The Rural Voice, 1994-10, Page 7a few forks in their travel from plate
to mouth at a farm table. But
nowadays there is more reason for
turning off meat than squeamishness
and a passing sensitivity about
animal suffering. It is called self
interest and Sarah Borowski fails to
deal with it.
Intelligent young people who
refuse cigarettes or mixing drinking
and driving just may grasp the
unsavoury health implications of a
rich meat and dairy diet. The
institutionalized myths that
encourage heavy animal food
consumption continue to fill
hospitals with unnecessary victims
of heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis
and multiple sclerosis. Thoughtful
young people may not want all that
avoidable grief in their lives. These
are not myths that Sarah Borowski
chooses to write about.
She would apparently have us
believe the hoary old one about a
vegetarian diet being a minefield of
nutritional peril to be avoided by the
young, the sick, the old and the
pregnant. Or that strength and
endurance call for meat. Rubbish.
Authorities all the way from Arnold
Schwarzenegger to the National
Academy of the Sciences tell the
opposite story. It is no accident that
successful athletes in gruelling
events like triathlons eat little meat.
So where does all this leave the
livestock producer?
First of all consumers are very
slow to cut down even when they
know they should. Second, the
cynical lobby groups for animal
products go on building up the tired
old myths to confuse and delay
legitimate consumer trends. Third,
meat and dairy products are not bad
like cigarettes, they just form too
large a part of our diet. While a
strict vegetarian diet looks after
nutrition quite nicely, there is a
problem with the appeal of the food.
It takes new recipes and maybe the
occasional inclusion of meat and
dairy to satisfy most people's tastes.
And now the really good news.
Even if our domestic market
Feedback
declines, a foreign market of
staggering proportions grows daily.
The emerging markets of Asia and
Latin America will not be slow to
appreciate the superiority of, for
instance, Ontario's grassland beef.
And the classes that suddenly
become wealthy will be able to
afford to import it. Beef raised on
arid hillsides or in demolished
rainforests should be no competition.
Initiatives like Market Grey -Bruce
will be required as the mcck don't
always inherit markets.
It seems to me that finger
pointing at air -headed pop stars,
wishful thinking and preferring one
set of myths, to another just because
they are our myths as Sarah
Borowski has done, is a recipe for
failure that our farm communities
don't need or descrve.0
John Rowland
llanover. dhti'
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OCTOBER 1994 3