Dr. Paul Offit just wrote a book called Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong, which not about an evil black dog that escaped from a box, but rather, seven instances when the march of scientific progress headed off a cliff rather than in the desired direction. People died. Many people died. Other bad things happened.

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Note: I interviewed Paul Offit about his book on Atheist Talk Radio. This interview will be aired on Sunday, May 28th, and will be available as a podcast. It should be HERE.
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Readers will have different reactions to, and ways to relate to, each of the seven different stories, because they are far flung and cover a great deal of time, diverse social settings, and a wide range of scientific endeavors. Some readers will get mad because he talks about DDT and Rachel Carson, though I assure you his argument is mostly reasonable (I did disagree with some parts). All readers will be amazed at the poppy plant and all it can do and has done, and astonished at the immense apparent ignorance displayed by that plant’s exploiters, from back in the early 19th century to, well, yesterday. Those interested in race and racism, the use of poison gas to kill people, will find things you didn’t know in Offit’s carefully researched histories. Also, don’t forget to take your vitamins. Or, maybe, forget to take your vitamins.

The chapter “The Great Margarine Mistake” is a great example of the very commonly screwed up interface between food science, food production and marketing, and the shaping of food preference among regular people. You know, that thing where “They tell us not to drink coffee. Then they tell us to drink coffee. They don’t know nothin'”

My biggest disagreement with Paul is over malaria. He did not incorporate an often overlooked fact about the disease into his discussion, and had he done so, may have written a somewhat different chapter. Briefly, in zones where there are two wet seasons (or one long wet season and a very short dry season) there has never really been success in curtailing malaria. In zones where there is a very long dry season but it is wet enough for part of the year for the mosquito that carries malaria to exist at least most years, malaria is relatively easy to beat down using a wide range of techniques, no one of which is supreme. So, for example, today, the distribution of malaria in South Africa, where it is not actually that common (thousands of cases in a normal year among tens of millions of people) is determined mainly by how wet the eastern wet season is, integrated with the movement into that area of people, usually refugees, who are a) infected and b) not getting medical treatment. (See this.)

Malaria was wiped out in country after country prior to the use of DDT, then the DDT came in and helped a great deal, in those relatively dry countries. But the wet countries, not so much. Indeed, in a place like Zaire, there are absolutely no reliable statistics on how common Malaria is or ever was over most of the country, but when I lived there in the 1980s, it was as common as the common cold in New Jersey, and DDT was theoretically in use. (That is a second correlation with causation: the wetter the equatorial country, the less we actually know about disease. I recall leaving the deep rain forest to visit the “city” to get hold of a few courses of leprosy medicine for a handful of people who visited our clinic who had it, where I had dinner with a guy from the UN who was on his victory lap for having wiped out leprosy in Africa.)

In some ways, Offit’s final chapter is the most interesting, the eighth chapter (combined with the Epilog) in which he does two things. One is to identify the kind of reasoning mistake, or methodological mistake, each of his seven examples exemplifies. Such as failure to pay attention to the data, or failure to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. The other is to go quickly through what may end up being similar stories of science gone wrong just starting to brew today or in recent decades, such as the long term unintended effects of widespread use of antibiotics.

A question that Offit’s book raises, indirectly, is this: When a Pandora-like box opens and some sort of monster creeps out, why did the box open to begin with? Sometimes it is jostled open, like in the case of unintended negative outcomes from the use of antibiotics. Sometimes it is opened because someone can’t resist the treasures that may be inside. Sometimes it is opened because science is an open process and must always seek knowledge etc. etc. I wonder if the recent development of an engineered polio virus (three instances), or the Spanish Flu, is an example of such. Sometimes it is opened because of (Godwin Warning!) HITLER. Seriously.

I don’t know what knowing these reasons gets us, but one possibility is this: when we find ignorance as a root cause of calamity, perhaps an appreciation of knowledge is gained. That is certainly the lesson of Offit’s review of the products of opium, their invention, intensification, deployment, and use. Apparently addiction was simply not understood at all until fairly recently, and that lack of understanding caused science, medical technology, and medical practice to do the exactly wrong thing over and over again.

And of course, lobotomies. The invention of the latter method of doing this useless and horrible procedure is something that, if put in a movie as a plot element, would kill the movie because it is not possible to suspend disbelief to the degree necessary to stay seated in the theater.

Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong is a great read and a necessary addition to the bookshelf of any practicing skeptic or science enthusiast.

Paul Offit, who is a pediatrician and the inventor of a rotavirus vaccine (see this for an interesting podcast on a related topic), is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He is also chief of Infectious Diseases and director of Vaccine Education at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Aside from Pandra’s Lab, he also wrote Do You Believe in Magic?: Vitamins, Supplements, and All Things Natural: A Look Behind the Curtain, Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All, and Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine.

The vast majority of the variation we seen in stature (height) among humans is not genetic. That is a fact hard to swallow by so many of us who were told in biology class that “height is a complex genetic trait with many genes affecting it.” It also seems wrong because the classic examples of variation in stature, the Pygmies of Central Africa (short) and the Maasai of East Africa (tall) are assumed to be populations under selection that caused them to be outliers. Of course, the Maasai are really not that tall by modern Western standards, but the story about them being tall, first told by relatively short European travelers who met them in the 19th century, persists, despite the fact that those travelers’ offspring, such as Modern Americans and Brits, are in many cases significantly taller than their own ancestors without natural selection being the cause.

But there are some genetic factors that control height and weight and account for some percentage of variation in those phenotypes. Pygmies taken from their homeland and raised among people with unlimited food supply do not grow tall. They may become obese, but not tall, because one of the main genes that regulates growth in almost all humans simply does not function in Pygmies. (One individual Efe Pygmy I’ve met who was raised among Italian nuns, in Italy, was short but rather wide.) There may be other short statured populations with a similar genetically determined stature. But as far as we can tell, something like 20% (and that is probably an overestimate) of variation in stature in living humans over the last century or so can be accounted for by genetic variation. The rest is a combination of diet and, I suspect, an epigenetic effect linked to maternal size and diet. When a population of relatively short people get unlimited food the next generation is taller. But then, the next generation is taller still. It is as though mothers won’t give birth to maximally sized offspring, just somewhat larger offspring, who then give birth to somewhat larger offspring, so the part of the demographic transition where everyone gets taller happens over a few generations. This is a well documented but not very well explained phenomenon, and the explanation I suggest here is merely a hypothesis.

A new study in Science looks at the Inuit people, and some Europeans living in the same place they live, in this case Greenland, and finds a genetic component to Inuit stature and weight. There are also other differences having to do with processing elements of their relatively unusual diet.

The key result with respect to weight and height is shown in the graph at the top of the post. The letters (GG, GT, TT) are the alleles (T is the derived allele). Homozygotes for the derived allele are quite a bit less massive, and a small amount shorter, than those without the allele, and heterozygotes are in between.

Here is the abstract from the paper:

The indigenous people of Greenland, the Inuit, have lived for a long time in the extreme conditions of the Arctic, including low annual temperatures, and with a specialized diet rich in protein and fatty acids, particularly omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). A scan of Inuit genomes for signatures of adaptation revealed signals at several loci, with the strongest signal located in a cluster of fatty acid desaturases that determine PUFA levels. The selected alleles are associated with multiple metabolic and anthropometric phenotypes and have large effect sizes for weight and height, with the effect on height replicated in Europeans. By analyzing membrane lipids, we found that the selected alleles modulate fatty acid composition, which may affect the regulation of growth hormones. Thus, the Inuit have genetic and physiological adaptations to a diet rich in PUFAs.

How long have the Inuit been living this lifeway, in this environment? Actually, not that long. The researchers, in their supplemental information, suggest that it could be as long as 30,000 years, but this is unlikely, or at least, the story is more complicated.

There are several complications to understanding the history of the selective environment of the Inuit, the environment that would have shaped this genetic adaptation. First, the environment has changed. Not only have we gone from an ice age to no ice age during this 30,000 year time period, but with sea level rise during the Holocene, the ecology of the arctic has changed considerably. Large areas of the continent have been inundated by the sea. Prior to that, most of the ocean adjoining land was immediately deep. With the inundation of the continent, vast relatively shallow areas of ocean would exist. Nutrients well up along the continental shelf, but shallow areas are also potentially nutrient rich because of sediments coming off shore. During glacial melt periods, there may have been frequent large scale fresh water incursions which would have had occasional disastrous effects on the local ecology. The position of estuarine settings, which can be very productive, would change. As sea level rise slowed, near shore sediments may have had a chance to build up, causing regional increases in productivity.

The migratory patterns, overall distribution, and abundance of marine mammals and common shoaling fish would have changed dramatically, and multiple times, during the last several thousand years. It would not have been until about five thousand years ago that things would have settled down allowing long term regional foraging adaptations to emerge. Prior to that there may have been periods when the marine environment was significantly more, or significantly less, productive.

Meanwhile, the ancestors of the Inuit themselves moved a great deal during this period. They were not in Greenland, or anywhere in North America, 30,000 years ago, but rather, in an unknown location in Asia. The Inuit ancestors were part of a later migration into the New World. The association (population wise) of true Arctic people and others living farther south is not known.

A second factor is cultural adaptation. When we look at the traditional Inuit foraging patterns and associated technology, together with the preceding prehistoric Thule adaptations, we can’t help but to be impressed with the highly specialized effective approaches, both strategically and technologically, to acquiring marine resources. Boats, lamps, harpoons, and processing tools are highly refined and efficient. That material culture and strategic approach, however, is only a few thousand years old. Before that, in the region, were the Dorset, who simply lacked many of these tools. It is possible that the Thule and Inuit had sled and sled dogs, but earlier people in the Arctic did not. And so on. The ancestors of the Inuit, just a few thousand years ago, could not have had as specialized a diet as the traditional (modern ethnohistoric) Inuit. Cultural adaptations changing over time is as important as, if not more important than, the afore mentioned likely changes in environment.

So, I’m not going to argue that these adaptations are not 30,000 years in the making. Rather, I’ll argue that strong selection for these alleles could be as recent a few thousand years or even less, and that prior selective environments (the combination of the natural environment and human cultural adaptations to it) may have different and the situation may have been rather complicated for many years. In other words, the new, and very interesting, results looking at the Inuit genome need to be integrated with a better understanding of Inuit history, which is probably going to require a lot more research in the region.

There is a second point I want to make about this paper. We see research suggesting a genetic explanation for a lot of things, but often, in the past, that has involved finding a correlation between this or that genetic variation and a presumed phenotypic feature. Often, the next key step to establish the link isn’t, perhaps sometimes can’t be, taken. This is the link between the observed genetic variation and a good physiological story. The present research finds genetic variation associated with physiological features that seem to be associated with a marine-oriented diet in an Arctic or Sub Arctic setting. That makes this research really valuable.

Greenlandic Inuit show genetic signatures of diet and climate adaptation
Matteo Fumagalli, Ida Moltke, Niels Grarup, Fernando Racimo, Peter Bjerregaard, Marit E. Jørgensen, Thorfinn S. Korneliussen, Pascale Gerbault, Line Skotte, Allan Linneberg, Cramer Christensen, Ivan Brandslund, Torben Jørgensen, Emilia Huerta-Sánchez, Erik B. Schmidt, Oluf Pedersen, Torben Hansen, Anders Albrechtsen, and Rasmus Nielsen
Science 18 September 2015: 349 (6254), 1343-1347. [DOI:10.1126/science.aab2319]

The overall body of evidence examined by the 2015 DGAC identifies that a healthy dietary pattern is higher in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, low- or non-fat dairy, seafood, legumes, and nuts; moderate in alcohol (among adults); lower in red and processed meat; and low in sugar sweetened foods and drinks and refined grains. Vegetables and fruit are the only characteristics of the diet that were consistently identified in every conclusion statement across the health outcomes. Whole grains were identified slightly less consistently compared to vegetables and fruits, but were identified in every conclusion with moderate to strong evidence. For studies with limited evidence, grains were not as consistently defined and/or they were not identified as a key characteristic. Low- or non-fat dairy, seafood, legumes, nuts, and alcohol were identified as beneficial characteristics of the diet for some, but not all, outcomes. For conclusions with moderate to strong evidence, higher intake of red and processed meats was identified as detrimental compared to lower intake. Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened foods and beverages as well as refined grains was identified as detrimental in almost all conclusion statements with moderate to strong evidence.

Humans eat a wide variety of foods; as a species, the diversity of species we eat is greater than any other animal by a very large margin, with the only quirky exception being the animals that we take along with us, the commensals such as rats and cockroaches. Most primates eat a high diversity of foods, but about two million years ago or a bit less, according to the “Cooking Hypothesis” (which a lot of people think is correct) we took an already diverse primate diet and added to it anything we might encounter in the environment that could be made edible with heat and added that to our diet. More recently, beginning about 10,000 years ago, we applied additional technology and the new practice of plant husbandry to convert other foods, some edible some not, into more useful items for our diet. Humans around the world did this independently over several thousand years, in parallel.

Then we got boats that were capable of doing magical things like sailing up wind, and navigation technologies that allowed humans to be less lost when doing so over great distances. Some humans had done this much earlier at a smaller scale, but by the 15th century there were big wooden boats criss crossing the seas, bringing people to places they had never been before, and along with them the foods people ate all over the world.

Have you looked at photographs of traditional people living in traditional, seemingly timeless, ways in places like Africa, the Amazon, or New Guinea? Look again, and focus on the things that form the backdrop for the scenes shown in those photographs. One of the things you’ll see in many pictures is the plantain, or the banana. You might notice the huge elephant ear leaves of taro plants. If you look closely you might notice cassava growing in the fields, or maize.

Maize was domesticated in Mexico, taro, plantains, and bananas in various different locations across south and southeast Asia. Cassava comes from the lowlands of South America, and potatoes come from the Andes. Some Yams come from Africa, some from South America (I oversimplify a bit). You can’t find a modern traditional diet, as it were, that does not include ingredients from continents other than where the traditional diet lives today, except perhaps in Ethiopia. Everybody eats everybody else’s food all the time. The main determinant of where food is grown is not where it was first domesticated, but rather, the limitations of seasons, rainfall, heat and cold. And even there, the limitations are relaxed. Maize only grows in the colder regions because varieties have been developed to do so, and many plants are grown in regions normally too arid for them, by virtue of irrigation.

Adding all this up – the diverse primate diet, the addition of cooked foods otherwise not edible, the artificially selected crops, and the global exchange of horticultural goods and practices – and you get a huge variety of food, the largest variety of food any species has ever managed to include in its diet. (Other than the rats and cockroaches, of course.)

Despite all this diversity, something has remained more or less the same all along. The “traditional” diet for humans, though much altered with cooking, is relatively low quality. I use the term “low quality” in the way an ecologist uses it. How many usable calories do you get out of a kilo of the food item under consideration? Or, related, how much work do you, using food preparation, chewing, and digestion (including the work done by the friendly microbes living in your gut) to convert that kilo of food into energy?

It is easy to see how our traditional diets are low quality by comparing them to the diets of a handful of primates that live almost entirely off of insects, or tree sap, or nectar. If we look at birds, we see the same thing; many species of birds eat pure sugar of one form or another. A few other animals have very high quality diets. Generally, carnivores have higher quality diets than herbivores. There are no carnivores that use multiple stomachs or habitually regurgitates and re-consume their animal prey in order to digest it. Herbivores that eat grass or leaves spend a lot of time feeding, have massive digestive systems designed by natural selection to digest the hell out of the food, and sometimes they have to “eat” the same food multiple times to get enough energy out of it to survive. Humans are somewhere in between. Some of our digestion is done pre-consumption by cooking and processing, but for the most part our natural, traditional diet takes a fair amount of work to process. We don’t live off of sugar water like hummingbirds and many insects do.

And this is why the leading cause of death in the United States and some other countries has shifted from the usual panoply of causes – infectious disease, accident, homicide, etc. – to our diets. Our diet is the most likely thing to kill us, and lately, the primary mediating factor in this particular cause of death is obesity and/or diabetes.

The “traditional” diet of any group of people, as I’ve already outlined, is relatively recent historically, being the result of 10,000 years of developing plants and a few hundred years of transferring crops and growing methods across the world. That traditional diet was prominent globally through the 19th century and well into the 20th century. The food came from farms, and although many amazing novel technologies were being applied on those farms, such as better plows and various other things that could be drawn behind oxen, a team of ponies or horses, or a small tractor, those technologies did not change the diets too much.

But as technologies developed, farms began to scale up. This is the reason that the New England countryside is graced with young forests criss-crossed with quaint stone walls. Those stone walls were field boundaries in the old days. But as farming scaled up, it became economically inviable to have small fields on small farms. A few other things went wrong on some of these New England farms as well, including some climate glitches and some other economic effects that drove farmers off the land and in some cases into cities where there were jobs working in mills. But some of those farmers took part in the great Westward Migrations, as the country grew, and established a new kind of agriculture in the vast regions of the midwest and plaines.

Add a growing urban market for foods, government help in the form of extension and agricultural colleges, more technology such as combines, railroads to move produce to market, mills to process the produce, add some water (irrigation) as needed and salt to taste. It took decades, but we went from an agrarian economy where the same traditional diet we had been eating was produced on a somewhat larger scale, to an agricultural economy that produces mostly one single thing. This product:

OK, I’m exaggerating there. It isn’t really true that the entire US agricultural system has been converted over to the production of sugary drinks. But sometimes it seems that way. Vast expanses of corn are grown in the midwest and plains, and that corn is used to produce vast amounts of ethanol (as fuel), alcoholic beverages, sugary substances including cola, feed for animals, and some of it even makes it to the table as … well, corn. But lets step back to the original comparison of “traditional diet” and the diet many Americans eat today.

When you eat a traditional meal, a good amount of that food is low quality, relatively hard to digest, carbohydrates with a mix of proteins. There will be a little simple sugar here and there and a bit of fat here and there.

The simple sugars go right away to the liver, where they supplement the body’s immediate energy stores. The complex sugars, the carbohydrates that consist of much larger and more involved molecules, take time to digest and break down to eventually use as fuel. So the sugar gives you a small amount of immediate energy and the complex carbohydrates give you energy over the coming hours.

The fats are simply stored up. If you eat fat, the fat molecules are minimally processed, moved to your hips or wherever, and are pasted there for later use. Or, forever, depending.

When you eat a modern diet, it will have two major difference from the traditional diet. The foods at the two ends of that spectrum of availability will be in greater proportion. Instead of having a bunch of low quality food in the middle, with a little fat (for later) on one end of the spectrum, and a little simple sugar (for immediate use) on the other end of the spectrum, the modern diet will have piles of fat and piles of simple sugar and not much in between.

So, what happens? The fat goes where fat goes, as stated already, but there is more of it. The sugar overloads the liver, which detecting an overabundance of energy, converts the sugar to some form of storage, and some of that is fat that joins up with the other fat. There is also a kind of molecule the liver converts some of that sugar into, stored in your liver, for in case you get hungry between meals. That molecule reduces the chance your body will use any of that stored up fat as energy.

Two thousand traditional calories provides you with energy for now, energy for the next several hours, and a bit of energy for much later. Two thousand modern calories provides you with way more energy than you need for now, and a huge amount of fat that you’ll never use because you are never going to let much time go between meals. Because there is a fast food joint just down the street. And your refrigerator and cabinets are full of junk food.

And that’s not all. Our system of agriculture has all sorts of other negatives as well. The following is from the Food and Agriculture page of the Union of Concerned Scientists:

Food and Agriculture: Toward Healthy Food and Farms
Our agricultural system has lost its way.

Millions of acres of corn, soybeans, and other commodity crops, grown with the help of heavy government subsidies, dominate our rural landscapes.

To grow these crops, industrial farms use massive amounts of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, which deplete our soil and pollute our air and water.

Much of this harvest will end up as biofuels and other industrial products—and most of the rest will be used in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) or in heavily processed junk foods, which seem cheap only because their hidden costs don’t show up at the cash register.

Industrial agriculture is unhealthy — for our environment, our climate, our bodies, and our rural economies.

A Better Way: Sustainable Agriculture

There’s a better way to grow our food. Working with nature instead of against it, sustainable agriculture uses 21st-century techniques and technologies to implement time-tested ideas such as crop rotation, integrated plant/animal systems, and organic soil amendments.

Sustainable agriculture is less damaging to the environment than industrial agriculture, and produces a richer, more diverse mix of foods. It’s productive enough to feed the world, and efficient enough to succeed in the marketplace—but current U.S. agricultural policy stacks the deck in favor of industrial food production.

… and there is much much more than that, visit the page.

Yesterday, I went to a symposium hosted at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota and organized by the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. A description of the symposium is here and the entire thing was “taped” and will be available. I’m not going to tell you anything major about the symposium now; I’ll wait until the video is available, then I’ll provide you with my thoughts on it. For now I’ll just say it was quite good, eye-opening, and that you’ll definitely want to watch it. In fact, you should feel a little bad that you weren’t there.

Stay Tuned.

Let me put that another way. Say you order a nice steak at your favorite restaurant, but when it was served to your table, instead of a New York Strip or a Filet Mignon you were given an equivalent amount of whatever a hot dog may include. It would probably be served in a bowl because hot dogs are mainly water. Floating in the water would be nerve tissue, cow anuses, sinus tissues, chicken eyelids, maybe an eyeball. If it was an “all beef” version these would all be cow parts. If not, it might be a mixture of cow, pig, turkey, and chicken. But really, nobody ever said that a non-beef hot dog only includes those animals. Goats, sheep, horses, and really, mammals and birds in general all have nerve tissue and anuses. Bon appetite!

Clearly, the role of a hot dog is not to provide or even enhance the meat eating experience. So, I ask you, what is the purpose of the widely consumed tube-steak?

I submit that the role of the hotdog is to provide a substrate for mustard and relish. Or, ketchup. Meat purists may eat their meat plain, or with minimal condiment. Other than certain young children or dogs, have you ever really met a “hot dog purist” who eats the hot dog without anything on it? In fact, studies would show (if they existed) that there is a correlation between the degree to which an individual self identifies as a hot-dog lover and how much stuff an individual piles on top of the hot dog, both in terms of diversity (how many different things) and amount (how high the pile gets).

As with many things, the importance of the hot dog is found in the context, not the thing itself. The role of the hotdog is the roll. And the condiments, including for some kraut or beans.

Now, consider the following facts.

<ul>

<li>2) In the United States and parts of Europe, the efficiency of our agricultural system, in terms of energy in the field transformed to energy on the dinner plate, is abysmally low.  Something like 30-40% of our "field calories" reach the table.  The reason for this is that so much of those field calories are first converted into meat.</li>

<li>3) The global food supply and the world's increasing population are expected, according to recent and reliable studies, to reach equilibrium in about 2050.  After that we start to starve en masse, I suppose.</li>

<li>4) The production of food generally is a large contributor to climate change, and the production of meat in particular is a very large contributor to climate change.</li>

<li>5) Anuses.  Cow, pig, sheep, goat, unknown.  In your hot dog.</li></ul>

Meat in hot dogs is not really meat, if you are a meat eater. It is not what you would eat were it not turned into something you don’t recognize. Meat in hot dogs is bad for you and bad for the planet simply because it is meat. Meat in hot dogs does not produce culinary pleasure, especially when you think about it. A hot dog made with no meat but that still had the undistinguished mushy internal texture, with a burnable plastic like exterior, would serve just as well to hold the condiments. Such a meat-free hot dog would still serve a roll. As it were.

Americans probably eat about 700 million pounds of hot dogs a year, according to the American Meat Institute. (Not per person, but rather, in total.) That’s close to 2.3 pounds per person a year. Th average American eats about 180 pounds of land-animal meat in total per year. So, about 1-2% of our meat diets consist of hot dog. (I’m purposefully leaving fish and other wild animals out of this.)

If all hot dogs were suddenly meatless, there would be no loss at the consumer end, only gains. We would still have the tube-shaped object to coat in corn and deep fry, put in a roll and cover with condiments, slice into barrel-shaped bits and pierce with uncooked linguini to boil later to make a festive meal of mini Cthulhus, and so on. But we would improve the quality of our own diets by an average of 1-2% with respect to meat consumption. Since there are a lot of people who eat no meat, and a lot of people who only rarely eat hot dogs, this probably translates into a much larger change for the hot-doggiest amongst us. The American Meat Institute estimates that close to half of American hot dog consumption occurs at outdoor events, mainly sporting events. We buy, at the grocery store, 350 million pounds a year of hot dog, and we eat at events the same amount again. This tells me that a very small subset of Americans, those who go to a lot of sporting events, then while there, consume a few hot dogs every time, are eating a very large percentage of the dogs. I’d wager that the most hot-dog loving third of those who eat hot dogs would reduce meat consumption in their diets by double digits if all hot dogs were suddenly Vegan.

Also, while as a specialty product (that you can’t find in most grocery stores, sadly) Vegan hot dogs are not especially cheap. But imagine the potential savings. If, instead of making hot dogs out of nerve tissue, anuses, and noses of animals, hot dogs were made out of the equivalent parts of plants … whatever that might be … they would be dirt cheap. Maybe the use of dirt there is a poor choice. Anyway, they would be cheaper than meat-ish hot dogs. Cheaper hot dogs would sell.

And that is the case for Vegan hot dogs.

Sources of information:

<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/08/01/the-problem-with-the-global-food-supply-new-research/">The Problem With The Global Food Supply: New Research</a></li>

<li><a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/seriouslyscience/?p=785#.Ug-rZ2TXikI">Ever wanted to know what’s really in hotdogs?</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2013/UR_CONTENT_430583.html">Can we feed the world?</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.inspirationgreen.com/food-consumption-in-america.html">The American Diet!</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.food.com/recipe/hot-dog-spaghetti-445667">Hot Dog Spaghetti</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.hot-dog.org/ht/d/sp/i/38599/pid/38599">American Meat Council</a></li>

Appendix

For completeness, I’ll note that the American Meat Institute claims this about hot dog ingredients:

What exactly is in a hot dog?

The ingredients in hot dogs have been the subject of much humor, rumor and speculation. But the answer is less exciting than the question.

All hot dogs are cured and cooked sausages that consist of mainly pork, beef, chicken and turkey or a combination of meat and poultry. Meats used in hot dogs come from the muscle of the animal and looks much like what you buy in the grocer’s case. Other ingredients include water, curing agents and spices, such as garlic, salt, sugar, ground mustard, nutmeg, coriander and white pepper.

If variety meats such as liver and hearts are used in processed meats, the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires the manufacturer to declare those ingredients on the package with the statement “with variety meats” or “with meat by-products.” The manufacturer must then specify which variety meat is included. In the U.S., companies are required to list ingredients in order, from the main ingredient, to the least ingredient.

But science says something a bit different. Here’s the results of one study looking inside the dog:

…Package labels typically list some type of meat as the primary ingredient. … A variety of tissues were observed besides skeletal muscle including bone (n = 8), collagen (n = 8), blood vessels (n = 8), plant material (n = 8), peripheral nerve (n = 7), adipose (n = 5), cartilage (n = 4), and skin (n = 1). … Electron microscopy showed recognizable skeletal muscle with evidence of degenerative changes. In conclusion, hotdog ingredient labels are misleading; most brands are more than 50% water by weight. The amount of meat (skeletal muscle) in most brands comprised less than 10% of the cross-sectional surface area. More expensive brands generally had more meat. All hotdogs contained other tissue types (bone and cartilage) not related to skeletal muscle; brain tissue was not present.

All traditional forager groups incorporate hunting and butchery into a broader cultural context. There is often ritual associated with hunting. Animals, especially mammals, are dismembered in stereotypical ways ways with some sort of meaning associated with the process. In many cases, meat goes through a process of “distribution and redistribution” whereby specific body parts are distributed to individuals based on their role in the hunt, and then, these parcels of meat are redistributed among the group on the basis of need, generally very evenly.

It appears that foragers value meat above other sources of food even if those other sources are more life-staining by being a larger part of the diet. The word “hunger” may sometimes really mean “hunger for meat” more than simple hunger for food. Although anthropologists have tried to link hunting success to reproductive success, this link is unclear. But, some concept of hunting ability or reliability seems to be associated in many cultures with one’s value in the group.

Almost all hunting of mammals is done by men in all foraging societies, with a few exceptions. The exceptions do not make up a large percentage of the meat acquired, and are rare even within the societies in which they occur. A majority of non-meat foods are obtained by females, but a larger percentage of non-meat foods are obtained my males than meat obtained by females. Many reasons have been given for this but few of the seemingly pragmatic reasons seem to hold up well to further scrutiny, such as “hunting is dangerous and women have kids.” Women engage in all sorts of dangerous foraging activities. It may be that the best explanation for the sexual bias in foraging vis-a-vis animal and plant foods is to be found in the cultural roles of hunting.

Dietarily, meat is probably very important for most groups as food for pregnant and nursing women and young children. There are special dietary demands for such individuals that may not be well met with only wild plant foods, but that are easily addressed with meat. Putting this all together, one might suggest that obtaining and distributing meat by men is an important form of parental investment.

The archaeological record shows a long association of chipped stone tools made of selected conchoidally fracturing rock and meat acquisition. Early sites have both stone tools of this type and bones that seem to show marks of butchery with these tools. This has led many archaeologists to emphasize the role of hunting in human evolution. However, chipped stone tools do not leave preservable evidence of use on plant foods or other materials, because these foods and materials are not found on archaeological sites. The wear patterns on the tools themselves can sometimes be studied and these indicate that many stone tools were used extensively on plant material, either food items or objects of use (i.e., digging sticks or some other wooden implement). It may be that most stone tools were used for tasks other than hunting and butchery. Also, both stone tools and cut-marked bones are rare prior to about two million years ago, so piecing together a good prehistory of tools and animal acquisition is probably asking too much of the data. Nonetheless, we see evidence of the use of animal products quite early in human evolution; this is not a practice invented by modern humans, but rather, one practiced by human ancestors as well.

Modern chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) hunt mammals and eat them. The total amount of meat consumed by a group of chimpanzees over the course of a year is much lower than the typical amount of meat in the diet of modern human hunter gatherers, but it is a regular addition to the diet. There are a lot of groups of chimpanzees for which we can not say hunting is documented, but every group of chimps that has been studied by primatologists exhibit this behavior. There is a large amount of variation across chimpanzee groups in how hunting is carried out and how much meat is typically obtained. Most of the meat is in the form of other primates (monkeys) but other mammals are taken. Non-mammal sources are also used by chimpanzees including birds and eggs and other vertebrates (but no fish, probably). When chimpanzees hunt monkeys, and are successful, the level of attention given to the captured food source is inordinate compared to, say, finding a good source of fruit. Chimpanzees of both sexes are excited about the prospect of getting a bit of monkey flesh.

Insect food is obtained by chimpanzees and also by many other primates. It may be the case that virtually all primates eat some insects (some eat mostly insects), though there are several species not especially known for it.

We think that the last common ancestor (LCA) of chimpanzees and humans was more chimp like than human like. Also, we think that this LCA was more like a common chimp (Pan troglodytes) than a bonobo (Pan paniscus). Since modern chimps across Africa, including those that have been separated from each other for a very long time, hunt mammals, and modern human foragers and their immediate ancestors are clearly documented as hunters of mammals, it is reasonable to postulate that the LCA also carried out this behavior.

Eating mammalian meat and other animal products is probably part of our evolutionary heritage at least since the chimp-human split. Modern foragers and, perhaps, modern chimps seem to attribute an importance to meat greater than one would expect from meat’s caloric contribution to the diet, and in modern foragers, hunting, butchery, and consumption of meat is tied in with numerous cultural practices.

Meat is probably an important contribution to the human “palaeolithic” diet and an even more important contribution to the human cultural repertoire. The invention of certain technologies, starting with chipped stone tools, allowed for the increased role of meat in our diet, though whether or not that increase happened in any given time or place is difficult to ascertain. For well over a century, mostly male archaeologists have held a fascination with the often phallic looking implements of hunting found in prehistoric cultures around the world, and in doing so have communed with the mostly male (we might guess) producers and users of those implements in the past. The human practices of hunting, butchery, and the associated often elaborate technologies are embedded in a meaning-drenched symbolic system that speaks to the role of males vis-a-vis females and children. If systems of kinship, marriage, and social power are characterized by an ever present though differentially strong patriarchy, hunting and butchery, and the tools of that trade, are material manifestations of that patriarchy.

Photograph (c) 1991 by Greg Laden

Here is the description:

When The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams was published more than twenty years ago, it caused an immediate stir among writers and thinkers, feminists and animal rights activists alike. Never before had the relationship between patriarchy and meat eating been drawn so clearly, the idea that there lies a strong connection between the consumption of women and animals so plainly asserted.

But, as the 21 personal stories in this anthology show, the impact of this provocative text on women’s lives continues to this day, and it is as diverse as it is revelatory. One writer attempts to reconcile her feminist-vegan beliefs with her Muslim upbringing; a second makes the connection between animal abuse and her own self-destructive tendencies. A new mother discusses the sexual politics of breastfeeding, while another pens a letter to her young son about all she wishes for him in the future. Many others recall how the book inspired them to start careers in the music business, animal advocacy, and food. No matter whether they first read it in college or later in life, whether they are in their late teens or early forties, these writers all credit The Sexual Politics of Meat in some way with the awakening of their identities as feminists, activists, and women. Even if you haven’t read the original work, you’re sure to be moved and inspired by these tales of growing up and, perhaps more important, waking up to the truths around us.

Including a foreword from Carol J. Adams herself, this collection of fresh, bold voices defies expectations and provides rousing support for the belief that women have the power to change the world around them for this generation and those to come.

Back from South Africa and with some time on my hands, I was hell bent on keeping the promise I had made to myself to get back into shape. For most people I know, this would mean eating better and going to the gym more often. But for me, it meant eating better and going to a gym for the first time in my life.

When I did eventually join a gym, and I’m going to tell you that story in a moment, I was an adult in my 30s, and the first time I went into the men’s locker room I saw more naked men all at once than I had seen in my entire life previously. That was also the first time I smelled a real gym locker room. Talk about sensory overload.

So, I went to a gym not too far from my house, and told them I wanted to join. This led to a meeting in an office with a couple of guys: a sales rep and a trainer. I had no idea that joining a gym would involve a committee meeting, but what the heck. The two men asked me a number of questions that I did not expect. They wanted to know why I wanted to join the gym. What were my objectives. At first I didn’t really have an answer for them, so they kept talking about why one might want to join a gym, a bit about their own personal experiences, and so on. They kept mentioning Thailand. I began to think that there was a connection between the Southeast Asian Sex Industry and joining a gym. Or maybe it was just these guys. I was confused.

Now, I should mention that as a biological anthropologist I was not totally ignorant of some of the fundamentals of diet and exercise, at least at the theoretical level, and before joining this gym, in the first two days after returning from South Africa, I had purchased and devoured a couple of fitness books. (In case you are interested, the most useful book I read was the then current version of Covert Bailey’s The Ultimate Fit or Fat) The point being, I did have some idea of what I was doing there, I had just not articulated it yet. But while these guys were talking about Thailand and other stuff, I formulated the answer I should have given them when I first walked in. So I interrupted their conversation and told them.

“I know why I’m here.”

“Huh? Wha… Oh, OK, why are you here?”

“I want to be the kind of person who sits down in a public restaurant and orders three pieces of pie, and while I’m eating the pie other people in the restaurant look over and say to each other, ‘Wow. Look at that guy. How does he eat that way and stay so trim and fit?'”

They looked at each other. They laughed. They looked back at me. I was not laughing.

Then one of them said, “Let me introduce you to Lenora.”

… Continued …

I started out walking a good six feet behind her, to avoid the sand she was kicking up and the occasional thorn-lined branch that might swing back in the wake of anyone walking through the African Bush. We were traversing open country in the Kalahari, in an area sealed off from people owing to the presence of unfriendly lions and other dangers. We were doing this in part because we both felt like we had been locked up for days and needed some freedom; We needed freedom from confinement, freedom from the people we were with, freedom from patronizing park employees, freedom of movement, freedom from the sound and smell of a diesel engine in a “safari vehicle,” and a taste of the freedom, which I can’t describe, you get when you walk through the wild bush in Africa knowing that you are being slightly annoying to the unfriendly lions and have the chance of almost anything happening and no way to stop it. Over every dune was a question, in every cluster of brush and camel-thorn tree was a mystery, in every patch of long grass a cobra or a rodent or a game bird or, at least, some kind of interesting spider or something.

Free in the Kalahari.

By now I was a full 20 or 30 feet behind Lynne, way more than necessary to avoid snapping branches. I decided to catch up a little just as we were about to mount the next dune, a bit larger than the last few. But Lynne took that moment to sprint rather than walk to the top, so while I also sprinted, I did not close the gap. In fact, she was down the other side of the dune before I attained the crest, and it took me a bit of work to get within 50 feet of her.

I hadn’t known Lynne very long, but we had been traveling together now for several days, and for reasons not within the scope of the present essay, we had become fast friends. Let’s just say adversity is to a relationship what a microwave is to popcorn; When there are only two of you in the lifeboat, you either crash and burn or learn to trust each other. And the metaphors. The metaphors become thick and goopy.

I was probably thinking about that, or about the strange holes we kept passing on the lower dune slopes that we later discovered to be silk spider traps, or the bright blue sky and the pleasant afternoon winter warmth when I noticed that Lynne had been out of my sight for a long time.

Finally, a few dunes later, I saw her at the bottom sitting in the shade of a Shepard’s tree. Eventually, I arrived at her rest spot, and we relaxed a bit and talked.

This is when I learned, while trying to catch my breath and not look too exhausted, that Lynne was considering herself to be rather out of shape. She told me that this trip was killing her. She needed to spend some time at the gym, she said, and this walk was telling her that she needed to do it soon. You see, Lynne was supposed to be in training for her first Ultra Marathon, a 250 kilometer race across the Green Kalahari. She had already run a couple of 50 km races that year as part of her prep, and she had also won a regional Ultimate Frisbee tournament and that was good, but with the race coming up soon she needed to be running every day and working with weights at least a few times a week. Neither was possible while we were guiding these tourists, staying mostly in game parks where we were not allowed to wander freely in the bush, and where there were no gyms.

So now I understood why Lynne was so keen on breaking out of the Kalahari rest camp, and I was glad we had done it. But I also realized, as I sat in the shade admiring my new friend’s stamina and resolve, that I had gone from a person who was always in pretty good shape to a person who was in the process of serious deterioration.

When I was a kid, I walked all the time. My parents were forever leaving me in various forests or on the side of lonely mountain roads, and I would always make my way home eventually, on foot. When I was a teenager, I had a girlfriend who lived far away, and a couple of five or six mile walks a day was a virtually daily event for me (I did not grow up in a car culture). At that time, I would also spend a couple of weeks a year in the Adirondack mountains. I would cover between 90 and 150 miles, much of it over peaks reaching beyond 5,000 feet, often trail-less, in a few days. Later, as an archaeologist, I walked and walked and walked, but often carrying piles of equipment and digging dozens and dozens of holes per day, on survey. Eventually, I went off to the Congo for fieldwork. I was famous among the pygmies for my walking there. I would routinely walk 10 miles through the forest one way with an empty pack, then 10 miles the other way with 110 pounds of food, or along the “road” either 10 or 20 miles, depending, to and from market.

I was always the one who was not tired, no matter how far we went or how much I carried.

Then it came time to write my thesis and do some other stuff, so I spent a few years mostly at a desk job and slowly slowly, month after month, my legendary walking muscles turned into something other than muscle, and though I had no more visible body fat than I had ever had I’m sure my muscle had all gone south. And by south, I don’t mean south.

And I knew this because as I sat under the Shepard’s tree, I realized that for the first time in my life, ever, I had been out-walked by another human being. Never mind that she was a semi-professional athlete marathon runner training for an ultra (which, by the way, she would indeed run, and in fact win now and then even beating the men, several times over the coming years).

So I resolved.

I resolved that on my return to the states, I would get my self in shape. And I did. I got myself very much in shape, and the next time I returned to South Africa, Lynne did not out walk me. And the next time after that, people at the gyms across South Africa found themselves in awe of my physical prowess as I traveled from place to place being … really really fit.

How did I do it? Well, I found Lenora, Inflicter of Pain. And I let her have her way with me. I’ll tell you about Lenora in the next installment.

… Continued …