This is one of the most disturbing radio programs that I have ever heard, made all the more shocking because it aired this week on the most progressive of all media, Pacifica’s San Francisco Bay Area radio station, KPFA in Berkeley, which so often provides invaluable social justice programming – except for a rather monumental gap.
If I don’t blow it here, that same station will be airing my brief commentaries on vegan animal liberation issues Wednesdays in the 8am hour at the invitation of the interim program’s host, but the station needs regular extensive coverage of issues that its inherent speciesism causes it to overlook, depriving its audience of critical information consistent with the Pacifica mission statement concerning peace, human health, environmental sustainability, and justice for all – which should, but doesn’t, include other species, therefore ignoring the bloodiest massacre of all time, and the most massive torture, enslavement, and imprisonment of the harmless innocent ever. Speciesism remains the only acceptable oppression in progressive media. It must change.
A good place to start would be to replace this horrendous pseudo-health pseudo-morality program “Your Own Health and Fitness” with Layna (“I am a carnivore for health reasons”) Berman, Tuesdays at 1pm. Here is this alarming show:
A program that in 2013 endorses consumption of decomposing animal cadavers and animal secretions for its health benefits literally endangers the public. Adding insult to injury, it is inexcusable that KPFA would allow the offering of “American Meat”, a how-to film for “raising” animals to exploit and eat, as a premium gift for donors of $100 to the radio station. This equals the previous speciesist outrage of KPFA (and KPFK) offering the factually-challenged anti-vegan book “Vegetarian Myth” in pledge drives past.
How can a Pacifica radio “health program” host be so unaware of the voluminous mountain of studies that irrefutably connects the consumption of “meat”, dairy, fish, and eggs to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, and on and on…
How can this “health host” be unaware of the book “The China Study”, detailing the largest study of diet and health ever, with the conclusions of the author, T. Colin Campbell, world-renowned nutrition expert from MIT and Cornell University, that we should all go vegan and that the dairy protein is the carcinogen to which Americans are most exposed. Professor Campbell has blamed animal protein – in small amounts – for 90% or more of all fatal degenerative disease in this country, and recommends going vegan for both prevention and treatment. How can “health guru” Berman be unaware of the extraordinary results achieved by Caldwell Esselstyn, M.D., (credited for saving Bill Clinton’s life) of the renowned Cleveland Clinic, author of “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease”, who has demonstrated such reversals consistently, and who makes the dramatic research-based claim that heart disease is preventable through a vegan diet, and nobody has to suffer it. How can “health expert” Berman be unaware of the dramatic results in addressing diabetes achieved by John McDougall, M.D., for over 30 years right here in the Bay Area. He is someone Ms. Berman may want to consult for the health condition she is treating with “meat”.
Perhaps we should forgive her ignorance, but KPFA “health” guru Layna Berman seems to want to brag about it, as she says …”lots of people are talking about plant-based diets…I’m ONE OF VERY FEW people who talks about CAUTION with doing only plant-based proteins because of the fact (?) that they are, the proteins can be, can interfere with your nutrient, your mineral balance, there are some things that plants produce to keep them from being eaten to extinction…and meat I believe can be raised in an ethical way…”
HUH? WHAT? DUH? Ms. Berman should ask herself why she is “one of very few” who caution about plant-based diets and plant-based protein. Perhaps instead of watching films about “raising” animals for food, she could spend a few moments examining studies or at least listening to two episodes of GO VEGAN RADIO WITH BOB LINDEN with interviews with T. Colin Campbell from years ago:
Okay, so according to Ms. Berman, beware – your broccoli is conspiring to poison you because it fears extinction. (Maybe that’s why everyone gets heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc., – the animals fear being eaten to extinction too?) If only Ms. Berman were to know that it is our diet of dead animals that threatens US with extinction by way of environmental devastation, she might not make absurd claims about the “sustainable” raising of animals. But when it comes to animals, Ms. Berman is a theatre of the absurd. After all the gobbledygook about plant protein, nutrition, minerals, etc., it’s off to left field for the absurd comment: “and meat I believe can be raised in an ethical way”…
Through the human-supremacist eyes of a flesh-eating, progressive, moralistic, speciesist – rape, slavery, mutilation, torture, imprisonment, kidnapping, stabbing, dismemberment, decapitation, and mass murder of the innocent can be “ethical” – as long as you gobble the remains.
During her radio program, Ms. Berman goes to a clip from the “American Meat” film where an antiseptic emotionless narrator outlines some of the acceptable mechanisms of the slavery that Berman calls “lovely” and that she says produce “better tasting meat”, including cows being moved to the barn where they “generate” milk. Please know Ms. Berman that the “process of generating” milk starts with rape (on what the dairy industry calls a “rape rack”) as impregnation is necessary to “generate” a baby who will be kidnapped from his wailing mother at birth to “generate” revenue when his weeks-old body becomes some “humane” veal chops, and you can drink the milk intended for him, stolen from his mother who herself will become “humane” hamburger after she can no longer produce the pus-filled mammary secretions that satisfy the consumer’s tumor-growing taste-bud pleasure. Are you a baby cow, Ms. Berman? Shouldn’t humans drink their mothers’ milk, and only in infancy? And why should someone be so exploited merely because she is female? Is there sexism in your speciesism? Because human milk is more natural for humans, would it be okay to move women into the barn in the winter, rape them, and “generate” milk and throwaway babies? It’s not really that much of a stretch to go from other species concentration camp products to human species concentration camp products, as history shows that to already have happened. I am reminded of the Theodor Adorno quote: “Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks – ‘they’re only animals’.”
Of “American Meat”, Ms. Berman says: “I don’t recommend this film for someone who is extremely squeamish…there are a few scenes in here that I had to look away
and that’s because I AM A VERY RELUCTANT CARNIVORE… I AM A CARNIVORE FOR HEALTH REASONS, ironically…Everybody gets to make their own choices…”
Because THE ANIMALS do not get to make their own choices, I believe that Ms. Berman SHOULD watch those squeamish scenes over and over, because she is not yet SUFFICIENTLY reluctant, and because she should not hide from the misery that she causes. Her “doctor’s note” does not cure her guilt, and she knows what she is doing is wrong, but cannot face it. She pays a hit man and turns away. If she were to watch, she may see herself reflected in the eyes of the doomed animals, and she may wonder what must they be thinking of her, and why a caring progressive person would be complicit in their murder. “Meat” is murder, you know – it’s even in a song.
And while all credible major health studies condemn consumption of meat, dairy, fish, and eggs and implicate them in countless diseases, we are sorry to report that Ms.Berman has contracted the only ailment cured by a hard-boiled chicken egg or some sort of chopped corpse. I’m very serious, Ms. Berman, and not to make light of it, please tell us of your malady and let us help you heal without endangering your health. You seem terribly confused. First, you think you are a baby cow. Now you think you are a “carnivore”. Ms. Berman, a simple examination of your fangs, claws, jaw, intestinal tract, and acids reveals you to be an herbivore, so please also stop confusing the KPFA audience.
Your feigned concern for animals is also confusing when you say “it’s almost biblical that human beings have been given the right to lord over
other creatures, and I have never felt that way…for me the animals, the innocents are the most important.” AND THEN YOU EAT THEM, Lord Berman of the hypocritical statement! And face it – you eat them for the pleasure, you eat them for the taste, and you eat them because you are addicted. You assuage your guilt by pretending that there can be “humane” meat, “sustainable” meat, and you believe your own fictitious rationalizations and ignore that all animal agriculture threatens the environment and squanders resources (51% of greenhouse gas emissions, 8,500 gallons of water per pound of cow flesh “beef”, for examples), but, well, uh, it tastes good so you compromise the environment and say…”so the big argument has been for a long time that raising ‘meat’ destroys the environment and so I wanted to, as I am want to do, bring you the other side of that argument…” (NO MATTER HOW FALLACIOUS AND RIDICULOUS?)
Your justification for condemning the innocent to life on death row and the death penalty for committing no crime other than being born and tasting good, is that the slave drivers and concentration camp wardens, and their PR firm on a larger scale, the Humane $ociety of the United $tate$, can declare that the animal prisoners are “happy”, the “meat” is “happy”, and we can giggle about “hog heaven” jokes as the innocents are slashed to bloody bits at will, Jack the Ripper style, as you say: …”happy animals…I mean, you know we all,I hate to be crude… we all die…these animals have really good lives…animals in wild environments sometimes live much less time than some of these domesticated farm animals…” That should be reassuring to the animals. We are progressives, therefore we are the good oppressors, and we only oppress those who taste good.
I knew we were in for a troubling hour when Ms. Berman opened the show, teary eyed because when humans eat, there has to be death, and she went into mourning about death associated with fruits and nuts (“beautiful living things that have been designed to survive” boo hoo) – and you could see it coming – so since someone has to die anyway, like an apple or a cashew – cows, pigs, and chickens may as well die too.
Maybe the time has come for “Your Own Health and Fitness” to die on the vine, disappear from the KPFA schedule, and make way for something relevant. Replacing it with KPFA’s first vegan animal liberation programming in over 60 years would be a true community service.
Ms. Berman announced that she is ready to retire to land she has bought so that she can “raise” her own eggs, although they are more likely a chicken’s eggs, which come associated with the inherent cruelty of all animal products, as well as greater incidence of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Hopefully in retirement, our KPFA “health expert” can read more about health, even as she’s munching on her medicinal cheese omelet, maybe discovering the Harvard University Physicians Health Study of over 21,000 people over 20 years that shows that the more eggs you eat, the sooner you die. One egg per day caused 23% more overall deaths, and diabetics who ate one egg per day suffered 50% more deaths than those eating the fewest eggs.
Egg-eating “health expert” Layna Berman, we wish you the best and the best of health in your retirement, and would sincerely wish to help you overcome your addiction to flesh and blood, embryos, and trans-species nipple drippings, and to offer you counseling for overcoming fear of fruit and vegetable conspiratorial behavior.
Misleading health information and speciesist rationalization of violence and killing really have no place on KPFA or any Pacifica radio station whose time is so valuable and really needs to be dedicated to good.
KPFA is located at:
1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way
Berkeley, California 94704
Station Phone: 510-848-6767
1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way
Berkeley, California 94704
Station Phone: 510-848-6767
Peace,
Bob Linden
www.GoVeganRadio.com
