The maintenance of leather isn’t terribly different from the maintenance of healthy human skin, and usually involves cleaning it – if appropriate – and applying an emollient to help keep it moist and supple. (Note: these processes can sometimes alter the apparent colour or finish of the leather, and if you are concerned about this, please seek specialist advice from someone who works with leather for a living.) The emollient may need to be a little more penetrating and harder-wearing than a moisturiser designed for living skin, depending upon the kind of leather and how it has been tanned and finished, but it serves a similar purpose.

Vegetarian soaps are readily available, including some sold as “oil soap” especially for leather. What about emollients, though?

Two of the most popular emollients for maintaining leather are mink oil and neatsfoot oil, but both are made from the remains of dead animals. Lanolin, is also popular, but although lanolin is usually harvested non-lethally (since it comes from wool), it does have the disadvantage of being allergenic in some cases.

Fortunately, there are plant-based alternatives readily available. Some folks advocate the use of olive oil or glycerin. I’ve recently started using jojoba oil for this – which has no contra-indications – since I had some to hand and since jojoba oil, being a wax, struck me as being less likely to become rancid. The only catch is that you need to work it in gently with your thumbs: your body temperature, and the small amount of friction, warms and thins the oil, allowing it to penetrate better into the grain of the leather. So far, so good: it has rejuvenated an elaborately tanned leather belt that was given to me as a gift, and I shall be trying it on other items in future!

If anyone reading this has recommendations to make about vegetarian leather maintenance techniques, please share them in the comments.

I would love to persuade you to eat more vegetables. And thereby to eat less meat – and maybe a bit less fish too. Why? To summarise, we need to eat more vegetables and less flesh because vegetables are the foods that do us the most good and our planet the least harm. … We eat too much meat in the west – too much for our own health and far too much for the welfare of the many millions of animals we raise for food.

You can read the rest of his account here.

I essentially concluded that I had played Russian roulette, Clinton said, Because even though I had changed my diet some and cut down on the caloric total of my ingestion and cut back on much of the cholesterol in the food I was eating, I still — without any scientific basis to support what I did — was taking in a lot of extra cholesterol without knowing if my body would produce enough of the enzyme to support it, and clearly it didn’t or I wouldn’t have had that blockage. So that’s when I made a decision to really change.

The former president now says he consumes no meat, no dairy, no eggs, almost no oil.

I like the vegetables, the fruits, the beans, the stuff I eat now, Clinton told [Dr. Sanjay] Gupta.

The above excerpt is from this article at CNN.

(Source: The Register.)

Anecdotally, vegans and even vegetarians have a reputation for being anaemic and physically weak, and it may indeed be easier to become anaemic from iron deficiency on a poor quality vegetarian or vegan diet than on a poor quality diet featuring meat. However, no poor quality diet is good for health – poor quality meat-based diets may lead to other problems – so let’s restrict our focus to those who are more careful about what they eat. Can a vegan who eats well and keeps fit gain or maintain respectable functional strength for sports or health?

The answer, emphatically, is yes. What’s the evidence? Vegan athletes.

I recently discovered that Jon Hinds, who operates Monkey Bar Gymnasium – a gym whose website I’ve been using for exercise tips – is vegan. Moreover, he has made veganism a core component of Monkey Bar Gymnasium’s approach to health and fitness.

Jon’s no slouch, and neither is his vegan bodybuilder friend Mike Mahler. Here’s a video of them performing 56kg kettlebell snatches; Mike goes first (NSFW):

Read a little more about Mike Mahler and you’ll soon learn about one of his protégés: champion mixed martial arts fighter Mac Danzig, who is also vegan, and whose diet hasn’t prevented him beating a string of fearsome opponents in the ring.

But is that it? These three white men who move in the same circles? Of course not. There are notable vegan athletes of every shade and gender. Here are a couple of handy lists: at Wikipedia and at Best Vegan Guide.

So, if you’re considering a vegan diet, but you’re afraid it will leave you weak and puny, worry not. Just be sure to maintain a good intake of essential nutrients, and you may find, as Jon Hinds did, that you actually improve your performance! (Skip to 6:10 in the following video to see him discuss this.)

I no longer believe that the only ethical response is to [completely] stop eating meat. (Source)

I didn’t think I’d ever see it happen, but George Monbiot is now advocating a low meat diet and agricultural economy in preference to a vegan or vegetarian one, which means he and Anthony Bourdain have moved into roughly the same territory.

Monbiot’s shift is based on the conclusions presented in Simon Fairlie’s new book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance. It is important to note that neither Fairlie nor Monbiot nor Bourdain appear to condone the current Western model of industrial meat farming. Indeed, Fairlie calls the feedlot beef industry one of the biggest ecological cock-ups in modern history, so his book isn’t an excuse to go and splurge on cheap steak at the supermarket. Not by a long way.

So what can you, dear reader, do to accommodate this new consensus into your shopping habits? Boiled down to a couple of sentences, here’s our take. If you have available to you a source of livestock products that are locally raised on an appropriate diet, enjoy those products in moderation. If not, continue to keep your consumption of animal products minimal for as long as it takes to change the status quo.

But wait, that’s not the whole story. Remember our strapline: Better for you, for livestock, and for the planet. There are reasons other than the efficiency of our planet’s agricultural economy in favour of avoiding meat. First among these is animal welfare. Fairlie’s model may be efficient, but it retains the possibility of animal cruelty, especially at the slaughterhouse. A second reason is personal health: present evidence suggests a well-balanced vegetarian or vegan diet could be better for people than one containing meat, particularly red meat.

It seems there’s still plenty of room for more detailed research into balancing these three pillars of a healthy approach to farming and eating!

I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. … I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat. (Source)

Could this be true? Has the arch carnivore of the Western media – the man who notoriously ate the still-beating heart of a cobra on television – finally turned the corner?

Let’s be clear about one thing: Bourdain’s concern isn’t to alleviate the suffering of any species apart from human beings. In his limited personal quest to raise the quality of human life, he does, however, care about the food we eat, and this raises a valuable point: even for a person with such narrow concerns, it makes sense to pursue a diet in which animal flesh is eaten only on the condition that its quality is high. And if that means eating less animal flesh, this is a price he’s prepared to pay.

One of the purposes of Lowmeat.org is to publicise common ground. The strapline here is, For you, for livestock, for the planet. The great thing about a low meat diet is that even if you only pursue it for the sake of one member of that triumvirate, the evidence suggests you’ll benefit the others as well. That, at the risk of sounding corny, is a win-win situation! So thank you, Anthony, for caring about our diets – and for writing about them – whatever you may think about the rest.

But what can you cook to replace some or all of the turkey, goose, pigs in blankets, or other traditional festive dishes you might usually eat? Well, you could spend a while searching your cookbooks and the Web for suggestions – and doubtless you’d find some good ones – or you could give yourself a head start by jumping straight to the recipes linked from this article by Adharanand Finn.

There, moderation isn’t so difficult after all. Happy holidays, folks!

Million Dead, Holloway Prison Blues

For the ethical consumer, shoes pose a problem. If one wants to buy shoes not made mostly of synthetics, one has two broad options: canvas shoes or leather ones. Canvas shoes are fine for some circumstances, but not for all.

The trouble with leather is that much of it comes from Indian cows that are treated rather badly (I know what you’re thinking: aren’t cows sacred in India? Well, not entirely…) and is then tanned in ways that create substantial water pollution. If you want to buy shoes made with leather from organically-reared cattle, tanned in a sustainable fashion, you’re out of luck.

That may be about to change in 2010. Organic leather company Natureally is working with manufacturers who are hoping to bring organic leather shoes to market. With any luck, this will open the door for more companies to start doing the same.

As for other items of clothing – belts, bags, jackets, hats and so on – it’s probably better to choose items made of sustainable non-leather materials like hemp, organically grown cotton, or wool.

UPDATE: there’s another good option: going barefoot whenever it’s safe to do so.

The red meat industry is an intense emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs), so reducing your red meat consumption is a great first step towards reducing your carbon footprint.

Reducing consumption of animal products generally has another advantage: it is more efficient. Because arable farming produces more calories per acre than meat or dairy farming, it means less land is needed to feed a given population. This reduces the risk of food shortages and could even allow surplus land to be reforested as carbon sinks, as explained in this video.

To read even more about the environmental benefits of low meat diets, have a look at this New Scientist article.