Comments | amnesiadust: sobering thoughts

amnesiadust

sobering thoughts

Jan 23, 2005 18:38

I might've mentioned to some of you that I just finished reading Gandhi's autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1925). There were plenty of things I didn't know about him and his personal idiosyncrasies which I got from this book, and one of these was that he was a pretty hard-core vegan, and basically ate nothing but fruits and ( Read more... )

Comments 5

darcydodo January 24 2005, 10:12:41 UTC

Umm... so far as I understand it, if you keep milking a cow, she'll keep producing milk. It's a stimulation thing, or something. I don't think she needs to continue having calves.

good point, but... amnesiadust January 25 2005, 09:14:47 UTC

Actually, that's something I wondered about too. The amount of milk a cow produces, and the length of time for which she produces it, seems to depend on many factors, not the least of which is how often you milk her. I found a few sets of lecture notes from biology/agriculture classes which got into plenty of detail about comparative biology of lactation in bovines and humans.

But we can still ask about ballpark averages or targets for the dairy industry. This article (the point of which appears to be that rBST and rBGH aren't harmful when consumed by humans, a point I'm not really out to dispute) tells us: "After having a calf, a cow produces milk for about 300 days. The highest daily milk production will occur at about 8 weeks after calving and then the level of milk production per day gradually declines during the rest of the lactation period." It makes practical sense too -- what biological advantage is there in continuing to produce milk after the young are weaned? This document goes into rather ridiculous detail on the ( ... )

shnells February 2 2005, 09:20:14 UTC

this is the reason why cows are sacred to hindus. they are considered as a mother because tehy are giving us milk. it used to be that each time milk was taken from the cow, thanks was given to her. now people just take. it's sad. i'm just as bad. i take too. i'm going to hell. wait. this is hell. omg.

hm! amnesiadust February 3 2005, 06:38:26 UTC

I did not know that. Cool!

Typically I thought of it being more the Buddhist frame of mind that we're all in hell and trying to get out. But I suppose that mindset is common to many threads of Eastern thought.

But if you've given up cheese and chocolate already, you're most of the way there...

rebbyribs February 16 2005, 17:50:56 UTC

Somehow, I managed to miss this post earlier, but wanted to respond now that I've seen it.

Logical self-consistency is a very hard thing to achieve. You're not going to be perfect. I find that it helps to focus on what good I am doing, and to go first for the low-hanging fruits. For example, if you switch to using soymilk and cooking oil (instead of milk and butter) but keep eating cheese for a while, you've made a substantial reduction in your dairy consumption, but also not
changed as much in terms of taste.

What convinced me not to buy more honey (although I'm still using up what I've got) is that commercial bees are often fed sugar-water through the winter to replace the honey that's been harvested. So commercial bee-keeping is still using agricultural resources inefficiently.

Finally,