The Near Impossibility of Being a "Good Person"

Unless you've been diagnosed as a clinical sociopath or psychopath, it's usually not your intention to cause other people harm.  I genuinely believe that the majority of people do something with the end goal of doing something good for their family, their friends or even for themselves.  If they end up doing something harmful to others, it's usually because it's the side-effect of their original intention to do good.

The problem is that in our world today, it's almost impossible to "do good" for one or two people without causing unintended harm to a whole bunch of others.

Let's use a simple example of a "good deed".  Let's say that this weekend, I decide to surprise my wife by making her a delicious breakfast in bed made up of her favourite foods: bacon, scrambled eggs, avocado toast, and crepes topped with Nutella and fruit.

Seems like a nice, unselfish and harmless gesture, right?  Not quite.

Bacon requires raising and killing a relatively intelligent, sentient animal. The raising of pigs produces a lot of waste, mainly rivers of pig feces.  It causes water pollution that kills fish in surrounding lakes and rivers, damaging local ecosystems. This also pollutes the air and causes a permanent, nasty smell for people living nearby.

Most eggs (unless they're free range) come from chickens that are stuck in little cages and barely see the light of day their entire lives.  The chickens are usually pumped with antibiotics and hormones to keep them "productive" and prevent illnesses caused by their terrible living conditions.

The avocado on her toast usually are imported from Mexico because they don't grow in Canada.  What most people don't know is that a large amount of avocado farms are now either under the control of or being extorted by Mexican drug cartels. A lot of profits from avocado sales are now going to these violent cartels.  This means a lot of the avocados coming to Canada and the USA are helping fund murder, extortion, smuggling, kidnapping, rape and slave labour.  Of course, transporting avocados from Mexico to Canada requires the use of fossil fuels and does leave a significant carbon footprint.

What about the crepes? Aside from the problematic eggs and milk that I use to make the actual crepes, the problem is the Nutella that my wife loves to eat.  One of the main ingredients of Nutella is palm oil.  While the Nutella website does say that they use "sustainable palm oil", I'm not sure how credible that is.  In any case, the production of palm oil requires deforestation of rain forests in Southeast Asia.  Sure the palm farms create jobs, but it's causing many species like orangutans to become endangered.

Then there's the breakfast itself. Yes, it's delicious (I'm an amazing cook, after all). But it's also a meal that's full of sugar, carbs and trans fat. So while she may enjoy the well-intentioned gesture and the taste of it, I'm actually contributing to the decline of her future health.

I love my wife and I want to find small ways to make her happy on a daily basis. This simple gesture that seems like a "good act" will help do just that. However, with all the unintended consequences, I would have done more harm than good in the world.

The same can be said about sending your mother flowers, volunteering abroad to build houses, and donating canned goods to charity.

Despite our desire to do good, today the old adage is more true than ever: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  We can do the smallest nice things for our friends and families, but in the process, the choices we make to get to those nice small things end up causing more harm to the environment, to other people living far away from us, and future generations.

Plant-Based Fake Meat is a Load of Bull

One of the best things about capitalism is that businesses will always find a way to co-opt seemingly positive social trends for the sake of making money off of easily duped people. The best example of this is the rising popularity of the new fake meat products like Impossible Meat and Beyond Meat.  Even more recently, KFC has jumped on the bandwagon by testing out the Beyond Chicken in their menu.

The marketing behind these products is that they're supposed to be better for your health because they're "plant-based". You seemingly get the protein you get in meat from plants while getting the same nutritional value as eating veggies.

The marketing material also implies that choosing a plant-based diet means that you're also being more environmentally friendly and you're reducing cruelty to animals. All this while keeping the same taste and texture of real meat. Amazing.  You now have a product that will allow you to feel morally superior to those ignorant meat-eaters without sacrificing the delightful feeling you get in your mouth when you're chewing on the flesh of dead animals.

Perfect product, right? Not so fast.

Healthier than meat?

For one this stuff isn't necessarily much healthier than meat. It's highly processed. To replicate the look, smell, texture and taste of ground beef and chicken with peas, soy and "plant-based ingredients", you'll definitely need to do some heavy industrial processing. You'll probably need less additives and processing to get a refrigerated piece of chopped up cow or chicken.

Also, Beyond Meat is mainly made of soy.  Soy has been shown to lower sperm count and decrease libido.  It has also been linked to mood swings and depression.  Prolonged soy consumption has also been connected to the growth of estrogen-dependent tumors found in breast cancer.


What about the calories and fat content?  Calorie-wise, a real burger patty has about the same amount of calories as a fake meat patty.  Sure, real meat will have more saturated fat than the fake patties, but new research in nutrition is showing that dietary fat isn't necessarily bad for your health.  In fact, it's actually necessary for your body.  The problem has been the sugar and carbs found in your burger bun and not the fat in the meat.

Better for the environment?

So what about the argument that avoiding meat is better for the environment and is less cruel to animals? Is that really true? That depends.  Sure, beef production which is used by most environmentalists as the worst case, does have a high carbon footprint.  Yes, the space required for cattle grazing usually leads to deforestation.

However, the amount of soy and peas used to make your plant-based burger requires mono-culture farming that's bad for the soil, requires a high use of pesticides, causes a lot of water pollution and has a high carbon footprint that contributes to climate change.  It also causes the loss of biodiversity by creating areas where only one type of plant can grow.

Coconut farming also promotes monoculture

At the same time the plant ingredients in that fake burger aren't sourced locally.  For example, the coconut oil required not only promotes monocultures, but also has to be shipped from Indonesia, the Philippines, and other tropical countries to North America.  That's a significant when it comes to fossil fuel use and carbon footprint.

Taste?

As for the taste, if you want something that tastes like meat and you have no allergies, why not just eat meat?  It always makes me laugh whenever I see fake meat products made for vegans and vegetarian. It's especially funny when the ones eating these products are the ones preaching and proselityzing about their diets. If their meatless diet is so superior, why are they still craving and trying to replicate the taste and texture of meat?

Looks like real meat, smells like real meat, somewhat tastes like it too... why not just eat a real burger?

Bottom Line:
The fake meat phenomenon is basically another sign of living in a privileged and easy society.  Historically, when you look at different societies around the world, humans will eat whatever they could get to survive. Even in hunter/gatherer societies, meat was considered a rare luxury because it's so difficult to hunt down and chase animals with non-firearm weapons.

As societies become wealthier and more industrialized, the consumption of meat increases. We're seeing that now in many developing countries the same way that we've seen that in the past in Europe and North America.  I suppose that when you reach peak wealth and privilege, the next step is to take your surplus of resources, go into a lab and create something that simulates the most historically coveted type of food.

Of course, I'm not saying that we should only eat meat.  There are many benefits to eating plants when it comes to dietary fiber, vitamins and other nutrients that can't be found in meat.  However, instead of trying to highly process these plant ingredients to look like meat, wouldn't it make more sense to just be the omnivores we evolved to be by eating your meat with vegetables?  I know it seems novel, but humans seem to have survived for millions of years eating that way.

Your Dietary Dogmas are Just Made-Up Religions

Keto, carnivore, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan, low-carb, high-fat, Paleo, low-sugar, Whole30, intermittent fasting...

These are some of the most popular diets and eating modalities you'll hear about in 2019.  People have arguments about which is better for your health.  Some will even attach a moral, quasi-religious aspect to the type of diet that you pick.  And yes, I've even fallen for a couple of these in the past as well.

But really, if you step back and think about it, these invented diets are just another sign that our lives in industrial societies in 2019 have become so easy and abundant.  For most of human history, "diets" as we know them didn't really exist.  Sure there were some religious dietary restrictions, but those had practical origins.  Some restrictions were established to prevent parasitic diseases caused by eating under-cooked meat and shellfish or poisonous plants.  Others were put in place because it was more practical to keep an animal alive for its milk and its ability to do work instead of eating its meat.  Of course food allergies also came into play.  Generally speaking though, humans ate what they could because they wanted to prevent death by starvation.

The only reason why we have these "modern diets" is because we now have access to whatever we want to eat without having to go in the wilderness, hunt an animal down or gather plants that won't poison you, all while avoiding predators that could potentially eat and kill us.  We don't even have to leave the comfort of our sofas to get a high-calorie meal.  It's gotten so easy in fact that obesity and diseases caused by overeating and being sedentary have become the main cause of death in our society.

While there are scientific research showing how certain types of food affect your body, the nature of the scientific method requires that you change the way you eat according to new, correct information. Being dogmatic about what you eat, but more importantly, proselytizing the superiority of your diet is not helpful.

So the next time that you start judging people for what they do and don't eat, stop and realize that you're just being a vain, privileged a-hole.  The dietary dogma that you follow is nothing more than an invention caused by an overly easy life compared to those of your grandparents and an extremely sedentary society.  Eventually, future scientific research will prove your food cult to be wrong.