On Goodall and Hummus (i.e. More Things Overheard)

In a Huffington Post interview with Marianne Schnall today, Dr. Jane Goodall displayed a disappointing and marked lack of consistency in her view of whether nonhuman animals exist solely for human use and pleasure. To defend her own choice to use nonhuman animals, Dr. Goodall fell back on that old familiar excuse that veganism is "just too hard". When asked about the hypocrisy of calling one species 'pet', while calling another 'pest' (in this case, with reference to hamsters kept in cages vs. mice killed in traps), she responded:

And you get the white coated scientist who has a dog at home who's part of the family who understands ever word I say - but then he goes and puts on his white coat and does unspeakable things to dogs in the name of science. There's a real schizophrenia. Yes, we are very peculiar [laughs].

Then, after describing the health benefits she experienced when she chose to stop eating meat, she was asked about going vegan and responded:

Well, I can't go vegan because travelling like I do, I really, really don't think I could. You know, it's really difficult. And I stay with people - we had a vegan staying us one time, and it's very difficult. Three hundred days on the road - you go to North Korea - it's jolly hard to be vegetarian much less a vegan [laughs]. But I do my best. And if people would think about intensive farming - if they would think of the damage to the environment of growing all this corn or raising all these cattle. If they would think about the torture of the animals on the intensive farms. And then if they would realize about the antibiotics getting out into the environment, the bacteria building up resistance and the superbugs that we are breeding, more people would become vegetarians.

So she has no difficulty promoting vegetarianism for the environment, for one's health and because of "the torture of the animals on the intensive farms" -- but veganism (i.e. refraining from using animals and their products altogether) is off her radar because it's "very difficult". Considering that as recently as 2007, Goodall was asserting that some cases of vivisection could be justifiable, and that vegetarianism is "not necessarily an option that everyone has to adopt" ("Goodall on Vivisection and Vegetarianism", from Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach), her own schizophrenia today isn't all that surprising. There were bits in the rest of her interview that I also found disconcerting. For instance, a) she presented what she called "good zoos" as perhaps being a better place for primates to be than in the wild where they still experience "fear" and "pain", yet b) states later that chimpanzees or the "voice of the natural world" would, if given the opportunity, tell us to bug off and stop interfering and then c) asserts that humans need to get involved--that we "have to go in and manage very often". The one thing that is clear from the interview is that Dr. Jane Goodall thinks that some animals are ours to use--just not the specific ones that she doesn't want us to use.

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I found an interesting looking recipe for hummus this morning that uses ginger and heaps of fresh mint to flavour it. The filler in the article that leads up to the recipe, however, left me with a (yep--here I go) bad taste in my mouth.

Because they don’t eat dairy products or meat, vegans can have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet. Combining grains and legumes can be a good source of protein. This hummous can be made with a whole grain to ensure for maximum protein intake.

Vegans do not have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet and the whole protein combining theory has been discredited. Why, oh why do people not take 10-15 minutes to do a little bit of background research before perpetuating misinformation? The folks at the University of Victoria's independent paper The Martlet should know better!

Stop the Presses! Mark Bittman's Become Protein-Deficient!

Someone kindly sent me a link earlier to a Mark Bittman piece from yesterday's New York Times. In Tara Parker-Pope's "Well" column in the health section of the paper, Bittman explains how while training for the New York City Marathon, he was informed that he's not eating enough "'complete' proteins". In fact, it seems that he just hasn't been getting enough protein at all. He lists the credentials of nutritionist and Today TV show regular Madelyn Fernstrom, and states:

We met, she heard me out, then immediately declared my diet to be on the “low end” protein-wise – which, she said, “would certainly cause fatigue,” especially since I eat mostly vegetables and don’t typically consume “complete” proteins (code-word for animal products).

So what's an omni foodie trying to pass himself off as a supposed "part-time vegan" to do?

I started eating a “concentrated protein,” usually tofu, a can of sardines, an egg thrown onto whatever else I’m eating, or something equally simple, right after six-miles-or-longer runs.

So here's the scoop: Bittman's obviously not an abolitionist or any sort of animal rights advocate. He's not a vegan. He's not even a vegetarian. He's a trendy food writer who's tried to cash in on the rising popularity of veganism, attempting to co-opt the term to sell his book. I certainly don't expect him to defend a plant-based diet any more than he already has for the limited reasons he has (e.g. personal health, the environment). However, the reference to needing "complete" proteins (or of the supposed need to combine proteins), whether or not for "athletes", has long-since been dismissed by even the most mainstream of non-vegan-friendly bodies as completely unnecessary. Plus, the whole idea (his token reference to tofu aside) of needing to consume "concentrated" sources of animal-based protein to not "often run out of energy halfway through even four-mile runs" had me rolling my eyes more than a little. Some of the comments were especially annoying, especially one where Tara Parker-Pope added a note describing Bittman as "mostly-vegan" and attributing his protein deficiency to that fact. Mostly vegan? Really?

I would certainly never try to encourage someone to go vegan for health-based reasons, since it's not about personal health: It's about our usage of animals for our own selfish and trivial purposes. On the other hand, it really ticks me off to see someone who's getting so much attention as a purported food expert now trying to spread the word that anyone exerting themselves physically needs to eat animal flesh to stay healthy. I really hope that someone takes him to task concerning this soon.

Vegetarianism in the news

I stumbled upon an article about a chef who'll be a guest on today's Oprah for a sandwich cookoff where three chefs will be paired with three Oprah fans. The chef was planning on making some sort of lobster, crab and cow concoction until...

...when Stone met the fan he would be paired with, she uttered four words that changed everything.

"She came up to me and said 'So, I'm a vegetarian'," he says. "I was like, 'Oh great. Just great,' and went right back to the drawing board."

After a brief moment of panic, Stone and his helper got to work, planning, shopping for and cooking an elaborate meal.

"We ended up doing a trio," he says. "A cocktail, a crab cake sandwich that was like a mini burger and a falafel. Thankfully, her doctor had said she should eat more protein, so she was willing to try some crab."

Yet another incidence of mainstream media presenting the eating of fish (or other water-dwelling critters) as vegetarian-friendly, as well as another perpetuation of the protein myth (i.e. that vegetarians don't get enough)... I'm irked. Sorta. I wonder if any of this will come up in the show.

And then while reading the New York Times...

Yes. Yes, Nicholas D. Kristof, it does indeed seem like ''soggy sentimentality'' and ''hypocrisy'' that you pretend to support animal rights, when in the same breath you assert that you enjoy devouring them. It's like someone asserting that he stands up for women's rights, even though he slaps his wife and daughters around at home and then -- whimsically -- shrugs off his doing so by blaming it on his upbringing. I mean, c'mon?

The protein myth

AlterNet has a short article today by Kathy Freston about the "protein myth". For most vegans, the question "But where do you get your protein?" always seems a bit perplexing as it comes up again and again (and again). It's as if by eschewing that ol' ribeye steak or yogurt cup, vegans face some sort of inevitable and well-known nutritional deficiency purportedly common to their ilk, even though most of the folks like me who live in North America live in a world where most diseases have to do with excessive consumption.

Freston points out that only 10 percent of most people's daily caloric intake needs to be protein-derived and that it's almost impossible to not meet this requirement by simply eating a varied plant-based diet. She discusses Dr. Dean Ornish's article that links common cancers, heart disease and other illnesses to high protein -- and especially animal-derived -- foods (she's right that his article is well-worth the read) . She also mentions T. Colin Campbell's famous The China Study, which also links cancer to excessive animal protein consumption.

The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) has a well-researched section on its website about daily protein requirements and vegan sources of protein. It also addresses the still widely-perpetuated myth (kick-started -- and long-since repudiated -- by France Moore Lappé in her famous work Diet for a Small Planet) of the supposed need to combine different types of protein to get a "complete" protein. PCRM also has an informative article on protein for vegans and breaks down protein requirements by body weight (as well as throwing in a couple of protein-rich recipes to boot). It's almost embarrassing how ridiculously easy it is to get the minimum amount of protein you need day to day.