I cannot listen to this debate in silence any longer!!! I find
the ignorance and misconceptions of the members of this list about meat
production and nutrition incredibly disturbing. MEAT IS NOT A HEALTHY
FOOD!!! Neither is any other animal product. The number one cause of
death in this country is heart disease, which is a direct result of
over-consumption of animal products. Almost all degenerative diseases are
diet related. Dairy is NOT a good source of calcium. It is an acid
forming protien like all other animal products and while it does contain
a large amount of calcium you cannot absorb any of it. Note the fact that
oseoporosis (sp?) is only prevalent in societies where we get all of our
calcium from milk but was virtually unheard of in Asia (where they
recieved most of their calcium from leafy greans and veggies) until they
adapted a more western diet. Heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, and
diabedes are but a few diseases that have been linked with the
consumption of animal products. None of these arguments are unfounded.
Dr. McDougall, Dr. Spock, and Dr. Klapper are a few of the well renouned
nutritionists that recomend a vegan diet.
On the eating plants issue... If you truly believe that plants
feel pain then the vegan diet is definitely more conducive to your values
than meat eating. It takes 16 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of beef.
Think of how many plants you save by just eating them yourself instead of
cycling them through the animals.
Animals are just as capable of feeling pain as we are. This has
been scientifically proven. So what right do we have to cause them pain
just to satisfy our taste buds when it is not at all necessary for
survival?
Again, other animals NEED to eat meat to survive, because of
their biological make up but our bodies to not resemble carnivores (ore
even omnivores) in any way. Carnivores and omnivores have sharp fanglike
teeth and straight colons. This is why they do not need fiber for healthy
digestion. While we have dull grinding mollars and rough curving colons.
We need large amounts of fiber to digest food well. Animal products, you
may wish to note, contain absolutely no fiber whatsoever. Almost all of
our closest relatives are herbivores and consume very very little or no
animal products.
We are the only species that drinks the milk of other animals and
continues to do so for their entire lives. Doesn't this seem a little
strange to you? It's just not natural. Animal products are hazardous to
your health and to the environment.
Go Vegan!!!
-Eliza
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Jan 10 03:28:48 1996
id AA01517; Wed, 10 Jan 1996 10:28:23 GMT
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 1996 10:28:16 GMT
From: Richard Twine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Meat and Masculinity!
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Tue, 9 Jan 96 17:04 EST D. Clayton 'LuvDoug' Smith wrote:
> From: D. Clayton 'LuvDoug' Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Tue, 9 Jan 96 17:04 EST
> Subject: Re: Meat and Masculinity!
> To: STUDIES IN WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> In his article yesterday on the relationship between meat and masculine
> identities, Richard Twine posed the following questions:
>
> 1. "Why are more women vegetarian/vegan?"
> 2. "Why do men find giving up meat so much more difficult?"
>
> Twine then went ahead to state that "some families/relationships are prevented
> from going veggie because of a man's insistence on meat."
>
> These statements piqued my curiosity because they presuppose so much. I
> did not necessarily agree that women were more vegetarian than men or that
> men for some biological or cultural reason were predisposed against "going
> veggie" so I decided to examine these statements using United States survey
> data.
>
> In 1993 the National Opinion Research Center included a number of
> environmental questions on their annual General Social Survey (or GSS). The
> GSS provides social scientists with the responses of a nationally
> representative sample of the noninstitutionalized, English speaking population
> over 18 years of age.
>
> The question of interest on this survey was:
>
> How often do you refuse to eat meat for moral or environmental reasons?
>
> The responses to this question were coded into four categories: Never,
> Sometimes, Often, Always.
>
> To examine the hypothesis that more women are vegetarian than men (Twine's
> first question), I had the computer develop the following table based on
> the 1993:
>
> Sex
> Male Female Row Total
>
> Never 75.2% 65.3% 69.7%
>
>
> Sometimes 18.8% 22.8% 21.1%
>
>
> Often 4.9% 8.5% 6.9%
>
>
> Always 1.1% 3.3% 2.3%
>
> ------------------------------------------
> Column Total 100.0% 100.0% 100.0%
>
> Sample Size 451 men 574 women 1025 people
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> From this table, we can see several things. First a majority
> of the American public (69.7%) have never refused meat for moral
> or environmental reasons. Second, and more important to the case
> is that it does appear that women are slightly more likely to
> refuse to eat meat than men; however, this difference is very
> small (1.1% for men compared to 3.3% for women).
>
> My conclusion is from this data is that the question "Why are
> more women vegetarian/vegan?" overstates the real world situation.
> One can emphasize that "on the average" a woman is more likely to be
> vegetarian, but it is probably better to point out that the
> distribution of men's and women's responses to the
> vegetarian question are very similar (at least in the US). There are
> still quite a few men (about 25%) that are more vegetarian than the
> majority of American women (about 65% that never refuse meat). I
> would be very cautious in making generalizations based solely "on the
> average".
>
>
> I also tried to examine Twine's second statement about the cause
> of vegetarianism. Twine chalks the difference up to the role of meat
> in masculine identity. In this space, the argument is pretty sound
> and considering that the GSS has no questions on the role of meat in
> masculine identity, I cannot examine this hypothesis; however, I can
> attempt to provide other possible "causes" for vegitarianism.
>
> I'll not attempt to go over regression analysis in this note.
> If you're interested in what I did please write me back. Anyway, I
> examined the following concepts to see if they were statistically
> related to the vegitarian question:
>
> Age
> Gender
> Education
> White/Non-white
> Number of Preteen Children in House
> Family Income
> Size of Community
> Hours of TV watched a day
> How often the respondent watched TV news
> How often the respondent watched Public TV
> Feminism - the GSS has several questions about women's
> roles in the household, in the workplace, and concerning
> children. I made a scale of these seven questions which I
> then examined in relation to the vegitarian question. If
> anyone is interested in the exact wording I will be happy
> to post/send them.
>
> What I found was that, controlling for each other using regression,
> most of these
> variables had no statistically significant relationship. The four
> variables that did show a significant relationship were education,
> gender, race(white/nonwhite) and the amount of public TV watched.
> The strongest relationship, CONTROLLING FOR THE OTHER VARIABLES, was
> between race, whether one was white or nonwhite and vegetarianism.
> This means that nonwhite were more likely to be vegetarians in the
> US, when gender, education and the amount of public television are
> held equal. I must also say that while these four variables were
> related to vegetarianism that they together explained just a small bit
> about people responses statistically (In more statistical lingo, they
> explained only about 7% of the variance in the vegetarian question).
>
> These results leave plenty of room for other explanations or better/
> more diverse questions. But they also provide alternative explanations
> for why people are vegetarian.
>
>
> Just two cents worth of reality check,
>
> D. Smith, Dept. of Sociology, Penn State University
>
>
Thanks for the stats. You didn't mention what kind of sampling technique you
used? I think the race difference is interesting though and warrants further
research.
-Richard (not Twine please, ECOFEM=informality) :-)
