Tag: Veganism

A Candle Has Gone Out: The Legacy of Jane Goodall

It’s with profound sadness I learned yesterday of primatologist Jane Goodall’s death at age 91.

Blessed with remarkable genes, she lived life with zest up to the very last, tirelessly traveling across international landscapes to raise funds for her Jane Goodall Institute in Tanzania, founded in 1977.

I read her NY Times obituary, but it falls short in evaluating the plenitude of her achievement and its significance for all of us. I learned some time ago that the NYT composes many of its obituaries in advance, ready-to-go like a frozen pizza.

It doesn’t take into account her devotion to the Tanzanians among whom she worked for sixty years, as earnest for their welfare as she was for chimpanzees, humanity’s closest relatives, possessed like us with dual capacity for good and evil.

She gave early warning of climate change as an eyewitness of its exponential ravages in Africa, the front line of its advance.

You can learn much of what she accomplished through reading among her many books The Shadow of Man or A Reason for Hope of her work in Africa, breakthroughs in science, and personal beliefs, some of them controversial such as her advocacy of birth control availability to help African families limit their family size. Tanzania is second among Africa’s 54 nations in population growth. With a present population of 68 million, its projected 2100 population will swell to 283 million, imperiling its subsistence resources.

Goodall had faced an uphill climb in winning acceptance among male scientists, stubbornly suspicious of any woman’s achievement in investigative research. Initially, when setting out for Africa, she had been a waitress and secretary. A wealthy donor, however, recognizing her brilliance, provided the funding for a Ph.D. in ethology at Cambridge University, Goodall one of the rare individuals to directly achieve a Ph. D., not having been an undergraduate.

I confess to a personal attachment to Goodall who, like me, suffered from lifelong prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder inhibiting one’s ability to recognize faces.

Currently the fate of her African investment, employing thousands of Tanzanians, remains under unrelenting threat with population growth, agricultural expansion, deforestation, fragmented forest, habitat loss, logging, and lack of consistent government enforcement of land use laws; not least, the volatility of donor contributions on which the work depends, collectively posing a Sword of Damocles hovering over its future.

There remain just 2300 chimpanzees throughout Tanzania, with an estimated 90 to 100 in Gombe National Park, the site of her research. Those numbers are down from the original 150 as elsewhere in Tanzania, bush meat remains a frequent staple despite its health risks. AIDS had its origin in Africa, consequent with eating chimpanzees harboring the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV). Goodall was a committed vegan, ardently opposed to factory farming.

Also contributing to their demise is ever expanding human encroachment.

A friend of animals, champion of Mother Earth, always with passion and never without hope, Dr. Goodall is in my pantheon of heroes, her many awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (USA), the Steven Hawking Medal of Science for Communication, and designation as Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

Acknowledging her advanced age, she approached death as her “next great adventure. When you die, there’s either nothing, it’s the end, or there’s something. And things have happened to me in my life that I feel there is something. And if there is, I can’t think of a greater adventure than dying.” 

I wish I lived in a world which lowered its flags in tribute to Dr. Goodall:

”Somehow we might keep hope alive—a hope we can find a way to alleviate poverty, assuage anger, and live in harmony with the environment, with animals, and with each other,” she wrote.

A candle has gone out and I feel lonely and in a dark place.

rj

The Fate of our Animal Friends in Pandemic Times

The untold suffering of our animal friends, victims of collapsing slaughter houses in the wake of mass worker viral infections, is so manifest it shouldn’t be ignored. It isn’t just Asian wet markets that need closing, though China bristles in denial, but industrial farming here at home, latent with cruelty, harbinger of disease, pervasive in despoiling the earth and advancing climate change. We rightly become angry at those who selfishly resist public safeguards like wearing masks and practicing social distancing yet, hypocritically, continue to crave meat that perpetuates such wrongs. I’m not asking you to become vegan, but at least reduce your intake of meat. Let’s get rid of this institutionalized mass cruelty. There are better ways.

This morning’s Guardian informs us that “at least two million animals have already reportedly been culled on farms, and that number is expected to rise. Approved methods for slaughtering poultry include slow suffocation by covering them with foam, or by shutting off the ventilation into the barns.” I’ll not even tell you about the plight of pigs, those most remarkably sentient animals.

Peter Singer, the world’s renowned ethicist, makes good sense to me and, hopefully, to you:

“It is tragic that countries such as China and India, as they become more prosperous, are copying western methods and putting animals in huge industrial farms. If this continues, the result will be animal suffering on an even greater scale than now exists in the west, as well as more environmental damage and a rise in heart disease and cancers of the digestive system. It will also be grossly inefficient. As consumers, we have the power – and the moral obligation – to refuse to support farming methods that are cruel to animals and bad for us.”

—rj

Confessions of a reluctant vegan

Food for Life distributes food on an internati...

I never thought I’d give-up meat.   Up to my mid fifties, I ate meat at virtually every meal, starting out with bacon and eggs in the morning; baloney sandwiches or a Big Mac for lunch; chicken or hamburger paddy at night.  Once a week I’d treat myself to a bucket of KFC chicken.  A steak was the right choice for special nights out.

Then it happened.  Karen shared an article she had just read in our local newspaper on the horrors of the turkey industry.  I’ll spare you the details, but it was pretty awful.

Both Karen and I then decided on switching to a veggie diet, though still including animal products such as eggs and cheese.  We made that decision the night before Thanksgiving Day, 1996, and we’ve been vegetarians now for close to 17-years and never looked back.

People choose vegetarianism for any of several reasons such as reducing weight, lowering heart risk, and promoting the environment.  We chose vegetarianism for ethical reasons, believing it wrong to inflict suffering on any sentient creature.  As the saying goes, always remember that the meat you eat once had a face.

The vegetarian diet, once you get past the meat cravings, is actually pretty good.  Sometimes it’s even too easy, what with all the veggie substitutes out there there for turkey, ham,  chicken and the like.  I can make a pasta dish complete with soy meatballs and fool people every time.  I can also fashion you a sumptuous veggie chili that tastes every bit like the original.  By the way, becoming a vegetarian doesn’t necessarily translate into a better diet than the ASD if you just gorge on junk foods like chips and sweets.

Transitioning to a vegan diet, however, has been a real challenge.  I chose to go this way about 15 months ago when a routine blood test showed my glucose at 108, meaning I was pre-diabetic.  It’s in this stage that you can make lifestyle changes that can prevent or delay the onset of diabetes.  I also found out I had high insulin resistance, meaning the insulin that the pancreas pumps out to handle blood sugar was having difficulty entering my cells, where it does its work.

I had to do two things in a hurry:  refine my diet even more by eliminating virtually all highly concentrated sugar foods such as soda, which I drank daily; candy, and baked goods.  I also needed to avoid refined, or processed, food products with their white flour, fructose, corn syrup and high sodium that are probably, along with meat and dairy, instigators of many of our health ills like obesity, coronary disease and, possibly, cancer.

I needed to eliminate foods having cholesterol content as well, which meant giving up cheese, one of my favorite foods.  Fatty foods clog the mitochondria, or cell gateways through which insulin accesses the cells, and obviously don’t do the arteries any good either.

Now I may surprise you when I say I don’t like going vegan–no more kitsch, or cheese, or morning fried eggs with buttered toast, or even pizza.  No more lovely potato salad.   No more sumptuous chocolate bars, cheese cake, apple pie.  Not even fruit juice.

It seems a diet made for hell, not heaven.  Frozen vegetables and mountains of lettuce just don’t cut it for me.  It’s like I’m turning into some kind of bunny.  It may have been ok for Gandhi, but hey, I’m not Gandhi.  Mexicans may love their beans, but day after day, it gets old for me.

What really makes things worse is that I’ve always been a slender guy not needing to lose weight.  On this diet over the past year, however, I’ve shed 15 pounds and have to cram nuts to steady my weight.  Weight loss may be great for most diabetics, who tend to be overweight, but not for yours truly.

At times I’m strongly tempted to compromise and resume the vegetarian diet, but then I remember it didn’t do anything for my insulin resistance, except maybe to encourage it.  Doing vegan, however, combined with aerobic exercise 5 times a week, I’ve cut my insulin resistance nearly in half, dropped my fasting glucose below 100, and have begun to transition from small LDL-p particles to the safer, large LDL-p particles.  Trigylcerides and bad cholesterol are way down;  HDL, the good cholesterol, is up sharply.  I think that’s where the second life style change kicks in.  You can’t just eat nutritionally dense foods.  You have to exercise vigorously 5 times a week for 30 minutes.  Even better, add resistance exercise 2 to 3 times a week.

But back to veganism.  Maybe it’s like being a baby again and Mama’s stand-by:  “Now eat up your veggies.  This bite’s for Mama.  This one for Papa.  This one for….

To put it frankly, I wish there were an easier, more appetizing route to good health.  But then again, all the studies that count show that diet matters and that a plant saturated diet does best for fostering good health.  The soundest dietary advice I ever got was put so simply by nutrition expert Michael Pollan in his fine book, In Defense of Food:  “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”  Though it isn’t easy, my own experience confirms its wisdom.

–rj

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