Animal Advocacy in Huffington Post & KFC Advertising Stds Complaint

[Guest guest]

The following information was provided to Vegetarian Network of Dallas by Bruce Friedrich, Animal Activist. Margaret************************************************

 

In the past few weeks, we’ve been hitting KFC in the

UK hard, with much-publicized letters from Pamela

Anderson and KT

Tunstall, as well as a victory

against KFC regarding and Advertising Standards Authority complaint against

our KFC literature, which graphically details KFC’s support for cruelty

to animals. KFC is feeling the heat and, according to this front page story in PR Week (attached), is trying to hire a

new PR firm to try to battle back. Obviously it’s a desperation move,

which makes us feel very good about our efforts. Also, I had this

piece about eating meat and global hunger published on HuffingtonPost.com

(a top 100 Web site and by far the most popular progressive news site in the

U.S. );

it’s been on the home page of their Green page for a few days,

which is nice. NOTE: Huffington piece is below. This coming weekend, I’m speaking that the Unitarian

Universalist general assembly in Miami ,

about “Faith, Animals, and the Next Social Justice Movement” (i.e.,

animal rights); I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be in

London til July 31, then back to the

U.S. (I can’t

wait!). I hope you’re all well, Bruce Bruce Friedrich

Vice President, International

Grassroots Campaigns Take sides. Neutrality

helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never

the tormented. –Elie Wiesel * Please watch, download,

and distribute this free and uncopyrighted video.**********************************************************From Huffington Post

Taking the Food Crisis Personallyby Bruce Friedrich

 

 

 

 

sPosted June 20, 2008

| 10:58 AM

 

 

In

April, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on food policy called the

diversion of crops to be turned into biofuels "a crime against

humanity". Indeed, 100 million tons of corn and other crops that could

feed people instead feed our cars.

What then to make of the fact that more than 750 million tons of

corn and wheat are diverted from the mouths of the global poor (and

away from biofuels) to feed chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals?

And that doesn't even include the 80 percent of the global soy crop

that is also fed to farmed animals.

Surely this is a crime against humanity of even greater impact:

First, it's more than seven times as many crops that are diverted to

feed farmed animals so that we can eat the animals; second, while

diverting grains for biofuels does decrease global warming, the impact

of eating meat is bad for our health and environment -- there is no upside.

I adopted a vegetarian diet more than 20 years ago, after I read Diet for a Small Planet,

by Frances Moore Lappe. In the book, Lappe makes the argument that

using land to grow crops for animals is inefficient, polluting, and

that it steals food from the mouths of the global poor. The point is

echoed by the respected environmental think tank, The WorldWatch

Institute, which published a report a few years back that declares:

"[M]eat consumption is an inefficient use of grain--the

grain is used more efficiently when consumed by humans. Continued

growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals,

creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the

world's poor."

More and more, that message is getting a hearing, so that a few

weeks ago, the UN's climate chief Yvo de Boer told the Reuters news

agency, "The best solution would be for us all to become vegetarians."

Indeed.

De Boer was talking about both the global food crisis and global

warming, because a U.N. report recently found that eating meat is the

number one human cause of global warming, causing almost a fifth of the

global greenhouse gas total -- and, of course, poor communities are the

first to suffer the potentially grave consequences of climate change.

The chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, is himself a vegetarian

and has been outspoken on the need for people who care about the

climate to move in that direction. At a press conference just after

winning the Peace Prize, the IPCC declared "Please eat less meat --

meat is a very carbon-intensive commodity".

Indeed it is, which is why the official handbook for the Live Earth concerts says that "refusing meat" is "the single most effective thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint" (emphasis in original).

And the U.N. report also found that eating meat is "one of the top

two or three most significant contributors to the most serious

environmental problems, at every scale from local to global."

Specifically, the 408-page report noted the meat industry's

contribution to "problems of land degradation, climate change and air

pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of

biodiversity."

Clearly problems of climate change and the global food crisis

warrant global and political solutions, but one of those solutions will

have to include a shift away from the massive handouts that governments

give to their meat industries in the form of government-paid inspection

programs (these industries should pay their own bills), subsidies for

feed crops, teams of scientists helping to grow larger animals with

fewer resources, and so on. And it should also include government

programs to encourage a public shift away from the consumption of

chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated last month that "[h]unger

is a moral challenge to each one of us as global citizens... [w]ith one

child dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes, the time to

act is now."

The current issue of the New Scientist, in discussing the

food crisis and the vast additonal crops that are required to feed

meat-eaters, as opposed to vegetarians, explains in discussing

solutions, "We could try to reduce the demand by persuading people to

return to a less meaty diet for example, but that is unlikely to work."

 

I think the New Scientist editors underestimate people. In Taiwan, they're taking the concept seriously; the Guardian reported on Wednesday that

to address the global food crisis and global warming, "around a million

people in Taiwan -- including the speaker of parliament, the

environment minister, and the mayors of Taipei and Kaohsiung -- vowed

to never again touch flesh nor fish."

If we take global warming and global poverty seriously, isn't adopting a vegetarian diet the least that each of us can do?

For more on this topic, please visit www.GoVeg.com. Find recipes and more at www.VegCooking.com.