Radio Australia Today Editorial

Another Whack on the Head

17 April 2008

Today we’re interviewing a man who has gone further than Al Gore ever dared.Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was pretty damning of the way we are hurting the planet, but in the end it is fairly positive, with the message that if we cut down on our power consumption, buy a hybrid car and do carbon offsets when we fly, then things will get better.

Not so, says Aaron Scheibner. Sorry Al, he says, but you’re wrong there.

Scheibner says that we’ll need to make a whole lot of changes on a personal level if we are to have a planet to live on.By that he means we have to give up meat.

Yep. Meat.

He also says we have to give up dairy products. Milk. Cheese. Even eggs.In the Australian film critics award-nominated doco (called A Delicate Balance), he has a whole swag of experts who say that meat and dairy production sucks up huge amounts of water (one figure says 100,00 litres of water is used to produce a kilo of meat). That’s the water that is used to grow the grasses needed for livestock to graze.

It’s not just about the planet. Scheibner has plenty of medical practitioners and resreachers who testify that meat and dairy consumption is what is causing the cancers so prevalent in western societies at the moment. It’s not the meat that is causing the cancers,  it’s the cooking of the meat, and also he says that the meat stops the body protecting itself from cancer formation.Whoa. It’s heavy.

After I watched the DVD of the doco. I thought how glad I was that I am a vegan. But I wondered about how the doco would be accpted by meat-eaters. Would there be denial? Would his doco by disparaged? Would people get angry? How would they cope with such aan indictment of their way of living.After he’s telling people that the ways of their parents and grandparents are wrong.

Well sorta. You see some of the medical practitioners in the doco make the point that eighty years ago, many people in the world were living a largely vegetarian diet. Chicken roasts were special yearly treats. Greek islanders were largely vegetarians and occasionally ate fish, which was uncontaminated by today’s toxins. Koreans rarely ate meat. It was only after the Americans came during the Korean war that the taste for meat was developed. Now South Korea is a heavy meat-eating nation.

We’ll be interviewing Scheibner today on the Club, and we’ll be podcasting the chat too. Have a listen if you can.

Somehow I don’t think this message is going to go away.