Pushing barrows

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My issues with the good Professor Grayling seem to have created some confusion, here and on Facebook.

I do not feel the need to enter into a debate on vegetarianism, as such. It was not the point of the post.

I do feel strongly that a person in a position of influence and power should not lie, and continue to lie once he has been shown his information is blatantly false, to push a personal barrow.

On any issue.

I took issue with Dr Helen Caldicott many years ago when she was campaigning against the French nuclear testing in the Pacific. I was strongly against the tests as was Dr Caldicott but, full of passion, she talked rot. Easily disproved rot. And my campaigning was weakened by association.

I rail against any politician, usually but not always the Opposition, who abandons truth in an effort to instil fear in voters.

If you can't win your case with the truth, perhaps you don't have a case.

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Back to the Professor, briefly:

He claims meat is full of bacteria. And defecating bacteria to boot. Oh, poo!

But we humans are made of meat.

And if we get a cut that permits bacteria to enter our flesh it gets red, sore and pussy.

So, is our flesh, or any animal's flesh, full of bacteria? No, it is not. Our bodies react badly to the presence of bacteria.

I am not making a case for or against meat eating.

I am making a case for the use of truth.
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...and how you say it.

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Wit a remarkable lack of presentation, the professor replied:

Dear Lee Kennedy
Thank you for your email and the accompanying letter. And for the nice things you say about some of my writings. We disagree about meat: you have a desire for logic and rational thought and yet you are 'saddened' and upset because of what I say about meat, and impute this to being saddened and upset because, by your lights, I fail in logic and factuality in talking of meat. Your points, however, simply won't do. For a start the fact that someone is 'saddened' that someone holds a different point of view does not wash with me; disagreement is the motor of clarification and debate, and sometimes disagreements are a datum that have to remain. I am not stopping you from being a graveyard for parts of deceased farm animals, I am telling you my take, and you are very free to think otherwise. As to facts and logic: Consult your dictionary for 'defecate', for example; and for 'carrion'; check with a microbiologist whether the contemporaneous existence of bacteria and antibiotics is possible; ask yourself whether it can really possibly, conceivably be true that deceased animal flesh can be bacteria free; read up a bit on factory farming and the use of growth hormones and antibiotics in cattle destined for the slaughter-house; read up on the effects of human over-exposure to antibiotics and their consequent reduced efficacy. I leave you to look up and verify the economics of meat versus cereal production and how many people can be fed by each method; I would especially look at the square mileage of rain forest being felled annually for running beef cattle in the Amazon basin as an indicator, and also at the staggering percentage of climate change carbon output from the meat industry. And you fail to accept that having raised the health and economic points, my own chief reason for being a vegetarian is a personal ethical one. You have made a different ethical decision: that doesn't sadden and upset me: my emotional responses are confined to the animals in the slaughter house. Good wishes - Anthony Grayling

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Dear Professor Grayling,

Thank you for your most interesting response.

My principle concern is the nonsense about defecating bacteria. They don't. If this strange assertion were true the same must apply to other foods that contain bacteria: Does that mean you don’t eat yoghurt because of the billions of bacteria ‘defecating’ in it? Or cheese. Or coffee? Or Cocoa? Or vinegar? Or sourdough bread? Or soy sauce? Or vitamins B2 and B12?

Nor are they swarming on meat the way you claim. If they were, those strange people who eat Steak Tartare and Beef Carpaccio would have died from food poisoning long ago.

Being an Approved Analyst under the Food Act here in Victoria I am not totally ignorant of the compositional and health aspects of food.

But I feel that you are misusing a position of trust by perpetrating quite bizarre notions about meat in a high-voltage, high emotion diatribe.

That is not to say I am anti-vegetarian; nor does it mean I am pro-meat. It just means I prefer calm and factual discourse.

Sincerely,

Lee Kennedy.

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No reply, so I assume that is the end of the correspondence. Calm or otherwise.
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Can a vegetarian talk tripe?

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This is Professor A. C. Grayling, philosopher, atheist and prolific writer.

He is also a vegetarian.

I have no problem with that, many of my favourite meals contain no meat:

Fresh pasta with pesto sauce, Margarita pizza, rhubarb crumble.

But I read one of his articles today and, when it comes to vegetarianism, the guy is as fanatical and as irrational as the worst religious fundamentalists he argues against.

Some examples:

"What butchers call 'fresh meat' is nothing of the sort, but is in fact carrion, because meat is only soft enough to cut, cook and eat when it has begun to decay. "

Comment: All meat carcasses are carrion, by definition. The hanging process has nothing to do with bacteria, indeed meat is kept cool (1-3 deg C) to prevent bacterial growth. The softening of the meat tissues during hanging is an enzymatic process, not bacterial.

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"Rotting is effected by millions of bacteria swarming in the meat; their task is to pre-digest it for us by eating it first; the gamey smell of hung venison comes from the excrement of the microbes smeared all over it - everything that eats must excrete, and the meat is both dining room and toilet for the microbes. "

Comment: Lots of emotive words, little fact. Game is not common fare and the cooking process kills all bacteria.

"Their task"? Sounds awfully like Intelligent Design, professor!

"Everything that eats must excrete" is true enough but bacteria don't eat. Not in the sense of a digestive system with a mouth, intestines and anus.

You do seem to have it in for bacteria. Does that mean you don’t eat yoghurt because of the billions of bacteria ‘defecating’ in it? Or cheese. Or coffee? Or Cocoa? Or vinegar? Or sourdough bread? Or soy sauce? Or vitamins B2 and B12?

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"Perhaps you like filling your mouth with rotting flesh full of injected hormones and vaccines, pullulating with microbes and covered in microbe diarrhoea."

Comment: Even if the food was 'pullulating' with microbes, which it isn’t, all bacteria are killed by cooking. If meat was so tainted, why can people eat raw meat safely? OK, not chicken, but many other meats are eaten raw or rare with nary a blink from the health authorities. Is this dereliction of their duties or is possibly because there no risk?

I must pull you up on diarrhoea. Yes, it is a nice emotive word but it is factually quite wrong. Diarrhoea is often a bacterial infection in animals. There is no evidence of bacteria having bacterial infections. They do not even have a digestive system that would support such a process.

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That will do. I can't help wondering how the good Professor would mark a student's paper if they wrote in such a bizarre manner and illogical manner.

But it is fascinating to see a normally logical and reasoned writer struggle with a topic quite obviously close to his heart. Rationale thought seems to have deserted him.

If I was a Creationist, which I'm not, and I was on the other side of a debate with Professor Grayling, which I am unlikely to be, I would have to slip in something like "God meant us to eat meat" and then watch him haemorrhage.
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