What with the world collapsing around our ears, maybe now is a good time to contemplate our post-apocalyptic future. It's become politically fashionable to talk about veganism as the new Heathy Diet; God forbid this should ever happen, because it'll precipitate another apocalypse (involving ecology, economics, and public health). No, the future has fat in it. And fewer carbs.
To explain why, I need to first outline why a vegan planet is a really, really bad idea. Even if you consider a healthier variant which includes saturated fats (from tropical oils), there are three big problems:
1) Despite being omnivores, humans eat a fairly limited range of things. We cannot, for example, digest cellulose or lignin (we can digest some forms of 'fibre' and resistant starch, but our ability to do so depends on our intestinal flora). Many plants are poisonous or unpalatable to us. The vegetables we eat today have been engineered to be a lot tastier than their wild ancestors. Veganism, therefore, means the cultivation of familiar vegetables, and to cultivate vegetables you need all the trappings of modern agriculture: herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, machines, and fossil fuels. The idea that you can just pick a spot of land and grow tomatoes on it is a silly city-dweller's fantasy. There are any number of things that can happen before you get to eat the tomatoes, and modern agricultural techniques have been honed to address those things. Unfortunately, those techniques are also destroying our planet, and more specifically they're destroying the land on which crops are grown.
2) Vegetables have low energy density and (mostly) a limited shelf life. That means you need to grow a lot of them, and that means (a) more resource-hungry logistics and complex storage and (b) a lot more land being brought into use. Not just any old land, but 'arable' land ... which is in short supply, because we're destroying it all. By, uh, growing vegetables on it. Most farmland loses more topsoil each year than it actually exports in produce.
3) Humans aren't the only animals that like eating vegetables. As mentioned in (1), if you have 100 acres of corn or cabbages, that looks like an all-you-can-eat buffet to any number of wild creatures (mostly small ones). The agricultural-science solution, of course, is to kill 'em all with extreme prejudice. A vegan planet would require wiping out entire clades of critters to keep the supermarkets stocked with vegetables.
We can fix all this with LCHF.
The key point here is that the animals we like to keep for meat, eggs and dairy all thrive well on pasture. "Pasture" just means a managed system of perennial plants, and there are many different climate-specific variants. You can establish useful pasture almost anywhere - even in arid locations, given enough land area and a bit of effort. The plants are usually a combination of native species that arrive by themselves, and a careful selection of introduced ones. When paired with the rooting, scratching, and browsing behaviour of pigs, bovines, goats, and chickens, you get a self-sustaining system that locks in its own fertility, requires almost no management, and exports valuable economic commodities (ie., meat, eggs and dairy).
In many climates you can supercharge this system, either by rotating the animals through the land and following them with annual crops (which thrive on the freshly-deposited fertility the animals leave behind), or by interplanting perennials that humans like to eat, such as coconut, palm oil, moringa spp., or fruit/nut trees. Fruit works especially well with pigs, since they happily eat fallen fruit (I've found turkeys and ducks will too, up to a point).
Chickens can even be rotated through low-growing perennials and/or long-lived annuals like katuk, roselle, okra, chili, allium spp., and grafted eggplant (typically on a solanum capsicoides rootstock). They do nibble on things, but not in a particularly destructive way.
This kind of system ('regenerative agriculture') stops soil erosion dead in its tracks, and in fact rebuilds soil fertility. The output is about half-and-half animal products and vegetables ... which by happy coincidence, is what LCHF adherents would like to eat.
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TheAwfulToad
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As an ex-pasture farmer, thats' music to my ears. You are spot on. I hated arable, it's destructive. Our farm was arable when we bought it, and you be hard-pressed to find a worm anywhere. The soil was dead, even grass wouldn't grow properly. After turning it over to large livestock, it took some years but eventually it became a healthy, alive place, the soil was alive, and more wildlife, with hedges everywhere after we had re-instated what the arable guys had pulled up.
Arable isn't even kinder to animals, depends how you look at it but it's almost certainly worse. I have spoken to scientists who feel exactly the same and say that their colleagues do as well, but they are actually scared to say so.
Old farmers never die, they just return to the soil
The inherent cruelty in modern farming is a disgrace, and it annoys me that politicians STILL don't get it: nature fights back. Coronavirus, if we can believe the news, is a direct result of treating nature with disdain. IIRC most experts were actually predicting a bacterial plague as a result of antibiotic resistance; about 80% of antibiotics are [mis]used in agriculture as prophylactics so that animals don't die en masse in their human-made slums. It could still happen.
There couldn't be a better moment for an agricultural revolution.
"Scared to say so", eh. Doesn't surprise me. It's sad, though, that so many people know how to do it right and most of them just aren't speaking up. If they did, they'd probably find that the industrial-farming crowd are simply a vocal minority.
During WW2, here in the UK the 'national herd' was culled to make way for Vegetable and Grain farming, along with bringing in 'marginal ' land.
More and more, it was found by the War's end,that the soil was totally depleted, and needed Artificial Fertilisers and pesticides to produce more than weeds. Feed The Nation, was a good idea, spoiled by Politicians.
Monocultures and vast fields were needed to produce, and hence hedgerows were grubbed out to make room for Industrial farming.
One reason we have to import much of our vegetables and fruit, as even the orchards were torn down to feed the nation.
Heathrow Airport was built over many acres of Market Gardens and the village of Heathrow was flattened. Airport expansion, hotels and ancillary airport industries, took more fertile land.
We are still not treating the land well, It is definitely time to bring back more traditional ways of farming and fertilising our fields.
Very informative. This is what we need - “an agricultural revolution“. But will people listen.... Perhaps a movement similar to the “black lives matter” or the “me.too” movement could get people to be more vocal about the way we are treating our planet - our home.
Thank you for your posts my husband and I really appreciate them.
I haven't yet fully understood why LCHF and many associated matters do not appear to be widely promoted. I suppose undoing the low fat mantra built up over many years takes some doing. The eat less meat theme is promoted, the consume less calories theme is also promoted along with the instruction to avoid fat, but LCHF receives much less press. The points that you raise and Cyrtis readily confirms regarding agriculture just do not receive the coverage. As you commented we need an agricultural revolution.
I realise that if the vast proportion of the population changed to LCHF many businesses would be unable to continue in their current form. Clearly massive changes would be needed in many areas, which I am sure you are much more informed about and about how the changes could be introduced than I am.
There have been some television coverage, BBC's 'The Truth about Carbs' and some others, the titles of which I do not remember. I know there have been LCHF presentations to the UK parliament and that a few prominent politicians including, I think, the current health secretary have enjoyed the results of a low carbohydrate diet, but still the papers and magazines I see rarely mention it. I have been tutoring via Skype and Zoom consuming far too many hours but now have a 4½ week break, can I manage to compose a few emails to some magazine editors? I'll try.
I receive two free magazines courtesy of the bank accounts that we have. The front cover of one declared, "Eat to beat type 2 diabetes with the Hairy Bikers". I thought to myself that this would mean at last the promotion of LCHF. I was wrong. The recipes do not include nutritional data per portion, but they are definitely not LCHF. The story continues ...
I think that's covered by "bovines". There are a lot of different breeds that are more or less suitable for different climates.
Well that’s so much information TheAwfulToad, amazing knowledge.
I’m on the LCHF plan and I’ve tried hundreds of diets this one is amazing it really is the results so far are staggering. I do think all these years I’ve been told low fat this low fat that. Not no more.🍏🍎
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