Not much happening today. I ate kind of badly, if you want the truth: pita bread with hummus for lunch, and left-overs for dinner. Not a terribly inspiring sort of advert for the vegan lifestyle, but to be honest, some days I just can’t get into cooking, which is something of a shame, because I do enjoy doing it and talking about it.
I have noticed that a lot of my bread intake lately has been in the form of pita bread; lots of it in the form of garlic and herb pitas from Tesco, which are actually rather tasty, if a little stinky! That, combined with garlicky hummus, is making me somewhat difficult to be around… Hehehe.
On the subject of pita breads, I found a good recipe for making them from The Fresh Loaf, and I think I’ll be giving it a go. It looks pretty easy and fairly quick. And, of course, anyone who’s made bread at home will recognise that it is often more satisfying and tasty than the shop-bought variety, if only because you get to feel satisfied at a job well done.
One of my passions is food, both cooking and eating it, as you may have realised. The other interest which consumes a lot of my thoughts is politics, although I tend more towards the analysis of political questions and grand issues than current affairs.
That being said, it’s not often I get to combine the two, and a recent news story caught my eye as being appropriate material for this blog:
People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist.
Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.
UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.
But a spokeswoman for the UK’s National Farmers’ Union (NFU) said methane emissions from farms were declining.
Considered from a logical standpoint, this is an overwhelmingly sensible idea – Westerners eat too much meat for their own good health in general, and large scale meat farming is incredibly wasteful as a practice, and generates huge amounts of greenhouses gases in the form of methan. I nodded along, thinking that nobody could possibly have much in the way of disagreement. We all want to be healthier and save the planet, right?
And then I saw the Have Your Say page relating to the story. For those who don’t know, Have Your Say is the Beeb’s attempt at making their news stories more accessible and relevant to the public by making them open to comment. And ouch. It seems as if every selfish idiot in the world decided to turn up at once and start spewing ignorance. Highlights include:
“This is an unacceptable story, Rajendra Pachauri is a Vegetarian. Human beings need meat we are meat eating creatures and we would not have developed our brains without it”
The amount of global warming caused by the hot air that governments and UN officials produced far far exceeds that from meat production.
I think they should lead the way and speak less.
Last time I looked eatting a lot of greens causes humans to vent extra methane and hydrogen sulfide gases.
I work hard, I pay my taxes, and I don’t give a stuff what other people think. I love my lifestyle and I am never going to change.
Wow. The mind boggles. After reading the “debate”, I went back to the article and searched in vain for where Pachauri calls for meat-eaters to be beheaded or for meat to be forbidden utterly; images ran through my head of secret meetings where nervous people paid huge amounts of money for sausages and slices of bacon. And yet, all I found was a suggestion that people consume less meat in order to cause fewer forests to be cut down for grazing land and thus mitigate the effects of climate change.
And yet even that modest idea was greeted with a cavalcade of baboon-like screeching and selfishness. Unbelieveable, some people.
Crossposted to the Odd Blog.
Posted by That Other Mike 
Thirty Day Experiment 