- Francis Bacon
Well, after receiving no attention whatsoever in the mainstream media, it looks as if the private member's bill, Bill C-517, An Act to Amend the Food and Drugs Act (mandatory labelling for genetically modified foods) was kicked to the curb before even getting to the second reading stage to determine whether it should be passed on to a committee. Those who voted it down include Convervative MPs Preston Manning and Peter MacKay, as well as Liberal MPs Michael Ignatieff and Paul Zed (from Saint John, NB) and if you click on the link above, you'll get a complete list of which MP thinks you shouldn't have a right to know what goes into your food. There were 101 ''yays'', 156 ''nays'' and 18 paired votes. That's close enough that all it would have taken was a bit of reporting on this to get people's attention so that they'd pressure their MPs to vote to push it forward. Greenpeace Canada has more about it here.
This is just a quick update to my previous post about Dr. Andrew Weil's article on becoming vegan, where he recomends taking Vitamin D3, which is almost always derived from animals (which, of course, means it's generally not vegan). In his article, he didn't mention Vitamin D2, which is usually derived from non-animal ingredients and is the form that tends to be used in vegan vitamins.
According to this recent study, although it was once thought that Vitamin D2 was less effective than D3, both forms are equally effective. So, there's no need for an animal-derived supplement.
I was speaking to a friend a few weeks ago about wanting to start up a local group to trade off skills -- the kinds of practical abilities these last few generations have more or less lost, thanks to plentiful and cheap energy having enabled (and accelerated) our consumerism. We're a disposable society, and I mean that in every sense of the expression. On one hand, long after we wipe ourselves out, life on this planet will keep on going on. On the other hand, we're also disposable in the sense that cheap oil has allowed us to evolve into wasteful creatures, to the point where we no longer even know where the hell to put all of our garbage.
A friend of mine frequently points out how our city is constantly littered with disposable Tim Horton's coffee cups, for instance. We leave our homes in the morning, spend minutes idling at a drive-through for a cup of coffee in a paper cup with a plastic top, which inevitably ends up on the ground or in a garbage can. For someone with a mean caffeine habit, investing in a travel mug and brewing a pot at home in the morning would pay for itself in a month. You can even buy a container of Tim Horton's coffee to make yourself (I say this in response to some Tim's addicts who insist that they like the specific taste of their coffee). What's the fascination with having something to throw away?
The ridiculousness of it all struck me yesterday as I popped into the local supermarket to discover a new entry in the ''cheap plastics 'r' us'' book of wastefulness. In the produce section, I discovered small clear plastic containers, each holding smaller plastic bags with what looked like prewashed and cut fruit. For instance, one baggie cont
ained 3-4 grapes in a smaller baggie, and then a couple of orange segments in a second baggie. Fruit -- something sold loose and with its own skin, wrapped in plastic baggies inside bigger plastic baggies inside a plastic container, undoubtedly carried home in a plastic bag. I don't get it. It's obviously not about convenience since I could peel an orange faster than it would take me to cut open all of that plastic.
When I was a kid, I remember reading old Little House on the Prairie books with wonder at the lengthy descriptions of how food was grown or gathered, and preserved. Things were dried, or salted, or pickled in those Tupperware-free days. I grew up in a home where pies were made from scratch -- from strawberries we picked ourselves, with a family that engaged in the annual fiddlehead picking ritual so popular in the Maritimes and Maine. Once a year, my mother and some of my older cousins would head out to a relative's farm or large garden and load up pillowcases with string beans and then bring them home, where she and my grandmother would spend an afternoon sorting through them and snapping off their ends to prepare them for canning.
Even with that, though, I still remember leaving home for my first year of university and not even knowing how to do anything but open a can or follow the simple instructions on the side of a box. I made Kraft Dinner and ate Mr. Noodles. I had frozen pizza and Campbell's Soup. I jumped into consumerism head-first because I could. It wasn't until years later, when I became a vegetarian and became mindful of the foods I ate, that I actually learned to cook whole foods; it wasn't until I had my first garden that I learned how to preserve herbs and vegetables. These were skills I should have and could have learned from my mother and grandmother, but at the time, there was no sense of a need for them to be passed on to me. After all, a strawberry pie could be bought frozen at the supermarket, where canned or frozen string beans were also plentiful.
So oil's running out. Cheap plastic and cheap energy are running out. Consumerism is convenient for us for now, but at the price of leaving us dependent on cheap plastic and cheap energy instead of learning hands on how to prepare and preserve things ourselves. And it's not just about food. Which brings me back to the original idea I mentioned in this post. Since consumerism has led to a breakdown in the traditional passing on of skills that enable a certain amount of self-sufficiency (and that certainly lead to a less disposable lifestyle), it seems to me that the best way to go about remedying this is to find others who have some sort of expertise in this or that area (composting, knitting, bicycle repair, foraging, wine making -- heck, even darning socks) and to trade off these skills with each other in some sort of informal but organized manner. Anyone in my area interested?
All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based -- or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug -- it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.
So, I just read an article by Dr. Andrew Weil, the portly quasi-Santa-lookalike nutritional guru. It's called ''Becoming a Vegan''. In it, Weil perpetuates some iffy information that more or less amounts to saying that you cannot thrive on a completely vegan diet. He brings up two instances where, in his opinion, animal products are necessary. First, with regards to Vitamin D, he writes the following:
I recommend a daily supplement of 1,000 IU of vitamin D3 -- cholecalciferol -- for everyone (vegan or not).
He asserts that your body can produce enough Vitamin D from exposure to sunlight, but states that most people don't go outside enough, hence the need for a supplement. The thing is that cholecalciferol (D3) is generally derived from sheep's wool -- definitely not vegan. Oddly, he makes no mention at all of Vitamin D2, which isn't derived from animals and which is commonly used in vegan vitamins.
Then, with reference to omega-3s, he writes:
Be aware that the vegetarian sources of omega-3s are not as good as oily fish. Consider taking a fish oil supplement or, at least, an algae-derived supplement of DHA.
Why would someone write an article about becoming a vegan and recommend taking an animal-based supplement as an option? The article seems mistitled. It would be more accurate for it to maybe refer to issues Weil finds inherent in a vegan diet; it's not about how to adopt a vegan diet if he suggests -- twice -- consuming animal products as necessary? I mean, is the definition of veganism now purportedly open to tweaking. too? (OK, my crankiness is showing, I'll admit...)
According to the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), fish-derived sources of omega-3 are at the very least unnecessary, and on top of that, that
omega-3s in fish oils are highly unstable molecules that tend to decompose and, in the process, unleash dangerous free radicals. Research has shown that omega-3s are found in a more stable form in vegetables, fruits, and beans. (See referenced text here.)
With regards to Vitamin D, the Vegan Society has information on animal-free ways to meet your daily requirement. The Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) has a blurb on the differences between Vitamin D2 and D3. Both are used to fortify milk and other dairy products and Vitamin D3 isn't always animal-derived (but usually is). I haven't seen anything to indicate that one form is superior to the other, really. I'll see if I can dig up some more information about this in my copy of Joanne Stepaniak's Vegan Sourcebook, but it seems to me that Dr. Weil's opinion left some pretty serious blanks to fill and that since he writes as an authority on nutrition, most reading his article wouldn't even think to second-guess what he says. Thankfully, groups like PCRM and VRG exist to set the record straight.
I had to sneak in a pic of my beloved trusty bike. This was taken by Officer's Pond, formerly known as Officer's Square before the Saint John River spilled into it.
Just a few feet away, a couple of kids were indulging themselves in -- uh -- water sports with their own bikes.
Someone over at the Crowne Plaza must have had a chuckle leaving this up.
Here's a scene along the south side bike trail (which is well underwater -- that second line of trees is where the river's edge usually lies).
And another:
And another:
Here's the Carleton and Brunswick intersection yesterday as seen from the Old Burial Ground.
While over by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, a couple of folks were checking out the Robbie Burns statue.
This is a view from this evening of the flooding at the Brunswick and Carleton intersection, as seen from the Old Burial Ground. Things got a little more complicated, it seems.
Here's that intersection at the foot of the train bridge today.
The fact that the road was blocked at that intersection didn't stop some attention-seekers from having some fun. I missed him coming in, but got him riding out.
