By Gene Ayres,
Your Consumer Curmudgeon

I recently met a woman who was working on preparing a food show for so-called vegans. I used to think vegans were sci-fi characters—aliens from Planet Vega. Maybe I wasn't that far off, not to offend anyone. But like perhaps PETA people, vegans do tend, it seems, towards being ideologues. And to me, ideology and food are not a good mix. I hate being preached to when I'm trying to enjoy a good meal. Especially about the rights and wrongs as to whether or not hogs have feelings, or corn has a soul (I have checked, and it does not!). It gives me indigestion. No doubt hogs do have feelings (and I do not take a position on this issue, by the way), but so do starving children in Haiti, and you have to eat something, and God did make us omnivores, whatever you may think or believe. Or if God didn't do it, Mother Nature did, because biologically speaking, omnivores we are.

Anyway, getting back to the food show, I think she had a good idea, to a point. Why not offer cooking tips for vegetarians (the other, perhaps less ideological name for vegans)? After all, as she kept pointing out, there are lots of vegans, and apparently there are no such shows at present, even on the Food Channel. But here's the problem: Julia Child did not get a million viewers and avid fans by lecturing them about the evils of this ingredient or that, let alone its users. People watch cooking shows because they love food, all kinds of food, and don't want to be preached at. Vegetarians are usually such for a reason: they believe it is wrong to eat meat. So this ideal must at least be implied in having a show for vegans only. Not surprisingly, the woman I spoke to was not interested just in giving cooking tips to people who happened to be vegetarians, for whatever reason (and some are certainly idealists, but others have medical reasons). What she wanted to do was convert meat eaters. When I asked her how she planned to convince meat eaters that they should give up something they loved in favor of a more limited menu notorious for it's tastelessness without lecturing them on the evils (rightly or wrongly) of eating meat, she insisted she had no such agenda.

No doubt just like corporations have no agenda in buying and selling seats in Congress.

Again, I have no wish to inject myself into the pros and cons of vegans vs. carnivores, being a devout omnivore, except to say that I think it would be a grave mistake to assume that just because a food is a vegetable, it is in any way as a result better for either the environment, or for your health. And depending on your preferences, it may not even be any cheaper, or more economical.

Here's why:

About five years ago I was hired by WorldWatch Institute to research and write an article for their global environmental magazine WorldWatch, about the alarming increase in the contamination of common salad greens, including organically grown lettuce, with a single chemical, now almost unavoidable in ground water nationwide. This chemical comes from fifty years of dumping rocket fuel into the soil by defense contractors and military installations. The chemical is called perchlorate; it is as common as ditch water, and deadly. Unfortunately, the Defense Department was ratcheting up big time for it's growing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had absolutely no interest in being criticized, let alone having its hands tied, by whining greenies like yours truly, or WorldWatch Institute. As a result, pretty much nothing was done about it. DOD actually got exempted from most, if not all environmental regulation during the Bush era, and nothing much has changed since that time.

Your salad, in all likelihood, still contains perchlorates. Which, among other things, can destroy the thyroid gland as well as damage the DNA in fetuses, and cause numerous kinds of cancer.

Which brings me to coal ash. You all may recall the huge disaster in Tennessee a couple of years back, when a giant holding pond of sludge from coal burning and mining burst its damn and flooded about half the state? Turns out this coal ash wasn't just coal ash. It also contained tons of mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium, among other toxic metals.

Needless to say, the government had a huge job on its hands: what to do with all that coal sludge that had spilled everywhere. Then some enterprising corporate contractors, with EPA collusion, came up with a brilliant idea: turn it into a synthetic form of gypsum, and sell it to farmers as a soil softener (think “stool softener,” and you're closer to the mark). This new so-called gypsum, or FDG (flu gas desulphurization gypsum) is supposed to be beneficial to farming. Well, maybe so. But all that mercury and lead, etc., it also contains (which the EPA insists is “insignificant,” without telling us just how much of this stuff would count as “significant” in our blood streams) may not be all that good for us consumers of all the produce these farms are producing (which, in fairness, also includes meat products).

Right now the government, along with the EPA, is trying to do a selling job on the public to embrace this new innovation in farm technology. Maybe next, they'll be having us eat dust? There won't be much else to offer, vegan or otherwise, if these trends are allowed to continue.

Sources:

King Jr., Neil and Rebecca Smith, “White House, EPA at Odds Over Coal-Waste Rules,” Wall Street Journal, 1/9/2010.

Mercola.com

“U.S. wants farmers to use coal waste on fields,” Associated Press, Washington Post, 12/23/2009.

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His newest book is “Inside the New China: an Ethnographic Memoir.” He can also be found at: www.geneayres.org.