63 thoughts on “Lettuce Pray”

  3. Tony

    A clumsy definition of vegan but they seem like nice kids what with the hearts and the colourful lettering. Carry on

  4. Padraig

    Vegans annoy me nearly as much as atheists

    Without fire and meat, we would still have small heads and big stomaches.

    Never mind the fact that increasing vegetable production has a negative effect on the planet – On the plus side, more vegans will end up creating a devolutionary process in their kind – so maybe there is a net positive.

        1. Yep

          I split over a year ago but people like yourself made it almost reasonable. Although few and far between.

        2. mildred st. meadowlark

          I find the journal to be an odd, and awfully aggressive place. Or rather their comments section.

          Intolerance seems to be the order of the day.

          Also, welcome Padraig :)

          I do love a fresh face/avatar.

        3. Pete

          Jays you’re a bit feckin long winded Paddy. Surprised anyone at the Churnal got a word in edgeways. Welcome an all that but only Memes posts this many times in one thread. And there’s only one Memes.

    2. medieval knievel

      you’re going to have to explain the ‘vegetable production is bad for the planet’ a bit further.

      plus, without spears and wearing boar skins, we’d never have survived the ice age. spears and boar skin coats for everyone!

      1. Padraig

        Fair enough

        There is no denying that meat production is bad for the planet; however, so too is green food production. There is a double negative, you require more greens to produce the same energy and more often than eating meat. Land suitable for grazing is often not suitable for growing crops so you need to expand land for the purpose of growing crops. It also has a severe impact on blue water usage.

        There is a study I would have to drag up that looks at several scenarios, what it finds is eating meat or veg both have severe impacts on the environment. If we are to look at better scenario it would be going back to small strip farming. We are seeing initiatives like that in cities, communities, planting our council reserves, etc and so forth.

        There is no one is better than the other, it all has a huge impact on our planet. There is also the sticky wicket that predominantly plant based (very much so for children) has health impacts that cannot be ignored.

        I will see if I have the study at hand.

        1. Andyourpointiswhatexactly?

          They’re ruining the land in Vietnam by growing coffee. They don’t crop rotate as they need the money, and it’s stripping the country bare.
          Simon Reeve did a coffee documentary: he has an interesting take on things. I’d recommend any of his documentaries/travel shows.

          1. Padraig

            If we were actually interested in making a better world and stopping deforestation, Palm Oil production, coffee as you mention etc. We would as Western (rich countries) just finance poor communities, so they have a viable option to survive.

            So many environmental warriors hold placards, these people are killing the planet – but like Opium farming, they too need to eat. If we gave communities an alternative to survive, we could have an impact on these harmful production methods. IMHO

          3. edalicious

            Wasn’t there a similar issue in SE Asia where farmers were flooding their rice paddies with sea water so they could grow prawns? They were initially getting a much better price for prawns than rice but as more and more farmers changed over, the price dropped and as the price dropped and they weren’t getting as good a deal anymore, they realised that the salt water had contaminated the soil under their paddies which meant that they COULDN’T go back to growing rice. Even worse, if one farmer was growing prawns, all the neighbouring paddies would get contaminated with saltwater, so all his neighbours would have to change over to growing prawns too. All for poopy, cheap, frozen, supermarket prawns!

          1. Padraig

            I must do some work, even though it is Friday; however, I don’t accept Wikipedia as a valid source. That link as an example, highlights that not all food is created equal in farming but cherry picked to form a conclusion.

        4. Nigel

          Agreed, Padraig. intensive industrial monoculture which requires greater quantities of fertiliser and various chemicals of increasingly strong chemicals for pest and weed control is draining the topsoil of fertility just as much as massive herds of cows or sheep. Of course this is less to do with whether you or I are meat eaters or a veg eaters and more to do with using what consumer power you have to source some, much, or all of your food from local, sustainably grown sources. Personally I don’t worry so much about organic – sustainably grown stuff will use less chemicals and be promoting biodiversity and that’s what you want. Farms use animals to root and fertilise fields and eat waste, so they can be an important part of sustainable agriculture.

          2. Steph Pinker

            I watched a documentary on the BBC many years ago about BSE; as far as I remember, it investigated the scientific origins and sociological reasons behind the disease and its human effects in the form of CJD. Basically, it was about supply and demand:

            *Customers wanted inexpensive quality meat, so, a couple of the larger British supermarkets began selling quality cuts of meat cheaper than butchers’ shops and smaller supermarkets, consequently, other supermarkets followed suit. This put pressure on their suppliers to provide the meat.

            *Suppliers couldn’t afford to sell quality meat to the supermarkets at the prices they were offering, hence, they put pressure on the farmers to produce more meat.

            *In an effort to provide more meat, farmers had to bulk up their stocks at a quicker pace than that which had previously been required, which meant they couldn’t graze their cattle on grass [which takes longer], so, they resorted to feeding them more meal mix and keeping the cattle predominantly indoors, to compensate for the lack of grass feeding.

            *The meal mix which farmers would normally have fed cattle [in conjunction with grass, hay, silage], in turn, was in such demand that the companies which produce these meal mixes began to bulk up the meal with offal from sheep, which includes the inedible parts of the sheep, like the brain.

            *Many abattoirs which provided the offal to the meal manufacturers were [apparently] unaware of a pre-existing brain disease in sheep, because the offal had previously been incinerated, rather than put back in to any type of food-chain.

            *As a result, infected sheep offal, through an unregulated system, was consumed by cattle and subsequently humans – who wanted quality meat at a low price.

            The above is a basic synopsis of the documentary and I’m sure it’s lacking in detail in many aspects, but it made me think about consumerism and how we live our lives, not to mention its effects – I still love steak though.

          3. Nigel

            Yeah, I remember that, if not the doc, the chain of contamination and the economic pressures driving it. Nasty stuff.

        5. BobbyJ

          The vast majority of land used for grazing in Ireland is suitable for growing crops. We make spectacularly poor land use choices in Ireland and that is why our agricultural emissions are off the chart. Stop spinning

          1. Padraig

            Not spinning –

            You are being tunnel visioned –

            Ireland is not the world –

            Unless, of course, you disagree with several scientists, which is also you right.

      1. Padraig

        HAHA

        They are zealots (when talking militant atheists) Athisim is bound by the same philosophical rules as religion. When it comes to militant atheists I find you cannot fit a razor blade between religious nutcases and atheists. To me (IMHO) both put a shunt to critical thought, as both have roadblocks in thought processes. Yet, of course, as my dogma is agnostic, I fall into the same trap of my dogma is the right dogma just the same as any other numpty :)

        As I am new here, it is good to know that I am often cantankerous, sarcastic, and provocative for that sake of it.

    5. Rob_G

      “Never mind the fact that increasing vegetable production has a negative effect on the planet “

      – no it doesn’t; certainly not when compared to producing the same food calories from meat, anyway

      (not a vegan nor a veggie, but that’s just demonstrably false)

    6. realPolithicks

      “Vegans annoy me nearly as much as atheists”

      Ah you poor thing, is everything ok…need a hug?

  5. mildred st. meadowlark

    I enjoy eating a freshly caught vegan with a salad of nice leafy greens and a homemade avocado dip.

    2. Amorphous Kerry Blob

      I sometimes wonder about the concept of hell.
      Imagine if hell was reliving those times you heard that awful little *crunch* noise while idly walking across your back yard, only to find that you’ve mangled a poor snail under your boot, punctured in every which way by the various shards of shell you’ve pushed into the goo. Imagine if hell was reliving said moments from the perspective of the snail.
      Imagine if your inclusion into hell was based on accidental events such as these.

      https://youtu.be/JJ–faib7to

  7. Rois

    My veganism knowledge is limited – I understand that they don’t believe in consuming anything from an animal source but are they fully against killing?

    For example a lovely swarm of flying ants decided to make our sitting room their den of iniquity this week – would a vegan have left them at it? Am I a monster for putting powder down?

    1. Nigel

      I don’t think everybody who is vegan or vegetarian is ‘against killing’ though some may be. Reasons fro choosing a particular diet can very enormously.

      1. Yeah, Ok

        But once you’ve killed them aren’t you morally obligated to eat them lest their calorific content goes to waste?

        1. scottser

          in my book yeah, if only vegans saw it that way.
          maybe just wait for the flying ants to die of natural causes, then eat them?

    1. Hello you!

      I passed a similar pair of doors on the way to the final last year.
      I thought it was a sign; it wasn’t…

  9. DavidT

    “Meat eating gave us big brains”, ah yes, that tired old canard. So a tiger has a big brain, yes?

    Cooking gave us bigger brains than other creatures, not meat.

    2. Padraig

      Highly debatable – a more accurate statement would be the combination of cooking, meat, forged an evolutionary process. If we look at evolutionary biology we can form a hypothesis that the increased consumption of marrow bone gave men a differing fibroblast construction than our female counterparts. As there is a great deal of debate in the evolutionary fields at the moment and quite a bit of new hypothesis, your blanket statement is indeed conjecture.

    3. BT Barham

      maybe can thank/blame the dog/man partnership for vegans.
      An intriguing study has sparked debate that if cannine and humans hadn’t come together for their mutual benefit.
      Humans may not have developed the agrarian methods they thrived at.Dogs acting as combined hunting partners,as guards and chasing predators away from the carrot patches…no pooches no vegans

      1. Clampers Outside!

        Aye that, and they ate meat, and gave themselves vitamin B12 which is required for normal brain and nervous functioning.

        A brain not functioning normally will not contribute to evolution.

  10. Just Sayin

    “Chalk is a limestone deposit created as plankton (tiny marine organisms) concentrate calcium in their bodies while living, then leach the calcium out after they die and settle onto ocean floors; over millennia, large deposits are formed, and as the seas recede, chalks deposits remain.”

    I would have thought that Vegans would be against smearing dead animal remains all over the place!

  13. postmanpat

    Most meat eaters don’t eat meat for the nutritional benefits , they eat it for the taste. Every human by even existing harms the planet but per person especially westeners , veggies make the least harmful environmental impact. More so than a ummmm-bacon reddit meme-rs or kobe beef foodie pintresters who drive hybrids. Then there are just people who don’t care at all.

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