Letters from a Young Radical

This is sort of a random, impulsive, spur-of-the-moment decision, but to give it some level of political force, I want to announce it here.

I'm going vegetarian.
I don't know for how long, I've never tried it before, but I want to give it a try.

I find it funny that I haven't made this decision before, and I've done a lot of reading (particularly those horrifying pamphlets they hand out) and I've been kind of shocked that I haven't found the sticking point for me.

Yeah, I don't like hurting animals, but as I'm not the one doing it, I've always just thought of it as natural (and to a degree, of course, it is). So animal cruelty didn't get me.

The whole animal cruelty thing in the factory farms is absolutely deplorable, I agree, so instead I shop for organic, vegetarian fed, free-range (etc etc etc) meat products. More expensive, but its a start.

Even the concept that it costs more energy to raise animals than vegetables didn't get me... until this morning.

I was reading Fred Magdoff's article called The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions, which begins with this shocking declaration:

"Of the more than 6 billion people living in the world today, the United Nations estimates that close to 1 billion suffer from chronic hunger. But this number, which is only a crude estimate, leaves out those suffering from vitamin and nutrient deficiencies and other forms of malnutrition. The total number of food insecure people who are malnourished or lacking critical nutrients is probably closer to 3 billion—about half of humanity. The severity of this situation is made clear by the United Nations estimate of over a year ago that approximately 18,000 children die daily as a direct or indirect consequence of malnutrition (Associated Press, February 18, 2007)."

Since my introduction to Socialism, I've seriously wondered how we can let this happen and call it fair in the "free market". But something about this week is really drilling it into me. How did we get so far down the wrong path?

Back to vegetarianism, I came to this passage with fire and brimstone going on in me:

"Feeding grain to more and more animals is putting growing pressure on grain stores. Feeding grain to produce meat is a very inefficient way of providing people with either calories or protein. It is especially wasteful for animals such as cows [...] because they can obtain all of their nutrition from pastures and will grow well without grain, although more slowly. Cows are not efficient converters of corn or soy to meat—to yield a pound of meat, cows require eight pounds of corn; pigs, five; and chickens, three (Baron’s, March 4, 2008)."

(Emphasis mine.)

I'm not sure if feeding grain to livestock instead of offering them basic pastures is a factory farm thing or an everybody thing, but screwing with food staple availability just to make more money faster really ticks me off. Not to say that we don't already have enough food to feed the world, it's just that using this type of raw material in such an inefficient way drives the availability down, and therefore drives the price up. This is one of the many reasons the food crisis is so dire right now, and I'm going to pull my penny-a-day on this one and go veggie.