Hay & Grass
The English say ‘make hay while the sun shines’ meaning that one should take advantage of the circumstances before they change. I didn’t really understand this saying-the literal and figurative understanding that I like to have of sayings-until I saw a television program about life on an English farm circa 1620. The program explained that English farmers would cut the wild grass growing in the meadows near their farm and leave it in the sun to dry, and then they would gather the dry grass, i.e. hay, and store it in a weatherproof barn. The hay would sustain their animals-cow sheep goat-through the winter. The saying should really be ‘dry grass while the sun shines’, which makes sense by itself with no need of agricultural knowledge.
This method of providing feed is peculiar to the northern regions while those who live in lower altitudes move their animals to the valleys in the winter and to the hills and mountains in the summer, taking advantage of the different climate between high and low areas and mirroring the behaviour of wild goats.
Further south people are forced to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of pasture, adopting a nomadic lifestyle to sustain themselves in harsh arid conditions. The nomadic life is the one most like the natural state of grazing animals, who travel exceptionally long distances-whether in the savannah or the tundra-in search of their main diet: wild grass.
Those residing in cold climates heroically made a living circumventing the shortage of grass in the winter by taking advantage of abundant grass in the summer; the price they had to pay was a stationary lifestyle that depended on the availability of nearby meadows, which later would have effects on their social developments. Their efforts had, also, a philosophical effect: they imparted the illusion of animals feeding on hay ‘made’ by humans, this in turn would lead to a flawed modern methods of meat production that depends on feed produced by humans.
Meat contains some of the energy in the grass, energy that has been collected from the sun with no human effort and is of little use to humans in general. Meat, also, contains proteins and fats needed by the human body to develop. Most importantly humans have a biological preference for roasted meat. So eating meat is both desirable and necessary, but it doesn’t have to be a daily or even a weekly habit.
The modern habit of eating meat on a daily basis is one of the most erroneous habits developed by modern society, it is not only harmful to those who practice it but also to others who are harmed by the modern methods of meat production.
Modern production of meat goes something like this: oil is used to grow corn, oil is used to collect and transport corn, oil is used to process corn into feed, more oil is used to distribute feed, oil is used to rear cattle, oil is used to transport cattle, more oil is used to slaughter and process meat products. From using animals as a conduct and collector of free energy the modern world has turned them into sinks that suck limited fossil energy!
Meat seems to need huge amounts of energy; unfortunately the quality of the meat seems to be in an inverse relation with the amount of energy spent on producing it.
When some argue that meat is an irrational product because the energy contained in it is just a fraction of the energy in the feed (which itself only a fraction of the energy in the oil consumed) they are only arguing against feed-reared cattle and their inability to comprehend that there is something else-an alternative that was the only option for the past thousands of years-and thus they show an extreme level of ignorance.
Chicken & Pigs
Chicken on a traditional farm would be put into a field after the harvest to gather the grains that got away; they existed on the crumbs and the leftovers of a household. Thus they collected energy that would be otherwise lost.
Stationary peasants dispose of their waste by feeding it to pigs-who consume rotten organic material including rotten meat-while mobile nomads dispose of their waste by lifting their homes and moving to a clean site, leaving the waste to nature’s scavengers.
Peasants eventually consume the flesh of their pigs, while nomads consider pigs unclean animals-because they consume rotten meat-and do not eat nor keep pigs. Mad cow disease developed from feeding cows the processed carcases of sick sheep; in essence the cows were turned into pigs via food processing. In the view of such dangers the nomad’s diet restriction to plant-based meat seems to hold some ancient wisdom that has been, in a world that thinks in terms of proteins and minerals, forgotten.
