Vegetarianism

Welcome to this week’s I Call Bullshit, a weekly look at bollocks and balderdash, spin and pseudoscience. This week’s bullshit just lobbed into my inbox this morning, so it’s FRESH!

It’s nut-free peanut butter. Yes, it’s the nut world’s I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

An increasing number of kids are inexplicably becoming deadly allergic to more things – particularly nuts. Meanwhile the number of hypochondriac adults who think being allergic to stuff makes them appear more youthful is skyrocketing.

Continue reading "ICB: Faking it -  I cannut believe it’s not peanut butter" »

“If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.” So goes a rather weary old dog of a proverb attributed to Paul McCartney.

Admittedly, his sentiment makes me as misty-eyed as the next idealist softie. But in light of the latest abattoir cruelty scandal, I need to have a quiet word with Paul.

“Glass walls” don’t come much clearer than the hidden footage uncovered by the ABC and subsequently splattered across our news last week. You don’t exactly need Windex to see inside the pure barbarism of NSW’s Hawkesbury Valley Meat Processors.

Continue reading "Enjoy your porterhouse, but consider the slaughterhouse" »

Wildlife harvesting advocate Professor Mike Archer AM has been geeing up the anti-vegetarian ork armies with an article putting the boot in for ‘hypocrisy’ over mice. The pesky little critters erupt into sizable plagues in grain growing areas every few years and Archer thereby accused vegetarians of having the “worst possible” diet in terms of suffering and sustainability.

What not to do when it comes to a sustainable diet

During the robust online debate following his article, Archer produced the following visionary statement on Australia’s food production future:

“In fact (sorry to sound insensitive), but we should not be consuming Australia unsustainably as we are now to feed 50 million people overseas in addition to the rapidly expanding Australian population. It’s a great short-term strategy to make more money and feel we done [sic] our bit to feed the starving millions overseas, but it makes us contributors to the exacerbating global problem of overpopulation rather than part of the solution. If we could just manage Australia sustainably, that would be the beginning of a rational approach to land-use and set a good example for the rest of the world.”

Continue reading "The ethics of feeding off the fat of the land" »

I am not a vegetarian. But I’m trying to be one because the killing of animals bothers me.

As a city-bred child the first time I saw an animal being slaughtered was while seeing the film Apocalypse Now, and I had trouble coping with watching something die. “At what exact point did its life end?”, I remember thinking.

It was the final scene in the Cambodian jungle, the setting for insanity and hell, when the poor cow was hacked gradually to death by a slight man with a machete. The initial impact was a mere tap. The cow wobbles a little, its legs faltering. The second and third strikes open up the back of its neck revealing the spine and a translucent red, and the legs give way to the huge dying mass above them.

Continue reading "WARNING: This could turn you vegetarian" »