Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Grant; Indoctrinating the kids…
Goldsmiths bans beef from university cafes to tackle climate crisis
Amy Walker
Tue 13 Aug 2019 00.51 AEST…
Goldsmiths, University of London, is also attempting to phase out single-use plastics and installing more panels to power its buildings in New Cross, as part of a move to become carbon neutral by 2025.
Beef products will no longer be available in the institution’s cafes and shops when the academic year begins in September, while an additional 10p levy will be added to the sale of bottled water and disposable plastic cups to discourage their use.
Prof Frances Corner, who took up the post of Goldsmiths’ warden this month, said the college would also switch to a completely clean energy supplier when its current contract ends and look into how all students could take curriculum options related to the climate crisis.
A psychology undergraduate, Isabelle Gosse, 20, said she thought the move was “a really good start to being more environmentally friendly”.
She added: “I think it’s a really positive move – Goldsmiths is recognising its own power and accountability in being more environmentally conscious.“Banning the sale of beef meat on campus, phasing out single-use plastics and the other pledges that the new warden has made highlights the current climate emergency that the world is facing.”
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/12/goldsmiths-bans-beef-from-university-cafes-to-tackle-climate-crisis
Having tried UK university beef patties I thought they had already banned beef – the meat content in most cases is a little lower than what people in the USA might be used to.
The UK has ongoing low level issues with CJD, a nasty prion disease caused by eating beef from infected cattle. Prion diseases are more resilient than viruses, they easily survive food processing and cooking. CJD has proven difficult to completely eradicate. The risk of catching CJD is very low, but not eating a few beef burgers could save someone’s life.
I doubt students who really want to eat beef will suffer – Goldsmiths is located in a part of London which is well served by a wide variety of fast food outlets, if you don’t mind the risk of an occasional mugging.
The thing is, none of this is going to add up to a hill of beans regarding changing the climate. Even if we could totally stop eating beef globally, it wouldn’t make a thousandth degree temperature difference, and nobody could prove it ever did. This is part of the stunt to make people believe they are acting to save the planet, so that more and more freedoms are eventually eroded away to the point that we no longer have any freedom. This is part of the marxist/socialist plan to completely destabilize the West and make it appear we are crumbling from within. While our enemies plan and finance these shenanigans.
+1 except for one thing…..WE provide the financing.
..if people had any concept how big the world really is
they would realize how small they really are
Ah! But you discount the deeeep, emotional neeeeeed! of entitled cosseted young collegiates to feeeeel! that they are Better Than Everyone Else and righteously Doing Their Part for The Planet ™.
This involves conspicuously eating $36 plates of greens in public, wearing $120 “fair trade” T-shirts woven by blind, one-armed Congolese dwarves; and speeding on $5K bicycles through busy intersections. Most of them have jobs like “Intersectional Justice Sculptor” or “Performative Psychologist.” They are 1/10th of 1% of any country’s population, but the media preach we must take them seriously and validate the silly stuff they make up. As for me, pass the ribeye!
I couldn’t have said it better.
Amen! You can say that again!
The vast majority of the world’s cattle and sheep are eating grass. The stupidity of claiming that animals eating grass is going to heat us all to hell should be self-evident.
Good grazing systems are FAR more natural and sustainable than growing plant foods at the productivity rates required to feed the world.
75% of the world’s grains are eaten by humans. Of the 25% of the world’s grain production that is fed to animals, roughly 90% of it is not human edible…. so ceasing to feed grain to livestock will increase the human-quality grain supply by around 3%. Any vegan who tells you that the world is short of food because we feed grain to cattle is lying.
The consequence of not eating beef is a reduction in the amount of high-quality BIO-AVAILABLE protein in the world quite significantly…. a commodity which is in far shorter supply than plant-based carbohydrate. It will deny us food production from that large proportion of the earth’s surface that is not suitable for cropping.
The brain-shrinkage from low-fat diets is having consequences.
Peter,
While I don’t disagree with your basic message, it should be pointed out that those grains which are fed to cattle and are not edible by humans are currently planted in fields which could easily grow human edible crops. So actually if we did kill most of the cattle on the planet, we could grow more human-edible plants, but I doubt we would feed more humans than we do now, and we would have to find new sources of protein and vitamin B12.
So I call BS.
Just drove through central Nevada on US 93 from the Idaho boarder to Las Vegas. Most crops grown are watered with well water from the aquifers. Cattle were grazing on open desert grasses in large tracts of natural desert lands. That land could only be used for human food crops with extensive irrigation and there are no rivers flowing to the sea in the Great Basin. Even where irrigation is used, Nevada desert farmers mostly grow either alfalfa or silage crops. Farther north you do see some wheat, but only interspersed with alfalfa and silage.
If massive amounts of water were available Nevada could look like Idaho or Nebraska growing corn and other human food crops. When you see the one hundred and fifty thousand square miles of the good old U S of A under cultivation of corn, much of which is for ethanol for vehicle fuel, why do you want to stop people from growing animal food crops to produce cattle, pigs and chickens to satisfy those of us who like eating meat?
Oh, I know, you know better what is best for me and the world.
Let FREE ENTERPRISE determine what crops are grown and if animals are raised for ME to eat. Free enterprise has made the US farmer the most productive in the world, and if there were no unrealistic benefits to producing ethanol, much more HUMAN FOOD corn would be harvested in the US.
Do some research about the subject. From 2008 when the ethanol craziness was just getting bad.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2430252/
Then look where some clowns say that growing crops for biofuels causing food shortages is a MYTH:
https://www.pre-sustainability.com/news/growing-biofuels-causes-food-shortages-myth-or-not
Pertinent quote: “Growing biofuels does not have to impede the production of food. To increase biofuel production while preventing food shortages and deforestation for food production, agricultural practices need to be intensified in a sustainable way.”
This tells me it is not a myth because they say it DOES NOT HAVE TO IMPEDE THE PRODUCTION OF FOOD, but it does! So again, OUR IDEAS ARE GREAT, others need to figure how to make them work!
Alternatively, this is exactly what Gillette did.
Shot themselves in the foot to save the planet … clever stuff!
The “new warden” should be forced to become “carbon neutral” at home & when out on-the-go as well. It would be the only, absolutely right thing to do ForTheChildren. Otherwise warden can buy some of my dispensation credits accrued over 5 decades of not eating meat.
No one on campus will be allowed to exhale.
The new warden should be forced to eat vegan pizzas for the rest of his life, just to show he means it.
He’ll soon snap out of it.
Prof Frances Corner. She?
Xer. 😉
Just beef? How about pork, or have the muslims already banned that? How about horse, do they still eat that in France? Maybe they could serve stray dog or cat? Is there a surplus of children in Ireland?
Feed the students a a diet of rice and beans and you’ll create more of a methane problem than if you raised cattle.
Such low resolution thinking from a University ‘Warden’. I suppose the title is apropos. What do you you call the lead person of an asylum over there? Head Master?
We need to ban idiots who think banning meat consumption is in anyway going to affect the climate in either direction.
I think if we commit these fools we might do more to quell the angst surrounding Global Warming than any other action we might take.
A man walks into a restaurant and says,”How do you prepare your chickens?”
The cook says,”nothing special.We just tell ’em they’re gonna die.”
Waiter: And how did you find your steak,sir?
Diner:Well,I just pushed aside a pea and there it was…
Dan, you should switch careers from comedy-writer to climate scientist.
Output in the latter genre ALWAYS generates a lot of laughs.
Mark Purdy on prion disease will stretch a person’s mind.
The takeaway is that Earth, Gaia, is a first-order forcing of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change. Her body. Her Choice.
Australia stands ready to supply Goldsmiths College, University of London with unlimited supplies of delicious indigenous witchetty grubs, raw, baked or fried to replace its beef menu.
Don’t forget those white long slimy leech-like things that live under the bark and which must be eaten alive of course. There’s all manner of tasty treats to be had…
That really sucks! Well,there goes my appetite along with my supper right out the window.
Mi9ke those ARE the witchetty grubs
and nicholas forgot the bogong moths I had a recipie book showing them tossed into spaghetti..with their wings still on leaving grey smears all over
and theyre rather large and squishy bodied buggers
ummm NOPE!
Ironic. Meat, particularly red meat, contains the proteins that power the brain.
Guess you don’t need a functioning brain in Goldsmith’s College though.
I have had a big feed of witchery grubs, fried in garlic butter a beautiful nutty flavour. They are to good for this university.
Has anyone read the Paris Climate Agreement?? So long as China’s and India’s “pledge” is the exponentially increase CO2 emissions and reach peak by 2030 with no promise to decrease later nothing anyone does will make a debt. (I’m pretending CO2 is a problem here.)
More useless virtue signalling and propaganda from academia, lapped up by the Guardian.
I like this bit “……… and installing more panels to power its buildings in New Cross” apart from the general useless of UK solar panels , they will be producing their peak energy when the school is on holiday and producing zero during a good chunk of the academic year in the northern hemisphere.
And there can be NO evening classes!
As you say, university cafeteria days remind of “mystery meat,” the most frequent protein served. I won’t get into SOS, which involved a white sauce and dried meat (Ham? Beef?).
But would you be surprised that Al Gore is a big investor in Beyond Meat, positioned to become even more wealthy should fear of meat become more entrenched.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2019/08/13/why-al-gore-keeps-yelling-fire/
The irony of Beyond Beef and it’s like is they have more calories but less protein.
They are less healthy than the meat they are meant to replace.
The irony is heavy with these products, but yet, there is almost no iron content.
The last time I had a steak,you could see the jockey marks on the side of it.
I can see it now. The Tower of London being guarded by the TofuEaters in their full regalia.
Ye Gods, see what being a member of the EU does to you?
‘Tofu eaters in full regalia’! Made my day…thankyou 🙂
Now that’s funny and on topic. Dan Cody, take notice.
Paul,if you had a sense of humor,you would of taken notice of mine.
The single most miserable first half of August in SE England I can remember.
Yesterday, I sat in my car for 30 minutes whilst what I can only describe as a monsoon downpour hit my locale. Seriously, this was rain of epic proportions that I have only witnessed once before in 60 years or so.
I’m pretty certain we’ll have August reported as one of the coolest on record. But you won’t see it reported on alBeeb.
Interesting to note that Prof Frances Corner has qualifications in fashion, but none in science.
She also resembles Cruella de Vil, but without the compassion – so much for her fashion sense.
“I’m pretty certain we’ll have August reported as one of the coolest on record. ”
France suffered one heckuva heat wave in July.
While at the same time, dallas texas had the 72nd hottest July r since 1890. (according to the NOAA temp records). The state of Texas which about the same size as France likewise had a 70th hottest July since 1890.
Global warming is powerful!
I have a collection of old Giles cartoons from the Daily Express from the 50s to the 70s and the wet English summer, especially for Bank Holidays, is a recurrent theme. There is nothing new under the sun.
Wonder what snake tastes like – must still be better than vegan mush.
Rattlesnake is pretty good . Haven’t tried others .
😉
You just ruined my appetite.There goes my supper right out the window.That really rattled me.
ah the “other other” white meat ;-)))
Do they really believe the world will become vegetarian on the premise that it will stop CC? Really? This is right up there with stopping the use of fossil fuels without a viable replacement. These whiny, demanding, hypocritical activists are being given way too much attention.
They may save a tiny amount of money by banning disposable plastic knives and cups, however they are going to have to increase spending on health services once the lack of sanitary utensils kicks in.
Goldsmith’s has always been one of the Artsy Colleges within London University. Not bigly into the thinking subjects.
No biggie, it’s not like it’s a proper school..
“The QS World Rankings place us in the top five UK Universities for Art & Design and Communication & Media Studies.”
In World rankings in the range 301-350
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2018/world-ranking#!/page/12/length/25/sort_by/rank/sort_order/asc/cols/stats
Same category as eg University of Denver (US) , Flinders University (Australia). (Imperial College (ahem) is No8).
One interesting statistic is that the female to male raio is about 2:1 , but I do not know if that is staff or students or both.
OK, they are joining the “Ban Plastic” mania, too.
Want to have fun?
Take a university course in Public Health and Communicable Diseases.
For field work, you need go no further than the campus Infirmary. The University dorms are a case study in “If It Can Go Wrong, It Will”. One of the *big ones* is (I am not kidding) mononucleosis! Invariably, the women’s dormitories are way worse than the men’s dorms. If the outbreak can be confined to one dormitory without rampaging across the whole campus it is considered a Big Win. Then you have colds, flu, strep throat, norovirus, and everything else you can think of.
Now Consider: Single use plastic cups are verboten. The entire campus population is carrying around “traveler” cups, and sharing. Have an *interesting* year at school. Single use plastic was adopted for a reason, and it was not to save money on dishwashing. This school is going to get an education.
This is equivalent to pissing into the ocean to raise the level of the sea. This is not even enough to signal virtue to any anyone but the most empty-headed climate zombie.
What did one ocean say to the other? nothing.They just waved.
Banning meat. That will lower cafeteria cost and I bet the saving will not be pasted on to students. as a matter of fact student will have to pay for cafeteria meals utilized or not.
Probably the costs will be lowered because more students eat elsewhere as well.
Doesn’t this college have one student with a glimmer of science (or math) understanding who can calculate how little these virtue signally gestures would mean, even if adopted by the entire UK?
Don’t liberal arts colleges teach logic any more?
Quite possibly not. Goldsmith’s is traditionally a sociologist-type college, not sciences or engineering.
I don’t know much about this school, I take it they don’t have much of sciences department and engineering is right out. I’d pass even if they offered a fully paid ride.
Dad,I’m going to a party. Would you do my homework for me?
I’m sorry, kid,but it just wouldn’t be right.
Well,maybe not.Give it a try anyway.
Not going far enough in my humble and sometimes sarcastic opinion. What about pork, lamb, venison, fish, poultry? Why do these poor suffering beasts have to take up the load of the freeloading cows?
Sheer nonsense but dangerous nonsense. I grew up in SE London. The Sun in a clear sky was a rare visitor in those days. But in those days, Goldsmith’s was definitely not a University.
Good! Anything that drives the price of meat down is good. That means I can buy more. Meat producers don’t fret. We’ll make sure you make a healthy profit.
Problem solved! Thanks to their heroic actions, the climate will soon be in homeostasis, and we can go back to solving real problems.
Vote with your feet.
Eat outside.
The climate change problem has been solved so no one needs to spend any more money on it. The Climate Crisis as if it ever existed is over for ever and will never return.
How would this be monitored?
When the sun doesn’t shine (guaranteed for a long period at least once per day) and the wind doesn’t blow/blows too much, will they be monitoring their supplier to ensure that they throw the breakers so as to not use fossil-fueled power?
Most likely they are using Al’s reasoning that paying indulgences to those with RECs is the equivalent of not producing CO2 and then claim to be CO2 neutral.
Stickers saying: “-Flush twice, it’s a long way to the cafeteria !” on backorder.
What are the 2 toughest jobs in the world? Flushing,New York and Wheeling, West Virginia.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-49330238
The attack on livestock farming is in full flight in New Zealand media. Once we did have an impartial subjective press. It is long gone. They are now knights on green horses saving us from our ignorant selves.
First step in a scientific study of a species’ impact on its environment? – establish a baseline. They claim to know the impact of NZ livestock methane production on global warming. Trollop. They don’t even know how much is being produced by marine seeps within our very large continental shelf. Its as large as the landmass of Australia.
Back to baseline. 1300 years ago there were no humans in NZ. 90% was covered in heavy rain forest – much of it growing in swamps and wetlands. Maori came and burnt 30 %. Europeans came and burnt another 30% and drained wetlands.
What is the methane baseline? We won’t discuss this. Apparently it is irrelevant.
Man and his beast has walked hand-in-hand for how many thousand years?
We, the realists, have no voice in NZ. We just get shouted down.
M
That does not necessary call for a happy end…
When the press preaches the virtues of famine bad things happen.
There was a company called “Gillette” once, which tried to virtue-signal its way to saving the planet, well, its stock price. Then began to go rapidly broke.
Competition = sell steak sandwiches
See who comes out on top.
Goldsmith’s college is entirely Arts and Sociology. No science there at all.
Alcohol and calculus don’t mix.Never drink and derive.
Yes they do.
Then you better where your seat belt,Mr.X.
I believe that there is a high correlation between those who are convinced in man made global warming and those who have a poor understanding of science. Any anomalies can be explained when you allow for the “snouts in the trough effect”
Look at it this way.
If you have a valuable resource i.e. meat, you don’t want to waste it on pointless consumers who wouldn’t know what to do with the additional protein…
We should thank Goldsmiths for its generous self sacrifice.
How does the current population of ungulates compare with the times of the massive North American and African herds before we slaughtered them and junked their habitat? I believe that there are fewer now than then so why are we not all dead from CO2, flatulence and general gas discharge?
Longing for a nice rare steak with a bottle of Shiraz!!
well I guess losing students might also lower running costs?
I wonder how many will transfer once the news of this and higher costs hits home?
As Dan Cody commented Alcohol and calculus don’t mix. Never drink and derive.
Cannot help but wonder what the warden is drinking. Obviously humans are low on the priority list.
The bit I don’t get. Prior to the expansion of Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago wasn’t the world teeming with herbivores like bison, elephants, wildebeest, antelopes and others? Has humankind distorted an undisturbed ecosystem to such an extent? I doubt it.
P.S. Consider that sloths make up 90 % of the meat in the Equatorial rainforests.
So they have stopped climate change dead in its tracks so we do not have to give it another thought and can stop spending time and money on it. Of course we must understand that extreme weather events and sea level rise will continue unabated because they are part of the current climate.
Creutzfeldt Jakob’s disease was mainly affecting older male and female retirees and unemployed people in the UK who did live on dog food and cat food cans – because those are cheaper than food for people.
So they have intaken prions that do not maintain a spatial structure. Predators and pets such as dogs and cats do not need these spatial structures. But in humans, such a diet can lead to the loss of important bodily functions.
https://www.google.com/search?q=creutzfeldt+Jakob+desease+due+to+petfood&oq=creutzfeldt+Jakob+desease+due+to+petfood&aqs=chrome.