Some very depressing food related news

[catlily]

I was watching Channel 4 news last night and they did quite an in depth piece on the organic dairy industry, focussing on the fact that despite the Soil Association not allowing the practice, a lot of farmers are culling unwanted day old male calves because they have no use for them, or in some cases, even shipping them to the continent for veal

Comments

[notgoinggently]

Thanks for this, Catherine. It helps to be informed or reminded of things like this when I'm feeling that I'm overreacting or that this is all such a faff that I should just go regular veggie. In fact by coincidence I was thinking about the issue earlier this morning (I didn't see the C4 report) and about how much harder what you do (attempting to eat an ethical omnivorous diet) is than what I do.

But then I know there are all sorts of issues surrounding soya etc which I haven't got to grips with.

[catlily]

It is getting harder and harder - but as you say, soya is pretty vital if you are going to be vegan, and the implications of soya are also dreadful - on a par with palm oil as far as environmental damage is concerned. I'm afraid it's on my list of things I try to avoid, unless it's organic. This pretty much rules out any non-organic chocolate as well, because most of them have soya lecithin in. There are also health implications - soya bean is thyroid inhibiting, so if you are prone to a sluggish thyroid, it's best avoided.

Are you managing the vegan thing OK now?

[notgoinggently]

Well, I'm not calling myself a vegan because I don't do the whole lifestyle thing (I'm wearing a wool jacket as I write) and so I think it's disrespectful to those who do, ditto the fact that I compromise when eating out (the veggiest thing I could get last time was pasta and tomato sauce - I had them omit the Emmental - but of course it was egg pasta) but yes, the food thing's otherwise going OK. I have to think to take food out with me and I have to cook more. Ironically M is all in favour for that very reason! Yesterday I made a pretty good no-parmesan parmigiana from

[happy_potterer]

It wasn't until I moved to Vermont and actually visited a dairy farm that I learned that getting milk from a cow is not a nice friendly act of human-cow symbiosis. The propaganda I heard all my life was "cows produce milk anyway, and there's plenty for the calves and the humans." I thought all mammals could keep producing milk indefinitely once they'd been pregnant, as long as they didn't stop nursing, an impression I guess I got from the phenomenon of wet nurses. Children's books don't explain that cows do run out of milk and need to be impregnated again and again, so that half the pregnancies result in "waste" calves that are destined to be meat (or dog food or whatever). Even once you begin to delve into how it all works, you have to get past the dairy industry's pleasant-sounding euphemism of "freshening