Your Trillion Dollar Meat Addiction

How is coronavirus working out for you? Lost wealth, social activities, mental well being, and if really unlucky your life. While the media mostly focuses on either blaming China, or how our government was slow to react, the truth is this. This was yet again another pandemic that was a result of people’s insatiable desire to eat animals. In this case, apparently a bat. WTF?

Not the First Meat Disease

This isn’t the first massive problem from eating animals. The biggie was the Spanish Flu. It’s called the Spanish flu because Spanish King Alfonso XIII came down with a nasty case of it. Spain didn’t participate in World War I and thus had the freest press in Europe at the time. Their press reported on the King catching this disease a lot, and the name Spanish Flu stuck. So if it didn’t have anything to do with Spain, how did it start?

Famed interdisciplinary researcher Alfred W. Crosby’s often cited theory is that the virus strain originated at Fort Riley, Kansas, by two genetic mechanisms – genetic drift and antigenic shift – in viruses in poultry and swine which the fort bred for local consumption. This theory of animals starting the pandemics isn’t just a one-off theory. It is repeated with SARS, H1N1, Ebola, even AIDs.

The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most severe pandemic in recent history. The disease passed from poultry to pigs to people eventually, with the number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.

Chicken & Pig Karma?

Chickens and pigs seem to be the catalysts for these horrible diseases, and it is because their disgusting living conditions, on top of each other, are the perfect breeding grounds for new diseases.

As human populations have risen, so have swine and poultry populations as a means to feed them. This expanded number of hosts provides increased opportunities for novel influenza viruses from birds and pigs to spread, evolve and infect people.

The truth is that crowding tens of thousands of animals, basically on top of one another, services as an amplifier to viral pandemics.

The H1N1 swine flu outbreak in 2009 originated by many accounts from pig confinement in North Carolina. The H5N1 bird flu outbreak in 1997 originated in Chinese chicken farms.

Dr. Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching

My favorite doctor, Dr. Michael Greger, author of Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching calls factory farming a perfect storm environment for infectious diseases. He concludes that if you want to have more pandemics, continue building factory farms.

$2.3 Trillion, Just Today

When is this going to stop? Just today the Federal Reserve had to agree to buy up $2.3T more of loans (munis and corporate bonds). The Fed normally only buys treasuries and mortgaged back securities, but now it is having do all kinds of unconventional things cause we’re falling off a cliff…..why? Because we keeping creating pandemics due to our lust for meat.

There is no reason to eat meat, other than it something you like and are used to. This isn’t a good reason. We have to stop this if we want to have a planet worth living on.

Here are some reasons to give up meat.

You’ll be healthier. Really, you’ll have more energy, lose weight, sleep better, have clearer skin, will be much less likely to get cancer, heart disease or type 2 diabetes. You can basically opt-out of the medical-industrial complex by going vegan. You’ll stop the destruction of the planet, stop the clearing forests to grow soy and alfalfa to feed cows. Animals are sentient beings. Don’t you think your dog or cat feels love, sadness, loneliness, and pain? So do pigs, cows, and chickens. You have no reason to torture them, which you are doing by buying their flesh to eat. You’ll like being a vegan. I promise. You’ll like yourself so much better as you’ll have better health, less monkey mind, and you’ll be practicing stewardship every day to mother earth.

It’s time for humans to evolve. We need to move past the point of letting our taste buds destroy all the accomplishments of mankind. We need to embrace stewardship for this plant, for our children, and for all of mankind.