Kristof schrijft over cultuur in en rond Gent. Vooral over muziek maar ook politiek, hedendaagse kunst, film, techniek, theater en literatuur komen soms aan bod.
Kristof is working as a freelance C++ Mac developer in Belgium, using his one man company.
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© Kristof Van Landschoot 2004-2010
This one in English because I want twitter user mt_mosquito to understand this.
Back in the days of the outbreak of the swine flu I made the remark that vegetarianism might not be a bad move to consider if we want to prevent a furious outbreak of some deadly virus or other. Like Swine Flu, more commonly known as Mexican Flu now, or like the Bird Flu. I had done a quick search on bird flu and vegetarianism and found this article which seemed to confirm my gut feeling: a lot of these new viruses have to do with the way we farm animals.
As twitter is, I posted this in a 140 character thought with a link to the article and a hash tag and within seconds received the following reply:
Stupid
If there is one thing I can't stand is that people call me stupid. Especially when it is obviously without even reading the article. I did not reply anything even though I considered it. My feeling is that it's often better to stay silent about things you don't like than to start arguing. Especially when the only means to argue is 140 character messages back and forth.
Also I guessed the credibility of the article might easily be undermined. What is worldwatch, the organisation that published this article, anyway? And who was the author anyway? Maybe some leftist anarcho-vegetarian lunatic? So I chose not to dispute the matter.
Imagine my cheer when just yesterday while I was soaking in my bath tub I found an interesting article in Newsweek that claimed exactly the same. Not exactly a biased source I would say. The author is "the senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer". I guess some people would call her a retard, but to me that sounds like somebody that might actually know what she is talking about. So it is with great pleasure that I quote the last two paragraphs of her interesting article:
A wiser set of pig-related actions would turn to the strange ecology we have created to feed meat to our massive human population. It is a strange world wherein billions of animals are concentrated into tiny spaces, breeding stock is flown to production sites all over the world and poorly paid migrant workers are exposed to infected animals. And it's going to get much worse, as the world's once poor populations of India and China enter the middle class. Back in 1980 the per capita meat consumption in China was about 44 pounds a year: it now tops 110 pounds. In 1983 the world consumed 152 million tons of meat a year. By 1997 consumption was up to 233 million tons. And the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that by 2020 world consumption could top 386 million tons of pork, chicken, beef and farmed fish.
This is the ecology that, in the cases of pigs and chickens, is breeding influenza. It is an ecology that promotes viral evolution. And if we don't do something about it, this ecology will one day spawn a severe pandemic that will dwarf that of 1918.
So let me take the opportunity: if diminishing hunger in the world, saving the environment or getting rid of animal cruelty is not enough to convince you, do it for your and all of humanity's health.
And if reading the article is too difficult, complicated or time consuming for you, let me repeat the message to you in a now classic animation movie clear enough for even children to understand. Well if they're not retarded I guess.