The Gloves Are Off

Blame it on the New York Times! Without a remodeling project or rehearsals to occupy my time and lend fodder for the blog, AN ACTOR REPAIRS has been dormant as you may have noticed. And now along comes this in this weeks "Week In Review" section. I resisted bringing politics, and most of all 'opinion' (the cheapest of all commodities-everyone has one) onto this blog for quite some time, but again, without my two main topics serving me up any goodies, I’m going to have to launch a few posts that look suspiciously like the chatter we’ve all come to recognize as blogging. So fair warning, the following deviates from ‘dovetails’ and ‘dialogue’ by a wide margin.

The following are a couple of excerpts from the Times article. The whole thing is definitely worth reading.

A SEA change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil. It’s meat.

and

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

and this as its most optimistic offering

Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production. “When you look at environmental problems in the U.S.,” says Professor Eshel, “nearly all of them have their source in food production and in particular meat production. And factory farming is ‘optimal’ only as long as degrading waterways is free. If dumping this stuff becomes costly — even if it simply carries a non-zero price tag — the entire structure of food production will change dramatically.”

Gone are the days when polite dinner conversation regarding vegetarianism centers around a civilized agree-to-disagree acceptance of these matters as a ‘lifestyle choice’. Tune in next time for my much-anticipated piece on why, given all that was said in the Times article, vegetarianism is actually a matter of enlightenment.

Betcha wish I’da stuck ta sawdust and stagehands.