Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Flitch

The whole purpose of lent is to come closer to Christ. You give up things to realize how much hold the world has on etc. My church says I fast strictly, luckily my parents weren't evil when I was young and we only fasted from meat. No meat, dairy, oil and fish. Tried that once, got very sick very fast, doctor said never again ^^'.

Do you have any idea how much meat we consume in North America?
This is from the site World Watch Institute

Global meat consumption is expected to grow 2 percent each year until 2015, especially in developing countries where eating meat is seen as a sign of wealth and prosperity. Half of the world's pork is now eaten in China, while Brazil is the second largest consumer of beef, after the United States.


Forty-three percent of the world's beef is raised on factory feedlots, and more than half of the world's pork and poultry is raised on factory farms.


An estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are fed to pigs, poultry, and cattle merely to promote growth and compensate for the unsanitary and confined conditions on factory farms. By volume, livestock in the country consume eight times more antibiotics than humans do.


With its high meat content, the average U.S. diet requires twice as much water per person per day as an equally nutritious vegetarian diet. A meat-rich meal made with imported ingredients also emits nine times as much carbon as a vegetarian meal made with domestic ingredients that don't have to be hauled long distances.


A diet high in grain-fed meat can require two to four times more land than a vegetarian diet.


The summary: we eat way more meat than we should. Look at what you eat in a day, got a picture of that in your head? Good. Now imagine what people used to eat. Mostly bread, or rice or something grain depending where you were from. A grain and a legume give you one complete protein. Look at how healthy they were. So even if the food we're consuming is prepared healthily and not mainly made out of fat/grease, we're still eating out of proportion. Try eating vegetarian for some time like a week; you'll notice just how much meat we consume. That's without even being vegan.

Can you tell I miss meat? Oh well, only about 3 more days.

Flitch [flich] (N)
1. salted and cured side of a pig
2. fish steak cut from a halibut
(also has some uses in carpentry, but that doesn't fit with the rant now does it?)

According to dictionary.com "flitch" originate from Swift's writings. You know, the guy who wrote Gulliver's Travels.

1 comment:

  1. Swift -> also the guy who suggested that people eat children and babies during a time of economic trouble - less mouths for the poor to feed and they can make a pretty penny selling them to the those upper classes with refined tastes.

    He was joking, of course.

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