TheBanyanTree: Re:The biter bitter ...and bitterer

[Julie Anna Teague]

Thanks for the numbers, Peter.  I've had discussions with friends along
these same lines.  It is sad that people have died from SARS, but MY GOD,
what about malaria and malnutrition...those preventable or treatable
problems that continue to kill so many people, children in particular. 

A recent NPR story on drinking water was relevant here.  In Africa, the
only way people can have clean water is if private interests step in and
clean it up, and then sell it.  All fine and good if that is the only way
they can get clean water.  Except, as we know, private interests
have...um...private interests.  And so children continue to die for lack
of clean water.  The reasons run so deep.  The solutions are complicated.  

These very issues, believe it or not, are related to my reasons for being
vegetarian.  Starving children keep me up nights, even when it isn't my
children who are starving.  I'd refer you to "Diet for a New America" by
John Robbins for a source of information and these quotes:

	To supply one person with a meat habit food for a year 
	requires three-and-a-quarter acres.  To supply one lacto-
	ovo vegetarian for a year requires one-half acre.

And these are all old numbers, circa 1987.  I sure more recent ones are
exponentially gloomier. In talking about cattle production in Central and
Latin America, from whom we import something like ten percent of our beef,
he points out that whereas a single steer required 12 acres, the land it
becoming so eroded that that steer now requires 20 acres, and to quote
again:

	Meanwhile, the native people suffer increasingly.  As
	valuable farm land is used to grow food for cattle, the 
	price and availability of native foods is pushed beyond
	the reach of many of the local people.  The result is that
	many of them are starving to death.

	The average family in Costa Rica eats less meat than the
	average American housecat.

And disease, of course, comes before death by lack of food for many
people.  Can we really imagine?  Ring Lardner said, "I've known what it is
to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant."  

Thanks, Peter, for your provactive numbers.  I hesitate, only for second,
to voice a view that may be considered "political" in our story forum. But
to me it is not about politics.  It is a story of suffering, disease,
starvation, malaria, diarrea, malnutrition.  And dear god, some of it is
preventable.  It must be.  I spend a considerable amount of time
wondering, "How".

Julie