Prepare to Howl : Dana Lyons' 'Three Legged Coyote'

A happy holiday howl:
Dana Lyons' Three Legged Coyote is an irreverent hoot

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / December 6, 2009

If you're bummed by Obama, nagged by nukes and turned totally off by your TV, here's a happy holiday homeopathic: Three Legged Coyote, the soulful, irreverent and occasionally hilarious new CD by Dana Lyons (Lyons Brothers Music).

My brilliant singer-songwriter-activist long-time buddy has done it again.

Lyons is the singing satirist whose "Cows With Guns" has become the anthem of the vegan/vegetarian movement. [See "Cows With Guns" flash animation.] The very idea of uzi-packin' bovines has become stock-in-trade for even those pacifists who would end at last the horrors of factory farming.

Dana has also rendered immortal a wide range of dam-busting, nuke-fighting, war-opposing activists. Their often lonely quest for peace, justice and the long-forgotten American way somehow finds a home in Lyons' range, which roams from the soulful to the sinful with shocking ease.

As usual, Dana's new Three Legged Coyote CD is a joy to behold. It's full of haunting incantations to the west, hilarious dissections of the tortures of the male-female relationship, and searing political balladeering to the injustices endured in Latin America, New Orleans and among us all.

Dana Lyons' cow with gun.

It opens with "Crazy Cowboy," a mellow ode to life on the prairie which carries through "Big Rolling Country" and "Three Legged Coyote."

But Dana can never stay too serious too long. The absolutely hilarious "How I Miss Your Dog" is the ultimate down-home put-down of a relationship gone wrong. No doubt countless thousands of future break-ups will be cemented with a rendition of this howl of a f---you farewell.

"Grandma's Up in Heaven, Giving Hell to God" will also surface at innumerable funerals dedicated to those old ladies in tennis shoes who really run the world.

But when we get to "Patagonia Dam Song" we get to another level altogether. Dana puts himself in the soul of a Patagonian rebel whose life has spanned a horrific coup now being topped off by the "sale" of the nation's water supply. We see these fights over water now more and more, between impoverished nations and mega-corporations that would claim the very air we breathe and water we drink. Time is on the people's side, and this brilliant, searing song comes right from their heart.

In "Blameless," Dana stops to take another crack at the ceaseless turmoil/torment of the dance of relationships. This one's a love/hate admonition to try to make peace. Dana lets you know he's serious... in a way... about the "can't we all get along" thing. But he's also savvy enough to know that, hey, if you can't laugh about the perils of sex and love, nobody's going to get much peace -- or much of anything else.

This CD does save the most powerful for last. The concluding "Sweet New Orleans" is a devastating, heart-breaking ode to the horrible suffering imposed on our most musical city by a government too callous to care. Drowned pianos, abandoned saxophones and the voice of a culture abandoned by the rich and powerful makes for a combined dance and dirge almost too painful to bear. Dana wears the shroud lightly, though, mixing the suffering with bitter irony and the tunes of hope. It's an unforgettable piece to remind us of the beauty lost and the power of redemption embodied in the world down there after Katrina.

In all, this CD, like so much Lyons has done, walks a hard line between serious politics, outrageous humor, compelling melody, and very good singing. Dana likes to tour and sing to citizen groups wherever possible. Hear this album and sign him up. You and your community will never be the same.

[Harvey is co-author (with Dana Lyons) of "Shoshanna's Solartopian Tree Stomp," which appears at www.solartopia.org. He is Senior Editor of www.freepress.org, where this review also appears.]

The Rag Blog

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BOOKS / 'Eating Animals' : The Beef with Factory Farms

Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:
A sweeping indictment of factory farms

...what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers.

By Jessica Roy / November 8, 2009

Jonathan Safran Foer is a strict vegetarian, but his most recent book, Eating Animals, is not a screed against meat. It is, rather, an indictment of the corrupt, large-scale factory farming that dominates the American meat market.

A journalistic work with a novelistic feel, the book is the result of three years investigating the U.S. meat industry, and it weaves together animal activist and farmer interviews with statistical research and even memoir to provide a sweeping account of Big Beef and its social, economical and environmental impact. Descriptions of animals suffering on the "kill floor" are enough to incite squirms from even non-animal lovers, but cruelty is not Foer's only grievance: There are health concerns and devastating environmental damage at issue as well.

Eating Animals may be Foer's first big swing at nonfiction, but primary themes hearken back to Foer's two critically polarizing novels, Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Family folklore and ideas about the complexity of memory permeate each; Eating Animals begins with a section titled "Storytelling," about Foer's grandmother, a Holocaust survivor (and passionate carnivore). "The story of her relationship with food," he writes, "holds all of the other stories that could be told about her."

The book is not without controversy, of course. Food politics gets at the very heart of what it means to be American -- alas, human -- and the subject of how and if we eat meat stirs up intense feeling. Last week, Natalie Portman kicked up a tiny tempest when she wrote about Eating Animals in a column on Huffington Post, championing Foer's argument but adding her own painfully tone-deaf riff about rape. (The controversy took place after the Salon interview but when I reached him afterward via e-mail, Foer had this to say about Portman's column: "It was such a thoughtful and generous piece of writing. I felt gratefulness more than anything else.")

I met with Foer recently in a coffee shop near his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn, where he spoke about what's wrong with PETA, how he finally went so local he ditched Amazon -- and what Americans can do to help put an end to the evils of factory farms.


This is not a straightforward case for vegetarianism. What is this book making a case for?

It's an explanation of my own vegetarianism, and it's a straightforward case for caring and thinking, and for the ideas that matter. These little daily choices that we're so used to thinking are irrelevant are the most important thing we do all day long. An enormous and very destructive force -- historically, it's unprecedented how destructive our farm system is -- has taken over America and is starting to take over the world.

And unlike so many other horrible systems, this one doesn't require electing a new government or raising billions of dollars or fighting a war. It can be dismantled just by people making different choices. I think there are a lot of different choices people can make that will lead to dismantling the system. It's not like everybody has to go vegetarian. There are plenty of people who feel like, for whatever reason, they just can't stop eating meat, but if they bought meat at the green market, from farmers they know by name, that's as effective a rebuttal.

What if you live in a city and you don't live near a farm? I'm sure there are tons of people like that in New York. What's your suggestion for them?

Well, in New York everybody is near a green market. Everybody is near a source of family-farmed meat. In fact, cities are frankly the best place to be in terms of that. But you ask a good question because there are a lot of times when you don't have a choice. Like, in a restaurant, you never have a choice, with the exception of -- maybe there's 10 restaurants in New York City. In restaurants people are often faced with this problem, like, "Well, I'm either going to have to leave my values at the door and just eat this stuff, or eat vegetarian." Those are the only two choices we have.

And then people think, what does it mean to care about something if you don't act on that care? Even if it makes things less convenient, even if it makes your meal less enjoyable -- which is totally possible. But we make decisions all the time guided by our values that make our lives less convenient and less enjoyable. We do them because they're things that matter more to us than a momentary pleasure, momentary comfort. I don't know why food would be an exception.

How has writing and researching this book changed the way you and your family eat?

We were vegetarians before, and we continue to be, and we're raising our kids vegetarian. One thing that has interested me about my response to this whole project is that it's made me care about other things. I mean, caring is contagious. It's very hard to care about one thing and not care about its neighbor.

For example, I was not a huge advocate of buying things locally, not food but like books -- anything. I would buy books on Amazon all the time. But for whatever reason, the subject does not have anything to do with that, but the process of writing it made me much more concerned about buying things locally, supporting my neighborhood stores, it mattering that I know the person who's selling me something.

That's something that's great about food is that so much intersects there. Tolstoy famously said, "If there were no more slaughterhouses there would be no more battlefields." I don't think that's true, and I don't think all battlefields are bad, but what is true is that when you start to care about food and think about the animals and how we raise them, it encourages you to have lots of other thoughts.

This is your first nonfiction book.

Well, it's my first and my last. I don't think I'll ever do it again. It's not something that interests me. I felt a little bit like dressing up for Halloween. Although, my interests at the end of the day were never really journalistic and it always did feel personal. And the themes that this book falls back on are the themes that my novels fall back on, like, how are lessons transmitted through generations and families, how do our decisions matter, how do they influence others?

So, part of what inspired me to write about this was not that I cared about it so much but that nobody was writing about it. There are a lot of things I care about, but great people are writing about them. And there hasn't really been a mainstream book about meat, despite the fact that it's everything. I mean, if it isn't the biggest, most important issue in our country right now, it's up there.

Did any specific authors or works influence your book?

Many. Of course, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Peter Singer. I mean if any of them had written the thing that I wanted to read, I wouldn't have had to write my book. See, Pollan is wonderful, but he doesn't really get into meat too deeply; he sort of goes up to the edge of it and then stops. The same with Schlosser. Peter Singer writes about meat very directly, but in a way that I feel doesn't include enough of the messiness of being a person in the world and having cravings, having personal history, having family. Reason has something to do with our food decisions, but not a lot. Most food decisions are made out of emotions or psychology or impulse, and so I wanted a book that included those things.

What were some of the most surprising or disturbing things you found in your research?

The most disturbing thing is not any instance, but the rule. It's a shame in a way that PETA videos or slaughterhouse videos are most people's exposure to factory farming because it gives the impression that the horrible things are the exception, when in fact they're the rule. So an animal running and getting beaten up or running around with its neck slit open: That is the exception, even on the worst farms it's still the exception. But the rule that happens even on the best factory farms is animals are genetically modified to the point of being unable to reproduce sexually, animals that never see the sun and never touch the earth, animals whose cages are never cleaned.

These things are not as shocking and don't work as well in a video, but they're something to be concerned with much more because they're happening to billions and billions of animals every year. It's the way that the notion that an animal is a thing has been systematized and it's part of the business model and that everyone thinks this way. That was the most surprising thing.

You also talk about your dog George, and consider why people will eat farm animals but not dogs. Can you elaborate on that?

The book in the beginning sort of presents two approaches. One is philosophical -- is it right or isn't it right? Why do we do this at all? And the other is practical. I side with the practical. I mean, the book moves in the direction of the practical because in a way the philosophical questions are irrelevant. "Is it right to eat an animal, is it not right to eat an animal?" That's how most people talk about vegetarianism. But to me it doesn't even matter.

The truth is I actually don't know what I think about that question. What I know is that it's wrong to do it the way that we're doing it. And we could sit here and argue about a perfect farm where animals are treated perfectly and slaughtered perfectly and whether that's right. But if it exists at all it exists in a place that is impossible for us to find on any regular basis. So what we should be talking about is how upward of 99 percent of animals are raised and what it does to them, what it does to the environment, what it does to rural communities, what it does to farmers. And that's bad; I mean, those things are bad. And that conversation preempts the philosophical conversation.

Your grandmother was a huge influence on your concept of food, and you also say she's an unapologetic meat eater. How did she react to the book?



I don't think she's read it yet. I think she will agree with a lot of what I said. I don't think she's going to change. I think she's past changing. But I've had pretty frank conversations with her about what's right and what's wrong, and she'll agree -- as will everybody, by the way. There's not a reader of this interview who will say it's right to make animals suffer unnecessarily.

So then it becomes a question of what is suffering to different people and what is necessary to different people. And people can have all kinds of different, very respectable differences of opinion on this question, but I've spoken to my grandmother about why this might be wrong and she doesn't disagree. It's sad. She said in a very upfront way, "I don't think about it, I'm not going to think about it."

For someone like my grandmother -- frankly, for a lot of people -- I don't really push it. I think for people who are still forming their habits, like high school students or college students, that kind of willed ignorance is lame at best and something much worse because they're most able to change. They're the ones who are ultimately going to have to foot the bill of factory farming and are more required to do the uncomfortable thinking that a 90-year-old doesn't.

Can you talk a little bit about America's obsession with food?

There's never been a culture that wasn't obsessed with food. The sort of sad thing is that our obsession is no longer with food, but with the price of food. Factory farming supplies a demand for cheap meat. That's it. It doesn't taste good, it's not healthy for us. The only good thing about it is that it's cheap.

But the thing is that it's not cheap. It's cheap at the cash register, and it's sold as cheap -- that's the defense for factory farming, "Look, we're making affordable food for normal people and all other arguments are elitist." But in fact factory farming is like the ultimate elitism because it's the most expensive food ever produced in the history of mankind. We pay very little at the cash register, but we pay and our kids are going to pay for the environmental toll, obviously the animals are paying, rural communities are paying.

And for what? So that corporations can prosper. The huge agribusiness -- companies make hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars, not in the name of feeding the world, but in the name of making something that's so cheap that people become literally addicted to it.

Aside from getting green meat and eating locally, what are things that both vegetarians and meat eaters can do to help the transition from factory farms to something better?

First of all, they just have to say no to factory farms always. Not sometimes, not most of the time, but always, which means eating vegetarian a lot of the time. I think this issue is frankly more important than our conversation about the environment, because it is the No. 1 cause of global warning. The World Watch just released a report that showed that they thought animal agriculture was responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gases, but it turns out it's 51 percent. So to talk about the environment and not talk about this is not to talk about the environment.

This conversation has to be totally mainstreamed. There has to be a consensus behind it that factory farming is bad and we're not going to support it and we're done with it. And it has to be unacceptable either to pretend these problems don't exist or not to actively engage with them. I'm not saying everybody has to reach the same conclusions, but they do have to agree on the common enemy.

Source / Salon

Thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Stephanie Smith : E. Coli and the Killer Burger

Escherichia coli (known as "E. Coli" to its friends).
E. coli nearly killed Stephanie Smith:
All-beef patty can be big-time trouble

By Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / October 9, 2009

Stephanie Smith was pretty much committed to vegetarianism. But after her mother insisted she get a little protein from a traditional meal, she broke down and let her mother (Sharon) cook her a burger. Sharon slapped a Sam’s Club beef patty in the frying pan and they had their American style meal.

When Stephanie got sick, her mother was sure she knew what had caused it. It had to be the spinach. What neither of them knew was that the meat industry poisons people all the time. That’s why it rarely makes the news. Stephanie went into seizures and had to be put into a coma to save her life. Today she is recovering, but she will probably never walk again.

The story of the burger that poisoned her is a complex one. No, as you probably have already guessed, the cows (as opposed to steers) who supplied the meat for that burger were not raised on a family farm. If the cows had been raised in this traditional manner, they would have been grass fed, allowed to exercise and slaughtered in a clean environment.

As it was the killer burger came from multiple sources. To maximize profits, Cargill purchased cow meat from here and there, high intensity feedlots where cattle are penned in and pumped full of the high protein food (soy) that makes their meat attractive on the plate. After feeding out in these filthy crowded lots, the animals are brought in to be slaughtered in an assembly line process. Although there are safety rules, greed and the sheer impossibility of keeping feces off the future meat products make food safety in this environment extremely difficult to achieve.

No one knows exactly where the E. coli tainted meat came from. Could be Omaha. Could be Uruguay. All the different sources make it easy for the companies to blame each other, while they speed up production and hire illegal immigrants at lower wages. The American Meat Institute says it is doing what it can to slow down the rate of E. coli poisoning.

Cook your burger all the way through and you will kill the pathogens, diseased tissue and possibly some of the hormones and antibiotics. Then you will have a wholesome American style meal. Medium rare could quite possibly kill you. Meat promoters point to the need for total irradiation of meat products. Just another part of a mouth watering American food experience, I guess, but obviously another workplace hazard for the largely immigrant workforce.

Are there other options? Aside from the obvious vegetarian diet that feeds the world 15X over compared to meat eating? The vegetable diet that is better for your health? The diet that does more to stop global warming than driving an electric car, riding a bicycle and recycling 100% of your trash? The diet that allows humanity to live at peace with animals and each other? Not that diet?

Okay, the other alternative is to go to your butcher and have him (or her) cut and grind up a piece of animal flesh for you to eat. It won’t cost $1 a pound and come in a pre formed patty, but it will put you in a safer and more morally honest position as a meat eater.

Bon appetit!

The Rag Blog

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Repugs : Obama Doesn't Want You to Eat Meat!

Cow. Check out this dude's carbon footprint.
The Repugs intend to sell this by claiming that Cass Sunstein is Obama's 'economic guru' and Sunstein wrote a well known (within academia) book on animal rights.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / February 8, 2009

I just got polled by what was plainly the Repug party and it was testing attacks on Obama.

The most interesting one was a claim that Obama wants to ban hunting and force people to become vegetarians.

They intend to sell this by claiming that Cass Sunstein is Obama's "economic guru" and Sunstein wrote a well known (within academia) book on animal rights. They can use for background filler substantial economic literature demonstrating that the most effective thing humans could do to stop global warming is become vegetarians because meat has a huge carbon footprint compared to veggies and fruit. Therefore, anybody who believes in global warming is a vegetarian, get it?

(I was flashing back on that time before Obama was Prez when he went to a Chicago deli to get a corned beef sandwich and all those cameras followed him. I thought the lesson from that was that he could no longer go alone to get a sandwich. In retrospect, the lesson might be that corned beef sandwiches contain dead cows.)

At least, Sunstein is closer to Obama than Bill Ayers ever was and Obama has indeed consulted with Sunstein... but anybody with two gray cells to rub together should understand by now that Obama has no guru, with the possible exception of the late Saul Alinsky, and that could only alarm people who've never read Alinsky (who was also Cesar Chavez' guru).

I'm beginning to feel sorry for the Repugs because they are so plainly at the bottom of the attack barrel, but every time I see the jobless claims or Iraq deaths the mood passes.

The Rag Blog

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Credit crunch? The real crisis is global hunger.

And if you care, eat less meat
By George Monbiot / April 15, 2008

A food recession is under way. Biofuels are a crime against humanity, but - take it from a flesh eater - flesh eating is worse.

Never mind the economic crisis. Focus for a moment on a more urgent threat: the great food recession that is sweeping the world faster than the credit crunch. You have probably seen the figures by now: the price of rice has risen by three-quarters over the past year, that of wheat by 130%. There are food crises in 37 countries. One hundred million people, according to the World Bank, could be pushed into deeper poverty by the high prices.

But I bet that you have missed the most telling statistic. At 2.1bn tonnes, the global grain harvest broke all records last year - it beat the previous year's by almost 5%. The crisis, in other words, has begun before world food supplies are hit by climate change. If hunger can strike now, what will happen if harvests decline?

There is plenty of food. It is just not reaching human stomachs. Of the 2.13bn tonnes likely to be consumed this year, only 1.01bn, according to the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation, will feed people.

I am sorely tempted to write another column about biofuels. From this morning all sellers of transport fuel in the United Kingdom will be obliged to mix it with ethanol or biodiesel made from crops. The World Bank points out that "the grain required to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle with ethanol ... could feed one person for a year". This year global stockpiles of cereals will decline by around 53m tonnes; this gives you a rough idea of the size of the hunger gap. The production of biofuels will consume almost 100m tonnes, which suggests that they are directly responsible for the current crisis.

On these pages yesterday Ruth Kelly, the secretary of state for transport, promised that "if we need to adjust policy in the light of new evidence, we will". What new evidence does she require? In the midst of a global humanitarian crisis, we have just become legally obliged to use food as fuel. It is a crime against humanity, in which every driver in this country has been forced to participate.

But I have been saying this for four years, and I am boring myself. Of course we must demand that our governments scrap the rules that turn grain into the fastest food of all. But there is a bigger reason for global hunger, which is attracting less attention only because it has been there for longer. While 100m tonnes of food will be diverted this year to feed cars, 760m tonnes will be snatched from the mouths of humans to feed animals - which could cover the global food deficit 14 times. If you care about hunger, eat less meat.

While meat consumption is booming in Asia and Latin America, in the UK it has scarcely changed since the government started gathering data in 1974. At just over 1kg per person per week, it's still about 40% above the global average, though less than half the amount consumed in the United States. We eat less beef and more chicken than we did 30 years ago, which means a smaller total impact. Beef cattle eat about 8kg of grain or meal for every kilogram of flesh they produce; a kilogram of chicken needs just 2kg of feed. Even so, our consumption rate is plainly unsustainable.

In his magazine The Land, Simon Fairlie has updated the figures produced 30 years ago in Kenneth Mellanby's book Can Britain Feed Itself? Fairlie found that a vegan diet produced by means of conventional agriculture would require only 3m hectares of arable land (around half Britain's current total). Even if we reduced our consumption of meat by half, a mixed farming system would need 4.4m hectares of arable fields and 6.4 million hectares of pasture. A vegan Britain could make a massive contribution to global food stocks.

But I cannot advocate a diet that I am incapable of following. I tried it for about 18 months, lost two stone, went as white as bone and felt that I was losing my mind. I know a few healthy-looking vegans, and I admire them immensely. But after almost every talk that I give, I am pestered by swarms of vegans demanding that I adopt their lifestyle. I cannot help noticing that in most cases their skin has turned a fascinating pearl grey.

What level of meat-eating would be sustainable? One approach is to work out how great a cut would be needed to accommodate the growth in human numbers. The UN expects the population to rise to 9 billion by 2050. These extra people will require another 325m tonnes of grain. Let us assume, perhaps generously, that politicians such as Ruth Kelly are able to "adjust policy in the light of new evidence" and stop turning food into fuel. Let us pretend that improvements in plant breeding can keep pace with the deficits caused by climate change. We would need to find an extra 225m tonnes of grain. This leaves 531m tonnes for livestock production, which suggests a sustainable consumption level for meat and milk some 30% below the current world rate. This means 420g of meat per person per week, or about 40% of the UK's average consumption.

This estimate is complicated by several factors. If we eat less meat we must eat more plant protein, which means taking more land away from animals. On the other hand, some livestock is raised on pasture, so it doesn't contribute to the grain deficit. Simon Fairlie estimates that if animals were kept only on land that is unsuitable for arable farming, and given scraps and waste from food processing, the world could produce between a third and two-thirds of its current milk and meat supply. But this system then runs into a different problem. The Food and Agriculture Organisation calculates that animal keeping is responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. The environmental impacts are especially grave in places where livestock graze freely. The only reasonable answer to the question of how much meat we should eat is as little as possible. Let's reserve it - as most societies have done until recently - for special occasions.

For both environmental and humanitarian reasons, beef is out. Pigs and chickens feed more efficiently, but unless they are free range you encounter another ethical issue: the monstrous conditions in which they are kept. I would like to encourage people to start eating tilapia instead of meat. This is a freshwater fish that can be raised entirely on vegetable matter and has the best conversion efficiency - about 1.6kg of feed for 1kg of meat - of any farmed animal. Until meat can be grown in flasks, this is about as close as we are likely to come to sustainable flesh-eating.

Re-reading this article, I see that there is something surreal about it. While half the world wonders whether it will eat at all, I am pondering which of our endless choices we should take. Here the price of food barely registers. Our shops are better stocked than ever before. We perceive the global food crisis dimly, if at all. It is hard to understand how two such different food economies could occupy the same planet, until you realise that they feed off each other.

Source. /The Guardian, UK
Thanks to Roger Baker / The Rag Blog

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