In his Thursday column, Nate Rushing does an excellent job of stating his opinion and, frankly, not much else. In his unabashed attempt to denigrate the vegetarian movement, a target too often eliciting the scrutiny of chest-thumping, ultra-macho, self-aggrandizing he-men, he overstates the trivial and overlooks abundant evidence that runs counter to his agenda. Indeed, he stands so thickly eclipsed by straw men, one need not wonder why his views embody carnivorous myopia.
Let’s set the record straight for everyone, but especially for those who may have been misled by Rushing’s fallacious analysis of the Meatless Monday group.
Though not expressly available in a strictly plant-based diet, vitamin B-12 is widely attainable through simple multivitamins and a slew of fortified eatables, such as breakfast cereals and soy products.
By no means is meat the be-all-end-all as a source of this nutrient, and by no means is B-12 the elusive needle in a haystack that Rushing makes it out to be.
While Rushing emphasizes the truly insightful fact bacteria can spread from, well, just about anything, he omits that slaughterhouse-primed livestock are routinely left to wallow in their own fecal matter and that their flesh carries high amounts of injected antibiotics. But antibiotics in food are probably good, right? Wrong.
The FDA has admitted they pose “an urgent public health issue” for human consumers and has documented the advent of bacteria that resist drug treatment as detriment of antibiotic use.
Not to mention, the near-complete corn diet on which modern commercial cows subsist makes their stomachs more conducive to E. coli growth and invites the formation of cesspools of acid resistant bacteria. And that’s not the good kind, which Rushing so fervently defends in his column.
What he additionally fails to address are the growing diabetes, obesity and heart disease issues responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. A vegetarian lifestyle is associated with lower rates of all these, in addition to lower body mass indices and longer average life expectancy.
Furthermore, cutting back on meat consumption is a practice of sustainability. Its production costs us vastly greater crop and water resources than the equivalent caloric value of agricultural produce. With millions starving around the world, a meatless diet is not only a nutritional gift to yourself; it’s a favor to those who lack even minimal sustenance.
But Meatless Monday is not asking anyone for an entirely meatless diet. Those involved are not here to mutiny your personal freedom, Nate. If Rushing did his research, he would know these concerned students encourage a healthy, thoughtful and compassionate lifestyle for the small price of passing on steak for tofu just one day a week. So stop the fearmongering and fill up your plate, Nate. You just might like it.
Editor's note: This letter refers to this column.
