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Sunday, December 6, 2020

Viv Forbes: Real Meat is Green


Wandering recently through an arcade popular with the green smoothie set, I saw a sign boasting: “Plant Based Meat”.

Someone should advise those nutritional dunderheads that all real meat is plant-based. Real beef and lamb are built from live plants like grasses, lucerne and mulga, plus salt, minerals and clay; the best chicken is built mostly on seeds and shoots of wheat, corn and grasses plus a few worms, insects and gizzard-grit; and when I was a kid our bacon was built by porkers from pollard, whey and vegetable scraps.

Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, deer, bison, rabbits, turkeys and kangaroos have a long history of providing meat for our ancestral hunters and farmers. In tough times the gatherers and gardeners collected and cultivated survival foods like wild onions, seasonal fruit, cabbages, tubers and grass seeds. But there was always a celebratory feast when the hunters returned with high-nutrition meat.

Fake “meat” is usually made from denatured soy beans, peas and wheat, all grown using diesel fuel for cultivation, planting, harvesting and transport – a huge carbon footprint. Then they add meat glue, binders and fillers to hold it together, and artificial flavouring and colouring to make it look and taste right. It is not natural, not green, and less healthy than the worst feed-lot meat.

Sustainable plant-based meat is made when cattle, sheep, goats, camels, deer and pigs graze natural free-range pasture which gathers solar energy via their green-leaf solar collectors. These grazing animals harvest plant biomass without using diesel and they also spread valuable plant fertiliser onto the ground and into the air.

Real meat is greener and healthier than any fake “meat” manufactured by green alchemists.

Further Reading
Do We Really Need Fake Meat: 
https://theconsciousfarmer.com.au/do-we-really-need-fake-meat/
All Sheep are Green: 
http://www.damaras.com/newsletters/200805.pdf
The Battle for our Livestock: 
https://clexit.net/2016/11/04/grasslands/

Viv Forbes is a geologist and economic analyst, who farms in Australia

1 comment:

DeeM said...

As with most things "clean and green" we only see the final product and a lot of us probably choose not to care how it actually got here. The truth is invariably a tale of environmental damage and degradation just as bad, if not worse, than our conventional alternatives.
The Green Movement plays on this and will do anything to prevent the actual carbon footprint, heavy metal mining, fossil fuel use, and of course exorbitant cost to be made known to the public at large. The real truth is that you can't have "clean and green" without heavy metals, coal and petrochemicals because all are essential to manufacture your new technology.
All of this information is readily available but our craven politicians and media organisations choose to ignore it and suppress it in the name of saving the planet. Well lets be honest, it's got nothing to do with saving the planet. For the rampant greenies it is but they're fanatics and nothing would persuade them otherwise. For the rest it's about promoting a progressive left-wing agenda to supplant Western capitalism.