I Do Love Celebrities

Jonathan Safran Foer might not like to be called a celebrity, but I'm going to do it nonetheless. Not to bug him, since I'm a fan and I hold him in high esteem, but because I'm a fan and hold him in high esteem and know that anything he says will be heard by many people. Which is why I applaud him, as a celebrity, for writing Eating Animals.

When I first saw mention on his book my stomach gripped into a knot and my eyes filled. Because for some time I've been working on a manuscript about eating meat. My finger hovered over the delete key, ready to throw what there is of my book into the virtual garbage can, until my partner Dave, always one to see the bigger picture, said that he thought that maybe, just maybe, there was room in the world for more than one book on the topic. Further, he pointed out that this was not the first book about eating meat.

I do still feel grim about the prospect of being published now that someone so famous has covered the topic in such an articulate and compelling way, but I am going to keep writing nonetheless. It's an issue I've been interested in since I gave up meat at the age of seventeen. And Dave is right, it's not going away. There are new reasons to be interested in what we eat that simply didn't have currency or urgency back when I became a vegetarian.

Still, I am impressed that someone with such a big profile would take the subject on. Look what happened to Oprah when she suggested people cut down on burgers. I'm sure there will be backlash but I hope that prior to that he receives an enormous amount of praise for putting his personal opinions out there in such an honest way. Hats off to you, Mr Foer.

Less food for everybody - is this not fairly scary?

Blood chilling... As growing seasons grow shorter there will be even less food.

Oxfam says interviews it carried out with farmers in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America show that seasons are shrinking in number and variety.

This is destroying harvests, pushing farmers to abandon traditional crops and causing widespread hunger -- which, the agency predicts, will likely be "climate change's most savage impact on humanity in the near future".

Rainfall is reported to be more erratic, shorter and more violent. Unusual weather events -- including storms, drier spells and fluctuating temperatures -- are happening more often. And farmers say winds and storms have got stronger.

This is bad for everybody

Am I Making Myself Sick?

My doctor called me a few days ago, and while it wasn't with news that I was going to die, it wasn't great.

He'd received the results from my blood test, a follow-up to a similar 'check all vitamins and minerals' test about ten months ago. I'd asked for that first test because I've been a vegetarian for 26 years and thought it might be worth a once-over. I felt pretty rundown, and knew that over the years I'd probably done too little exercise, taken on too many energy-sapping jobs, and had gone through two pregnancies, two bouts of breastfeeding, a divorce and a fair bit of stress, all meat-free.

Suffice to say, doctors don't initiate calls when things are going well. My iron, zinc and magnesium were lower than they were last time. My vitamin D levels were dangerously low. My doctor sternly told me I needed to get a handle on this. I told him I'd been taking vitamins almost daily. In fact, for a good three months I had taken them daily along with tonics supplied by a naturopath and had been convinced I was on the road to robust good health. Evidently not.

So I put down the phone and wept. I know what these deficiencies do. I know I'm very tired and often struggle to get through the day (iron), making it hard for me to do my job, care for my children and stay on top of all the other stuff of life. I know I am prone to catching whatever ailment people around me have (zinc). I know what's causing my swinging appetite and fatigue (magnesium). And I know that vitamin D deficiency is serious because lately I seem to hear about it on the radio every day. I know it's often a deficiency shown in patients who have cancer, MS, and depression. It's enough to make you weep for days...and then wonder whether your emotions are real or the result of a random vitamin which one would think was common as muck since it comes from the sun for god's sake!

Can it be that my no smoking, no drugs, light drinking, fresh food yadda yadda vegetarian diet is bad for me?

The crappest thing about this is that I honestly thought I was 'handling' it. I thought I was boringly healthy. I see a naturopath, swallow all the goop she gives me, go out into the sunshine, eat tofu/tempeh/beans and take vitamins when I remember. But it's not enough, evidently, and his phone call, which also included the words 'serious', 'immediately' and 'every single day' brought up a whle lot of unpleasant issues for me.

I don't want to eat meat at all, ever. I eat fish every now and then, having reintroduced it to my diet some years back, under duress (breastfeeding second time and chronically exhausted) and knowing how hypocritical it is since, no matter how smelly or stupid, fish are living things. And I don't want to eat living things. Now, both naturopath and doctor tell me I should eat fish three times a week - or more! - or I'm going to get very sick.

I've long wondered if my diet had some connection to my insomnia - and believe me, I'm aware of what a whining hypercondriac I'm sounding like right now - and I think it might. A lot of the women I know who are vegetarian suffer from sleep disorders. My doctor tells me there's no link but I'm not convinced. Especially knowing I'm not giving my body a lot of what it needs to function well in other areas.

But If I have to choose between being tired and weepy and keeping true to what I believe, I'm opting for an ethical life. I'm not being perverse - I just don't think I could face myself if I decided to fang into a T-bone so that I had more pep in my step, or so that I could make it to the top of the steps...

Starting yesterday, I have a daily schedule for my pill-taking. No more half-assed occasional vitamin taking; I'm treating them as essential. I'm acting like a drug addict or some crazed evangelical health nut. And I've marked a date, three months from now, for another blood test. It better be better.

Foie Gras Wars

Hilarious, in a depressing and head-slapping way. The world is on the brink of economic and environmental ruin and people are warring about foie gras. An inspired topic for a book - my next purchase.

Read about it at the Daily Beast.

What's happening in the bowels?

There's no image that seems appropriate for this post. A rabbit is as good as anything.

I called a dietitian today - the next person on my list of interviewees for my meat book, Chapter Health (sample chapter the publisher is waiting for so patiently). I've truly exhausted the helpful and well-informed naturopath I've been visiting. I hadn't seen a naturopath before - evidently there's a hundred-question limit per appointment. Who knew? She has, I think, answered most of my questions regarding iron, protein, zinc, combining, absorbing, good recipes, local restaurants, reputable vitamin suppliers. Most. Time to let her recover...

When I called the dietitian, she asked about my bowels. Third, maybe fourth question. Granted, hers is a profession where almost any question can seem legitimate if asked with suitable authority. Do you eat wheat? Do you like your mother? Do you spend much time lying on the ground staring at clouds? All possibly relevant to your physical health I imagine. However, she opened with bowels. I answered of course, and am now curious what else is in her bag of queries. Hoping to stay firmly on the topic of meat.

I think I ought to meet a Chinese medical practitioner next since those I'm spoken with over the years have always responded to my then-vague and meandering queries about health with horror that I don't eat pork (that there's the problem). Ginger in summer and cold foods in winter also made star appearances as Problems.

....................

For lunch today, I went to a vegetarian cafe near my occasional workplace. I had a thick wrap made from some type of flat bread rolled tightly around generous chunks of tofu and tempeh that had been fried in tamari, juicy tomato, crunchy bean sprouts, lettuce and cucumber, spring onion and a spicy satay sauce. Hippie delicious. As soon as I finished, I wanted another.

The man who served me (sigh, a stereotype of skinny ponytail hanging limply from near-bald pate, wire-rimmed glasses, faded purple t-shirt with a slogan long past legible, floppy sandals) put the plate on the table and said that it probably wasn't my normal thing but that he hoped I'd enjoy it.

I was too hungry to waste time being affronted but seriously, I've been chowing down on tofu for several decades. Does what you wear really indicate what you eat? For him, sure. But I haven't touched meat since I was seventeen and back then my role models were black-clad, pasty, angry English musicians. Now I spend a lot less time in second-hand stores, but even on a non-workday I'm not going to wear hemp or very crappy t-shirts but I suspect I know about tofu than the chef. Well, were there much to know...

Anyway, here's a menu that might inspire should you find yourself unsure of what to have for a veggie meal. Black tie optional.

Bacon Explosion

That's the real name of a recipe - Bacon Explosion.

The end product looks like roadkill, and I say that informedly, having had a friend who at one point during his university life ate roadkill as part of a large and fairly deranged statement about man-environment-meat-cars-and-sustainability. Or somesuch. He was broke and so ate possums, frogs, cats and snakes he found on the roadside, turning his nose up at birds for reasons sanitary. Any lofty meaning he wanted to convey with this act was lost on his revolted audience. There may have been one or two alpaca-jumper wearing, earnest, off to South America friends who supported his dietary choice, but as far as I know no-one supported him enough to join him on his night-time trawls.

Anyway, Bacon Explosion looks like something my friend would've found on Highway One. It would take a very fast car driving over something that was very ugly in life to make a meal like this.

Here's the recipe, if that's the right word for this smashing together of dead things.

Oh, but before the how-to, know that Bacon Explosion, described by the New York Times as 'pig, pig and more pig' is one of the most popular recipes circulating on the internet right now (390,000 viewings before Christmas 2008). Evidently rolled up pig - offering a bumper 500 grams of fat - is just the centrepiece for a stylish modern dinner party.

So, putting aside my ethical, health and aesthetic judgements for a moment, here's the meat.

Meat without the Animal

From a story on NPR titled Lab-Grown Meat a Reality, But Who Will Eat It?

Though the idea of growing animal parts in a lab rather than on a farm has been around for a century, it has never seemed like a good time to talk about man-made meat. But the concept has had some famous proponents, including Winston Churchill in his 1932 essay "Fifty Years Hence": "We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium."

Churchill was likely inspired by the work of Alexis Carrel, who at the time of Churchill's comment had been keeping alive a cultured piece of chicken heart tissue for 20 years. The Nobel Prize-winning scientist kept his experiment small, but it fed many an imagination, including that of author Frederik Pohl.

Pohl wrote the 1952 sci-fi novel The Space Merchants, in which tissue-cultured meat gets a starring if inglorious role — it's the starter ingredient for an ever-growing lumpen food source known affectionately as Chicken Little.

...

Vladimir Mironov, a biologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, is among a handful of scientists culturing meat from animal tissue. His work involves turning formless, textureless patches of the stuff into mass-produced form — like meat sheets, or what one might affectionately call "shmeat."

"I personally believe that this [is the] inescapable future," he says.

But standing between Mironov and shmeat right now are production models, production facilities, venture capital — and consumer demand.