h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Are there any lessons we need to learn from the Easter Island experience?

If there was ever an object lesson in the history of the world on the importance of conservationism, and sustainable economics, it is Easter Island.




Meanwhile, back to spider goats, spider silk is used for all kinds of things, anti-scuff coatings on eyeglasses and quality optics, for example.

Problem is, its extremely expensive if one has to harvest it exclusively from natural spider webs.




On the advantages of different kinds of herd animals, a top Guernsey dairy cow without BGH or anything like that to stimulate milk production can produce as much as 6,000 gallons a year.

Next runner up, after cattle, is the the East Fresian sheep, at 500 gallons a year.




Goats have the advantage that they can eat almost anything in the way of herbiage and the disadvantage that they will, making them a leading contributor to desertification where they are herded on a large scale.

I read somewhere that buffalo were perfectly adapted to the Great Plains area of the U.S. Where buffalo grazed, the grass held up pretty well. I've eaten buffalo meat, and thought it was a good substitute for beef. Do you have any comparable figures for buffalo?

[While we're talking about milk production,let's also consider soy milk. Soybeans have roots that attract nitrogen-fixing bacteria, thus these beans can grow in poor soil.]

Found it... http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1992-02-15/

I personally think that the controversy on cattle contributions to global warming began with question on cattle lowing, as to which end the 'mooing' sound is coming from, and is being promoted in the popular media to the purpose of giving the impression that environmentalists concerned on issues like global warming are over-reacting.

Some people never learn.

Apparently milk production for bison is not considered an issue except in context of cows caring for their calves.

...among other consequences of the extinction of the wild herds of bison, the dust bowl...

Soy beans supply two of three essential fatty acids, linoleic and linolenic acid.

The third one, essential for human nutritional health, arachodonic acid, is difficult to supply except from animal sources, whether it be milk or royal jelly, or any kind of flesh.

Very interesting topics! Just one thought! I am not a vegetarian, but as there is a very ancient tradition of vegetarian living and vary many millions are vegetarians, isn't the idea you need meat or any animal products in your diet a bit weak one?


As for cattle, i like the bison idea, but even better : Lab Meat! :P

Wow! diesel fuel from sugar, and the coming revolution!?

Great stuff!

Hope this thread has a long future ahead of it

Thank you, myk6629129AKALoftskywalker.

I've learned a lot from the other posters, and I hope that they've learned something from me.

China is said to be a nation of vegetarians for the most part. When I was in San Francisco in 1996, I ate at a Chinese Buddhist vegetarian restaurant. I loved the food. It's amazing what one can do with wheat gluten and fried tofu.

India has a history of vegetarianism going back to a few centuries after Christ, when it was decided that avoiding meat would allow for a healthier population as it became larger. The thing is, there are different levels of vegetarianism, in India as well as in any other country. Ovo-lacto-vegetarianism is one strain. Vegan is another one. The Jains will not eat onions, though this is the only thing i know about them. Upper-caste Brahmins tend to become vegetarian in their later years, because they want to have the highest karma at the time of their deaths.

Amon Westerners, George Bernard Shaw was perhaps the best-known vegetarian. I have a copy of the cookbook that his cook used. The Nut shep[herd's pie is delicious. What many may not know, however, is that Shaw had a fierce sweet tooth. His vegetarianism might have increased his craving for sweets.

I have an old school friend who has been a vegetarian for many years. I started to eat less meat, almost unconsciuosly, maybe 10 years ago - and i eat realatively little meat on an average week (almost none at the moment - seem to living on beans and pulses).
I told my vegetarian friend one day that the idea of eating slaughtered animals was playing on my mind, not to the extent of anxiety but i was aware of my reservations towards cruelty to animals.

I thought my sentiments would be totally shared and expected some words of support; instead my friend laughed scornfully at me and just said she didnt eat meat because it upset het stomach.

I can see the logic of vegetarianism as an ethical way of life, as well as maybe a healthier one, and also am interested in the benefits to society and western culture as a whole of vegetarianism being more mainstream.
I live in an English town with a population of 250,000 people (1/4 million) now in this town which has every culture under the sun represented and a cosmopolitan educated and industriuos population thier is not one vegetarian restaurant ( and of all the Indian, Chinese and other Asian restaurants - which thier are a very many, vegetarian dishes are very hard to find).
So it seems a widespread idea, but in practice not very widely practiced.

There's a very nice Indian restaurant about five miles down the road from me. At lunchtime they have a buffet. The dishes on the left side of the buffet are vegetarian dishes. The ones on the right side contain meat. You will get a very tasty meal no matter side you choose from.

I wish we had one like that round here.

Our culture promotes eating meat, as our forefathers have done (albiet not quite as much as we consume now) and thier seems no will to eat healthier while thier is so much money to be made from processed food it seems to me.


Just as with the revolutions in technology, new materials, new ways to work and spend money; we also have at our fingertips in the western world whole new ways to eat - with all types of new foods to our cultures. I think aswell as the revolutionary ways we have of growing/producing food thier could be some more creative ideas for cooking/eating it.

"I think aswell as the revolutionary ways we have of growing/producing food thier could be some more creative ideas for cooking/eating it" [myk6629129AKALoftskywalker]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that's what the Internet was for. If you want a recipe for tuna/olive stew, you can use Google to find one -- or, more likely, 1,700,000 recipes for it.

Or, if you prefer an actual book, you could get one at a bookstore or library. I have a growing number of overstuffed recipe binders that I've accumulated from Internet recipes or photocopied pages from books.

"...If you want a recipe for ...... you can use Google to find one..."

Yes this is true. It was a bit of a sweeping statement i used. What i meant was it is suprsing how much our tastes in food have broadened, from the influence of foreign (global?) cuisine, and the ready availability of cheap exotic foods; yet still we (in this little part of England anyway) have not changed that much atall - although we have changed the food we have come into contact with and made it our own in some cases. Still no vegetarian restaurant in sight.

You are right Paul it is a cooking revolution and there is definately no shortage of recipes on the net. Which is the best Tuna/Olive stew though? You are more organized than me i think, when i look for a recipe i have to go through so many to find what i want sometimes.

So anyone on here taste "labmeat" yet?

I don't know what labmeat is. The tuna/olive stew was a hypothetical example.

I was just asking a rhetorical question, for there are so many recipes for exactly the same dish. As for labmeat, i meant meat grwn in a lab, which someone mentioned we had the capability of doing - not that i know of it.

Re: post 28, on Hindu vegetarianism, the caste based system established in India goes back to the generation before Marco Polo, the generation of Nicolo and Maffeo Polo, late 13th and early 14th centuries, a period during which India was embroiled in catastrophic religious wars.

Since it was observed that soldiers who were wounded in battle didn't heal quickly or well unless they got red meat in their diets and since there were food shortages, rationing laws similar to those of the WW II era were created, restricting red meat to the kshatria or warrior caste, while members of the other three occupational castes, laborers, merchants, and brahmins, were expected to conform to a vegetarian diet.

(Poultry and fish always have been considered okay for the vegetarian castes, though many Hindus eschew those as well.)

The exemption for the military to the Hindu law on vegetarianism persists to this day.




The WW II studies on the question gave the same results, soldiers wounded in battle who didn't get red meat in their diets didn't heal either quickly or well, so meat rations were routed preferentially to hospitals.

The invention of battlefield portable blood transfusion technology certainly helped as well.

(In ancient Rome, it was the custom for gladiators wounded in the arena to quaff a cup of blood immediately after the event.)

Unlike the wartime western world of the WW II era, with medieval India, the wartime rationing rules became permanent sumptuary laws.




My own excuse is somewhat different.

During my late 20s (1979), I was getting excruciating gout pains.

My feet felt as though there minute splinters of glass embedded in every joint of every toe.

At the end of an active day, my toes would be an angry red, by the following morning, they had turned purple.

Since I knew that gout is cause by uric acid crystals forming in the joints and those in turn are due to excessive meat in the diet, I cut back radically on my meat consumption, went to a 'vegan' diet, no animal derived foodstuffs at all.

After about six months, the gout pains were no longer troubling me, but I'd developed another problem.

If I got the tiniest scratch, say from a grass seed in a sock, it wouldn't heal, instead got bigger and bigger, day after day.

At that point I resumed meat eating, but with restraint, only if I had an injury of some kind to heal, or was going to be getting into a situation where there was an elevated risk of injury.

I didn't have gout pains again until 2006, when I passed a kidney stone, and haven't since except an occasional twinge when the winter weather is changing.

The point on injuries refusing to heal without red meat, frequently reported by gout sufferers, is flip side of the coin with gout.

On the other hand, excessive indulgence produces excruciating pain, especially in the feet.