I love digging out under-reported facts that go against the grain of common wisdom. It’s the demonstration mode of the old axiom “Live and Learn.”
For example, it is common wisdom that one of the more serious contributing factors to global warming is cow farts. Yes, I said “farts.” Get over it. Of course, the people who most like to perpetuate this wonderful myth – outside of the vegan Morlocks – are people beholden to the energy industry. They don’t want you to cut back on gasoline consumption or get into renewable fuel sources. They don’t want you to maintain the anti-pollution standards that have brought massive reductions in air crap. You know, the very standards that our current president and his fellow Trumpublicans abolished, killing tens of thousands of people each year.
No, they want to sell you clean coal and put the family farmers out of business by slaughtering all the animals we consume, as do most all other animals. It would seem to me that such a program would cause a lot of harm in the short run, but, admittedly, less if family farmers packaged their kids for the black market supermarkets.
So now we’ve got hamburgers, tacos, and pizza that are made out of vegetable extract. “It tastes great – exactly like meat” sayeth those who haven’t eaten meat in many a year. “It takes like shit – exactly like shit” sayeth the beef eaters and chicken eaters and people who think cauliflower shouldn’t be in pizza. I’m sure that, given enough time, the Impossible Burger will taste almost every bit as good as a Burger King Whopper. You don’t know better if you believe cow farts are killing us.
Last week’s episode of South Park illustrated these points quite nicely, with their typical humor and biting wit. Spoiler alert: Cartman joins the faux food supporters. They postulate the way to make faux food successful is to use marijuana mulch as the source of vegetable goo, and they’ve got a good point. End Spoiler
There’s a problem with screwing around with the food chain. It is very risky, and the law of unintended consequences kicks in pretty fast. I realize vegetarians don’t like to consider this, but they are science deniers who conveniently overlook millions of years of history and evolution. Which also means certain fundamentalists don’t like it either.
We can work on how to deal with cow burping. Maybe if we stopped assembly line animal breeding, fed them more grass and cut out the corn and the chemicals. Or maybe if we add calcium carbonate – Tums – to their feed. I dunno; I’m not a family farmer.
Animals, including humans, have been eating each other quite naturally since we all became multicellular. It’s the capitalist lust for increased “productivity” that’s the problem. In their greedy minds, productivity is a synonym for profit and damn the consequences.
Most certainly, the trendy camp followers who blindly follow political fashion without doing their due diligence are not helping one bit.
And the next vegan who won’t stop proselyting to me at a post-funeral dinner just might become my next night’s dinner. At least I’ll know the main course will have been fed healthier, less chemical laden food. Vegans just might be health food.
We can fix it without screwing up millions of years of evolution.
In this way, the camp followers can follow the lead of the Prius-driving folks on South Park from several years ago and get high off of the smell of their own farts.
