What do Clinton, Vegans and GaGa have in common?

Former President Bill Clinton went on a essentially a plant-based diet... living on beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit."- details and health impact of his newfound whole-foods, low-starch, mostly vegan diet (here).

While former Vegan is promoting to "eat meat to save the planet"?

The 59-year-old, who lives on the Monkton Wyld Court 'centre for sustainable living' near Bridport, Dorset, said: "700 million tonnes of human edible food are poured down the gullets of livestock every year to provide a luxury commodity for the wealthy, while around a billion people in the world do not have enough to eat. 

"The Gandhian response, of rejecting such a tainted product, is understandable; yet the net result – importing protein and fat from third world countries – has perverse repercussions."

In a recent contribution to Permaculture magazine, he wrote: "Livestock provide the biodiversity that trees on their own cannot provide. They are the best means we have of keeping wide areas clear and open to solar energy and wind energy.

"They harness biomass that would otherwise be inaccessible, and recycle waste that would otherwise be a disposal problem. And they are the main means we have of ensuring that the phosphate which leaks out from our arable land into the wider environment, and that is crucial for agricultural yields, is brought back into the food chain."

He also challenges the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report Livestock's Long Shadow, which suggested that farm animals generate 18 per cent of human-generated global warming gases, through their flatulence and other types of emissions.

He said the figure attributes all deforestation in the Amazon region to cattle, rather than logging or development, and confused the gross and net production of nitrous oxide and methane.

Mr Fairline said his earlier experiences living on a different commune, dominated by vegans, convinced him it was sensible to eat some meat.

He said many of he key ingredients in their diet, including olive oil, soya milk, chickpeas, lentils and rice, had to be imported, often from developing countries, at huge cost despite the existence of grass-eating dairy livestock on the site.

"We were producing, from grass, a substantial proportion of the protein and fat that we required for our nutrition, but this was shunned," he said. "Instead we imported it from countries where people go hungry."  Read full at telegraph

EyeCandy NOTE: to my colleagues, educators, regulators, scientists and true environmentalists… I am sorry for the GagA