Grumpy Vegan

Reading yesterday’s New York Times the Grumpy Vegan came across two articles that each made seemingly unrelated points about animal rights.

The first, “Today’s Harvest of Shame” written by a farmer and former president of the American Farm Bureau, discussed the U.S. government’s practice of subsidizing farmers. The Grumpy Vegan has long thought that meat and dairy products are maintained at artificially low retail prices because of government subsidies. The animal rights movement would do well to focus on this issue and ask that society should know what the real cost is of the 99 cent burger.

Today, it’s obvious that we need to transform our public support for farmers. Many of our current subsidies inhibit trade because of their link to commodity prices. By promising to cover losses, the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.

The second article, “U.S. Cancer Death Rates Are Found to Be Falling”, declared, “Death rates from cancer have been dropping by an average of 2.1 percent a year recently in the United States, a near doubling of decreases that began in 1993, researchers are reporting.”

Surely good news. And thanks to what? Animal research? Not a mention of it.

Much of the progress comes not from miracle cures, but from more mundane improvements in prevention, early detection and treatment of some of the leading causes of cancer death — lung, colorectal, breast and prostate tumors. Years of nagging and pleading by health officials are finally beginning to pay off, experts say, in smoking cessation and increased use of mammograms, colonoscopies and other screening tests for colorectal and prostate cancer.