01.10.10
Posted in knitting and crocheting at 9:56 pm by Administrator
Since I can’t post pictures on the comments section, I’ll just add it here. . .
This is the Misti Alpaca skein. It’s not a great picture as it really has some flecks of red that is not evident in the picture. And the picture kinda has a bluish tinge, when really, my eyes in life says it’s not really bluish, but dark and multicolored.
And since I know it’s hard to know what the colorway will look like knitted up just by looking at the skein, I knit up a small sample. This picture looks to me more like what the actual colors look like. Aaron says this pic is a little lighter than the actual, but closer in color than the top pic.
I didn’t expect to have a hard time finding the right colors. I mean navy and dark gray sound basic, right? Well, they had lots of choices, but not many plain colors and mostly a lot more vibrant than this! The only other colorway in Misti Alpaca was in greens.
I don’t usually go to several yarn shops in a such a short time, so the temptation was too great to not pick up something for myself, errrp! I’ve been wanting to try some Koigu for a long time, and I finally broke down and got a couple skeins. I left one in a hank, and the other I had wound up. I think I’m going to make this into a scarf for myself.
Okay, that’s all for now.
Marlakins
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01.05.10
Posted in Book Reviews, Church Issues and Bible Interpretations, Health-related--Natural Alternative Treatments, Historical Trivia, food and restaurants at 8:28 pm by Administrator
The first book I’ve finished reading in 2010 is Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. I assumed before I read the book that it was going to be an appeal to become vegetarian, and for the most part, it is. Being that I’ve already gone down that road before, and due to health reasons I found that my body works better when consuming some animal products, I had no intention of going back to veganism. However, I still wanted to read the book because I thought it might have more information that I had not be aware of. And that has been the case. Thus I’m happy that I’ve read the book because it was informative, and Foer didn’t come across as beating in down our throats that we should all be vegetarian. Rather he tried to give the viewpoints of both vegetarians and ominvores, which I appreciated.
So what did I learn from this book? Well, first of all my diet choices have been primarily formed around health issues. So I’ve been concerned with cleanliness and nutritional value. Secondly, I have been concerned with our environment and excessive chemical uses and genetic engineering because that also results in affecting our health. While I had known that animals in factory farms are not in the best of health, and thus not the best source of high quality, clean nutrition, I had not really considered their “suffering” aspect of it. I’m not really talking about the fact that animals have to be killed to eat them, but rather their treatment before they’re killed. As a Christian, I have great respect for what’s written in the Bible. The Bible doesn’t prohibit eating meat from animals, and even encourages it in Genesis 9:3-4 when God discusses with Moses what he can eat after the flood:
“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.”
There are many other examples from both the Old And New Testaments that allow eating animal products. Even Jesus eats fish and feeds it to the multitude. But on that same note, the Bible does address the welfare of animals. Proverbs 12:10 states:
“A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
I believe some vegetarians will say that it’s not right to kill an animal just to eat it and that killing it in itself is cruelty. Judging from the Bible, I don’t agree with that because God commanded and required animal sacrifices and Jesus also clearly ate meat. If any one of us is righteous, Jesus would definitely fit the bill. He was not cruel, and thus the mere eating of animals is not a cruel act.
It was also mentioned in Eating Animals that the conditions of factory farms and slaughterhouses promotes violence and disregard for animals. While I can believe that may be true under the current conditions of the factory farms, I don’t believe it is necessarily true for all methods of killing animals for food consumption. Otherwise I don’t think God would have commanded that animals be sacrificed or that livestock be provided for the many feasts that the Israelites held several times each year. God clearly wants us to be good people, not violent mad men. And so God lists many things that we must do to be good people, and nowhere does He state that we should not kill animals for food because it makes us violent. But I do appreciate that Foer describes the violence committed against many hundreds of factory farm animals because honestly, I had not really taken much time to consider their plight. I am disturbed at how many slaughters don’t go as smoothly and painlessly as possible, but I was horrified to read that many of the workers were just downright violent with the animals and literally physically torturing them by beating them and stabbing and slicing them while alive for no apparent reason than that they are frustrated with the animals. I also knew that the living conditions of factory farmed animals were atrocious, but I had no idea of the extent to which the animals suffered in those conditions. From reading war books and realizing the devastating health effects of poor nutrition and living conditions for people (civilians and prisoners of war), I can now understand a little more the extent of suffering factory farmed animals are forced to endure. And it is heartbreaking.
Foer doesn’t only expose the problems with factory farming of land animals, but he also touches upon sea animals. Our family generally purchases wild-caught seafood because we have wanted to avoid farmed fish because they are also fed antibiotics and questionable feed, not to mention many farmed fish like salmon are genetically engineered. We’ve done this for about the past 8 years now after we stopped being vegetarian. But Foer points our that in trawling for specific fish many other hundreds sea life species not intended for food are dragged up and killed in the process. I had heard about how some fishing operations drag net that are about 35 miles long, but naively, I didn’t even “think” what that meant for all the various sea animals in those 35 foot nets’ wake. Again, it’s heartbreaking and disturbing to me. I know from reading older sailing books that our oceans were once more heavily populated with sea life. The accounts of sailors back in the 1500 and 1600s comment on that and had impressed upon me while I read those stories. So to know that our current methods of fishing are seriously depleting our oceans of fish is disturbing.
So what does this all mean to me? Should I go back to being a vegan? From learning the hard way, I see that my body really does much better with some animal products. I personally believe that anyone with a blood condition like I had should have some animal products for optimal health. I know that vegetarians claim that we don’t need animal products to be healthy, but my experience has shown me that animals are the best source of B12. Plant sources of B12 are analogs and thus can actually deplete our B12 stores. B12 is essential for blood production in our bodies, and it’s likely God knew this and thus allowed man to eat animals after the flood. It may have been that before the flood we didn’t need animal meat, but it seems our living conditions must have changed after the flood, which may have required eating animal meat to keep us healthy. Consider the animals in the wild how they also eat other animals. Eating other animals is essential for some of their survival. And example of this is a story I read in Weston Prices’ book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, about lions in captivity. He wrote that the first lions in captivity would fail to thrive, and they were unable to breed. In order to understand this an man observed the lions in the wild and found that when the lions killed it’s prey, the first thing they would eat was the liver. From that observation, liver was fed to the lions in captivity and they subsequently thrived AND were able to reproduce. Obviously for lions liver is required, and liver doesn’t grow on trees or any plant. There are other aspects of plant vs animal nutrients, but that would be for another post. The bottom line is that I don’t think that everyone can thrive well being vegans. I know my health was not optimal that way, and there are likely many others like me.
In the end, I do appreciate Foer’s book. I like how he writes about the importance of social eating. That has been a big issue when I had originally gone vegan, then back to meat products, but all organic. What we eat has been, at times, a very touchy and uncomfortable subject for me because there always seems to be someone not happy or offended that we won’t eat certain things. And at times it has been frustrating for me that not more places offer organic fare. So now I have more to consider, more to weigh on my conscience. While I don’t think, for health reasons, that I will stop eating animals, I think I am going to be more conscientious and perhaps cut down on my animal consumption. The year has just begun. Let’s see how it goes.
Marlakins
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