Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Since everyone is reporting this story (“Meat hook dangling craze mystifies police“) to me, I thought I'd mention that it's Gus and CherryBomb they're talking about, and you can see lots of pictures from it (including the Coast Guard) here in their BME/Ritual gallery.

So I was watching something yesterday about how reduced calorie diets not only dramatically increase health in animals, but also slow the aging process itself. The “senior monkeys” in the study still had young fit bodies, never grew gray hair, and kept up their libidos. None of this is really new knowledge — we've known for at least the past hundred years that lowering caloric consumption causes a person to live longer and stay healthier and more alert, and the swath of diseases associated with both high calorie diets as well as with meat, dairy, and eggs, are also quite public knowledge.

So why does the US government so aggressively promote high calorie and high animal-product diets? While it's true that there are powerful lobbies for the junk food and animal farming industries, I think the real answer is a lot darker than that. Give some objective thought to why the US (and other Western nations) would want people to age quickly and die sooner…

One of the biggest problems that modern societies face is what to do with old people. The pension and healthcare systems were never designed to handle people living so long after retirement, and are becoming increasingly strained. There just isn't enough money in the system to support such a high percentage of people living so long, and Medicare certainly can't even come close to supporting it. Keeping in mind that this new American lifestyle that espouses high calorie and high meat is a recent idea (no more than forty years old — this is not the diet of your grandparents' youth), I think it has to do as much with population control and economic stabilization as it does with lobbyists.

By feeding people a high calorie and high animal byproduct diet, you ensure that they die before they become a burden on society. It's really quite clever when you think about it… So eating a steak really is a patriotic thing to do, in the same way that becoming a suicide bomber might be patriotic in other nations. I suppose it's better than the sci-fi alternative of having forced suicide at age 65, right? If everyone went vegan and lived to be 85, or we found some other way to extend life, many people would be stuck working until age 75 due to the growing cost of supported a huge retired population.

So keep eating your meat — the early death you suffer is for the good of the nation.

PS. Maybe it's selfish, but I'm staying vegan.