There was an article that appeared in Hawaii’s newspaper that not only got my attention, it affected my heart as well.
In an article written by Michael Moss of the New York Times, he spoke about a facility that created more profit but came at a steep cost to the farm animals involved. The facility was a Meat Lab.
At a remote research center on the Nebraska plains, scientists are using surgery and breeding techniques to re-engineer farm animals to fit the needs of the twenty-first century flesh industry where soft-heartedness does not come into the equation.
The potential benefits are huge; animals that produce more offspring, yield more flesh and cost less to raise.
But, and there’s always a but, there are some minor complications.
Pigs are having way more piglets – up to fourteen instead of the usual eight – but hundreds of those newborns that are too frail or crowded to move, are being crushed consistently when their mothers roll over.
Cows, which normally bear one calf at a time, have been “fixed” so they can have twins and triplets. Unfortunately, they emerge weakened or deformed, dying in such numbers that even the flesh producers have been repulsed. Now that’s one for Ripley’s!
Then there’s the lambs. In an effort to develop sheep that can survive without costly shelters or shepherds, ewes are giving birth, unaided, in open fields where the newborns are killed by predators and bad weather.
About a year or so ago at the height of the birthing season, two veterinarians had to deal with the weekend’s toll: twenty-five rag-doll bodies. Five abandoned by overtaxed mothers, had empty stomachs. Six had signs of pneumonia and five had been ripped apart by coyotes.
All the remains were tossed into a barrel destined to be dumped into a huge evacuation confine affectionately known as the “dead pit”.
These experiments are not the work of a flesh processor or some fly-by-night operation. They are conducted by a taxpayer-financed federal institution called the U.S. Meat Animal Research Center, a complex of laboratories and pastures that sprawls over fifty-five square miles in Clay Center, Nebraska.
It’s so wonderful to see our tax dollars in action despite this action being hidden by the mainstream media and the government.
Also, not widely known outside the world of Big Ag, the center has one salient purpose: to help destroyers of beef, pork and lamb turn a higher profit as diets shift toward poultry, fish and vegetarianism.
Since Congress founded it fifty years ago to consolidate the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research on farm animals, the center has worked to make lamb chops bigger, pork loins less fatty, and beefsteaks easier to chew.
But all those endeavors came at a steep cost to the center’s animals, which have been subjected to more illnesses, more pain and more premature deaths over many, many years.
The research to increase pig liters began in 1986; the twin calves have been dying at high rates since 1984, and the easy-care lambs for 10 years.
Too bad they never figured out a way to eliminate the mercury, PCBs, and toxic waste from fish, the horrendous amounts of doodoo from the poultry, and all the GMOs from the beef feed. Maybe then we could appreciate “our government in action”.
As the decades have passed, the center has come to grips with another issue. That being a exploding public concern for the well-being of creatures-for-slaughter that has even made its way into the beef industry where a demand for humanely raised “products” (aka living beings) has proliferated.
I always wondered how a commodity for consumption, be it a someone or a something, could be humanely killed. After all, with high profit being the motivator, slaughter comes via an assembly line. Do you really even think that a worker on an assembly line would even consider the word – humanely? No way. The thought is always move ‘em and kill ‘em.
But, our trusted government understands that it has been widely accepted that experimentation on animals and its benefits for people like cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, arthritis and more, will entail some distress and death. Gotta love the politicians!
So, The Animal Welfare Act – a watershed federal law enacted in 1966, two years after the center opened – sought to minimize that suffering. But it left a huge exemption: farm animals used in research to benefit agriculture. Don’t ya love it when other areas seeking profits are granted exemptions?
To close that loophole, more than two-dozen companies and universities that experiment on farm animals have sought out independent overseers and joined organizations that scrutinize their research and staff. Interestingly enough, the center has resisted this as far back as 1985 because various corporate “hookers” said “. . . that membership may bring more visibility to its activities, which we may not want.”
While the center’s “big brother” agency, the Ag Department, strictly (allegedly) polices the treatment of animals at slaughterhouses and private laboratories, it does not attempt to monitor the center’s use of animals or even enforce its own rules requiring careful scrutiny of experiments.
As a result of this, the center, which was built on the site of a World War II-era ammunition depot about two hours southwest of Omaha and locked behind a security fence – similar to all the Monsanto plants (birds of a feather…) – became the destination for the kind of high-risk, potentially controversial research that other institutions will not do or are no longer allowed to do.
What the center does is to pay tons of attention to increasing animal production and virtually none to animal welfare. Since not being held responsible why would they give a crap about what’s going on?
The bottom line is PROFIT. Make the livestock bigger and leaner despite creating harmful complications that require more intensive experiments to solve.
The leaner pigs that the center helped develop are so low in fat that, for example, one in five females cannot reproduce so the center’s, if you’ll pardon the expression, “scientists” have been operating on pigs’ ovaries and brains in an attempt to make the sows more fertile. Then of the 580,000 animals the center has housed since 1985, at least 6,500 have starved and a single , easily treatable problem like mastitis, which is a painful infection of the udder, has killed more the 625.
The experiments have not always helped the flesh business. Industry-wide, about ten million piglets are crushed by their mothers every year with the goal of bigger litters being the major contributor.
Not only do they generate more and weaker piglets, but the mothers have also grown larger because they are kept alive longer to reproduce.
With the production of meat being a rough enterprise to begin with, the Meat Lab stands out despite many met producers balking at the harm caused to all their flesh victims.
The Meat Lab’s spokesperson says that they “. . are greatly concerned about the humane treatment of creatures for consumption as anyone else. But, it’s not a perfect world and we’re trying to feed a population that is expanding very rapidly to nine billion by 2050, and if we are going the feed that population, there has to be some trade-offs.”
In other words, if you are addicted to flesh and blood why would you even give a shit about what happens to a creature before you eat it?
Oh yeah, the Meat Lab has been used as a teaching facility for the Univ. of Nebraska in Lincoln to teach animal “care”.
In closing, whatever we eat – flesh or plants – has to die. Killing always invites karma. In the ancient scripture, Bhagavad-gita, God says: “If one offers Me, with love and devotion, a leaf, a flower, fruit or water, I will accept it.”
First, He makes it clear that He will accept only plant-based foods. By His accepting these foods, He removes any karmic reaction due to the killing of the plants making what you eat purified. Second, by offering plant-based foods, flowers and water to Him you are in the beginning stages of developing a relationship with Him.
As this progresses, He, from within your heart, will lead you to those that can help you develop a more personal relationship with Him.
We all have choices in life.
Aloha!
To learn more about Hesh, listen to and read hundreds of health related radio shows and articles, and learn about how to stay healthy and reverse degenerative diseases through the use of organic sulfur crystals and other amazing superfoods, please visit www.healthtalkhawaii.com, or email me at [email protected] or call me at (808) 258-1177. Since going on the radio in 1981 these are the only products I began to sell because they work.
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.
So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
