advantage 48 – Healthy organic vegetable food

Excerpt from the book »Gradido – Natural Economy of Life«

»As long as there are slaughter houses

there will always be battlefields.«

– Leo Tolstoy

Russian writer

The earth can produce enough food for everyone – but not with three meals of meat a day. Today’s factory farming is an atrocious crime against living nature. The animals are tormented during their lives and slaughtered in a barbaric way. One meal of meat requires over thirty times the resources needed for a comparable vegetable meal. Factory farming is considered to be one of the greatest environmental sinners, even coming before emissions from industry and cars.

Vegan meals completely without animal products can be prepared in at least as tasty and varied a way as other meals. Everything indicates that a vegan diet is considerably healthier than an animal-based diet.

It is not our wish to re-educate everybody to become vegans. But when more and more tasty vegetable food is provided in our shops and restaurants, we will automatically eat fewer animal products. Instead of eating meat twice a day, we perhaps eat meat only twice a month. In this way we reduce our meat consumption to a thirtieth of the amount, without having to forgo culinary pleasures. On the contrary, our diet becomes more varied and much healthier.

Here we also follow the threefold good – more pleasure and health for individuals, sufficient food for all people with less ecological damage and less animal suffering. 

Nowadays there are tasty vegetable alternatives to almost all meat and milk products, such as vegan sausages and steaks and soya, rice and hemp milk. They may not taste exactly the same as animal products but they may even taste better and there is something for every taste.

And what about butchers? Will they have to cease doing business? Absolutely not! The fine art of butchers consists in making tasty meat from meat that does not originally taste so good. The same skill is required for producing tasty vegan steaks or sausages; only the basic ingredients are different. The butcher can continue to exist without any problems. I can even imagine that the first vegan butcher in a city will do very good business.

Vegetable food can be grown in sufficient quantities and biological quality everywhere in the world. For this we do not need either chemical fertilisers or genetic engineering. Organic farmers and permaculture farmers show that it is possible. The best food is produced locally and one side-effect is that less transport is needed. It may happen that large concerns can no longer earn so much money but, in turn, they will be supported in developing eco-friendly products and services by the Equalisation and Environment Fund. Farmers and small farmers will likewise be supported in growing organic food regionally. 

Advantage 53 – The solution to the problem of world hunger

Excerpt from the book »Gradido – Natural Economy of Life« 

»World agriculture could feed 12 billion without any problem.

That means that a child that dies of starvation today is murdered.«

– Jean Ziegler

from “We Feed the World”

Feeding the world population is not a technological problem but once again an economic one, resulting from the market logic of the old monetary and economic systems. As we saw in advantage 48, we can supply entire humankind with high-quality organic food. This food will be mainly from vegetables as their production needs only a thirtieth of the resources necessary for animal food. Since the consumption of too much animal food is the cause of most lifestyle diseases in civilised countries, we will also get healthier as a side-effect.

Organic cultivation of fruit and vegetables is possible everywhere in the world, even in desert regions. Permaculture provides successful examples of this. In general, vegetable dishes are much tastier than animal ones. The culinary diversity is significantly greater and for people who enjoy meat there are now excellent vegetarian substitutes that taste delicious. Vegan steaks, sausages, soya milk and much more make the changeover a pleasure. We do not propose banning meat consumption but merely recommend offering an increasing number of vegetarian dishes in shops and restaurants – a trend which fortunately is already noticeable.

For the 24,000 people who die of starvation every day on average and the many million people who survive but suffer from hunger the question of taste is of minor importance. At most, religious laws play a part. There are religions that prohibit the consumption of meat but vegetable food is permitted everywhere.

The more the so-called civilised world reduces meat consumption, which is unhealthy anyway, the more prosperity is possible for all of us and the sooner there will be peace. Then nobody will have to suffer hunger or thirst anymore.