Sean Armstrong: Dismount your soy SUV and saddle up some scrumptious pony

[XemaSab]

Sorry for the delay in this article—I just got off the airplane (100 mpg per person—better than my commuter car) from my honeymoon in Iceland last Wednesday, and writing this article was a lower priority than hot springs next to glaciers and oohing at the Aurora Borealis.

But the honeymoon was actually research for this article: while Shail and I were traveling from roaring waterfall to hissing stem vent we were trying to follow a roughly 250-mile diet of dairy, beef, sheep, fish, onions, potatoes, carrots and kale (plus some geothermal hot house tomatoes). To give you a sense of our dedication, our last breakfast was young horse fried with onions. Lots of horses in Iceland, and no grains to make a breakfast cereal.

You may be shuddering now imagining us eating a pet animal. You know though, half the horses in the U.S. are locked into stalls for almost every waking hour, and many go insane from the confinement—is better to kill an animal that’s lived a good life or torture an animal all its life and let it die of old age? Truth be told it was a little uncomfortable for us to fry foal, although young horse is unquestionably a nice-tasting meat. (Fun Fact: did you know that dogs and guinea pigs were domesticated in North America by the Indians for food, not as pets?)

So here we arrive at a quiet conflict among the activists in our town—I arrived in Arcata 11 years ago a vegetarian, trying to eat low on the trophic pyramid in order to preserve arable land that is inefficiently converted to food crops that are fed to animals so we can harvest their animal protein (meat and dairy). That worked in Wisconsin, but in Arcata soy is the gas guzzling SUV of proteins and our grass fed beef is the two-seater Honda hybrid.

http://www.arcataeye.com/index.php?module=Pagesetter&tid=2&topic=4&func=viewpub&pid=358&format=full

[jilln]

1. What a bunch of BS.

When you feed grains to animals, it is far less efficient than using the grain to feed people. And land supports FAR more plant protein than animal protein. This writer's an idiot. And sick, too.