This post germinated in my mind as I walked home from SoLVe’s screening of Food Inc last night. The SoLVe team did a great job. After the movie, Vernon Tava (Co-Editor of The Solution and past SoLVe President) facilitated a discussion between the 50-70 students present, with two lecturers – Peter Sankoff and Mohsen Al-Attar – present as expert commentators.
One of the most resounding and repeated themes was: What do we do now? Naturally, I think we should go vegan – that’s a given. But more fundamentally we should think more about what we eat – and what we consume in other ways. When we come to food, we are all consumers. To claim that is a tautology: We consume food.
Mohsen presented a juxtaposition between the self as consumer and the self as citizen. I want to make five simple observations. Continue reading
New advertisement from the Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine advocates vegetarianism.
I bet it’s nice to be right every now and then. Good for the self-esteem, at any rate. However I’m not sure where you stand when publicly falsifying your own previous positions. There is a certain degree of comfort in knowing that if the new me wasn’t right, then sure enough the old one was.
This is where British environmentalist George Monbiot now finds himself. Despite previously proclaiming that the ‘only’ ethical stance in the face of coming food and climate crises was veganism, he has recently published an article dramatically titled ‘I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly’. Continue reading