SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Humane Society International announces:
Humane Society International [HSI] in Brazil has teamed up with four cities in the northeastern state of Bahia--Serrinha, Barroca, Teofilandia, and Biritinga--and the local Public Prosecutor Office, to transition all of the meals served at its public school cafeterias to 100 percent plant-based by the end of 2019, reducing meat, dairy, and egg consumption by 25 percent per semester. This marks the first time in history that any school districts have committed to having exclusively plant-based cafeterias. The change will impact over 23 million meals a year [covering 30,000 students].
The launch of the project, called "Escola Sustentável" (Sustainable School), took place on Monday, March 19th, and was followed by four days of plant-based culinary trainings for the cities' school cooks, led by HSI's Chef André Vieland. Chef André taught cooks how to prepare cost-effective, nutritious recipes, using accessible local ingredients. Escola Sustentável's mission is to improve student health, reduce the cities' environmental footprint (especially water consumption), and empower local farmers who will be able to supply the school districts with plant-based foods. Leticia Baird, Brazilian Public Prosecutor for the Environment in the State of Bahia, who led the creation of this program, stated: "Providing our school districts with plant-based meals will help save environmental and public financial resources, allow for a future of healthy adults, and build a fair world for the animals."
Sandra Lopes, food policy manager for HSI in Brazil, stated: "We applaud the cities of Serrinha, Barroca, Teofilandia, and Biritinga for becoming the world's first school districts to commit to going 100 percent plant-based. It's an honor to have worked with city authorities, nutritionists, and school cooks on the adoption and implementation of this initiative, and we're excited to continue working closely with them to ensure the success of this program."
AlterNet adds:
School meals in those cities typically feature animal proteins such as beef, lamb, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, and butter, Brazilian publication Correio reported.[pt-br] Under the new, two-year experimental program, lunches will consist of soy, rice milk, peanut butter (instead of butter), vegetables, root vegetables, grains, and whole-wheat bread.
Definitive implementation of the program will depend on health outcomes of the students after the trial period, according to Correio. Students will undergo periodic tests that count blood, ferritin, vitamin B12, total cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood glucose levels. Weight, height, and body composition will also be measured.
Families who do not agree with the newly imposed diet can send their students to school with packed lunches from home, [Ms.] Baird [...] said.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Tuesday March 27 2018, @08:20PM (11 children)
The Great Redundo
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @09:45PM (10 children)
OK, so that doctor's article about the complete protein myth actually doesn't say what the headline says it says (and makes a very weak, hand-wavy case for what it purports to say).
Sure, you can get all your amino acids from vegetables. This isn't new news; it's been well known for a long time. The trick is which vegetables, and prepared how? Not all vegetables contain all significant amino acids, and even the ones that do contain them in varying quantities. Simply stuffing yourself with brown rice and black beans will not give you a balanced diet. This is one reason for vegans having such a hard-on for soy and quinoa. (It turns out that Brazil is a major soy grower, so I bet that factors into the argument in a big way. Big money wins again ...) It also turns out that messing with the diets of people who are growing bodies (both children and pregnant women, but also body builders) can have major ill effects on their health - in particular related to the availability of calcium and protein. You won't be growing much in the way of muscles and bones without those, and the diseases of deficiency that you get without them are rare in the first world, but very well-documented.
The doctor waves his hands cavalierly over the topic of who needs how much of which proteins and why, simply declaring that we need much less than we think based on the original sources for that information. Unfortunately there's a long list of (again, well-understood) reasons why the usual recommendation might not be enough. If you're twenty-five years old, sedentary, not pregnant and happy to avoid gyms and other sources of effort, you can get away with very small amounts. If you're a manual labourer, that is a problem. If you're pregnant, a low protein diet is a real problem for you and the fetus alike. If you're a child, low protein intake can cause retardation and stunting. Simply declaring ex cathedra that eating a vegetable diet will get you all you need along with calories is only conditionally true, at best.
The doctor's strongest argument based on available information is that it's possible to have a healthy vegetarian diet.
Yeah, great. We knew that. Thanks a bunch.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:23PM (9 children)
you can get all your amino acids from vegetables
Rather than saying "vegetables", "plant sources" would be better.
If you regularly eat a legume with a grain, you will get all the amino acids your body needs to build proteins.
Pasta and garbanzos.
Bread and hummus.
Kidney beans and rice.
Burritos.
Frijole dip and tortilla strips.
3-bean soup with crackers.
Lentil soup with pasta alphabits.
brown rice and black beans
Yup. That works too.
The possibilities are legion.
stuffing yourself with...
Most people greatly overestimate the amount of protein they need.
Now, what I think of as "veggies" adds micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) to your diet.
Don't forget some nuts now and then as well.
Vitamin B12 is the only thing missing from a diet with no animal products.
How to synthesize B12 for pennies has been known for over half a century.
...and its rare that I can't beat the price of the cheapest on-sale animal product by a factor of at least 2 by shopping in the produce aisle.
The differential is typically A LOT greater.
Veggies are much better for the budget.
My cardiologist would rather that I stay away from animal products as well.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:44PM (7 children)
So far so good.
Now we come to the other problem: agronomy.
Can we grow enough of the right kind of vegetable sources to get enough of the right kinds of amino acids to everybody to get them a balanced diet?
(Spoiler alert: no. If you exclude petrochemical and other exhaustible mineral fertilisation sources, that turns to Hell, no!)
But it's all good for the privileged few who can be so picky as to eat vegan.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:15AM (3 children)
Just grow hemp, grows like a weed, the seeds have complete protein, all the essential oils, most of the essential B vitamins and as I said, grows like a weed.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday March 28 2018, @09:31AM (2 children)
Serious question. If hemp grows that fast and is that good as a food source, it should be the diet of choice for a whole raft of insects and animals. Is it?
If not, why do bugs and critters avoid it?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:22PM
Wikipedia implies but does not state that insects may not like THC very much. "Journal of the International Hemp Association" claims it very explicitly, but I donno if the source is trustworthy. The idea in a post-legalization world of gardeners spraying food crops with 5-gallon buckets of pure THC is kinda weird, but probably would work. Rinse off your apple before eating it or you'll get pretty high...
With respect to animals, some googling around indicates without extensive industrial processing and masking by stronger flavors, low-THC hemp tastes like grass and dirt, so almost anything else would taste better, although I imagine hungry herbivores would ravage a hemp field if they got into it. High-THC weed probably doesn't taste good to animals plus or minus getting high.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:41PM
Lots of bugs and animals like to eat the leaves, though it is mostly birds that like to eat the seeds, which ripen pretty late in the season for bugs, at least around here. It's the seeds that are nutritious, as well as not containing any active compounds.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @12:37AM (2 children)
[Can't] grow enough of the right kind of vegetable sources [...] If you exclude petrochemical and other exhaustible mineral fertilisation sources
Your sources of information are poor.
It's clear that you consume large amounts of USAian propaganda.
Native Americans were growing more than enough food long before petrochemicals. [wikipedia.org]
Digging up shit that's been sequestered for tens of millions of years is NOT an infinite resource as Tower of Power has said. [google.com]
Some places are doing community gardens and maximizing other unused resources.
Cuba, in particular. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [counterpunch.org]
Even the city of Havana uses every undeveloped area to grow food for itself.
N.B. Over a century ago, a really smart English dude named Henry George [archive.is] (orig) [dissidentvoice.org] came up with a taxation notion that would have gotten idle land down to approximately zero.
The "communes" in Venezuela are currently riffing on his ideas, expropriating farmland that has been abandoned and putting it back into production.
Folks in Africa have also found that USAian-patented seeds and petrochemicals are unnecessary for bountiful yields. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [truth-out.org]
These guys aren't vegan, but they turned saltwater and desert into a sustainable ecosystem. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [dankalia.com]
Again, it's clear that your vision has been tainted by USAian corporatist bullshit.
The big problem here on Earth is Capitalism (an ownership model that has long since outlived its usefulness).
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:18AM (1 child)
The point about boosted yields from petrochemicals comes right back to Norman Borlaug.
Yes, yes, he improved yields a lot with breeding. That's great. We got that memo. The problem is that so much of agriculture is limited by sheer pace of nutrient cycles that anything above that level of activity amounts to strip-mining the soil for historically placed nutrients. Now, you can supplement it with oceanic resources (kelp, baitfish and so on) that do help, but even so it's far from ideal.
And even if you decided somehow to fertilise all the everything with oceanic resources (that are themselves limited by the way), you still run into the problem that no power on earth will turn Wyoming into the next Garden State. Sheer altitude and climate dictate the limits. Land is quite simply not fungible, which is one reason that driving the indians into the high plains was such a cruel blow - the palefaces had quite correctly assessed the relative value of various pieces of land, and repeatedly took the best bits for themselves.
The same applies worldwide. Much of each continent is quite hostile to agriculture, and takes specialised knowledge and substantial investments to make really productive. In fact, it was Norman Borlaug (among others) who calculated the carrying capacity of earth and figured out that the Malthusian trap is a tragically real one.
But please, by all means show the way. Get some land, roll up your sleeves and show us all how it's done.
You should get a Nobel prize if you're right.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @04:56AM
If you were half as aware as you want folks to think you are, you'd know about this guy. [wikipedia.org]
He was a bit of a legend in the field of farming in the city.
I've mentioned him several times [soylentnews.org] before. [soylentnews.org]
The "before" link has another guy saying basically the same thing: Build your soil via EARTHWORMS.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @11:55PM
My doctor put me on a low carb diet. Not a whole lot on that list of yours I can eat.