Duffbert's Random Musings

1 - Hey Tom, when you croak, can I have your books?

2 - That, my friends, is why I'm a firm believer in wild-life conservation. Nice seguey, eh? That's right. Canadian wild Elk, bear and venison is probably the safest meat on the planet. Barring a trip to Canada to hunt, I hunt deer in our own back yard and promote it because when the population goes unchecked, terrible things happen like wasting desease and denuding of flora to the point of extinction of some species of wild flowers, fruit producing plants, and rare plants. Killing deer is the morally correct thing to do, both for the larger deer population and for the environment. And now, I can get my meat fix without eating meat that has been jacked up on drugs. God bless America. Of course, my wild deer are eating corn from the neighboring fields that have been sprayed with godknowswhat kind of chemicals... and drinking water from the streams and creeks that have all of the runoff from said fields... I still like venison and the idea of hunting... but... I think I'm going to go have myself some more toasted soy-beans.

3 - I spent a year of college studying organic agriculture full-time, followed by full-time study of political economy. I can see the demise of family farms and continued rise of agri-business playing out right here in Vancouver USA. When I was starting college (mid-70's) there were many, many family dairy farms in our county; now there is a handful. We have local areas called Fruit Valley and Prune Hill - where there used to be fruit orchards and prunes were once a substantial part of the economy. No more. Most of the food we find in the grocery stores now comes from very large agricultural businesses.

Hormones and antibiotics are quite commonly used to enhance livestock growth and minimize disease. Livestock are fed grain or plant and animal materials that have been exposed to herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers. Residues store in the fatty tissues, and so, the fattier the meat product, the greater potential you have of ingesting these residues (cheesburger, anyone?).

I firmly believe it is a very wise decision to consume only organically raised meat (if one chooses to eat meat). Given that most biological organisms are about 10% efficient, one should also bear in mind that to get a given quantity of a nutrient - say protein - a cow would need to ingest 10 pounds of soy protein for you to get 1 pound of protien from the cow meat. Or you could ingest 1 pound of soy protein, exposing yourself to one tenth of the accumulated chemical residues. This is, of course, a vast simplification, but the general point remains the same.

4 - Compelling reasons to be vegetarian in my own, biased, opinion.

5 - I'm sorry, but all I can think of right now is Jimmy Buffett's song "Cheeseburger In Paradise"....

"I like mine with lettuce and tomato, Heinz 57 and french fried potatoes..."