I came across Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride’s blog post on vegetarianism. I believe it is one of the most important posts anyone should read if they want to get to the bottom of nutrition and be informed about the dangers of plant-based eating.
I have pasted the post below but you can also check out her website here.
In our information-overloaded world it is often difficult to distinguish what is genuine and what is false. This is particularly true about the pervasive idea that the whole of humanity should ‘reduce meat consumption’ or even become vegan or vegetarian.
Various political and emotional ideals are used to promote this propaganda, pronouncing vegetarianism as an ‘innocent’ and ‘cruelty-free’ life style. Let us have a look at this idea and ponder the question: is there anything or anyone innocent in this World?
How innocent is a cat, which caught a bird and ate it? How innocent was that bird who ate hundreds of insects and worms every day of its life? How innocent were those insects and worms who ate other insects, worms and microbes? How innocent are microbes who routinely eat each other and anything else in the world? How innocent are wolves, wild dogs, chickens, pigs and other creatures who would eat one of their own if it is injured and cannot protect itself? How innocent are cows, goats and other herbivorous animals who eat plenty of insects together with grasses and herbs on the pasture? And did you know that plants are carnivorous? They consume microbes inside the cells of their roots, killing these microbes in quite a brutal way. How innocent are trees, flowers and grasses whose roots would eat the body of a buried animal or human, because these bodies are a perfect source of nutrients for plants? There have been accounts where roots of trees, growing in a cemetery, were found to grow in a shape of a human body which was buried under that tree. Knowledgeable gardeners will tell you that the best fertilisers for a vegetable garden are bone meal, blood, meat or a fish meal. How innocent are herbivorous animals or humans who eat those plants? Are plants not alive? Do they not feel? Just because plants don’t have cute faces with eyes and whiskers, does it mean that they deserve less compassion than a cow, a lamb, a goat or a pig?
Research shows that plants are conscious, sentient beings just as all other life forms on the planet: they can feel pain, they perceive light, smell, touch and sound, they can think, communicate and adapt to changing environments.
Majority of vegans and vegetarians live in cities; they do not grow any food themselves and have a very vague idea of how it is grown; they buy their food in supermarkets. Who fills the shelves in the supermarkets? Industrial agriculture, and it is arable industrial agriculture which grows plant matter. Industrial arable agriculture is one of the most destructive human activities on the planet (please, see the chapter Industrial Agriculture). It is polluting the soils, the waters and the atmosphere while producing crops low in nutrition and full of toxic chemicals. Ploughing, tilling and digging the soil rips this living substance apart and destroys its complex structure in the process. When soil is repeatedly ‘cultivated’ for growing crops, it dies and turns into a desert! All deserts on our planet are man-made.
It is worth repeating that topsoil is the most precious part of Nature. It is a living community of all kinds of creatures from microscopic fungi, viruses and bacteria to worms, insects and small animals, such as moles, mice, voles and other. The soil under your feet is not just ‘dirt’, it is a magnificent and complex living matrix – it is alive! From the beginning of arable agriculture humanity has been destroying this living matrix with impunity, turning large areas of our planet into deserts. And, since the advent of modern industrial agriculture based on powerful machines and poisonous chemicals, this destruction has escalated to unprecedented levels.
According to United Nations about a third of all topsoil on our planet has already been degraded and, if our industrial agriculture continues destroying it at the current pace, we will destroy most of it by 2050. This means that life on Earth will seize to exist! The only way to sustain large numbers of vegetarians and vegans on the planet is through industrial arable agriculture. Plant-eating humanity can kill the planet quicker than anything else!
True organic agriculture cannot guarantee the large yields of plant matter for a plant- eating humanity. I am an organic farmer and my experience taught me that the most difficult foods to produce on an organic farm are vegetables and other plant foods.
Animal foods – meat, milk and eggs are easy! Provide animals and birds with a natural habitat and plenty of pasture and they look after themselves. But growing vegetables is where all the hard labour is! And the yield is completely unpredictable; it depends on parameters which are out of our control, such as the weather, rainfall, sunlight and other. Modern so-called ‘organic’ produce in supermarkets comes from industrial agriculture. It is a sad fact, but in the last decades organic standards have been corrupted and simply cannot be trusted anymore. So, vegetarians and vegans who buy their ’organic’ plant foods in shops are deceiving themselves.
How innocent and ‘cruelty-free’ are modern city-dwelling vegetarians and vegans, whose life style is only possible because of industrial arable agriculture? Apart from destroying the topsoil, do they know how many animals, birds, insects, worms, microbes and other life forms are killed daily by agricultural machines and chemicals? Do they know what fertilisers, pesticides and other chemicals are doing to the life in our ground waters, rivers, lakes, seas and oceans? These chemicals don’t stay on the farmer’s fields, they get washed down into the planet’s waters. Nitrogen from fertilisers stimulates growth of phytoplankton in the water, which in turn provokes growth of oxygen-consuming microbes. Water without oxygen cannot sustain life. All kinds of living creatures die in these waters, including those with cute faces and whiskers, such as dolphins, seals, otters and whales. These dead areas in our seas and oceans are already unacceptably large and are increasing every year. Arable agriculture is the cause of dying coral reefs all over the planet with all the life forms these corals sustain.
A considerable percent of nitrogen fertilisers finishes up in the atmosphere in the form of methane and other nitrogen-containing gases. Global corporations and western governments with their model of industrial agriculture have put out a ridiculous lie, that ruminant animals ‘belch out methane and cause the climate change’. The truth is that large amounts of methane in the atmosphere come from nitrogen fertilisers. Industrial farmers are addicted to these chemicals; the soils on their farms are destroyed to such a degree that, without nitrogen fertilisers, nothing will grow on them at all. So, vast amounts of these chemicals are used all over the world every year by arable farmers. All for the sake of growing lots of plant matter to feed plant-eating humanity.
Most of the crops grown for food in the world are so-called commodity crops: wheat, sugar beet, sugar cane, oily seeds, soy, rice and maize. These are turned into flour, sugar, soy protein isolates and vegetable oils – the four major ingredients of all processed ‘foods’. Heart disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer, autoimmunity, infertility, allergies, mental illness, Alzheimer’s disease and all other chronic health problems are caused by foods made from these commodity crops. Sugar is the most addictive substance in the world, closely followed by wheat flour and everything made from it (bread, pasta, cakes, breakfast cereals, cookies, etc). Many of these commodity crops are genetically modified, which makes them particularly health- damaging for humans, soils, microbes and animals. We are destroying our precious Planet for the sake of growing massive amounts of these crops.
When you change your diet, no matter what diet you choose, most of the health benefits from this dietary change come from removing sugar, flour, processed ‘foods’ and vegetable oils (in the first year at least). Let me repeat this: no matter what you are actually eating on your new dietary regime, the initial health benefits you enjoy after changing your diet come from removing sugar, flour, processed ‘foods’ and vegetable oils! This is a clinical fact! That is why one can find glowing testimonies in the first year of using any kind of diet: from vegan (eating only plants) to strict carnivore (eating only animal foods) and anything in between, as long as sugar, flour, processed ‘foods’ and vegetable oils are removed.
Yet, flour, sugar, processed ‘foods’ and vegetable oils are the most consumed things in humanity. Why? Because they are cheap and addictive. People, who become vegetarian or vegan and continue eating these things fall ill very quickly. They develop physical and mental illnesses, chronic and degenerative, which blight their lives and make them a burden for their families and society. The pro-vegetarian propaganda tells people that they are going to be healthy and save the planet by choosing plant-based life style. The reality is precisely the opposite. Please, read more on this subject in my book Vegetarianism Explained.
Many vegetarians and vegans base their choice on a belief that ‘it is wrong to kill’. They put this argument forward as a reason for why everybody should be a vegetarian. Let us discuss this subject.
Is it wrong to kill for food?
When we come as guests to someone’s house, what is the right thing to do: follow the rules of that house or start dictating to the host your own rules? Pronouncing that ‘it is wrong to kill for food’ is telling the Creator of this world that his creation is wrong and faulty.
Everything in this world kills for food! Animals kill, microbes kill, insects kill, birds kill and even plants kill. That is how this world functions. Nothing is killed for sport or out of boredom, only for food. All creatures in natural environments only hunt when they are hungry, apart from one creature – man. Killing for fun, for ‘sport’ or ‘pleasure’ does not exist in Nature; only humans indulge in such things. You can observe a lion lying happily next to a herd of zebra ignoring them, because he is not hungry. I have observed cats not even looking at a mouse because the cat has just eaten. There is a deep wisdom in only killing for food; it preserves balance and harmony in the wonderful circle of life on our planet.
We come to this world as guests for a period of time from birth till death. This world functions according to the rules of That which created it and which maintains it. And these rules work very well: the world is magnificent and infinitely functional. Everything in Nature is in balance and harmony. Everything feeds everything else providing a perfect habitat for one another and all the necessary resources. Nothing goes to waste in the natural world, and death is just as important as birth. When something dies, its body provides a source of food, a habitat and resources for other life forms. Plants or their parts die every autumn, microbes and insects die after a few days or even hours, and animals die after a few years. Majority of things in Nature die perfectly healthy, because it was their time to leave this world and give resources to others or because they are killed for food. Humans die too, some in infancy or childhood, some after a few decades and some after a long life. Some die from diseases, some die naturally and some are killed.
Imagine if there was no death. Just think: what would happen to this world if nothing ever died? The world would simply explode and seize to exist. When we look at the full picture, everything makes sense in this world, everything is in balance including death and killing for food.
Here comes a human and says: death is wrong! When someone dies, humans behave as if that person failed somehow and start crying. Why did he/she die? Why didn’t he/she live forever? Humans come to this world as guests and, instead of learning and respecting the rules of this world, they start dictating their own ideas on how this world should work. Where do these ideas come from? From the weakest point in a human – the human mind – the easiest thing to manipulate and deceive.
It may sound surprising but true knowledge does not come to us through the mind! Simply filling one’s head with information by reading or hearing something does not form knowledge. True knowledge comes only from experience! You have to live through the experience and get the knowledge by using all of your senses, and you have to go through all the emotions and feelings of that experience. Only then we get the truth of that experience, only then we truly know something. And once you have got the true knowledge, nobody can confuse you on this issue.
To understand death, it is important for a human being to go through the experience of death in some way. Killing an animal for food allows us to connect to death. Going through this experience allows the person to come to terms with death, to respect it and to get a true knowledge that death is normal, essential and even beautiful.
Our volunteers on the farm get introduced to killing for food though harvesting our cockerels (male chickens / roosters). Our chickens have many chicks in the summer, and in every clutch of chicks there are usually equal numbers of boys and girls. By next spring they have all grown up and are ready to produce their own offspring. Chickens form families with 5-9 girls per one boy; this is an ideal ratio where the cockerel becomes a loving husband, keeping his harem of hens protected, healthy and happy. But we have too many boys and all of them cannot form a family – there are simply not enough girls for them all. So, they become hooligans and they hurt chickens. This creates an imbalance on the farm, disharmony. The role of the farmer is to maintain harmony and balance; you have to manage your farm, which means that you cannot allow everything to live.
We harvest our cockerels in spring and summer. The whole procedure is described in the chapter Chickens and other birds, but here I would like to address the emotional aspect of it. There is no need for brutality: we kill our cockerels in a humane and loving way. First, we pick up every cockerel and hold him gently, stroke him and thank him. We thank him for giving his life to sustain our lives, for making our farm alive with his singing and activities, for all the chicks he has fathered and for his beauty. Speaking to the spiritual aspect of the bird, we ask him to go quickly and come back to us again as a new-born chick. When we do that, the bird calms down and accepts death without struggle. Something magical happens when a human talks to an animal with sincerity and love. There is a distinct feeling that the bird knows what is happening and what is coming next, as if some kind of agreement has been signed. Taking its life turns into a conscious spiritual experience.
Having experienced the death of the bird, the volunteers then participate in plucking the feathers, cleaning the body and the organs. Out of respect to this living creature which gave its body to us, the least we can do is not to waste any of it. Every little part of the body is cleaned and used for food: the head and the neck, the feet and the organs go for making soup, and the body is left in the fridge to mature for a few days. After that we cook the cockerels and have a group dinner.
When a person gets immersed into the farm life: looking after chickens, then killing one of them, cleaning and cooking it and then enjoying it as a dinner, all previously imagined ideas about life and death change. A true knowledge comes into you without words, through feelings, viscerally, by-passing the preconceptions of the conceptualising mind. We had many vegans and vegetarians coming to our farm and going through this procedure. Many started eating meat. An understanding of how life works comes to us when we go through the whole circle of life: watching a tiny chick hatching, looking after it and loving it, watching it grow up and then taking its life for food. If all of us would go through this experience in our childhood, a lot of naïve ideas and misconceptions would be avoided in humanity.
If you observe animals and birds in the wild, what do they do most of the day? They are busy with survival, searching for food, safety and shelter. Our farm animals have a very leisurely life, because we provide them with food, shelter and safety. They are on holiday all the time, enjoying themselves, while we, humans, work hard to make sure that they are fed well, they are happy, healthy and safe. Our pigs wallow in the grass, sleeping, sunbathing, playing and digging. Our goats and cows graze on fresh grasses, herbs and bushes, lying down, sunbathing and resting when they want to.
Our chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, Guinea fowl and peacocks are all over the farm, having a happy social life, digging for worms and insects, having dust baths, sleeping, chasing each other and playing. The only creatures on the farm that are working hard are us, humans! So, when time comes for our animals and birds to give us something in return, we have no problem with taking it. It is a fair exchange! Eggs, milk and meat are our rewards for the hard work we put into looking after our animals and birds. We love them and look after them with great care, making sure that they have the best life possible according to the way Mother Nature designed them. In return, they give us the best quality milk, meat and eggs to keep us healthy, happy and strong. Humans, animals and birds – we all live together as one natural community. And in a good community every member contributes to the whole, pulling its weight, giving and receiving.
There is no chaos in Nature; chaos only exists in human heads. Hundreds of volunteers have come to us with their heads full of self-destructive ideas of dysfunctional humanity! It is wonderful to observe how the farm transforms these human minds removing the chaos, bringing peace and a quiet confidence. Nature shows us every day that birth and death are mirror images of each other; both are equally beautiful and necessary. Understanding death on a deep level removes the fear of it, puts it in perspective. Everything in Nature vibrates love and service; that is why it is so functional and beautiful. All we, humans, must do is observe Mother Nature and follow her rules. They are very wise and are worth following!
