Real Meat Vs. Fake Meat: What’s Really Greener?
Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant-Based Meat”. Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based.
Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne, and mulga, plus salt, minerals, and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn, and grasses plus a few worms, insects, and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollards, whey and vegetable scraps.
Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, deer, bison, rabbits, turkeys, and kangaroos have a long history of providing meat for our ancestral hunters and farmers.
In tough times the gatherers and gardeners collected and cultivated survival foods like wild onions, seasonal fruit, cabbages, tubers, and grass seeds.
But there was always a celebratory feast when the hunters returned with high-nutrition meat.
Fake “meat” is usually made from denatured soybeans, peas, and wheat, all grown using diesel fuel for cultivation, planting, harvesting, and transport – a huge carbon footprint.
Then they add meat glue, binders, and fillers to hold it together, and artificial flavoring and coloring to make it look and taste right. It is not natural, not green, and less healthy than the worst feed-lot meat.
Sustainable plant-based meat is made when cattle, sheep, goats, camels, deer, and pigs graze natural free-range pasture which gathers solar energy via their green-leaf solar collectors.
These grazing animals harvest plant biomass without using diesel and they also spread valuable plant fertilizer onto the ground and into the air.
Real meat is greener and healthier than any fake “meat” manufactured by green alchemists.
Viv Forbes is the executive director of The Saltbush Club.
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Alan
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Let’s have more of this supported by a detailed analysis of land and energy use. Attenborough gets away with promoting a vegetarian diet, but he never produces evidence to support his claims.
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Jerry Krause
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Hi Viv and PSI Readers,
I recently read that there is no such thing as a ‘wild’ horse. That instead there are only ‘feral’ horses.
Feral: “A feral animal or plant is one that lives in the wild but is descended from domesticated specimens.” (Wikipedia)
Feral horses live and thrive in wilderness environments in which one might consider there are not enough plants to support a domesticated horse. There are not ‘wild’ pigs but only ‘feral’ pigs who find and eat plants that allow them to live and thrive.
My point is there is nothing ‘un-natural’ about humans feeding domesticated animals the food that humans grow and harvest on ‘better’ land than that on which the feral horses and pigs can survive and thrive.
Have a good day, Jerry
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