Vegetarianism (Part 9)

Tell me, how much do you know about Africa. Let's start with Africa, about seven million years ago, because that's where human life began. The climate, the creation of our ancestors, our beloved kin of bacteria, fungi and plants, eased from wet to dry.

Cradled in the grasses were large herbivores. Approximately 25 milllion years ago, in the exuberance of evolution, a few plants tried growing their bases instead of their tips. Grazing would not kill the plants, quite the opposite actually. It would encourage them by stimulating root growth. All plants want nitrogen and predigested nutrients, and ruminants could provide those to the grasses as they grazed. This is why, unlike other plants, grasses contain no toxins or chemical repellents, no mechanical deterrents like thorns or spines to discourage animals. Grasses want to be grazed. Bear in mind, it was grass that created cows, human so called 'domestication' was, in comparison, just the tiniest tug on the bovine genome, and cows tugged back with the lactose tolerance gene.

Our direct line lived in trees, until the trees began to disappear. We had two evolutionary edges to see us through, our disposable thumbs and our omnivorous digestion. We had the capacity to manipulate tools and we had bodies equipped with both the instincts and the digestion to handle a range of foods. Well, some animals are monofeeders. You must be thinking, what does that mean? Example, koalas eat only eucalyptus and fig wasps dine only figs. Monofeeding is a gamble, if your food source fails, you go down with it. But a brain, which is a huge energy sink, can be small for a monofeeder, which spares energy for every other function.

Human are not monofeeders. Back before we were human, when we were tree dwellers, we ate mainly fruit, leaves and insects. But from the moment we stood upright, we've been eating large ruminants. Four million years ago, Australopithecines, our species' forerunners, ate meat. Anyone studied human Anthropology or evolution before? You would have heard of it, and might be familiar with this species. 

I would try not to discuss too much about human evolution and anthropology, but anyone who is interested to read about this species, go ahead and enjoy it. This species, primarily based in Africa, was eating grass-feeding animals, the large ruminants swaddled in savanna. 

We come from a long line of hunters, we are hunter gatherers. This is what we learned, and in the learning, we became human. We made tools to take what the grasses offered, large animals laden with nutrients, more nutrients that we could ever hope to find in fruit and leaves. Our brains are twice as large as they should be for a primate our size. Meanwhile, our digestive tract are 60 percent smaller. Our bodies were built by nutrient dense foods.

Now, let's compare humans to gorilla. Gorillas are vegetarians and they have both the smallest brains and the largest digestive tracts of any primate. We are the opposite. And our brains, the true legacy of our ancestors, need to be fed. 

Well, what can I say, the vegetarians have their own story, a very different one than the one told in the bones and tools, teeth and skulls. If we really look at gorillas, what we find are animals that contain the fermentative bacteria necessary to digest cellulose. We humans contain no such thing. 

For most of us, the bodies beneath our skin, inside our ribs, are unknown territory. But if we lay aside the story we long for, and listen to our bodies, our biology will not lie. Now, check this out. There are two small differences between humans and dogs. One is that our canine teeth are shorter, and the second, our intestines are longer. We are omnivore, we are built to eat meat, for the protein and fat it provides. There is absolutely no debate about it, and the vegetarians can argue all day long but the fact is, we were hunters, our meat eating heritage, is an inescapable fact. 

Life, is only possible through death. Everything is dependant on killing, whether directly or indirectly. You are either doing it, or waiting for someone else to do it for you. Our ancestors knew how to use their tools. Dangerous animals such as rhinoceros, wild horses, mammoths and cave bears, were large and strong and without defenses, our primal ancestors would have been snapped into two by the jaw strength of a cave bear. 

Agriculture, comes with 'diseases of civilization'. Understand that no one speaks of diseases of hunter gatherers. It is because they are largely disease free. Look around us, do you notice more and more people are suffering from chronic diseases and health illnesses? List of the diseases includes arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, cancer and lots more. A whole host of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions. These diseases are ubiquitous amongst the civilized and are absolute rarities for hunter gatherers. 

Do bear in mind, cereal grains which you eat every morning for months and years, are a relatively recent addition to the human diet and represent a dramatic departure from those foods to which we are genetically adapted. We are eating foods that didn't exist until few thousands years ago, domesticated annuals, especially grains, and even more their industrial endpoint of refined flours, sugars and oils, particularly cooking oils. 

Do remember, our teeth are made to eat meats, not cellulose. Our stomachs are singular and not multiple, and our stomachs secrete acid, butchering tools are found besides butchered bones, and to state the obvious, we are contemporary hunter gatherers. 

To be continued...

Vegetarianism (Part 8)

Let me reveal to you one fact about food. Western countries support the giant food producers with subsidies totaling $360 billion. Go Google it yourself, and you will get this information. Food industry globally, is a multi trillion dollars business, an extremely massive industry. 

I have a question. Are you an environmentalist? Anyone? If you are, and wants to stop world hunger, here is what you should do. First of all, try everything in your power, to stop the grain cartels, including revoking their corporate charters. I know this sounds a bit insane for a normal citizen, but whoever who has connection to the federal government, there is every possible chance this can be achieved. Then, understand how federal farm policies are driving local economies into ruin and farmers into suicide the world over. Get involved with the local state and national campaigns to change their policies. There are also human rights, feminist and pro democracy movements in poor countries who could use our money and out help. 

You got to realize, refraining from factory farm animal products is a righteous act, for animals and the earth, but it will not save a single hungry person. Buying soy burger is an emotional fix that does not address the tenacious and terrible roots of power and inequality. Check the label, you are probably giving money to the very corporations that are creating the problem.

Remember I briefly discussed about Ghana in my last post? Now, let's take Japan as another example. If the Japanese weren't replying on the fisheries around the world and trade with agriculture exporting nations, two thirds of the country would be starving. Likewise in Great Britain, over half of the country's food comes from outside its borders. There are clearly more people in those countries then the land can support. 

Because there's no mass starvation in Japan or Great Britain, and the stores are filled with staples, no one realizes that they are collectively overshot their locality, their bioregion and their country. Has any of you wonder how many people can the planet support? If you use 1800 CE as your benchmark, there were roughly 1 billion people at the start of the fossil fuel age. If you use 8000 BCE, the beginning of agriculture, there were about 8 million of us at the start of the fossil soil age.

Human life, like all life, require resources. But the link between cause and effect, between consumption and degradation, has been broken in our cultural consciousness. Do you realize that agriculture increases human numbers through the very act of destroying the landbase? 

When a forest is cleared for crops the loss of biodiversity translates into more food for people. Soil begins to deplete immediately but that won't be noticed for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, which is the fate of nearly all agricultural soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for decades. But, while the soil is steadily eroding, crops will support the growing village. 

This is not a romanticize life in a hunter gatherer culture, means our primal ancestors. Breast feeding is often toted as hunter gatherer birth control, but it's only about 80% reliable. Lactation will stop a woman's menses, but she may still ovulate, which means she can still conceive. Some cultures have a different views of sexual intercourse altogether. Semen is believed to contain a life force that strengthens a man if kept and weakens him if spent. In some cultures, like the  Melanesian Islands, semen is passed from older men to younger in religion rituals, while sexual intercourse with women is considered a duty for procreation, to be avoided as much as possible.

Like almost everything that humans do, sex is a social institution. Who does it, why they do it, how they do it. The answers are shaped by the culture we live in. Ok, lets not prolong the discussion about sex. But, I want to be clear that social hierarchies based on sex, race, age or even status, exist in many hunter gatherer cultures.

Let me tell you guys some interesting facts about one of the hunter gatherer culture in Paraguay. The Ache, live in the tropical rainforest of Paraguay, where married women are completely dependant on their husbands for meat (food). It was up to each individual man whether or how much to share. Not only that, but the food that the women collected also belonged to their husbands. The women could only eat after the men had taken what they wanted.  Now, in this real life scenario, an existing primal culture, where men in many societies restrict the amount of resources that their wives can use, even food resources.

Food taboos are common throughout the world, in both hunter gatherer and agricultureal societies, and the most common taboos involve what and when women are allowed to eat. Another example is the Chipewyans, where women only ate after the men took what they wanted, which meant they often got nothing. Also, in parts of Indonesia, all meat belongs to men. If any of you stayed in Australia before, or have studied about Australian Aborigines, you will know that the order of preference in food distribution is old men, hunting men, children, dogs and the women, blatantly prevent women from eating animal fat most of their lives.

For most women in our industrial, media saturated culture, every meal has been turned into a tightrope strung between self loathing and chronic hunger, at any given moment, approximately 70% of women are on some sort of diet, and almost half are continually gaining and losing weight. Bear in mind, eating disorders are now third most common chronic illness in adolescent girls.


Now, as we have seen, agriculture is the drawdown of fossil soil and the monocropping of continents. But, agriculture is also the devastation of human culture. The myth of civilization is that it creates security, when what it creates is centralized social hierachy and systematic hunger.

You must realize, that famine is a creation of farming. Millions of people have starved over the last six thousands of years! The myth is that civilization has been a net plus for human rights and human happiness. Since history belongs to the victors, that is what the civilized would say, but they are the ones who owned the slaves, the rest of us. We are living in a brief historical moment when cheap fossil fuel has made unimaginable consumption possible. To grind the grain of the civilized, female slaves spent their lives bent over on their knees and hands, leaving their arthritic and deformed legs and spines to speak to us in silent outrage. The question is, are you listening? Agriculture foods, the grains, the beans and vegetables, we are all urged to eat in the service of world community, are the foods of displacement and destruction, not justice or peace. To be blunt, they are the foods or slavery, and when this short moment of oil engorgement fades into memory and then into myth, we will be left with sweat. Grain requires sweat.

The planet wants to be living a community. not a monocrop. Agricultural food is soaked clean through in oil and blood. Take the fossil fuel out of the equation and tell me where there is room for human rights. Agriculture, its foods, its civilizations, is the end of the world.

Vegetarianism (Part 7)

Why do we feed corn to cows? The corn will sicken them and in turn, the humans who eat them. So why do it? To answer that, first of all, we need to understand farm policy for that country, especially US. I remember very often people tell me that grain fed beef is good for health, and there are also really crazy people who told me eating organic whole foods is not good. Well, from time to time, I meet some really 'out of whack' folks and usually these people are just lazy and don't bother about their health so much. 

Anyway, let's continue with some discussion about something else. I'm not going to discuss the farm policy of different countries as it will be quite boring, and I don't think most of you readers out there want to know it either. We feed corn to cows because it's now cheap. Some cultures consider feeding corn to animals a sacrilege, for corporate control of our food, it's a necessity. 

Everything about corn meshes smoothly with the gears of this giant machine, grass don't. Grain is the closest thing in nature to an industrial commodity, storable, portable, fungible, ever the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Since it can be accumulated and traded. grain is a form of wealth. It is a weapon too, the nation with the biggest surpluses of grain have always exerted power over the ones in short supply.

Throughout history, governments have encouraged their farmers to grow more then enough grain, to protect against famine, to free up labor for other purposes, to improve the trade balance and generally to augment their own power. In an industrial economy, the growing of grain supports the larger economy, which is the chemical industry, the oil industry as well as biotech industries, usually in most developed countries.

Having enough of this orgy of cheap carbohydrates, the government then helped the grain cartels to use its 'subsidization' with tax relief, exempting them from environmental protection laws, and developing a meat grading system that elevated the fat 'marbling' of grain fed beef.

Now, understand grass. Grass is not a commodity. It can't be easily stored, shipped or standardized and even traded. It, the grass, like sunlight and rain, is the ultimate local, decentralized resource. And like sunlight and rain, it cannot lead to the condensation of power. Grass farmers need few if any fertilizers, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and fossil fuel. They aren't an industry. They are actual farmers, engaged in work that requires a skill set, not an instruction manual.

Grass, can't be turned into the hyper-processed cheap junk that fills our grocery stores. It can only be passed through a ruminant who will turn it into food, not a commodity, food as rooted as grass in a local ecology and a local economy, and potentially a local politics.

We feed corn to cows because corn is impossibly cheap, and feeding it to cows makes them grow fast, much faster then their native diet. A grain feed steer reaches market weight in nine to twelve months instead of two years. Commercial chickens reach adulthood in six weeks rather then the five months they normally took.

The resulting product may be cheap, but there is a price to be paid for all of us, animals, land, rivers, farmers, consumers, and citizens, paying it. So, you are an environmentalist, being a vegetarian, then why are you supporting commodities instead of food, corporate profits over local, living economies, and power over justice?

Farming is a pyramid. They have flooded the airwaves with their PR campaigns. Well, I'm sure all of you know the tagline, "Supermarket to the world". But, do you understand what this tiny handful of companies is and what it's doing? They have driven prices down below production costs and kept them there. They have gotten the federal government, the taxpayers (which is us!), to make up the difference. They have destroyed small farms and local economies across the globe. And now, they own patents on the seeds themselves. I'm sure some of you might heard of Monsanto? Those seeds represent the knowledge, labor, and heritage of all of humanity, and their DNA is now owned by one of those super huge powerful companies such as Monsanto and ADM.

Folks, read the labels on your soymilk and the groovy multi grain flakes you pour in. You might be surprised what you read and discovered. Anyone heard of Dean Foods? Probably not in Malaysia as much, but in US, it's huge. Dean Foods owns White Wave, and guess what? The main shareholders of Dean Foods are Citigroup, Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, GE, Home Depot, Microsoft (yes, Microsoft!), Pfizer, Phillip Morris, and of course, Wal Mart. How about General Mills? Anyone heard of this company? Do you know who are the shareholders for this company? Check this out. The shareholders are, Chevron, Disney, DuPont, Exxon Mobil, GE, McDonalds (yes!), Monsanto, Nike, Pepsico, Starbucks and Phillip Morris. Also, I'm sure some of you guys heard of Kraft Foods right? Cheese, remember? And yes, Phillip Morris owns Kraft Foods (if I could still remember). I could go on and on revealing tons of these information, but am I making my point here?

Before I sign off this topic, check this out. Consider a farmer in Ghana, who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed itself and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it's cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producer in the developed world much more to  produce the rice, he doesn't have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him to grow it, so if he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can't feed his family anymore. Sad, but true.

If you are an environmentalist, why don't you know any of this? Have a moment for yourself, think and ask yourself, why? And of course, you must have an open mind. I shared quite a bit about 'politics' related topic in this post. Till then...

Vegetarianism (Part 6)

The logic of the land, tells us to eat animals that can eat the tough cellulose that survives there. But the logic of the vegans leads us away from the local, our only chance of being sustainable, back to the desperate dying wetlands, her eroding delta. Yes, I may say that eating grains directly is less water-intensive that eating grain-fed beef. But why eat either? Animals integrated into appropriate polycultures destroy nothing.

Now, my question to you. Are you an environmentalist? If yes, why are you killing a distant river with every bite? Up until 1950, agriculture was still limited by the amount of energy that fell from the sun. What that meant practically was that animals has to be integrated into small farms because their manure, the best source of naturally occurring nitrogen, was needed there. 

Animals ate the cellulose in pastures, pastures rotated with annual crops. In most places, most soil wore out and eventually imperialism was the final results, but there were limits of biology and physics, building blocks and energy. Nitrogen was prized, and every molecule of that was used by hungry plants and ultimately hungry humans.

You have probably heard that amino acids are the building blocks of protein. Well, guess what? Nitrogen is the building block of amino acids, the alphabet of DNA. While nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, it's not available for life processes since it's paired in tight bonds. To be available those pairs must be split and then rejoined to hydrogen atoms. This is called 'fixing nitrogen". If you are a gardener, you might have read that leguminous plants 'fix' nitrogen. As usual, it is the bacteria doing the work, but these particular bacteria live in a symbiotic relationship with leguminous plants, trading in the nitrogen for a droplet of plant sugar. This is where essentially all the fixed nitrogen on the earth started.

Do remember that annual plants only get their day in the sun after a catastrophe opens a niche in the perennial polyculture. By the way, does any of you know that nitrogen makes great bombs? We have Germany's nitrates came from Chilean mines, until British disrupted the German supply. Anyone heard of Haber Bosch? His discovery kept Germany in the war business. It also won him the Nobel Prize. This brilliant guy also developed poison gases, including ammonia and chlorine. 

Now, the myth is that civilization is progress, for human rights, human health and human culture. The myth continues, agriculture's foods are the foods of peace and justice. If I could still remember right, since 1950 or so, the fertilizer has come from fossil fuel. Breaking our dependance on the sun and nature's fertility meant an explosion in the grain production. Please do understand that we are only here, is because of fossil fuel, because we figure out how to transform stored energy into edible energy. There is no where else to get that energy.

As the natural gas and oil get more expensive, then prohibitively expensive, there will be no way to keep that grain coming. And then what? But, it's the industrialization of agriculture that has made factory farming possible. This is another point political vegetarians need to understand. 

Animals were taken off from their native food, out of their natural life patterns, because they weren't needed on farms anymore. Their ability to turn cellulose into protein wasn't an asset when corn could be grown so densely, so cheaply out of bare land and fossil fuel. And the truly bizarre began to make economic sense. Guess what? Mountain of corn that the US produced had nowhere else to go but into animals. Cheap corn. Crops yields have doubled as of year 1997, and the practice of repeatedly plowing the fields, removing the covering of grasses, and poisoning the bugs and the weeds(pesticides, herbicides, etc) robs the soil of most of its life giving characteristics.

As of now, it takes more then a calorie of fossil fuel to produce a calorie of food energy for humans, somewhere between 4 and 10 calories of fossil fuel for a calorie of food. The fossil fuel is in both the fertilizer and the pesticides, and it's essential to the machinery needed to plant, harvest, process and transport grain. The political vegetarians, however noble with their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in complete ignorance of where the food comes from.  Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. Every single vegetarians look shocked when I told them that plants are highly carnivorous! Are you stunned too when reading this right now? You must be wondering do plants eat? 

Before I sign off this post, let me briefly enlighten you about plants. Now, majority of the plants, every single one of them, usually has its own microorganism which protects them. Example, the fungus is protecting the host plant from the predatory parasites, and how does this work? Well, the fungus, is able to secrete a type of 'glue', sticky substance, which is used to melt minerals from the rock. Heard of rock salt? Yeah, that's where the minerals came from. And when the predatory parasite comes within the range of the host plant, it will get stuck in the 'glue' (imagine spiderman web), and guess what? This part is interesting folks. Check this out. the fungus then split open the gut of the parasite, and then eats the internal organs, and feed them to the host plant. Why? Plants wants nutrients, particularly MEATS, and it is the internal organs which has the most value in nutrients. Any internal organs in animals are nutrient dense. Unbelievable? Study soil science and you will know this true facts about plants, microorganisms and the symbiosis between them.

Let me ask you, what is fungus favorite food? Take a wild guess. Come on, try. Has any of you had fungal infection before? Well, the answer is SUGAR! Yes, the host plan is feeding the 'protector' fungus as much sugar(sap) as they need, in return, the fungus traps earthworms, parasites, and literally feed the plant their internal organs. Sounds cool? Now, vegetarians, now you know plants is highly carnivorous. So, being a vegetarian for religious purpose, isn't 'really' a real vegetarian. There is no such thing as pure vegetarian.

Vegetarianism (Part 5)

E.Coli. Heard of it? It is one of the premier diseases of civilization, in this case, the end point of industrial agriculture. E.Coli, is a common resident in both humans and cows. Some variants are harmless, other are even useful to us. But, there is a type of E.Coli strain, which causes intestinal bleeding that can result in kidney failure, brain damage and death.

The harmless strains of E.coli, died out in the unnaturally acidic digestive tract of unnaturally fed cattle. Our modern economic insanity, that has created corn-fed or soy-fed cattle, can't see reason. It can only see a mountain of corn or soybean cheaper to buy that it is to grow, subsidized by thousands of years of natural capital, topsoil, fossil fuel, aquifier water and of course, taxpayers.

My first argument against the political vegetarians isn't an argument at all. It is an agreement. Factory farming is a nightmare, from every angle, ethically, ecologically, nutritionally. There is no word besides torture to describe the experience of laying hens in battery cages, so crowded that they can't lie down or open their wings, driven insane by the bright glare of lights that stay on forever! Torture also describes what happens to pigs, animals that are smarter than dogs, so smart in fact if they had digits instead of hooves they could probably learn some so called 'sign' language. Anyone who watched FOOD INC documentary, would know how those poor hens were tortured and most of them were too fat, until they can't stand and collapsed on the ground. Thanks to synthetic growth hormones, antibiotics, artificial lightings and other god knows what chemicals been injected to this animal.

The air in hog factories is laden with dust, dander and noxious gases, which arew produced as the animals urine and feces build up inside the sheds. Respiratory disease is rampant. The unnatural flooring and lack of exercise causes obesity and crippling leg disorders, while the deprived environment produces neurotic coping behaviors such as repetitive bar biting and sham chewing, meaning chewing nothing! They are forced to live in their own feces, urine and vomit, and even amid the corpes of other pigs!

This torture life ends at the slaughterhouse, where if not properly stunned and killed, they may be boiled alive in a rendering vat. No moral person can face these facts without a sickening of the spirit. Where I part company with the political vegetarians, is when they conflate factory farming with any and all meat. Now, majority of vegetarians simply is ignorance. I know this statement may provoke or upset some of the readers who are vegetarians, but let's think it once again. Do most vegetarians know that soil eats cows?

Now, let me tell you this. The estimated 5 pounds of grains fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition. Yes, I agree it is a waste, but to a certain extent. As we have seen in abundance, growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destructions of topsoil.

In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possibly might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture.And it is ridiculous to the point of insanity to take the world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily lived on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.

My question back to you, are you an environmentalist? If yes, why are you eating annual monocrops? According to British Group Vegefam, a 10-acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn and only 2 people producing cattle.

Well, how much truth is in that claim? Set a side the fact that diet of soybeans, corn and wheat will result in massive malnutrition, along with the stuff like pellagra, retardation and blindness, and ultimately premature death. By contrast, a 10-acre farm of perennial polyculture can produce as follows:

3000 eggs

1000 broilers

80 hens

2000 pounds of beef

2500 pounds of pork

100 turkeys

50 rabbits

Not to mention a few inches of topsoil as well. As I did mentioned earlier, two third of the world is utterly unsuited to growing grains. Check this out. A pound of wheat, can be grown with 60 pounds of water, whereas, a pound of meat, requires 2500 to 6000 pounds. On pasture, beef cattle will drink about 8 to 15 gallons of water daily. The average pasture raised steer(cattle) takes about 21 months to reach market weight, thats 630 days, at eight pounds a gallon. for a total of anywhere between 40000-75000 pounds of total water for an entire cow! Thats around 450-500 pounds of meat, with another 145 pounds of fat.

Bear in mind, a dairy cow will drink more water, anywhere from 25-50 gallons, depending on the breed, temperature and the amount of milk she is producing. For nine gallons of milk, she will drink about 18 gallons of water.

More importantly, comparing that pound of beef with that pound of wheat. The beef contains almost twice as much calories then wheat. Calories are simply energy, which means beef is providing substanstially more. If you would want to compare pounds of water for calories(energy) produced, wheat and grass fed beef ends up almost even. And there's more then simply energy, those beef calories, contains more nutrients then wheat, especially essential protein and fat. The numbers on those are 21g vs 13.5g, and 8.5 vs 1.8g respectively.

It's also crucial to understand that protein in beef contains full spectrum of necessary amino acids, and it's easy for humans to assimilate, while the protein in the wheat is low quality and largely inacessible due to its protein is comes wrapped with indigestible cellulose. In a nutshell, for water used, beef is better.

Most importantly, animals aren't ever expanding water balloons. For a cattle, almost all of the water consumed will be returned to the soil in the form of urine and feces laden with nutrients and bacteria, to the land that needs it. Everyone has to realize that attempting annual crops will DESTROY that land forever. That is the point the political vegetarians need to understand. Who cares if more food can be produced by farming when farming is destroying the world?