1. Let the Great World Spin: This I saw at Chapters on the bestselling list. It's a period novel set in 1974 in NYC.
2. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This has actually been made into a movie with Emma Watson, who I think is just adorable, as the main character. I prefer to read before watching, so that's my plan.
3. The Happiness Project: Mostly I just hope that this will be inspirational as it focuses on positivity and unique insights
4. Eating Animals: More on this below
5. Secret Daughter: I actually just finished this one... It was quite good, set in India and California and focused around adoption and the notion of biological vs. adopted familiies.
Eating Animals is by the same author as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is a novel that I have read half of. Not because I didn't enjoy it, but because I picked it up when I was at my sister's house a few years ago and only got half way through before ending my stay. It was quite good from what I can recall so I really should track down another copy. Eating Animals is pretty self explanatory and I cannot wait to read it. I have always been torn regarding what to do on the subject of vegetarianism. Recently I have been eating about a 90% vegan diet which does make me feel great so hopefully I can keep it up!
When I was in Australia, I wrote this opinion editorial regarding vegetarianism, right before the Olympics began, that I thought I would share.
Veggie Nation
Do you cuddle with your dog, take it for walks, spend $3000 on its hip replacement, but then eat a cow or pig without a second thought? How do you differentiate a pet from dinner?
With the 2012 Olympics being held in less than two months away, the athletes are surely cracking down with their training and diet rituals. This includes the Chinese athletes, who are all going vegetarian due to the uncertainty of whether or not the meat they have available to them has clenbuterol or ractopamin in it, chemicals used in animal feed to produce leaner meat. According to Yang Hongbo, head of catering for 700 always-hungry, high-performance athletes at the Jiangsu Sports Training Centre, "No company dares to sign a contract promising their meat does not contain clenbuterol or ractopamine.” The athletes have to be extremely careful to avoid consumption not only to avoid disqualification by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), but for optimal performance purposes. As individuals tune in to support their favourite athletes, eating their burgers and steaks, will they consider they are indirectly taking drugs?
Do you cuddle with your dog, take it for walks, spend $3000 on its hip replacement, but then eat a cow or pig without a second thought? How do you differentiate a pet from dinner?
With the 2012 Olympics being held in less than two months away, the athletes are surely cracking down with their training and diet rituals. This includes the Chinese athletes, who are all going vegetarian due to the uncertainty of whether or not the meat they have available to them has clenbuterol or ractopamin in it, chemicals used in animal feed to produce leaner meat. According to Yang Hongbo, head of catering for 700 always-hungry, high-performance athletes at the Jiangsu Sports Training Centre, "No company dares to sign a contract promising their meat does not contain clenbuterol or ractopamine.” The athletes have to be extremely careful to avoid consumption not only to avoid disqualification by World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), but for optimal performance purposes. As individuals tune in to support their favourite athletes, eating their burgers and steaks, will they consider they are indirectly taking drugs?
After seeing numerous documentaries including Earthlings and Food Inc. and reading several books on the numerous negative effects of eating meat, I became a vegetarian roughly five years ago and have never looked back.
On average, vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. When you’re not eating the flesh of cows and pigs, you’re not consuming high levels of saturated fats, found only in animals. Thus, you’re less likely to suffer from heart disease or high cholesterol levels, which means lower blood pressure and lower risks of type two diabetes, prostate and colon cancers. Several studies from top university and independent researchers have concluded that eating cows, chickens, pigs and other animals is carcinogenic and therefore, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, vegetarians "are about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than non vegetarians, regardless of other risks such as smoking, body size, and socioeconomic status." And, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, arguably the foremost epidemiological researcher alive today, believes that no chemical carcinogen is nearly as severe in causing human cancer as animal protein.
The majority of society is extremely ill-informed when it comes to the food they’re eating. The saying goes “you are what you eat”, but do you really know what you are eating? Most people purchase their food from the supermarket, after being sold on the “health and necessity” of the items, from various marketing campaigns. But, they neglect to check who in fact funds these promotions in the first place. Most people are clueless as to where their food has been grown or processed before it was stocked on the shelves.
I believe that this ignorance is the primary reason more people are not vegetarians; if they knew about the meat industry and processes, they wouldn’t eat it. So let me tell you this: cows are the worst treated animals in the world. Have you ever seen a cow whose sole purpose of existence is to be fattened up only to be slaughtered and eaten? Of course not, because these cows never see the light of day. They are stuck inside a windowless warehouse with thousands of others, being genetically altered via hormones and drugs until they have grown large enough to be transported several miles, typically without food or water, to the slaughterhouse. They will then have their throats slit, often while they are still conscious, with their bodies being skinned or hacked apart.
Speaking of hormones, have you heard of hormones being secreted by your body when you are stressed? The same thing happens to animals in the minutes leading up to being slaughtered. Stress releases adrenalin hormones, which initiate the flight-or-fight response and then the humans eat those humans in their steaks. Professor of Nutritional Physiology, Irwin H. Putzkoff, PhD, MD, found that when a person eats the stressed cows’ meat, it causes dramatic reduction of vitality and sexual potency in humans. The Pennington Biomedical Research Center found that Even after a single meal, blood levels of LDL-cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol) rose higher when men were given fast-food beef, slaughtered the stressful way, opposed to organic beef.
On average, vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. When you’re not eating the flesh of cows and pigs, you’re not consuming high levels of saturated fats, found only in animals. Thus, you’re less likely to suffer from heart disease or high cholesterol levels, which means lower blood pressure and lower risks of type two diabetes, prostate and colon cancers. Several studies from top university and independent researchers have concluded that eating cows, chickens, pigs and other animals is carcinogenic and therefore, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, vegetarians "are about 40 percent less likely to get cancer than non vegetarians, regardless of other risks such as smoking, body size, and socioeconomic status." And, Dr. T. Colin Campbell, arguably the foremost epidemiological researcher alive today, believes that no chemical carcinogen is nearly as severe in causing human cancer as animal protein.
The majority of society is extremely ill-informed when it comes to the food they’re eating. The saying goes “you are what you eat”, but do you really know what you are eating? Most people purchase their food from the supermarket, after being sold on the “health and necessity” of the items, from various marketing campaigns. But, they neglect to check who in fact funds these promotions in the first place. Most people are clueless as to where their food has been grown or processed before it was stocked on the shelves.
I believe that this ignorance is the primary reason more people are not vegetarians; if they knew about the meat industry and processes, they wouldn’t eat it. So let me tell you this: cows are the worst treated animals in the world. Have you ever seen a cow whose sole purpose of existence is to be fattened up only to be slaughtered and eaten? Of course not, because these cows never see the light of day. They are stuck inside a windowless warehouse with thousands of others, being genetically altered via hormones and drugs until they have grown large enough to be transported several miles, typically without food or water, to the slaughterhouse. They will then have their throats slit, often while they are still conscious, with their bodies being skinned or hacked apart.
Speaking of hormones, have you heard of hormones being secreted by your body when you are stressed? The same thing happens to animals in the minutes leading up to being slaughtered. Stress releases adrenalin hormones, which initiate the flight-or-fight response and then the humans eat those humans in their steaks. Professor of Nutritional Physiology, Irwin H. Putzkoff, PhD, MD, found that when a person eats the stressed cows’ meat, it causes dramatic reduction of vitality and sexual potency in humans. The Pennington Biomedical Research Center found that Even after a single meal, blood levels of LDL-cholesterol (the “bad” cholesterol) rose higher when men were given fast-food beef, slaughtered the stressful way, opposed to organic beef.
Raising animals for food is a grossly inefficient use of land, resources, energy and water. Animals eat large quantities of grain, soybeans, oats, and corn, however they only produce comparatively small amounts of meat, dairy products, or eggs in return. Over 70 percent of the grain that we grow is fed to farmed animals, while millions of people are starving. It takes up to 16 pounds of grain to produce only one single pound of meat.
According the the United Nations, the land mass used for raising animals, including land for grazing and growing feed crops, is now at an astonishing 30 percent of Earth’s land mass. Shouldn’t this land be used for something more efficient, like, growing crops for PEOPLE to eat? With this stupendous amount of livestock grazing, comes the extinction of several plant species, soil erosion and eventual desertification that renders once-fertile land, barren.
Climate change has been labelled as humankind’s greatest challenge, and according to the U.N., a global shift towards a vegan diet is necessary to combat the worst effects. Researchers at the University of Chicago agreed, stating that this shift in diet would be more effective than all Americans switching from a standard car to a hybrid. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the majority of global warming. And, raising animals for food is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide emissions. Therefore, cutting down on the amount of cattle etc. being raised solely to eat, would decrease this amount substantially.
If everyone moved closer to a vegetarian diet, the world would be a better place. Eating meat wastes our precious resources and is destroying our environment. Raising animals solely as food for humans requires massive amounts of land, food, energy, and water and contributes to animal suffering. Finally, eating meat is actually detrimental to your health, so turning that Meatless Monday into Monthly Meatless, may improve your health, and lengthen your life, as Vegetarians and vegans live, on average, six to 10 years longer than meat-eaters!
