being a fan of most animal products is not one of them.

But I assure you, honey is worse (at least in expectation).

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Let’s first establish that bees in the honey industry do not live good lives. First of all, their lives are very short. They live just a few weeks. They die painfully. So even putting aside grievous industry abuse, their lives aren’t likely to be great. Predation, starvation, succumbing to disease, and wear and tear are all common.

Second of all, the honey industry treats bees unimaginably terribly (most of the points I make here are drawn from the Rethink Priorities essay I just linked). They’re mostly kept in artificial, conditions, in mechanical structures that are routinely inspected in ways that are very stressful for the bees, who feel like the hive is under attack. Often, the bees sting themselves to death. In order to prevent this, the industry uses a process called smoking—lighting a fire, sending smoke into the hives, to prevent alarm pheromones from being detected and the bees from being (beeing) sent into a frenzy. Sometimes, however, smoking melts the wings of the bees (though my sense is this is somewhat rare). Reassembly of the hive after inspections often crushes bees to death.

These structures, called Langstroth hives, also have poor thermal insulation, increasing the risk of bees freezing to death or overheating. About 30% of hives die off during the winter, meaning this probably kills about 8 billion bees in the U.S. alone every single year. The industry also keeps the bees crammed together, leading to infestations of harmful parasites.

Oftentimes, beekeepers take too much honey and leave all of the bees to starve to death. This is a frequent cause of the mass bee die-offs that, remember, cause about a third of bee colonies not to survive the winter. Because beekeepers take honey, the bees main source of food, bees are left chronically malnourished, leading to higher risk of death, weakness, and disease. Bees in the commercial honey industry generally lack the ability to forage, which exacerbates nutrition problems.

Bees also undergo unpleasant transport conditions. More than half of bee colonies are transported at some point. Tragically, “bees from migratory colonies have a shorter lifespan and higher levels of oxidative stress than workers at stationary apiaries.” The transport process is very stressful for bees, just as it is for other animals. It also weirdly leads to bees having underdeveloped food glands, perhaps due to vibration from transport. Transport often is poorly ventilated, leading to bees overheating or freezing to death. Also, transport brings bees from many different colonies together, leading to rapid spread of disease.

Honey bees are often afflicted by parasites, poisoned with pesticides, and killed in other ways. Queen bees are routinely killed years before they’d die naturally, have their wings clipped, and are stressfully and invasively artificially inseminated. This selective breeding leaves bees more efficient commercially but with lower welfare levels than they’d otherwise have. Often bees are killed intentionally in the winter because it’s cheaper than keeping them around—by diesel, petrol, cyanide, freezing, drowning, and suffocation.

So, um, not great!

In short, bees are kept in unpleasant, artificial conditions, where a third of the hives die off during the winter from poor insulation—often being baked alive or freezing to death. They’re overworked and left chronically malnourished, all while riddled with parasites and subject to invasive and stressful inspections. And given the profound extent to which the honey industry brings invasive disease to wild bees and crowds out other pollinators, the net environmental impact is relatively unclear. The standard notion that honey should be eaten to preserve bees is a vast oversimplification.

Thus, if you eat even moderate amounts of honey, you cause extremely large numbers of bees to experience extremely unpleasant fates for extremely long times. If bees matter even negligibly, this is very bad!

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So don’t eat honey! If you eat honey, you are causing staggeringly large amounts of very intense suffering. Eating honey is many times worse than eating other animal products, which are themselves bad enough. If you want to make an easy change to your diet to prevent a lot of the suffering that you cause, please, for the love of God, avoid honey.

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How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution

Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.

This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.

When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations.

Many who study the microbiome suspect that we are experiencing an extinction spasm within that parallels the extinction crisis gripping the planet. Numerous factors are implicated in these disappearances. Antibiotics, available after World War II, can work like napalm, indiscriminately flattening our internal ecosystems. Modern sanitary amenities, which began in the late 19th century, may limit sharing of disease- and health-promoting microbes alike. Today’s houses in today’s cities seal us away from many of the soil, plant, and animal microbes that rained down on us during our evolution, possibly limiting an important source of novelty.

But what the Sonnenburgs’ experiment suggests is that by failing to adequately nourish key microbes, the Western diet may also be starving them out of existence. They call this idea “starving the microbial self.” They suspect that these diet-driven extinctions may have fueled, at least in part, the recent rise of non-communicable diseases. The question they and many others are now asking is this: How did the microbiome of our ancestors look before it was altered by sanitation, antibiotics, and junk food? How did that primeval collection of human microbes work? And was it somehow healthier than the one we harbor today?

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Most study subjects live in the tropics; their microbial communities may reflect tropical environments, not an ancestral human state. Yet even “extinct” microbiomes from higher latitudes—including from a frozen European mummy—are similarly configured to break down plant fiber, adding to the sense that the Western microbiome has diverged from what likely prevailed during human evolution.

The Sonnenburgs think fiber is so important that they’ve given it a new designation: microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, or MACs. They think that the mismatch between the Westernized, MAC-starved microbiome and the human genome may predispose to Western diseases.

Scientists studying these communities suspect that while mortality is high from infectious diseases, chronic, non-communicable diseases are far less prevalent. At the same time, researchers since the late 20th century have repeatedly observed that even in the West, people who grow up on farms with livestock, or exposed to certain fecal-oral infections, like Hepatitis A and sundry parasites—environments that, in their relative microbial enrichment, resemble these subsistence communities—have a lower risk of certain Western afflictions, particularly hay fever, asthma, and certain autoimmune disorders.

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As Justin Sonnenburg put it, “We have this unsupervised drug factory in our gut.” The question facing microbiologists today is how to properly tend to that factory.

Here, studies of populations living more traditional lifestyles may provide clues. In the past, most people likely imbibed many times more fiber than today. If you eat minimally processed plants, which humans have for millions of years, you can’t avoid fiber. Modern hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists certainly eat loads of it. The Hadza of Tanzania, for instance, consume at least 10 times more than Americans, in tubers, baobab fruit, and wild berries. Agriculturalists, like those Burkina Fasans, also eat more fiber than Western populations, in porridges and breads made from unrefined grains.

Given this constant supply of microbiota-accessible carbohydrates, human microbiomes of the past, the Sonnenburgs argue, likely produced a river of these short-chain fatty acids. That probably changed some with the transition to agriculture, which made diets less diverse. But an even more drastic shift occurred quite recently, with the advent and widespread adoption of refined foods. As a result, westernized populations, the Sonnenburgs think, have lost healthful, fiber-fermenting microbes. And we suffer from a kind of fermentation byproduct deficiency.

So why can’t we supplement our diet with short-chain fatty acids? When I visited Sonnenburg, he showed me one reason why: The ecosystem that produces the acids may be as important as the acids themselves. He brought up two cross-sectional images of fecal pellets still in mice intestines. Most microbiome analyses take a tally, from genetic markers, of what microbes are present and in what abundance. That’s equivalent to imagining what a forest looks like from a pile of wood chips, and gives little sense of how the forest was organized. By some ingenious tinkering, though, one of Sonnenburg’s post-docs had developed a way to freeze the ecosystem in place, and then photograph it.

The resulting picture was unlike any rendition of the microbiome I’d seen before. One animal had eaten plenty of fiber, the other hadn’t. In the fiber-fed ecosystem, similar bacteria clustered with one another, not unlike schools of fish on a reef ecosystem. An undulating structure prevailed across space. But in the non-fiber diet, not only was diversity reduced, the microbes were evenly distributed throughout, like a stew boiled for too long.

At this point, Sonnenburg sat back in his chair and went quiet, waiting for me to notice something. To one side of both images, microbes were mostly absent—the mucus layer on the lining of the gut. But that layer was twice as thick in the fiber-fed mice than the non-fiber fed. That difference amounted to about 30 nanometers, far less than the width of a human hair. But one day we may look back and shake our heads that Western diseases—from diabetes to colon cancer—stemmed from 30 nanometers of mucus that, somewhere along the way, went missing in the developed world.

We think of the Western diet—high in unhealthy fats, sugar, and proteins—as overly rich. But what’s missing from the diet may be just as, and perhaps more, important than what’s abundant.

Years ago, while still a post-doc, Sonnenburg discovered that something very odd occurs when those MAC-loving microbes go hungry. They start eating mucus. “This is the stage where you say, ‘Oh my God. They’re eating me.’ ” Sonnenburg said. “You can see it.”

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Yes, Shrimp Matter

I left private equity to work on shrimp welfare. When I tell anyone this, they usually think I've lost my mind. I know the feeling — I’ve been there. When I first read Charity Entrepreneurship's proposal for a shrimp welfare charity, I thought: “Effective altruists have gone mad — who cares about shrimp?” 

The transition from analyzing real estate deals to advocating for some of the smallest animals in our food system feels counterintuitive, to say the least. But it was the same muscle I used converting derelict office buildings into luxury hotels that allowed me to appreciate an enormous opportunity overlooked by almost everyone, including those in the animal welfare space. I still spend my days analyzing returns (though they’re now measured in suffering averted). I still work to identify mutual opportunities with industry partners. Perhaps most importantly, I still view it as paramount to build trust with people who — initially — sit on opposite sides of the table.

After years of practicing my response to the inevitable raised eyebrows, I now sum it up simply: ignoring shrimp welfare would have been both negligent and reckless.

This may seem like an extreme stance. Shrimp aren't high on the list of animals most people think about when they consider the harms of industrial agriculture. For a long time — up until the last few years — most researchers assumed shrimp couldn't even feel pain. Yet as philosopher Jonathan Birch explains in The Edge of Sentience, whenever a creature is a sentience candidate1 and we cannot rule out its capacity for conscious experience, we have a responsibility to take its potential for suffering seriously.  

We don’t know what it is like to be a shrimp. We do know that if shrimp can suffer, they are doing so in the hundreds of billions. 

Why worry about shrimp in a world where so many mammals and birds live in torturous conditions due to industrial agriculture?2 The answer is that shrimp farming dwarfs other forms of animal agriculture by sheer numbers. An estimated 230 billion shrimp of various species are alive in farms at any given moment —  compared to the 779 million pigs, 1.55 billion cattle, 4 33 billion chickens, and 125 billion farmed fish.

Shrimp are harvested at around 6 months of age, which puts the estimated number slaughtered annually for human consumption at 440 billion. For perspective: that’s more than four times the number of humans who have ever walked the earth. At sea, the numbers are even more staggeringly shrimpy. Globally,  27 trillion shrimp are caught in the wild6 every year, compared to 1.5 trillion fish.

Despite their size, shrimp are the proverbial “elephant in the room” when discussing animal welfare in food systems.

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The future of shrimp welfare is one of the most underexplored areas in modern animal rights, but its potential for impact is immense. We are only at the beginning of a movement that could fundamentally shift the way we treat aquatic animals — both on farms and for those caught in the ocean. While challenges remain, including entrenched industry practices and global trade complexities, the path forward is becoming clearer with each step taken by animal NGOs and progressive food companies.

For the first time ever, shrimp welfare is becoming a relevant topic within the broader animal welfare movement, one that has traditionally focused on larger animals and more familiar causes. But the staggering number of shrimp affected, their capacity to suffer, and the emerging solutions make this a moral issue we can no longer ignore. Addressing shrimp welfare isn’t just about reducing suffering for billions of animals — it’s about redefining our relationship with the natural world, expanding our circle of compassion, and challenging the limits of our ethical responsibilities.

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Gastronomical Conversations Can Reflect Who We Are, & Who We Are Not

KR: One of the first settings where food and language converge is during family meals. How does this differ from country to country?

MSK: Research shows that in the United States, families talk about whether the food is healthy, whereas in Italy, they talk about whether it’s tasty, which is ironic since there are so many health problems in the US with obesity.

KR: Eating together is not the norm in all cultures. Those who do have family meals often don’t talk while eating — it’s considered distracting. What they want to represent to children is an attentiveness to their food and gratitude for it. In the Marquesas, I found that talking happens while procuring and preparing food, not at meals.

JC: We think of the family meal as something everyone does, but it is closely related to class and race. Those who can afford to, and people who work 9 to 5, can have regular family meals. But not shift workers, those working two or three jobs, or those who come from different cultural traditions. It’s become a moral issue too — the message is that if you don’t do it, you’re missing a really important socializing moment with your children. People are made to feel like they’re failing.

MSK: It’s put up as an ideal today but, at some time in history, children weren’t supposed to eat with parents or talk at the table, so this idea of the family meal as an eternal institution that’s crumbling is wrong.

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Much of the Cuisine We Now Know, and Think of as Ours, Came to Us by War

“Sicily became quite famous for its fruits and vegetables, and that can be traced back to the Muslim era, when the gardens probably began as  pleasure gardens,” says Wright. Pleasure gardens were designed as places of repose, and for Muslims, a reminder of the paradise awaiting the virtuous. “They were eventually turned into ‘kitchen gardens,’” Wright continues, describing them as “experimental horticultural stations” to develop better propagation methods. But at the same time, they were places of beauty. “The gardens were lush with vegetable crops, flowering bushes, and fruit trees, and graced with water fountains and pavilions,” Wright explains in A Mediterranean Feast. During the 300 years that the Arabs ruled Sicily, its agriculture and economy grew, and institutions evolved. In fact, when the Normans seized power, they kept many practices of their predecessors, including the organization of the government and, in the upper classes, the wearing of flowing robes.

Humans are bound to food by necessity first, and then by choice. The types of food you eat distinguish your country from another country, your group from another group. When new influences come—whether from conquest or colonial exploration or the popularity of a TV cooking show—there is a period of adaptation, and then often the full incorporation of a new technique or ingredient into the country’s culinary lexicon. The potatoes and tomatoes that went from the New World to Europe in the Columbia Exchange of the 15th century were first scorned by Old World diners who feared they were poisonous, then in time became emblematic of their cuisines. In its original form, Sicilian caponata would never have been made with tomatoes, but today there are versions that include them and they are considered perfectly Sicilian.

Food constantly evolves, as do taste buds. To the Western palate, Japanese food seems so distinctly Japanese, yet it went through many modifications once the country opened to the West in the 19th century, explains Katarzyna Cwiertka, the chair of modern Japanese Studies at Leiden University and a scholar of East Asian food. “New ingredients, new cooking techniques, and new flavorings were adapted to Japanese customs,” she says. “The changes were really tremendous.”

Military canteens played the role of first adopters. Once Japanese soldiers became accustomed to a food, they would eventually introduce it to the wider public when they returned to civilian life. Such was the case with curry, which started appearing in Japan in the late 19th century. It was a borrowing not directly from India, but from the British Empire. “The Japanese start to serve it as a  Western food,” says Cwiertka. “It enters military menus and canteens and continues after [World War II] into school canteens. By the 1950s and 1960s it is a national dish. When you ask Japanese students abroad what they crave most, they would say ramen or curry. And ramen [of Chinese origin] is also not a Japanese food.”

What the Japanese have done—over and over again, Cwiertka points out—is move foreign foods into the category of washoku, the genuinely Japanese. They adapt and absorb foreign culinary influences this way. “It’s more like the invention of a tradition than a tradition,” she says.

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Why Is the U.S. So Behind on Animal Welfare?

Why does the U.S. lag so far behind the U.K. and E.U. on animal welfare? One view is that Americans are still influenced by a Wild West mentality that tolerates the rough handling of animals. Supporters of that view point to the survival of the rodeo, which, like the bullfight, entertains spectators by mistreating animals. People who find it entertaining to watch a frightened young calf being lassoed by a rope that chokes them and then drags them to the ground are unlikely to be concerned about the suffering of pigs or chickens.

Yet when Americans can vote for laws that give farmed animals more space to move around, they do so. In 2002, 55% of Floridians voted to ban keeping pigs in stalls too narrow to allow them to turn around. In 2006, 62% of Arizonans voted to ban such stalls for both pigs and veal calves. In 2008, 63% of Californians voted to ban such stalls for pigs and veal calves, plus standard battery cages for hens. In 2016, 78% of Massachusettans voted to ban narrow stalls for pigs and veal and standard battery cages for hens, and to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using these systems. In 2018, 63% of Californians voted to ban the sale of pork, veal, and eggs from out-of-state producers using systems that do not meet California’s standards. (A challenge by pork producers to the ban on in-state sales was dismissed last year by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

So I suggest that the U.S. is so far behind the E.U. on animal welfare, not because Americans care less about animals than Europeans, but because the U.S. political system is less democratic than Europe’s parliamentary system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are stronger and individual lawmakers do not need to raise large amounts of money to get re-elected. Money and lobbying have far greater influence in U.S. politics.

The U.S. congressional committee system also serves to disempower the electorate in a way that cannot happen in a parliamentary democracy, in which the Prime Minister and Cabinet are members of the legislature and have much influence on legislation. In the U.S., House and Senate Agriculture committees in both state and federal Congresses are usually made up of lawmakers representing predominantly agricultural districts, and they effectively have a veto on proposals to protect farmed animals. They often receive substantial donations from factory farm operators. In states without provision for citizen-initiated ballots, only tiny Rhode Island has farmed animal legislation that can compare with the E.U. or U.K. At the federal level, there is no legislation that even attempts to regulate the conditions in which farmed animals are kept.

Most Americans care about animals, and would like their country to be among the leading nations in protecting animals from unnecessary suffering. The reality is more disturbing, and I hope that people who learn the true situation seek to change it.

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The Elemental Foe - Poverty

Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude. Most of humanity lacks a sense of what we are escaping everyday. 

We abuse and torture all animals in the name of protein, waste so much food every time we eat, waste so much water, electricity and zillion other material things. 

Next time you do any of the above and/or forgot gratitude, remember these lines from this important post: 

Even now, having escaped true poverty, you walk through your days with no consciousness of how closely it stalks behind you. Remember the last time you had to go an extra hour without eating? Remember the gnawing feeling in the pit of your stomach, the red fog that seemed to settle over your brain? You are always just a few hours away from that. You will never outrun it. Humanity as a whole is only a few days or weeks away; if the elaborate and fantastically expensive food supply and distribution system we’ve built were to suffer an interruption, we would be reduced to the level of starving wild animals in short order.

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It is industrial modernity — our single weapon against the elemental foe. It took centuries of blood and sweat to build, centuries of sacrifice by our sturdiest workers, our most brilliant inventors, and our most visionary leaders. And it is fantastically complex, far beyond the ability of even the most brilliant individual to understand in full; only collectively, at the level of society, do we shore up its fragile walls and keep it from collapse every day.

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And to us also falls the task of reminding the world that growth must be sustainable. If we burn the walls of our fortress to throw a party in the moment, there will be nothing left to protect our descendants, and the foe will devour them. It is tempting to believe that manmade climate change is not real, that natural habitats can be razed without consequence, and that the world’s waters represent an infinite safe dumping ground for pollution. These are all just more unaffordable daydreams.

Part of this task is to remind the world of the importance of technological progress. Without newer and more sustainable sources of energy and materials, our choice would be between degrowth and environmental destruction. Technology built industrial modernity, and technology sustains it, and only technology can extend it into the indefinite future.

But most of all, it falls to us to extend the fortress’ protection to every human on the planet. As you read these words, there are still billions of humans living outside the sheltering walls of industrial modernity — still grappling hand to hand with the foe. Less than half of humanity lives on more than $10 a day. Almost two billion live on less than $3.65. Two billion lack access to safely managed drinking water. Every day, 190 million people go hungry in India alone.

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If you want to understand the principles that underlie my political leanings, this is the key. Humanity is at war — a war so old, so terrible, and so all-consuming that even World War 3 would be a minor skirmish in comparison. Whether or not we remember it, we are always on death ground. 

We need to innovate to eradicate elemental foe, and eradicate pain and suffering of all living beings.

• Perceptually educate kids on this. 
• Work on turning this into an omnipresent awareness. 

Because as usual in the history of humanity, only a handful of humans will rise to the task and make this a reality. 

And yes, rest will be complacent. We cannot afford to keep complaining about the complacent 99.9% of humanity. 

Focus on lifting those handful of humans who act on it. 

 

Ancient Humans Show Evidence Of Plant-Heavy Diets

Previous research suggests that our ancient human ancestors were hunter-gatherers who relied heavily on eating animals. These assumptions have been replicated in popular “fad” diets such as Paleo and Carnivore, which emphasize humans’ ancestral diets and encourage heavy meat consumption. However, the science on prehistoric diets remains unclear. Did ancient humans truly prioritize hunting animals and only forage for plants when necessary?

According to the authors of this study, research on this topic typically relies on indirect evidence. Previous scholars excavated objects like spears and arrowheads, stone tools, and large animal bone fragments and made the assumption that large mammal hunting was the norm. However, other excavations suggest that plant-based foods were also part of early human diets, including studies of human dental remains. The authors wonder whether the overrepresentation of hunting-related artifacts in excavations, along with gender biases, have inflated the importance of hunting.   

In this study, researchers tested the hypothesis that human hunter-gatherers in the Andes highlands in South America relied mostly on large mammal hunting. They used a more direct research method called stable isotope analysis — this involves studying certain elements in human bone remains to reveal what types of food ancient humans ate. They also compared this information to plant and animal remains found at the excavation site. They sampled bones from 24 humans who lived in what is now Peru during the Archaic Period (9,000-6,500 years before present).

Researchers assumed their results would show a diverse diet with an emphasis on large animal consumption. However, contrary to previous research, the bone analysis suggested that plants dominated ancient diets in the Andes region, making up between 70-95% of dietary consumption. Wild tuber plants (like potatoes) were the main plant source, while large mammals played a secondary role. Meanwhile, meat from small mammals, birds, and fishes, as well as other plant types, played a much smaller dietary role. 

- More Here (full paper here)

This makes intuitive sense, try to replicate a typical American diet of three (or more) meals everyday with meat by hunting animals with rudimentary tools. Good luck, if you had a meal a week!

Our society, economy, and civilization is built on abusing animals. Most bodies are “built” on abusing animals. Factory farms is an euphemism for torture cambers for unwarranted protein needs of sedentary lifestyle of humans and masquerading in name of made up tradition, culture, health and god knows what else. In the end, these humans suffer in hospitals and hospice. 

How to stop this vicious cycle? I pretty much live to find even a marginal answer to this question. And I am open to the idea that this might be the wrong question and we need a new question(s). 

The War On Weeds

When are you gonna get rid of those weeds, my father would ask every time he visited my Vermont lawn. Splotched with purple thyme, yellow dandelions and white clovers, the lawn attracted honeybees and, later in the season, fireflies. He and I saw the same plants, but we had learned to see differently. Where my father saw interlopers, I saw residents.

For most of my childhood, my father was at war on his quarter-acre plot, my childhood backyard. In some of my most vivid memories, he struggles with the lawnmower, sweat beading on his arm hair. He curses the crabgrass, he drenches dandelions and clovers with chemicals from white spray bottles he got at the hardware store down the street. It was an endless battle.

My father was a Vietnam veteran and a lifelong Republican. He liked to say that women belong in the kitchen. I had become an environmental studies professor, a member of the East Coast liberal elite, a daughter he was ashamed to introduce to his friends at the Post.

He died a few years ago of multiple myeloma, a brutal cancer that riddled his bones with holes. Until the end, he was convinced that being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused the disease. He had lived half a century longer than many of the young men he’d served with, and he felt ashamed, I think, of the extra time.

In the weeks after his death, I looked up the logbooks of his aircraft carrier, hoping to piece together whether he would have been exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I later realized he’d been exposed to it in our backyard.

“Our global biodiversity crisis, a crisis of being, is at its core a crisis of seeing.”

[---]

With ample supplies of chlorine and phenol, a waste product of fossil fuel refining, Dow and other chemical companies then faced the task of selling farmers, homeowners and land managers on the need to kill broadleaved plants. This included many Dust Bowl farmers who, for years, had been told that the degradation of their land was their fault precisely because they had removed too many broadleaved plants. It was not, in other words, a ready-made market. The author of a 1947 article in Agricultural Chemicals wondered, “Are weeds merely an annoying nuisance or are they something that farmers will pay money to combat?” Tellingly, the first venue in which Mitchell published his 2,4-D results was not a scientific or agricultural journal but a golf magazine.

Early advertisements for 2,4-D weed killer portrayed hand-pulling and hoeing as outdated technologies soon to be replaced by chemical tools. In 1947, Dow released a 20-minute promotional film, “Death to Weeds.” The film opened with an imagined class-action lawsuit pitting the plaintiffs, farmers and homeowners, against the defendants, weeds. Weeds, the narrator explained, robbed crops of water and food, and they harbored insects and plant diseases. Charging that “weeds are our common enemy,” the narrator argued that they inflicted “never-ending warfare against the American farmer.” But Dow’s “arsenal of chemical warfare” was capable of bringing these enemies to justice. The film closed by declaring weeds “guilty as charged” and deserving the death sentence. Biocide, it argued, was justice.  

Companies sought their own niches in the synthetic herbicide market. While Dow initially focused on growers of corn, wheat and sugarcane, the J.T. Baker Chemical Company worked to sell dairy farmers on 2,4-D by arguing that plants like wild garlic and ragweed imbued milk with “weedy flavors” and that killing these species with 2,4-D would improve profits. Companies’ 2,4-D products diversified as they insinuated that different formulations were needed for croplands versus pastures, small-scale operations versus large ones, fog sprayers versus airplane sprayers. Over the years, Dow has marketed 2,4-D formulations under a variety of names, including “2-4 Dow Weed Killer,” “Esteron 44,” “Dow Contact Weed Killer,” “Formula 40,” “Weed Killer 4D,” “Scorpion III” and even “Justice.”

[---]

Rachel Carson described a world without birdsong and asked her readers to hear the silence of death, of birds killed by two decades of heedless biocide use. Today, when we look outside, we see a world shaped by eight decades of heedless biocide use. We see grass. We do not see what is missing, what we have killed.

The world that would be if synthetic herbicides had not been so successfully marketed is invisible.

- More here (A must read) 

Cheese Paradox - Why Do Vegetarians Continue Eating Cheese And Dairy?

This study examines vegetarians’ rationale behind consuming non-meat animal products (NMAPs). The authors point out that NMAPS share many of the same ethical concerns as meat — for example, NMAPs come from violent industries that harm and kill animals after they are no longer profitable.

According to the authors, most studies on vegetarians ask questions about why they choose not to eat meat, not why they choose to eat NMAPs. To begin to fill this gap in the research, they formed three research questions:

• Do vegetarians view eggs and dairy as an ethical issue? 
• Why do vegetarians include NMAPs in their diet? 
• Is cognitive dissonance involved in vegetarians’ NMAP consumption, and if so, how do they overcome it? 

[---]

Like many meat-eaters, the authors found that participants tended to justify their NMAP consumption using three of the “4Ns” — that it’s nice, normal, and necessary, but not natural. The authors identified four themes in the data: “acknowledging harm,” “personal benefits,” “social norms,” and “neutralizing dissonance.”

Regarding the “acknowledging harm” theme, participants cited different reasons for becoming vegetarian, but all of them had ethical concerns about animals in the dairy and egg industries. Despite eating NMAPs, they acknowledged that animals used for eggs and dairy may live in gruesome conditions and are killed after they’re done being used. Some people also noted the links between the meat and the NMAP industry. Therefore, in response to the first research question, respondents were generally aware of the ethical harms of eggs and dairy. 

[---]

The authors believe that the “cheese paradox” is an important finding because it puts a spotlight on a major barrier to turning vegetarians into vegans. If advocates can better understand why cheese is so difficult to give up, it may be easier to address this barrier more effectively. 

This research can be used to inform NMAP-reduction strategies. One idea for advocates is to publicize how cheese is connected to the cows it comes from, to increase empathy toward cows. Because of the limited convenience sample, the authors suggest recreating the study with a larger sample to include more perspectives, along with a quantitative study of the cheese paradox. They believe that we can also learn from vegans who were vegetarian in the past to find out why they eventually gave up NMAPs. Finally, they advocate for plant-based nutrition to receive more attention in education and other institutions to help people overcome both personal and social barriers to change.

- More Here

Very Good Sentence On Cooking & Eating Vegetables

There were so many things I didn’t think about Chinese food until I read it in Fuchsia Dunlop. Her new book Invitation to Banquet is organized around 30 dishes to explain every aspect of Chinese cuisine:

Cantonese sashimi, for example, to discuss knifework; and Mapo tofu to talk about the intense flavors that comes from fermenting the bean. 

Fuchsia raises the questions I have: “Where is the creativity, where the delight, in simply roasting a chunk of meat and serving it with bald potatoes and carrots, as the English like to do?” 

And I feel like she is speaking for me when she is lamenting the poor use of leafy vegetables in western cuisine: “either overcooked or served brutally raw as some strange kind of virtue,” compared to the Chinese greens, which are “more generously portioned than the apologetic little dishes of spinach served on the side… and cooked as carefully as anything else.” 

I wish that there was a book like this for every cuisine to introduce techniques and traditions through personal stories.

- Dan Wang's 2023 Letter

Chicken For Dinner - Cruelty At A Genetic Level...

Broiler chicken is a prime example of science unleashing evil.

Remember, ideologies such religion, politics, nationality etc., are not the only "privileged" ones to unleash evil. Everything under the sun and touching human minds have the potential to become evil. 

If your plate is filled with misery, you are indeed feasting on misery (when there zillion misery free alternatives). Diet of misery can never be a healthy diet from your body. 

There is an unending quest to find a better chicken because humans simply cannot control their taste buds even when billions live a miserable life. 

When Peterson was a child, a typical chicken would take around four months to reach its slaughter weight of 2.5 pounds. Growth rates began to crank upwards in the 1950s, and by the 1970s, as Peterson rose to the heights of his reputation, the chicken was well on its way to becoming a new beast — one featuring a “distinctive new morphotype,” according to scientists. Today, chickens reach 5 pounds in two months, while consuming less food.

Consistently fast-growing and fat chickens became the foundation of a small empire. Before Peterson passed away in 2007, his company was cranking out more than a million broilers each week and bringing in $180 million in annual sales. That made Peterson one of the country’s top 25 poultry operators — and one of the biggest businesses in Arkansas.

The domesticated chicken — Gallus gallus domesticus — had meanwhile been turned into one of the planet’s most important animals: our most-consumed meat. With a global standing population of at least 25 billion, these birds outnumber every other vertebrate species. The total standing biomass of domesticated poultry is around three times higher than the biomass of all wild birds combined.

Understanding the human relationship with our fellow animals — and considering the future of how we might or might not eat those animals — requires reckoning with this unlikely bird.

[---]

But the rise of poultry, and of poultry science, has not been great for the chickens themselves. They are now less functional animals than meat-growing machines. So much of a chicken’s energy gets devoted to growing as big as possible as fast as possible that the parts less useful to us humans — lungs and hearts, say — are neglected and wither. Due to underdeveloped immune systems, the birds are dosed with antibiotics. Many full-grown broilers are unable to stand under their weight. Activists and critics have called them “prisoners in their own bodies.”

They’re also more literally prisoners: Most broilers spend their brief lives locked inside massive sheds alongside tens of thousands of their genetic cousins. Each bird gets around a square foot of space, so many that are still young enough to walk have no choice but to step over their immobilized relatives. This is an ethical nightmare, clearly, but also an existential threat: So many identical chickens packed so close together is a breeding ground for disease. The latest strains of avian influenza have grown so severe that endangered wild birds have to be immunized to prevent their extinction. That several humans have tested positive for bird flu over the past few years is also worrying; the worst pandemic in the past century, with a death toll perhaps 30 times worse than Covid, came after bird flu jumped through poultry farms into human populations in 1918.

The specter of chickens killing us through disease is what first led me into the annals of the industry, and eventually to Peterson. What hope is left, I wanted to know, for those of us who enjoy eating meat?

[---]

In the 1940s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped sponsor several “chicken of tomorrow” contests, competitions meant to see who could develop the fastest-growing birds. Many of the entrants attempted to tweak and perfect one of the classic, long-known chicken breeds. But the initial winner took a more daring approach: He crossed a popular East Coast meat bird with a different breed developed in California, creating an entirely new hybrid chicken. Three years later, the same breeder won a second national contest, again with a crossbred bird. A revolution had begun.

[---]

Many of the companies that advertise “free-range” or “pastured” chicken raise these Cornish Cross hens. Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of Farm Forward, a nonprofit that advocates for safer, healthier and more humane agricultural practices, argued that it hardly matters where such a chicken spends its life. Cornish Cross hens need so much help from humans that they may lead better lives if kept indoors, he said. Studies have found that the greatest factor impacting a chicken’s welfare is its breed. The cruelty, in other words, is inscribed at the genetic level.

[---]

Even if you do not care about animal welfare, there are reasons to despair over industrial chicken. You might worry about human welfare, for example: Modern chicken production is a labor nightmare, sometimes conducted by underaged and undocumented immigrants. And if you don’t care about laborers, there’s a more self-serving reason to worry: Chickens are a major public health risk. The use of antibiotics could drive the evolution of drug-resistant super-bacteria that could infect humans, too.  

Perhaps scarier, though, is that chicken CAFOs are breeding grounds for influenza. Population density helps increase pathogen transmission, while genetic homogeneity helps drive pathogen evolution, so sometimes mild viruses become far more deadly. Even early animal agriculture practices created what anthropologist James C. Scott called “a perfect epidemiological storm.” Since then, the scale and density of agriculture has increased enormously.

[---]

Decades of advertising have told the world that to eat meat is to be powerful and virile, an ideal of maleness in a world where men dominate. (Studies show that meat eaters tend to hold more authoritarian political viewpoints.) As a man myself, perhaps my desire to eat meat is the result of brainwashing. 

We Owe Debt Of Gratitude To Flies

Flies generally get a bad rap. People associate them with dirt, disease and death. “No one except entomologists really likes flies,” Finch says. Yet there’s good reason why we should cherish, encourage, even nurture them: Our future food supply could depend on it. The past few years have seen growing recognition that flies make up a large proportion of wild pollinators — but also that we know little about that side of their lives. Which sorts of fly pollinate what? How effective are they at delivering pollen where it’s needed? Which flies might we harness to boost future harvests — and how to go about it? With insect populations plummeting and honeybees under pressure from multiple threats, including varroa mites and colony collapse disorder, entomologists and pollination specialists are urgently trying to get some answers.

Animals are responsible for pollinating around 76 percent of crop plants, including a large number of globally important ones. Birds, bats and other small mammals do their bit, but insects do much more — pollinating flowers of many fruits, vegetables and nuts, from almonds to avocados, mangoes and melons, cocoa and coconuts, as well as crops grown to provide seed for future vegetable harvests. In a recent analysis for the Annual Review of Entomology, Australia-based biologist Romina Rader and colleagues from Australia, New Zealand and the US calculated that the world’s 105 most widely planted food crops that benefit from insect pollination are worth some $800 billion a year.

Bees, especially honeybees, get most of the credit, but overlooked and underappreciated is a vast army of beetles, butterflies, moths, ants, flies and more. In Rader’s analysis, only a handful of crops were visited exclusively by bees; most were visited by both bees and other insects. She and her colleagues assessed the contribution of each type of insect and found that flies were the most important pollinators after bees, visiting 72 percent of the 105 crops.

[---]

Making fields and orchards more fly-friendly won’t always be enough. With that in mind, researchers round the world are trying to identify flies that can be reared commercially and released where and when their services are needed. But where to start? The vast majority of pollination studies have focused on bees, and although many species of flies have been reported visiting crops, in most cases little is known about how good they are at transporting pollen, let alone whether their visits translate into more fruit and vegetables.

That’s beginning to change. Scattered studies have logged how often flies visit flowers, counted the pollen grains stuck to their bodies and recorded crop yields, and found that some flies give bees a run for their money — and in some cases, outdo them. Researchers studying avocados in Mexico, for instance, found that the large green blowfly Chrysomya megacephala (aka the oriental latrine fly) visited more flowers in a given time than bees and carried pollen grains on parts of the body that would contact the stigma of the next avocado flower it visited. Studies in Israel, Malaysia and India all suggest that blowflies are effective at pollinating mangoes, while trials in the US and New Zealand showed that the European blue blowfly (Calliphora vicina) produced as good a yield of leek and carrot seed as bees.

- The essential fly

Did Eating Only Meat Lead Neanderthals's Demise?

For the last two decades, advances in molecular biology have deepened archaeologists’ understanding of early human diets. The cool conditions in Northern Europe, such as France and Germany, help preserve collagen in fossil bone. With a technique called stable isotope analysis, we can recover minute amounts of carbon and nitrogen from the collagen in early human bones and find out where the protein they ate came from. Isotopes are groups of atoms belonging to the same element, but they have different masses. Studies of these bones’ isotopes have shown Neanderthals in Northern Europe got 80–90 percent of their protein from animals. That’s up there with the wolves and hyenas. In the arid southern parts of Europe, we’re not so lucky. Collagen in fossil bone easily disintegrates in warmer climates, taking with it the clues to southern Neanderthals’ diets.

[---]

The zinc level in carnivores’ bones is lower than those of their prey. The difference is not affected by age, sex, or decay over time. Zinc ratios can be measured from samples as small as 1 milligram of bone. Even these tiny amounts allow an accurate assessment of an animal’s place in the food chain when they were alive.

The recent study’s analysis of zinc from the tooth enamel of a Neanderthal who lived and died around 150,000 years ago in the Spanish Pyrenees gives new insights into the diet of ancient humans. Zinc isotopes were analyzed from 43 teeth of 12 animal species living in a grassland around the Los Moros I Cave in Catalonia, Spain. These included carnivores such as wolf, hyena, and dhole (also known as mountain wolf); omnivorous cave bears; and herbivores including ibex, red deer, horse, and rabbit. The results brought to life a food web of the Pleistocene steppe, a system of interlocking food chains from plants up to the top carnivores. The zinc in the Neanderthal’s tooth had by far the lowest zinc value in the food web, revealing they were a top-level carnivore.

[---]

Isotopes taken from sites across Europe from remains of the H. sapiens groups who inherited Pleistocene Eurasia from the Neanderthals reveal they had broader dietary range. Plants, birds, and fish were main courses for these early humans. The Pleistocene was the grassland-steppe ecosystem that dominated Siberia during the Pleistocene and disappeared 10,000 years ago. It had a remarkably unstable climate and changed from dry grasslands and wet tundra to coniferous woodlands, constantly shaking up the variety and number of large herbivores grazing there. So, an omnivorous diet would have made these people far more resilient than those who relied on big game hunting. We don’t know much about what happened to Neanderthals when big game populations collapsed. If reindeer failed to show, what could they do? But with rapid progress in biomolecular science, I doubt we will have to wait long to find out. 

More Here

The Inner Lives Of Cows, Pigs & Chickens

I think I heard about Farm Sanctuary when Max was a puppy and as each year goes by, my respect for them and their work grows. Rescuing farm animals and giving them a new life is one of the best things human beings can do. 

But even they cannot rescue every animal and I always wondered about for lack of better word - economies of scale. Now they are trying to solve that issue by doing volunteer studies on the farm animals - read the whole piece here: 

And a growing body of research suggests that farmed species are brainy beings: Chickens can anticipate the future, goats appear to solicit help from humans, and pigs may pick up on one another’s emotions.

But scientists still know far less about the minds of chickens or cows than they do about those of apes or dogs, said Christian Nawroth, a scientist studying behavior and cognition at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology in Germany. “I’m still baffled how little we know about farm animals, given the amount or the numbers that we keep,” he said.

Farm Sanctuary, which was founded in 1986, has always held that farm animals are sentient beings, even referring to its feathered and four-legged residents as “people.”

“They have their own desires, and their own wants and preferences and needs, and their own inner lives — the same way that human people do,” said Lauri Torgerson-White, the sanctuary’s director of research.

Now, the sanctuary is trying to collect enough data to convince the general public of the humanity of animals.

“Our hope,” Ms. Torgerson-White said, “is that through utilizing really rigorous methodologies, we are able to uncover pieces of information about the inner lives of farmed animals that can be used to really change hearts and minds about how these animals are used by society.”

[---]

Farm Sanctuary began not as a home for rescued animals but with a group of young activists working to expose animal cruelty at farms, stockyards and slaughterhouses.

“We lived in a school bus on a tofu farm for a couple of years,” said Gene Baur, the president and co-founder of the organization. But in the course of its investigations, the group kept stumbling upon “living animals left for dead,” he recalled. “And so we started rescuing them.”

They ultimately opened sanctuaries in New York and California, establishing educational programs and political advocacy campaigns. (They raised money, in part, by selling veggie hot dogs at Grateful Dead concerts.)

And in 2020, the organization, which now houses about 700 animals, began assembling an internal research team. The goal was to assemble more evidence that, as Mr. Baur put it, “these animals are more than just pieces of meat. There’s emotion there. There is individual personality there. There’s somebody, not something.”

The research team worked with Lori Gruen, an animal ethicist at Wesleyan University, to develop a set of ethics guidelines. The goal, Dr. Gruen explained, was to create a framework for conducting animal research “without dominance, without control, without instrumentalization.”

Among other stipulations, the guidelines prohibit invasive procedures — forbidding even blood draws unless they are medically necessary — and state that the studies must benefit the animals. And participation? It’s voluntary.

“Residents must be recognized as persons,” the guidelines state, “and always be provided with choice and control over their participation in an experimental study.”

 

FDA Approves UPSIDE Foods Cultivated Meat!

The dream come true news came yesterday ! 

In a major first for the food industry, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared that a lab-grown chicken product developed by California food-tech startup Upside Foods is safe for human consumption, setting the stage for a new food revolution in which the world’s meat is grown in bioreactors instead of on factory farms.

[---]

“This is a watershed moment in the history of food,” said Dr. Uma Valeti, CEO and Founder of UPSIDE Foods, in a statement “We started UPSIDE amid a world full of skeptics, and today, we’ve made history again as the first company to receive a ‘No Questions’ letter from the FDA for cultivated meat. This milestone marks a major step towards a new era in meat production.”

Congrats Uma Valeti for everything you did and doing for animals. You are one the handful of humans I salute and respect. 

I am happy but clearly, I am down playing my excitement. 

I have been wrong over the years when I was optimistic and I have been wrong also when I was pessimistic. 

Leave alone predicting what happens in the future in this complex system. 

My down playing comes from my past learnings of how humans have immense capacity to mess up. 

I have heard people say "yuck" to cultivated meat while happily devouring chicken living horribly and dying in their own poop. Good news: these people have a shelf life and will be gone by the end of this century or earlier. 

This is a huge moment for future animals. I will not be around to see your happy lives; the good news is neither would all the humans you treated you horribly over the centuries. 

Max and I will be celebrating your lives for the rest of time. 

This Is Reality!

 

Thermostat 6 - Animation Short Film 2018 - GOBELINS from GOBELINS pro on Vimeo.

A Flicker Of Serenity In This Hurricane Of Mindless Suffering

I salute all those who worked and still working hard to bring serenity. 

Thank you.