Ode to a Hypocrite:
This was my written response to someone who believed specifically that consuming cow’s breast milk is “natural” because it can be found within the faddy “100 mile limit.” I sought to discredit the idea that it is “natural” or in any sense “local,” or “environmental:”
I am Vegan, which is to say that I do not support the objectification of non human animals to suit my dietary desires, or in fact for any reason what so ever. I won’t walk up to another woman and begin to suckle from her breast, heck, there is no nutritional reason I would even want to! Thus, I offer the same courtesy to my bovine fellow Earthlings.
Dairy production (presuming you do not have a cow in your own back yard, and even if you do it is very un environmental) involves mechanically raping female cows, then taking their newborns from them at birth who will be locked up to become veal. The mothers are fed grains that come from other countries (far outside of the mystical 100 mile diet boundaries) even from other continents (most cattle grain comes from South America or Africa.) Growing this grain takes up vast swaths of land that could be used to grow more nutritionally viable food, which could be fed directly to humans rather than inefficiently cycling it through a cow to consume their milk. A dairy cow will eat “about 100 pounds of feed each day, which is a combination of hay, grain and silage (fermented corn or grass). They drink a lot of water too – up to 50 gallons a day.” (taken from Dairy Farming Today website’s FAQ.) And if we think about the gross fossil fuels burning into our environment to transport all of that grain here (yes, even pretty organic grains) it’s really an environmental disaster!
So what about drinking soy milk, where the beans are grown equally far away, then shipped around the world spewing toxins into the air? How is that better?? Well, it is a minute fraction of the quantities of environmental degradation that dairy produces. However, for those who are legitimately concerned with the environmental impacts of their food choices, most Vegans (that I know) are happy to use local grown hemp seeds, or Fraser Valley Hazelnuts, and other beautiful proteins to make their own milks (which are absolutely delicious, I should add.)
Their are always ways to be better and better to our Earth, and shutting down all large scale animal housing/killing facilities is the #1 way of doing that.
I’ll leave you with an article from the United Nationes website and bid you Peace:
http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?newsID=20772&CR1=warning