Genes are the characteristics and processes that every living thing is made up of and performs. Genes are the reason hair is blond, skin is white, and certain people are more resistant to illness than others. Genes are not only contained in humans and animals though; they are also the characteristics of the food we put inside of our bodies daily.
Genetic engineering is when the genetic “blueprints” of an organism are artificially changed and altered. In this science, genes from any living thing can be placed into another, lending the borrowed characteristics to the new host organism. This is gaining popularity because scientists can and want to develop, for example, food resistant to a certain herbicide, or to produce more. This may sound appealing, but that is before an in-depth look is taken at its negative effects, which include:
New toxins and allergens in foods
Increased use of chemicals on crops, resulting in increased contamination of our water supply and food
The creation of herbicide-resistant weeds.
The spread of diseases across species barriers.
Loss of bio-diversity in crops.
The disturbance of ecological balance.
Artificially-induced characteristics and their inevitable side-effects will be passed on to all following generations and to other related organisms. Once released, genetically-modified crops can never be recalled or contained, and they have been grown commercially since 1996.This is so dangerous because these modifications (mutations) created by scientists would never occur in Nature. People may believe that they are immune to these foods- “I won’t eat it if I don’t buy it!” But that is not true thanks to the complacency of government and food industries. People do not learn how much it already permeates common-place foods. Thus far, common genetically modified foods available and used (much without common knowledge,) include: tomatoes, squash, yeast, corn, potatoes, and soybeans (which are used in 60% of all processed foods, such as: bread, pasta, candies, ice cream, pies, biscuits, margarine, meat products and vegetarian meat substitutes). Genetically-modified organisms are also used to produce different cheeses and canola oil. And most of these genetically modified foods will not be or are not labeled.
Coming Home
An important current issue is that the European Union has recently allowed the import of a strain of sweet corn that is internally insect resistant. It is called the “Bt11” strain, created by the Basel, Switzerland-based ‘agribusiness,’ Syngenta.
Syngenta calls itself ‘a world-leading agribusiness committed to sustainable agriculture through innovative research and technology.” They make the claim that they “believe in delivering better food for a better world through outstanding crop solutions.” It is funny to note that there is already enough means to feed the entire planet as it is, and people are only starving based-upon their own lack of motivation or will to work for it. This ‘better’ food is tampered food and their ‘crop solutions’ are nothing more than crop problems that will have a ripple effect on our ecosystem that will be increasingly felt in generations to come.
The Bt11 sweet corn developed by Syngenta is so important because it is the first GM (genetically modified) human-edible food strain to be imported after the lift of the 6-year European Union ban on GM foods. These genetically modified sweet corn seeds from Syngenta have been available commercially in the United States since 1998. What makes these seeds resistant is a soil bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis (Hence the “Bt”). Syngenta states that Bt is safe to use while it is a naturally occurring soil bacterium. They also state that it is found in soils around the world and is also used by farmers and organic gardeners in an attempt to ease peoples’ minds about the two extra genes simply added to the genetics of this sweet corn.
Syngenta uses only specific strain of Bacillus thuringiensis and the actual effects of this Bt that Syngenta uses are sickening. The strains that Syngenta have bred into their sweet corn seeds sent to Europe create a certain protein, known as Cry1Ab. When the plants grow normally, sometimes they are eaten by insects who lay their eggs in the plant. Two of the most “important sweet corn pests” are the European corn-borer or the corn earworm. These insects’ larvae grow and eat inside the plant, where a conventional herbicide can not reach. Once these larvae hatch, they begin to eat these GM stalks, ears, and leaves and the insect’s intestine breaks down the Cry1Ab protein. This creates a shorter protein that attaches itself to the wall of the larva’s intestine, in turn damaging the cell membrane. The membrane becomes oozing and full of holes, which obviously kills the larva.
Cry1Ab is produced in the growing Bt11 corn’s ears, stalks, leaves, and silks for the entire life of the plant. Including up until when it is picked to be ingested by people. This example of genetic modifications can be first viewed as helpful because they can increase the productivity of crops and the value of them, and have even been “proven to be safe for consumption.” But there is no way to know their long-term effects as it simply has not been around long enough to see.
Genetically-modified foods are not Natural, and therefore they are not good. And although they may not affect this current generation, the effects on the vegetation and animal life on the Planet that our children inherit will be irreversible.
Intro to Veganism ~ Eating Superiorly (Information from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals)
Every year, more than 25 billion animals are slaughtered for food. Raising animals on factory farms is cruel and ecologically devastating. Eating animals is bad for our health, leading directly to many diseases and illnesses, including heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
Animals on factory farms are treated like machines. Within days of birth, for example, chickens have their beaks seared off with a hot blade. Male cows and pigs are castrated without painkillers. All of these animals spend their brief lives in crowded and ammonia-filled conditions, many of them so cramped that they can't even turn around or spread a wing. Many do not get a breath of fresh air until they are prodded and crammed onto trucks for a nightmarish ride to the slaughterhouse, often through weather extremes and always without food or water. The animals are hung upside down and their throats are sliced open, often while they're fully conscious.
Today's factory farms leave behind an environmental devastation that generations to come will be forced to clean up. Raising animals for food requires more than half the water used in the United States and is the biggest polluter of our water and topsoil. Coyotes and other animals are poisoned and shot by western cattle ranchers who consider federal land to be their land for grazing. Our meat addiction is slowly poisoning and depleting our land, water, and air.… And YOU!
To Be Vegan By Bruce Friedrich
A reason for adopting a vegan diet is for the environment. The best thing any of us can do for the environment is to adopt a vegan diet. Raising animals for food is steadily and rapidly depleting and polluting our arable land, potable water, and clean air. All animals need food to survive. For example, a 200-pound man will burn off at least 2,000 calories even if he never gets out of bed. As in humans, most calories that go into an animal are burned off; only the excess calories are available to make milk, eggs, or flesh and fat.
It’s bizarre, really: You take a crop like soy, oats, corn, or wheat, products high in fiber and complex carbohydrates, but devoid of cholesterol and artery-clogging saturated fat. You put them into an animal and create something with no fiber or complex carbohydrates at all, but with lots of cholesterol and saturated fat. It makes about as much sense to take pure water, run it through a sewer system, and then drink it.
E, the respected environmental magazine, noted in 2002 that more than one-third of all fossil fuels produced in the United States are used to raise animals for food. This seems a conservative figure. If we have to grow massive amounts of grain and soy (with all the tilling, irrigation, crop dusters, and so on that that requires), truck all that grain and soy to factory-style farms and feedlots, feed it to the approximately 10 billion land animals who are raised for food in the U.S. each year, truck those animals to automated slaughter facilities, truck the dead animals to processing centers, run the processing and packaging machines, and then truck the packaged meat to grocery stores—well, there’s a lot of energy being used up at each one of those stages.
If all this energy is being used, all these fossil fuels are being burned, and all this manure is being produced, of course, we’re talking about some serious air pollution. Many environmentalists will sooner walk or ride their bike than drive, in order to decrease air pollution in their area, and then will happily eat some dairy, meat, or egg product without a second thought about the fact that they are paying for gas-guzzling animal transport trucks, refrigerated meat trucks, pollution-churning processing plants, and so on.
A similar analysis holds for land. According to John Robbins, the average vegan uses about 1/6 of an acre of land to satisfy his or her food requirements for a year; the average vegetarian who consumes dairy products and eggs requires about three times that, and the average meat-eater requires about 20 times that much land. We can grow a lot more food on an equal amount of land if we’re not funneling the crops through animals.
Also, the use of herbicides and pesticides and the monocropping of feed crops like corn, soy, wheat, and oats are destroying vital topsoil. Howard Lyman, a fourth-generation cattle rancher who has become a vegan advocate, talks about how he became a farmer because of his love for the life-filled soil. Now, he says, the soil has become lifeless dirt—in large part because it has been ruined by raising animals for food.
And think about water. According to the National Audubon Society, raising animals for food requires about as much water as all other water uses combined, even as many areas are experiencing drought conditions. It requires about 300 gallons of water to feed a vegan for a day. It requires about four times as much to feed a vegetarian, and 14 times as much to feed a meat-eater. Of course, if you have to feed animals, you have to irrigate the crops that you’re feeding them. You have to give them water. The systems that keep animals today use water to hose down both the factory farm and the slaughterhouse. It’s a water-intensive operation.
Raising animals for food is also a water-polluting process. One dairy cow produces more than 100 pounds of excrement per day. The animals raised in the U.S. produce 130 times the excrement of the entire human population of this country. Their excrement is more concentrated than human excrement and is often contaminated with herbicides, pesticides, toxic chemicals, hormones, antibiotics, and so on. These massive farmed animal factories don’t have waste treatment plants, so this sludge goes in vast quantities onto and destroys topsoil, or it goes into and pollutes water, often causing ecological imbalances and killing fish and other aquatic life.
Clearly, all of these statistics are going to be approximations. Some of them will change based on the time of year and the area crops are being grown in. What doesn’t change is that animals will not grow or produce milk and eggs without food and water, and they won’t do it without producing excrement. Thus, eating meat, dairy products, and eggs will always be vastly more resource-intensive and vastly more polluting than using the land to grow food for human beings.
Of course, anyone who reads the papers knows what the factory fishing trawlers are doing to our sea and ocean bottoms. One super-trawler is the length of a football field and takes in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single netting. Trawlers scrape up ocean bottoms, destroying coral reefs and everything else in their way; hydraulic dredges scoop up huge chunks of the ocean floor to sift out scallops, clams, and oysters. Most of what the fishing fleets get isn’t even eaten by human beings. Half is fed to animals who are raised for food, and about 30 million tons each year are just tossed back into the ocean, dead, which greatly disturbs the natural biological balance. Commercial fishing fleets are destroying sensitive aquatic ecosystems at a rate that is quite beyond comprehension.
Then there is aquaculture, which is increasing at a rate of more than 10 percent annually. Aquaculture is even worse than commercial fishing, because, for starters, it takes about 4 pounds of wild-caught fish to reap 1 pound of farmed fish. Farmed fish eat fish caught by commercial trawlers but not used for human consumption. Farmed fish are often raised in the same water that wild fish swim in, but fish farmers dump antibiotics into the water and use genetic breeding to create Frankenstein fish. The antibiotics contaminate the oceans and seas, and the genetic-freak fish sometimes escape and breed with wild fish, throwing delicate aquatic balances out of kilter. Researchers at the University of Stockholm demonstrated that the horrible environmental influence of fish farms can extend to an area 50,000 times larger than the farm itself.
The choice is clear: We can show our environmental values every time we sit down to eat by eating a vegan diet, or we can stomp over the Earth by eating meat, dairy, or eggs. Really, a true environmentalist can not eat meat, dairy, or eggs.
The indisputable fact of the matter is that the production of all animal foods in modern agriculture settings, no matter if they are meat, dairy or eggs, always involves killing the animals when they are no longer profitable, and this is always a gruesome and violent process. Furthermore, factory farms are abusing animals—they are treating animals in ways that would be illegal, were dogs or cats treated so abusively. Everything natural to animals is denied them; their entire lives, from birth to death, are characterized by unmitigated misery.
In the rush for profits, abnormal breeding practices are used so that animals will grow far more quickly than they would naturally, and their organs and limbs can’t keep up. So, for example, chickens’ upper bodies grow seven times as quickly as they did just 25 years ago, but their lungs, hearts, and limbs can’t grow that fast. These factory-farmed animals live for fewer than two months before they’re at full slaughter weight, and yet they still suffer from high rates of lung collapse, heart failure, and crippling leg deformities. Chickens and turkeys are naturally inquisitive and would normally spend their lives actively dust- and sun-bathing, digging in the underbrush, building nests, playing with their chicks, and so on. Walk into a factory shed today, with tens of thousands of chickens, and you’ll find that, after just a month, the animals have become so debilitated that they can barely move.
Similar conditions exist for all animals raised for food: Cattle and pigs have their testicles ripped out with no painkillers. Cattle have their horns cut from their heads and have third-degree burns, branding, inflicted on them, often three or four times during their short lives. Pigs have their ears, tails, and teeth mutilated. The beaks of laying hens are seared off with a hot blade. The animals are pumped full of hormones or antibiotics, both to make them grow more quickly and to keep them alive through the horrible conditions that would kill them from stress and disease if they were not drugged.
After very short lives, the animals are shipped to slaughter, often through severe weather extremes and always without food or water. Conditions are so bad that some animals arrive at the slaughterhouse crippled or dead. According to the USDA, more than 100,000 cattle per year, mostly dairy cows, arrive at slaughterhouses unable to walk off the backs of the transport trucks. According to the National Pork Board, more than 400,000 pigs each year arrive for slaughter unable to walk off the trucks. More than 100,000 pigs arrive dead from the harsh traveling conditions. As for those who do make it, imagine how bad the conditions must be to kill and injure so many others.
The animals who live through transport invariably suffer an awful death. Workers and veterinarians from inside the plants testify that animals are routinely conscious through the entire slaughter process—their throats are slit, their limbs hacked off, and their skin torn from their bodies, while they are still conscious. Pigs routinely go into the scalding hot water for hair removal still conscious. Chickens are scalded alive in the feather removal tank.
Sometimes people ask about dairy products, since the animal abuse in the dairy industry isn’t as obvious It may be surprising to hear that animal abuse in dairy production is worse than that in most other animal product-based industries. Cows give milk for the same reason all animals give milk—for their babies. But we take their babies away from them within 24 hours of birth and add the females to the dairy herd. Many of the males are raised for veal. You might say that there is a hunk of veal in every glass of milk.
But that’s not all: Not only do those who consume dairy products support the veal industry, they support the abuse of the cows as well. Most dairy cows spend their entire lives on concrete and often become lame as a result. And dairy cows now give about four times as much milk as they did just 25 years ago. Imagine a human mother giving four times her normal milk output. The animals’ udders are so overloaded that they sometimes drag on the ground, and fully one-half of all dairy cows suffer from mastitis, a painful udder infection. There is no way of getting around the fact that the production of dairy and meat involve very similar aspects of pain and suffering for the animals. It is best not only for us but also the animals if we can transition as quickly away from these products as we are able to do. Thanks to the creation of so many fantastic soy products in recent years, it is now easier to do then ever.
One of the most incredible facts about the animal abuse I’ve just discussed is that it’s all routine. It’s inspired by profit; it’s standard agricultural practice. The industry will tell us that only happy animals produce, but that’s nonsense: Stressed animals eat more. Animals unable to move grow more quickly than animals who can move around. Mutilating animals and dosing them with hormones and antibiotics allows them to live through conditions that would normally cause them to kill one another from the stress or to get sick and die. And, of course, cramming animals into transport trucks, even though it kills a lot of them, is more economically viable than using more trucks and giving the animals more space. Once they’re at the slaughterhouse, the low-wage, high-turnover workers are forced to kill at such a pace that animal welfare is entirely discounted. Profit is king; animal welfare is not a concern.
Make no mistake: If someone eats meat, dairy, or egg products, that person is contributing to serious animal cruelty, no matter how good of a person they are in the rest of their life. And it’s animal cruelty that, if it were done to a dog or a cat, would warrant felony animal abuse charges against everyone involved. This isn’t a comfortable thing to deal with, I know, but it is the truth. And how can we turn our backs once we know this?
But wait, aren’t Vegans deficient in protein, calcium, or other nutrients? The American Dietetic Association and the World Health Organization, among other groups, point out that vegan diets provide everything we need and that, in fact, they cut out a lot of the stuff that’s horrible for us, thus making vegans healthier. The diseases that are killing us are not deficiency diseases. We’re dying from heart disease, cancer, and stroke. We’re plagued with diabetes and obesity. You can be an unhealthful vegan, but it’s a heck of a lot easier to be an unhealthful consumer of meat, dairy products, and/or eggs. Dr. T. Colin Campbell argues that animal products are like tobacco—a little bit probably won’t hurt you, but why risk it? They’re bad for you. Of course, you can be a vegan, technically, and do nothing but drink soda and eat French fries. One should make an effort to eat a variety of foods and to be as healthful as possible.
Vegan and Vegetarian Recipes
The recipe below calls for beef “TVP” chunks. TVP means “Textured Vegetable Protein,” and it is made of textured vegetable protein (soy flour), partially hydrogenated soybean oil, water, salt, hydrolised corn gluten-soy-wheat gluten protein, and yeast.
To use TVP, completely cover it with water and simmer about ten minutes to reconstitute. Use it like you would use cooked meat or add to wet dishes that require further cooking. Each 1 ounce serving is equivalent to 3 ounces of cooked meat.
Vegan Shepard‘s Pie
3 - 4 chopped potatoes
2 chopped carrots
1 cup of fresh green beans
2 stalks of celery, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 ½ cups of beef TVP chunks
3 packets (Vegan) brown sauce mix (yes, it does exist in „normal“ grocers)
6 - 8 cups mashed potatoes
Put all the chopped vegetables in a big pot with just enough water to cover and start cooking. While the vegetables are cooking, re-hydrate the TVP (see the directions above,) and begin preparing the mashed potatoes.
When the vegetables are almost done, turn off the heat and drain. Use the water that the vegetables were cooked in to make the brown gravy. Put the vegetables back into the pot and add the gravy and TVP, mix well.
Using a large casserole dish, put the contents of the pot (vegetables and all) into the casserole dish. Leave about 4 centimetres between the top of the vegetable mixture and the top of the dish. Add potatoes on to the top of the veggie mix. Get a think layer on top. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
Put the dish into the oven and bake 30-45 minutes, until the surface is firm and a little browned. Enjoy!
Vegan Chocolate Cake
1/2 cup soft soy margarine
1 Tablespoon vinegar 1 cup soy milk
1 - 2/3 cups all-purpose white flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1-1/2 cups sugar
1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons of an egg substitute
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla
A separate 1/2 cup water
Put vinegar in cup and add soy milk. (This is a Vegan substitute for Buttermilk). Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slightly oil and flour two round baking pans.
Place flour, cocoa, sweetner, baking soda, and salt in large bowl and mix together well with spoon. Mix egg replacement and 1/4 cup water until smooth. Add margarine, vanilla, soured soy milk, 1/2 cup water, and mixed egg replacement to dry ingredients in bowl. Beat with electric mixer for 3 minutes at medium speed, scraping bowl frequently. Pour into prepared pans.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove from the oven and let cool in pans for 5 minutes. Remove from pans and cool on cake rack until cold. Frost as desired. A good idea for frosting is unsweetened apple butter, for example.
WAU
WAU Elements #2 due out in August 2004!
