When he becomes King he won’t be able to say anything … thats the way it works with our Monarchy.
So he is making hay while he can, quite literally it seems.
McDonalds is pre-processed turd in a bun for its healthy qualities.
Castigating Charlie for criticizing Macci D is a non-starter.
Funny that, Doctors say we shouldn’t smoke and they want it public policy.
Who elected those Twits to dictate mandatory public policy?
I don’t know what this means. McDonald’s (and the non-organic agribusiness infrastructure on which it relies) provides what as far as I can tell is pretty clean, non-spoiled, nutritive food to millions of people – something that societies through history often failed to do, with tragic consequences. The fact that some people overindulge (in Mickey Ds or any other source of calories) is an indictment of them, not of McD.‘s. Since fast food rose to prominence, life spans have continued to increase. And what do you think today’s top athletes – who are the strongest, fastest, and tallest in history – were raised on? Overwhelmingly, since most of them hail from middle class to lower middle class to po’ backgrounds, I can just about guarantee you that McDonald’s figured more heavily in the formation of LeBron James or Beckham or Daunte Culpepper than did the Prince of Wales’s stone-ground biscuits. And they all strike me as pretty healthy.
(a) Doctors have degrees in doctoring. Charles is a hobbyist who, I doubt, has any formal training in agronomy or the economics of feeding the world.
(b) There’s no significant benefit from smoking, beyond the hedonic. My suggestion or argument here is that big bad non-organic farming has saved a lot of lives and made an adequate (more than adequate, but again, not the fault of the technology) supply of food available even to the very poor – no small achievement, and so I suggest that modern agribusiness should not readily be demonized when it has had tangible benefits (even if it also has tangible costs).
(c) I don’t, in fact, want doctors telling me that I can’t choose to smoke, so I think I’m being consistent.
Sorry bud, you left reality there for a moment.
There was me thinking parents feed children from a kitchen, I had no idea that we were supposed to ‘eat out’ after breastfeeding.
Do you honestly believe your above comments are correct.
You sound as though you think “non-organic farming” or “agribusiness” is some kind of sentient entity whose feelings we might hurt if we don’t give it enough appreciation. It isn’t; it’s an industrial process, and it doesn’t care what we say about it. In any case, I don’t think it’s necessarily “demonizing” something to point out problems with it, and to advocate alternatives that avoid those problems.
Sure, the alternatives may have problems of their own, and we need to be aware of that. And we need to avoid exaggerating the benefits of the alternatives into hyperbolic claims that they can’t live up to.
But nowhere have you provided evidence that Prince Charles really is “demonizing” conventional agriculture, or failing to realize that it produced a lot of food for poor people in the late 20th century, or demanding that it be completely eliminated and replaced with organic farming worldwide. You cannot simply adduce Charles’ alleged twittitude as proof, even “implicit” proof, that he’s saying things that you can’t show he’s actually explicitly said. I agree with John Mace that you’ve got a bit of a strawman argument here.
I absolutely do. I don’t know anything about whether we are or are not “supposed to ‘eat out’” – I just know that lots of people do, and that among them are lots of inner-city kids, including future star athletes, whose working single moms may not have time to cook but can afford to feed them McD.'s and Doritos, and who manage to be well-nourished and strong notwithstanding. And yes, the agregate lifetime (and even current) McDonald’s consumption of the super-human, super-fit athletes of the NBA or NFL would, I am certain, astonish all of us.
Fuel is fuel.
This sounds pretty harsh (“castigated” doesn’t sound too different than “demonize” to me) toward modern agribusiness:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19960920/ai_n14064853
Do you have actual evidence that she is positing this dichotomy?
When being interviewed about liberal politicians, I could say “Al Gore is, in private, really one of the most forward-thinking, radical humanitarians I have ever talked to”, and turn around and say “And Rudy Guiliani, though considered by a conservative, is an even more forward-thinking, radical humanitarian than Gore”, without being inconsistent.
While it’s quite possible that she thinks Patricia Woertz is a backward thinking egoist, her statement certainly doesn’t require that to be the case. Nor does it preclude her from thinking that Woertz is also either forward-thinking and/or a humanitarian.
Prince Charles lives in the UK - so do I.
We don’t have any shortage of agricultural land, we actually bribe farmers not to use land - it is called ‘set aside’
Organic farming simply means not using certain pesticides and fertilizers, it has nothing to do with mass production. Personally I would prefer my beef free from growth hormones and prophylactic antibiotics. I’m also not that keen on having my fruit sprayed with chemicals that might, or might not, have long term effects.
Prince Charles also has views on architecture, while I quite like The Gherkin, I must confess a lot of ‘modern’ architecture (say 1950s on) is pretty ugly.
His main problem is his presentation, his accent is pretty strangulated and he has a habit of being photographed wearing silly clothes, but his ideas on a number of things are not particularly whacky and he does put his money where his mouth is. From what I can tell his lands are well managed, his products are good and I far prefer Poundbury to a bunch of pre-fabricated buildings built using maximum density and the cheapest materials.
I suppose I’m biased, my parents got into organic gardening in the early 1960s, at the time people thought they were eccentric. It is little more than using decent manure, growing nitrogen fixing crops as fertilizer and avoiding pesticides. I think that one of the reasons my parents got interested was because at the time my father worked for a major chemical company.
Could you do us a favour, and actually provide an instance of Charles saying or doing something that backs up your assertions that he thinks non-organic farmin is “inconsistent with “responsible stewardship of the land.”” Or actually, just give me any idea what it is that he’s done that you find so reprehensible?
Because really, from your cite, op and follow up postings, I’m struggling to get any substance. It seems to me a massive amount of inference and projection.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19960920/ai_n14064853
BSE is God’s vengeance on us for industrialized farming.
You seem to have a terrible habit of posting a link, then not quoting a specific statement.
For example, this seems pretty accurate actually:
“Feeding cattle with protein derived from cattle or other farm animals, which almost certainly caused the BSE outbreak, was “totally inappropriate . . . perhaps BSE will come to be seen as one example . . . of how nature hits back when we violate her laws””
He does not say anything about it being God’s revenge. He does raise the following question:
"“Apart from certain medical applications, what actual right do we have to experiment, Frankenstein-like, with the very stuff of life?”
Which seems like a fair question to raise.
So could you please actually tell me just what it is that he’s said that you object to. And please, not just a link, leaving the reader to have to guess which part of a whole article it is that you find disagreeable.
Is that supposed to be a synopsis for what he actually said ?
*Feeding cattle with protein derived from cattle or other farm animals, which almost certainly caused the BSE outbreak, was “totally inappropriate . . . perhaps BSE will come to be seen as one example . . . of how nature hits back when we violate her laws”. *
What he says is fairly complex, and also fairly simple.
We in the UK do not need mass food production, we can feed ourselves with a few interesting imports for variety - we certainly don’t need patented GM stuff that is primarily developed for resistence to patented weed killers.
While I have no objection to experimenting on rats, beagles or whatever, I would be seriously interested in destroying the headquarters of Monsanto, for a start it would be fun - but I’ve also got a nasty itch in the back of my brain that those b/stards might be shortsighted idiots after a cheap buck.
Curious, I detest those animal liberationists, but I find I have more in common with them than people selling crap because we can spray crap on it.
Quite interesting that I feel so strongly about it.
Other than “Charles himself does not make wise eating choices,” what does this prove?
I have spent a good amount of time in India and it’s my observation that healthy, nutritious, inexpensive foods are readily available from street stalls and small vendors. Proliferation of American-style fast food would result in a marked decline in the (1) nutritional value, (2) affordability, (3) variety, and (4) just plain tasty goodness of the types of foods commonly and easily available on the street.
It would also result in damage to those who depend on the supply chains for such vendors. McDonald’s is known for demanding uniformity from its suppliers and as a result has engineered massive changes in agricultural and food industry practices resulting primarily in homogenization and a steep drop in diversity of foods available in the market. Small producers and vendors, unable to compete, go out of business in favor of conglomerates.
Banning McDonald’s, while it might be a debatable policy, is not a ridiculous notion, out of hand.