With an Oink Oink here…Baby Steps to Plant Based Week 8

Okay, I admit it, I am running a little behind. My only excuse is it is just becoming warm here, I want to get my garden done, get my kids ready for summer, and sit on the deck with a cold beer. But here I am, with a spare silent second, with the little one and the dog sleeping inches away from me, and the men in our life out making money and playing ball. I thought we could talk about pigs. We all know that is where pork comes from, yes even your beloved bacon. Pigs are awesome, and cute, and smarter than your dog. Why in the heck then, do Americans consume such vast quantities of this amazing animal?

 

From a report by NBC News “Pigs are wise … and clean

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  Paulo Whitaker  /  Reuters

  Here’s the dirt on pigs: They are perhaps the smartest, cleanest domestic animals known – more so than cats and dogs, according to some experts. But pigs don’t have sweat glands, so they roll around in the mud to stay cool. A sign of their cleverness came from experiments in the 1990s. Pigs were trained to move a cursor on a video screen with their snouts and used the cursor to distinguish between scribbles they knew and those they were seeing for the first time. They learned the task as quickly as chimpanzees.”

It is amazing to me that Americans go crazy to save a dog, but regularly eat an animal that is smarter than a dog. Weird Right.  Pigs are very social animals. They form close bonds, and in the wild a group of sows and all their piglets will stay together as a family unit. Pigs are very rarely aggressive, the exceptions being a sow protecting her young, or a boar if provoked. Pigs in meat ‘factory’ farms are packed together with unfamiliar pigs causing stress and chaos. According to The Humane Society “Wild boars have been observed to live 11-25 years in the wild;[175],[176] however, due to hunting, the average lifespan of wild boars and feral pigs is about 4 years.[177],[178]Pigs raised for meat in North America are usually slaughtered at about 6 months of age, when they are still juveniles.[179]”  Isn’t it a shame that we are so selfish to ruin family bonds, and long healthy lives just for the sake of our appetites?

It is also quite a shame that pigs have to live cramped together with strangers, in tiny cages where they can’t even turn around. All in the name of bacon. The pigs in factory farms are shoved so closely to one another that they often bite each other’s tails and backsides out of stress and frustration. Pig flesh a.k.a. bacon, pork chops, loin, roasts, baby back ribs, ham, and sausage are all quite bad for your health. Pork is high in saturated fat and cholesterol which causes heart disease and promotes cancer. Save yourself, free the pigs.

Is it really worth it, to satisfy your taste buds? Is it really worth one of these precious lives to make your meal complete? There are a ton of substitutes if you feel you need them. My favorites are Tofurkey brand keilbasa and the Yves pepperoni. Tastes will change with time, and bacon will go out of style. Be conscious of your food choices. You can make a difference. Stop contributing to the death of millions of animals annually. Just for American consumption in 2008:

USDA slaughter stats 2008

Cattle: 35,507,500
Pigs: 116,558,900
Chickens: 9,075,261,000
Layer hens: 69,683,000
Broiler chickens: 9,005,578,000
Turkeys: 271,245,000″

I know that this is hard to swallow, but sometimes that is what it takes to make people aware of the damage they have been doing to animals, and to their health. Flesh is not food. Fruit is food, vegetables are food, potatoes, rice, quinoa, nuts, seeds and beans are food. Living, breathing, feeling beings DO NOT have to die so that you can have a meal. Eat a salad, save a life.

 

 

I hope that you are enjoying and applying my Baby Steps to Plant Based series to your life. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, if I don’t know the answer, I will gladly point you in the right direction. If you have friends or family that you think would like this series please feel free to share.  You can also find me at

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Lets Talk Sausage – Baby Steps to Plant Based – Week Two

Sausage. Once upon a time, when my son was still a toddler,  I would feed him breakfast sausage thinking that I was doing something good. I thought, ‘he is a growing boy, protein is good for building muscles and fat is good for the developing brain.’ Oh, if I knew then…I hope that everyone is enjoying the daily salad that we added to your diet in week one, I know I am!  Week Two is all about giving up the sausage (don’t be naughty!) Sausage and all processed meat products are unhealthy. They are full of fat, chemicals and toxic additives. They may taste great to you now, but after you have gone a while without them, you will wonder what you ever saw in them.

In preparation for writing this I googled the ingredient list for sausage (I couldn’t find a specific list of animal body parts used in processed meats, but I think it is safe to assume it is not the highest quality meat).  I followed the sausage links (pun intended) and what I found is that most store bought sausages contain most, if not all of the following: amesphous, corn syrup solids, curing salts, powdered dextrose, encapsulated citric acid, fat replacer, fermento, gelatin, glucono-delta-lactone, monosodium glutimate (MSG), non-fat dairy milk, sodium nitrites,  potassium sorbate, salt, sodium ascorbate or sodium erythorbate, soy protein concentrate, sucrose, trehalose, water and soy protein isolate. Remember, that on food labels, ingredients such as these can sometimes hide under innocent sounding names like ‘flavoring’, ‘spices’ and ‘salts’.  If you are anything like me, you have no idea what most of this is or does. Needless to say, I went back to google to figure out what some of these ingredients are, and what they do to the human body.

amesphos- is a phosphate blend used to maintain fresh taste, increase tenderness and juiciness, reduce loss of meat fluids and promote color development. Phosphates can be deadly to people with kidney disease and can cause damage to people with normal kidney function.

corn syrup solids- are a powdered form of high fructose corn syrup, which is a highly processed sweetener. Consumption of refined sugars of all kinds can lead to weight gain, obesity, diabetes, chronic inflammation and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

trehalose- a crystalline disaccharide that is found in various organisms (fungi and insects) that is about half as sweet as sucrose and sometimes used as a sweetener in commercially prepared foods (origin- international scientific vocabulary- trehala, a sweet substance constituting the pupal covering of the beetle. yum! sounds like witch’s brew, not food… beetle juice, cow eyeballs and pig hooves…so mote it be.

monosodium glutimate- is classified as an excitotoxin.  US govt. research determined that consumption of MSG can have the following side effects: burning sensation in the back of neck, forearms and chest; numbness in the back of neck, radiating to arms and back; tingling, warmth and weakness in the face, temples, upper back, neck and arms; facial pressure or tightness; chest pain; headache; nausea; rapid heartbeat; difficulty breathing; drowsiness; weakness. Sounds like a good time, right?

sodium nitrite-that is used to enhance color and prevent bacteria growth in packaged meat products are a cancer promoting additive. a substance that form a variety of nitrosamine compounds that once ingested into the human bloodstream cause damage to internal organs including the pancreas and liver. The USDA tried to ban this product in the 1970’s but was vetoed by the food manufactures, claiming there was no other preservative that would work for packaged meats. Side of cancer with your breakfast anyone?

 

I would also like to mention that sausage is full of fat, and as the fat is where we (both humans and animals) store toxins, along with the fat you will be eating all the toxins that the animal has consumed. This includes the growth hormones they are injected with, the antibiotics that factory farm animals are routinely fed as well as all the pesticides that are on and in the corn and grains used to feed the animals that will be made into sausage and other processed meats.  As you can see, eating sausage, hot dogs, and other processed meat products contain many potentially hazardous ingredients that we are all better off avoiding. There are so many great vegan alternatives out there these days. My favorites are Field Roast Italian Sausage and Tofurkey brand Linguica. Both are delicious, the Field Roast have more spice to them though. We sautee ours in a pan with peppers and onions and eat them on whole wheat rolls with mustard and a side of garlic roasted potatoes. Even our carnivorous friends enjoy them! So please, do your health a favor, and give up processed meats. You don’t need sausage to have a good time.

Stay tuned for week three! I hope that you are enjoying the Baby Steps to Plant-Based series, and if you are please take a moment to ‘like ‘ http://www.facebook.com/annieeatsapplesforever and to share this, or any post with your plant-curious friends! Please feel free to leave your questions and/or comments on this or the facebook page, thanks for reading. Peace, Plants and Positivity to all.