“Factory Farms Are Our Best Hope” in NY Times, tangled humpback in LA Times, + more 12/15/24

Today’s, Sunday, December 15, New York Times has a long and depressing essay telling us we should accept factory farming. The Los Angeles Times has an article about a humpback whale, entangled in rope, who rescuers have tried but failed to free. At least we have good vegan-friendly news from the BBC cooking show, Saturday Kitchen, and more good news from San Antonio, which is now the most recent city to ban horse-drawn carriages, though with a five-year phase in period for the ban.

I share that San Antonio news with thanks to all those in Texas, or passionate about horse-drawn carriage issues, who wrote to the San Antonio Express-News in support of the ban. I was pleased to have a letter in that paper on Thursday, the day of a hearing, a copy of which I have printed out on X and on Facebook.

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Michael Grunwald’s essay, titled, “Factory Farms Are Our Best Hope for Feeding the Planet,” appears on page 6 of the Sunday Review section of the December 15 New York Times. Sadly, we read that it is “the final essay in What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply.”  What a way to end the series.

It opens with:

“’Industrial agriculture’ is a phrase used to signify “bad,” evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t like to associate with their food. Factory farms are a constant target of environmentalists, documentarians, animal rights activists, spiritual leaders like Pope Francis and the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

“Even the manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan has called for banning them, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, has blamed industrial agriculture for making us sick and fat. The United Nations has pointed out that it does $3 trillion in damage to the global environment a year.

“Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.

“And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.

“But industrial agriculture in particular has one real upside: It produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land. And that will be agriculture’s most vital job in the coming decades. The world will need even more enormous amounts of food by 2050, about 50 percent more calories to adequately feed nearly 10 billion people. The inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere.”

Given how upsetting it is to share this essay, I am at least grateful that I don’t have to personally provide a DawnWatch gift link, as the author proudly shared that one on his X Feed.

I share that with a note that if you click on it, you will find, at the end of the article:

“The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com ”

And I can’t resist mentioning that the Times also has a page urging more women to write.

The Times notes that Grunwald has a book coming out, “We Are Eating the Earth.” If you are inclined to respond to the Times essay above, in order to give animals a voice, you may wish to know that Grunwald published an essay earlier this year, in Canary Media, titled, “Afraid of high-tech food? Get over it: Too many Americans are squeamish about cultivated meat, alt-protein processed foods and GMOs, but we’ll need to get used to them to avert a climate catastrophe.”

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Today’s sad Los Angeles Times story, “Rescue crew tries in vail to untangle a humpback whale,” is on page B3.

I can share this Yahoo Link for those who hit a paywall at the Times.

I shared the story on the DawnWatch X page and on the DawnWatch Facebook page with the caption:

“Gee I wonder where the rope came from. #F**kFishing ”

though I did not asterisk out the first word in the hashtag, as I have here on email to avoid spam filtering.

The Los Angeles Times is often great about printing our letters that speak for animals, but can only print one letter per person every 60 days, so please don’t just leave it up to the regulars to write. Animals need all of our voices.

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Now to the cheery BBC “Saturday Kitchen” segment! On the most recent episode, Chef Mike Davies was promoting his new cookbook, “Cooking for People.” Apparently “people” includes vegans!  He has vegan versions of everything, inspired by his wife who is a vegan chef, and he tells us:

“Chefs who won’t or can’t function in that space aren’t really chefs…. If you can’t cook veg, you don’t really know what you’re doing.”

I was so thrilled by the 45 seconds on that issue, that I shot a film of it to share. So you can check it out on X or on Facebook.

Sharing those posts is a great way to commend the vegan-friendly tone of the show, or folks in the UK might want to submit a comment on the BBC website.

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Finally, I want to share a gift link from DawnWatch to a Wall Street Journal story, which appeared in print on Monday December 9, about a rescue dog named Scrim. It is not too late to respond with a letter to wsj.ltrs@wsj.com if you are inclined .

Scrim, who escaped a “euthanasia” needle at a shelter by a few hours,  unsurprisingly doesn’t want much to do with humans. He ran away from a rescuing family to head back to the streets, where he stayed for months, and then, once captured again, he jumped out a second-story window to escape. But his saviors won’t give up.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of dogs, desperate for human companionship, get killed every year for lack of resources and attention.

Crazy world.

Yours and all animals’,
Karen Dawn of DawnWatch