What Is The Deal With The Food Crisis? (Radical Diets Ment to Save the Earth..)

Ok, so here is part two of my food crisis series...today I've decided to write about radical diets that are suppose to save the world.

All of this started, I believe, probably with the Diggers in the mid-sixties and the Yippies! who came about around the same time. Both the Diggers and the Yippies! advocated free food, survival schools and dumpstering, the way the Freegans of today live. The Diggers actually are a much older group which apparently has been around in England since the 1600s, advocating for the poorest of poor; the Robin-Hoods if you will, the peasants fighting for the rights of other peasants. But in the 1960s the Diggers appeared here in the US, advocating growing your own food, dumpstering and sharing everything they had. Some called the Diggers communists, some called them radicals, but really, the Diggers where just the Food Not Bombs of their day; showing up at radical events all over San Fransisco, the Diggers made sure every hippie and bum and radical in their vicinity was well-fed. The Diggers had a series of Free Stores in San Fransisco, held events where people burned money to protest our capitalist, wage-slave economy and they also coined the phrases "Do your own thing" and "Today is the Beginning of the Rest of Your Life..." Anyway, the Yippies! where a similar group, lead by Abby Hoffman, but they where a little more hippie then the Diggers. The Yippies! promoted shoplifting, dumpstering, DIY food-growing and brewing, so on the food front, they where similar. Steal This Book is probably the most famous book from the Yippie! movement, and is a very interesting read about living for free.

Anyway, so that is probably the first camp of radical food plans or diets I want to talk about; namely the Free-Food Diet. The idea is that we can bring down capitalism and civilization as we know it, by eating, and living, for free. Also, many in the free food movement, feel that eating dumpstered foods does not support oppression, because you are not purchasing factory-farmed, Monsanto-GMO, over-fished, slaughter-housed foods. Even those who normally eat vegan, sometimes eat dumpstered animal products because they aren't contributing any money to the suffering of those animals. (Note: IT IS NOT SAFE TO EAT DUMPSTERED ANIMAL PRODUCES! DO NOT DO IT!) Nevertheless, this type of direct action, as great as it is, will not save the earth; simply because it is not going to catch on with the general public. And, if it did, dumpsters would no longer be overflowing with edibles, because it is our capitalist society that keeps those dumpsters overflowing; this is, in the end, not a sustainable lifestyle. But the way the world is at the moment, I am all for dumpstering; in fact, my roommates and I eat a lot of free food.

Another idea that was popularized first by the book Diet for a Small Planet, was the idea that vegetarianism or veganism (the more radical version of vegetarianism,) will save the world. The basic idea is that growing food to feed to animals is wasteful in terms of space because it takes a lot more acherage to raise say, a cow, then it does to grow soy protein to feed like 100 more people then that one cow would. (I don't know the exact numbers, but you get the idea, this is not a new concept, I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about.) Also, many people don't like to support factory farming on a purely ethical level; and I have to say, if you've ever watched a slaughterhouse video made by PETA, you''ve probably gone vegan or vegetarian yourself, at least for a while. Again, these are great concepts, except, if you really start doing your research, you will realize that we evolved to eat animal products. First of all, it is really difficult to get enough protein on a standard vegetarian or vegan diet. As I learned in my nutrition class, the average lady needs at least 60 grams of protein a day; if you are going to get all the protein you need from say, peanut butter, you would have to eat approximately 20 oz of peanut butter! That means you'd have to eat an entire jar of peanut butter yourself. Say you aren't vegan, and you eat cheese. You'd still have to eat 10 oz of cheese to get your daily protein. You'd have to drink eight 240 milliters of soy milk to get enough protein if you where getting it from soy milk.

I've heard something disturbing from a few vegan friends recently; that is, they never bleed. They have their periods every six months at the most; I'm sorry, but this means something is really wrong; and the fact that quite a few vegans have disclosed this to me lately means that there is some kind of correlation there. I think it is very hard to be vegan and not be malnourished; hell, it is hard to be on any "diet" and not be malnourished. I'm probably malnourished since I eat whatever I can get for free, but I think it is even easier to get malnourished when you don't eat any animal products. Now I love my vegan friends and I think they are very noble for not wanting to contribute to the suffering of factory farms, but it would freak me the hell out if I only bled once every six months; please ladies, don't starve yourselves to save the earth! I was a vegetarian for a long time myself; but as soon as I started craving meat, I went and got some. I will not be anemic for the earth, as much as I love her!

A backlash towards veganism; or so it seems to me, is the Paleo-Diet, the Hunter-Gatherer Diet, or Rewilding Diet. The Paleo-Diet focuses on meat; you are ideally suppose to hunt and kill this meat yourself; shunning the food that caused our rapid population growth; namely grains. The idea is that we started becoming overpopulated once we started farming. This cannot be refuted; if you have studied anthropology at all, you know that there is a direct correlation between people leaving the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and settling down to farm and the population explosion. I first became aware of this correlation when my friend Jake had me read Ishmael and told me that "people should starve to death in Africa, because Africa is no longer able to sustain so many humans..." I though Jake was crazy (and I also had a huge crush on him,) but the more I read about sustainability, I realized Jake was crazy like a fox. We have sealed our own death warrant when we moved into the Mesopotamia River-Valley and set up shop as farmers; growing grain meant we could stock-pile the stuff for times of famine and keep popping out kids, because we had artificially destroyed the one thing that in the past had kept us from becoming overpopulated; namely starvation. So basically, the Rewilding diet preaches shunting "the foods of civilization" such as pizza, bread and pasta, and learning to kill deer and eat berries and fish and root veggies again.

Again....radicals are fucking silly if they really think this is going to "save the world." I mean, six billion people can't all forage for food again; we just don't have enough wilderness left (or probably in the first place,) to sustain these numbers. Some folks stare this fact grimly in the face and say "well, nobody said we think there will be SIX BILLION of us left once the dust settles..." Like my old friend Jake, many rewilders are realistic in the fact that some of us are going to have to die in order for the world to be sustainable again; in fact, a lot of us will have to go. I wanted to slap Jake when I first heard him say that feeding the starving masses in Africa was just adding to our problems, but now, I know he is right. Starvation was the old way of keeping our growth in check; now that that no longer happens, we are in dire straights.

So is this world food crisis perhaps the solution as well as the problem? I don't know; I just count myself lucky at this point to still have food on my plate...

Love ya,
Carrot
p.s. I mean no offense to anyone I just offended (I know I'm gonna get some angry responses,) but the truth is any diet alone isn't enough to save the earth...and I do worry that my lady vegan friends aren't getting enough protein...all the other primates on the earth eat meat ladies..I worry 'cuze I love you...)

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