The agricultural sector and environmental groups eat each other tofu and soybeans to break out the smell of gunpowder and smoke.

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"soybeans shipped from as far away as South America are processed into soybean salad oil and made into tofu eaten by vegetarians, and the rest is turned into animal feed." At this point, I felt that there was something wrong with my reading level in Dutch and did not understand this sentence. This is an article written by the chairman of the agricultural union in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, criticizing vegetarian groups for advocating "40 days without meat".

The eternal killer of the soybean environment from across the ocean?

EVA, located in Ghent, Belgium, continues and gives a new meaning to the 40-day fast after the Christian Carnival, and has received responses from many civic groups and agencies. The president of the trade union, as a dairy farmer, believes that this group of hippie noble people are obsessed, beating themselves in the mouth, thinking that they are superior in style, not eating pork and beef produced locally in Belgium, but only those soybeans that have come from afar. He said bluntly that diesel freighters seriously pollute the environment and bring soybeans all the way, and soybeans grow on farmland opened up by deforestation of rainforest. fortunately, Belgian animal husbandry reuses soybean residues left behind from the production of tofu. Belgium's high-quality meat is the real maintenance of the sustainable environment.

Delicious steak produced locally depends on imported feed

After a few days, my colleague herbal tea and vegetarian groups joined hands to continuously respond to the views of the chairman of agriculture, and then I believed that there was nothing wrong with my reading ability in Dutch! First, they explain that tofu is not made from salad oil; second, 93% of soybeans from deforestation and diesel container ships are used as animal feed. In a word, more than 50% of the animal feed in Belgium's animal husbandry and meat farming industry depends on imports. Therefore, the proud "local" steak on the chairman's plate is not produced "locally". If there is no high proportion of imported feed, there is no way to provide meat for the public to eat.

If Belgian people eat less beef, pork, chicken, etc., or even no meat every day, they will be able to eat locally raised animals from feed to growth and from the inside to the outside.

Herbal tea also provides me with a message that I can rest assured that soybeans from South America are genetically modified, and the European Union forbids the food industry to use genetically modified soybeans, so people buy raw materials from continental Europe. For example, non-genetically modified soybeans grown in France, Italy, Ukraine and Serbia.

Taiwan and Belgium eat more meat than Taiwanese.

Herbal tea says that if Belgians eat less beef, pork, chicken and so on every day, or even no meat, they will be able to eat locally raised animals from feed to growth and from the inside to the outside.

The Belgian European diet, with steak, pork chops, and fish chops as the main meals, has long been my subjective belief that the total weight of meat intake in the way Westerners eat steak must be greater than Taiwan's usual way of cooking minced meat and shredded meat. But I was wrong!

According to upstream and downstream news, Taiwanese people eat 213.86 grams of meat a day, and dietitians recommend 70 grams. The average Belgian eats 111 grams of meat a day, while dietitians recommend 100 grams. If the two survey methods are the same, it may prove that my subjective bias is correct (laughter). But in any case, the modern diet is indeed easy to eat too much meat, thus affecting the industrialization of animal breeding and expanding meat processing, creating pollution problems and resource allocation problems that we are easy to ignore.

Looking through the catalogs of supermarkets in Taiwan, or super-ramming barbecue restaurants, and competing to provide beef and pork imported from the United States, Australia, Japan, and Spain, we can see that Taiwan's meat-loving consumers prefer imported products, unlike European meat eaters who are proud of home-made goods; perhaps Taiwanese consumers are eager to avoid the food safety problems created by bad businessmen and think less about the lasting justice of the food production chain.

The first official Ministry of Agriculture in French-speaking Belgium was directly linked to vegetarian groups.

Promote the vegetarian community V é g é tek for the first time in French-speaking Walloon and Brussels, while teaming up with EVA in the Dutch-speaking area to promote "Meatless 40 days". The official agricultural department quickly set up a "I am a farmer" website to post publicity in local food supermarkets to publicize the benefits of eating on the ground, and by the way discredit the vegetarian movement that does not eat human smoke and fire, and specialize in eating imported vegetarian fruits and vegetables, calling on the public not to believe it easily. The two sides come and go without showing weakness to each other.

French vegetarian groups are smart in cyber warfare, taking advantage of the one-word difference in the name of the website of the Walloon government to promote meat products, and set up a new website to explain that consumer meat is harmful to the earth's environmental resources. The agriculture minister angrily threatened to sue vegetarian groups for plagiarizing domain names.

What if the milk foam with a strong latte is replaced with soy milk?

In contrast to the Dutch-speaking area where vegetarians have grown up steadily and have regular supporters, vegetarian groups in Ghent, the city where the vegetarian movement was born, used car advertisements to encourage people to promote "no milk" and drink plant milk products instead. Such as soybean milk, almond milk, oatmeal milk.

The dairy farmer department in the Dutch-speaking region was furious, pointing out that the vegetarians were obsessed. However, vegetarians, as dietitians or biologists, analyze the environmental pollution problems caused by human consumption of milk, and the calves are born and forced to be separated from the cows, and the heifer will grow up to become a cow, while the calf will enter the slaughtered meat market; cheese farming in order to increase milk production, raising cows for super large cows and other agricultural industrialization problems.

In other words, if there is no milk foam in the Xiangnong latte, would you like it to be soaked by grandma soy beans? I have done a variety of vegetable protein milk foam experiments, or soybean milk can make a thick milk foam, but of course the taste is different from milk.

The traditional agricultural sector expanded the war to the European Court of Justice, which ruled that plant proteins composed of soy milk, oat milk, soy yoghurt, soy cheese, etc., should not use the words milk, yoghurt, cheese, butter as product names, so as not to mislead consumers.

Open the refrigerator to find the hidden version of soybeans.

European people romantically imagine the juicy and tender steak, roast chicken and so on, which come from nearby pastures and can be called local agricultural products. According to the WWF survey, each European person eats 61 kilograms of soybeans each year. Many people can't believe that if they don't drink soy milk, eat tofu or buy soybeans at all, how can they eat more than 60 kilograms of soybeans?!

Because European animal food relies on imported soybeans to make feed, for example, the production of 100 grams of chicken breast requires an incredible 109 grams of soybean feed!

Our ancient dietary tradition in the East, fuelled by the concept of sustainable diet in the West, has become a debate between environmental groups and the agricultural sector, the descendants of soybeans with tofu blood in their blood, and it is difficult to think of the issue of human sustainability on the other side of the world.

Note: the picture is the Gilles costume of the La Louvi è re Carnival in Belgium. Based on Pixabay.

"40 days without Meat" was held for the first time in 2011 and expanded to 100000 Belgian participants for the seventh time in 2017. Citing the daily meat intake survey of European people in Germany, the organizers pointed out that Belgian people have reduced their meat consumption much faster than other European countries in recent years, so they believe that they have established a sense of connection between people's meat consumption and the environment and climate, and have achieved the goal of eating less meat to ensure social sustainability, so they decided to draw a rest.

I finished writing this article a year ago, but I didn't publish it. Even though time flies and the meat-free fasting campaign is suspended, the differences between the agricultural sector and those who pursue environmental sustainability remain the same for Europeans to eat hidden soybeans every day.

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