In its issue No. 60 of February 2001, the journal
Sciences Frontières ( http://www.sciencefrontieres.com)
8 bis rue du Chemin de Fer, 94110 Arcueil
published a quite astonishing text,
which is an extract from Health and Illness, by Rudolf Steiner, lecture
of 13 January 1923 - Editions anthroposophiques
Romandes.
| .. Well, gentlemen, you can cook a cabbage for as long as you like,...Well, gentlemen, you can cook a cabbage for as long as you like, you will not get meat out of it. You will not manage to get meat out of it by putting it in your pan or your saucepan, any more than it is possible to transform into meat a cake that one is preparing. There is no technique that allows that. But, in short, what one cannot do technically is done in the body of the animal. But the forces necessary for this operation must first be found in the body of the animal. Among all the technical forces at our disposal, there are none that allow us to transform plants into meat. We do not have them. Our body, as well as the body of the animal, therefore contains forces capable of transforming plant substances, plant matter, into flesh matter... .. Imagine that the ox took it into its head to say to itself: .. " I have had enough of walking about and doing nothing but pulling up these grasses. An animal could do it for me. I am going to go and eat that animal! ". Let us see: the ox would start eating meat! Yet it is capable of producing flesh itself! It has forces allowing it to do so. What would therefore happen if, instead of plants, the ox started eating meat? All the forces that could produce flesh in it would therefore find themselves idle. .. Take any factory supposed to produce some thing or other, and suppose that you produce nothing but that you set the whole factory running. Imagine a little the waste of force there could be. A considerable force would therefore be wasted. Now, gentlemen, the force that is wasted in the body of the animal cannot dissipate like that. The ox overflows with this force, it does something else in it than transform plant matter. This force remains, it is indeed there, it acts differently in it. And what it does produces all sorts of waste. Instead of flesh, it is harmful substances that are manufactured. The ox would therefore fill itself with all the possible harmful matters if it suddenly started to be carnivorous. It would fill itself in particular with uric acid and urate. .. Now urate, as for it, has particular habits. The particular habits of urate is to have a weakness for the nervous system and the brain. If the ox ate meat directly, there would result from it a secretion of urate in enormous quantity, the urate would go to the brain and the ox would go mad (...). If we could carry out the experiment of feeding a whole herd of oxen by giving them doves, we would obtain a herd of completely mad oxen.... |
....We have a couple of old
friends who lost a son aged about thirty.
The latter died a few years ago, rather quickly, in a little
more than a year, of an illness qualified as "rare" by the faculty
and described as a Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. This young man, divorced
and father of a child, consumed a lot of meat. With hindsight,
the symptoms described by his family: loss of balance,
then coma, closely resemble those of mad
cow disease. I think that a number of cases of death are not
brought to the public's knowledge. The reason is simple: the
parents, the relatives, are in general crushed
by grief and the first reaction when an inquiry
is opened is to think "autopsy". Now who would wish
to see their own child cut up after his unfortunate body
has been exhumed? I admit to having myself been
confronted with a similar problem more than ten
years ago. My son died in a diving accident, in
Marseille, following an intensive practice of free diving at
great depth. Now none of the accounts that I had gathered
from the witnesses of the drama matched up. He died surrounded
by four divers equipped with tanks, who saw him
join them at the bottom and who did not concern themselves with his
fate any more than with a fig. And they were all professionals. One was
a shopkeeper, another had written books on the subject, the
third was, irony of fate, "diving
doctor". One of them, now deceased,
had told me "clients, we look after them like milk on the fire, but
friends, they do what they want". Lamentable remarks from a professional,
father of a family, who had passed sixty. Apparently
remembering every detail, that one had mentioned
only two diving companions, on that wreck
of the "Saint-Dominique" which lies at thirty meters
deep, near the entrance to Marseille. Now thanks to the others
I learned that there was a fourth diver, a Brazilian,
whose trace I had great difficulty in finding and who declared to me
at once, when I called him on the telephone "how
did you get my number?". It was not a matter of homicide,
of course, but simply of a series of imprudences, of accumulated
negligences. One does not let a boy of 23 do the yo-yo
at thirty meters deep (I did not know that my son was doing this
type of extremely dangerous activity) without a minimum of supervision.
One does not concern oneself with the absence on board of a free diver,
at the moment when the boat moves away, after having come back
on board and having raised the anchor. My son's mother
wanted an inquiry to be opened. I said "what is
the point, it will not bring him back to life" and I was thinking of the
first gesture that an examining magistrate would make: order an autopsy of
the body.
....To come back to this
mad cow business, it is only one of the first consequences
of the madness of men. Others will follow. The primary cause is the
race for profit, the obsession with profitability. The spectators had
doubtless laughed a lot while watching the film by de Funès entitled
"l'aile ou la cuisse" in which the director was mocking
the one whom the late Desproges had once called "the Napoleon
of fast food". Today, do we really know
what we are eating?
....I can tell you one thing
: since this epidemic began, my wife and I
have not touched a steak. Not because of a
morbid, obsessive worry, but by considering this
as a "militant gesture". If the public does not boycott the products
that put its life in danger, it is not the public authorities who will concern themselves
with the problem, they who have their eye glued to polls and voting
slips. Those responsible are not the breeders, nor the peasants.
They are those who are supposed to manage the country, those who "forget"
to ban the importation of animal meal banned in other countries.
Now, stupidities, one accumulates them, and one will continue. Until a fairly
recent date, ecology seemed to be a movement of
well-off countries, of gentle dreamers. People spoke of "the greens" as
one spoke of a belated sixty-eightist bourgeoisie. Had Daniel Cohn-Bendit
not made himself one of the champions of this movement, in Germany
?
....One hears everywhere people
speaking of "re-balancing of ecosystems"
adding "it has always been like that". Yes, species disappear,
and so what? The dinosaurs also disappeared,
did they not? Did one have to get worked up about the ozone layer, the warming
of the atmosphere? Was all that not a little overestimated,
by dint of the media?
....Everyone thinks what they want.
I saw Egypt this winter. The famous Aswan dam has
definitively regularized its course (but it was already so with a more modest dam, built by the English).
This dam gave birth to an immense water reservoir: Lake
Nasser, south of Aswan, which supplies electricity to all
of Egypt, which was thus able to know a minimum of industrialization
(or at least of equipment). In return the Nile, in the course of its annual floods,
ceased to enrich the soil with the most fertile silt
on Earth. The Egyptians must irrigate, put fertilizer everywhere. But
there is worse. No longer fed by the contribution of silt, the
delta is eroded by sea currents: the coast
is retreating, rapidly. That had not been foreseen. Yet, to govern
is to foresee. But what should have been done? Egypt, whose birth rate
is one of the highest in the world, should it have passed by
a minimum of industrial development? One will content oneself with noting
that on each side of this green band Râ darts his rays.
Egypt lives surrounded by a powerful solar energy, which
no one would have dreamed for a single second of exploiting, not
only with the help of photovoltaic collectors, but by focusing
this energy with cylindrical mirrors, by directing this free
and non-polluting energy towards a thermal power station. Other solutions
were possible, since, to create energy,
in whatever form it may be, Carnot's principle requires, a hot source and a cold source. The Nile or even the nearby sea could
serve as a cold source. But that would have been thinking differently.
....Closer to us, the
Somme was in this spring of 2001 ravaged by floods.
There was a great deal of damage. Why? It had, certainly, rained a great deal
that winter and the water table was saturated, incapable
of absorbing a strong water input. The Somme also flows slowly.
43 meters of difference in level only, to the Channel.
But there was also something else: intensive agriculture, as an
old peasant pointed out, has made the bocage disappear. Now this whole
set of hedges creates a loss of head with respect to any fluid flow. Water cannot thus rush down the plains without restraint. To compare
two lands saturated with water, one with and the other without bocage, is to
compare the flow of water on a doormat and on a cemented slab.
It does not happen in the same way. No need to be
an engineer to imagine it.
....And the stupidities accumulate,
to earn more, faster. After me the deluge..... It is
done.
....The Russians diverted
rivers, to irrigate cotton crops, the only water input of the
Aral Sea, a closed sea, which eliminates this input by evaporation.
In a few decades this sea, a precious reserve of fresh water,
has melted like snow in the sun. After me, the desert.
....I speak of Russia, but,
as Souriau pointed out to me, go to the first supermarket
you come across and head for the "fresh products" section. You will
find there a number of prepared dishes, in trays. Everything is there,
even the taste. A refrigeration system
keeps these products at a pleasant temperature, no more.
It is not frozen food. In fact these same trays could
very well be stored and presented at
ordinary temperature, even in full sun. Why? Because they
no longer contain the slightest bacterium, all of these having been
eliminated by irradiation, after passing through a ...
cyclotron. But do you imagine how consumers would react
if these products were offered for sale with the mention
"sterilized by nuclear irradiation"?
....All this is not from yesterday.
I had a friend, an engineer at the CEA. Thirty years ago the first
tests of preservation by irradiation began:
- You see, these strawberries. They were subjected
to gamma bombardment, in their airtight plastic bag.
That was three months ago: one would say they have just been picked.
We waited, then we put that
on the market. What becomes of these biomolecules subjected to
this intense bombardment? We know strictly nothing about it. Cancers
have no smell, and there are, nowadays, so many ways of contracting
one. One is spoiled for choice, since we are told that fresh fruits,
and particularly "traditional fruits", which are progressively disappearing
from the stalls, replaced by others, which keep better,
naturally provide us with anti-oncogenes.
....This same friend had contacted me
so that I might illustrate, with the help of drawings, a study that the CEA
had just completed, intended to measure the quantity of chemical
products actually absorbed by plants when they were watered
with fertilizer. Radioactive tracers had then been used and the conclusion
was more than obvious: 95% of the fertilizers were quite simply
not absorbed, all going into the water table.
That was thirty years ago.
....Nature seems to have its logic
and we have ours and they are not the same, apparently. When
one sees the stupidities that are committed, heavy with consequences
on all levels, the money that is wasted, in particular in armaments,
one ends up dreaming of a gentle utopia, where the biologists of
INRA would let Nature manage, better than them, where
one would stop grafting genes of phosphorescent jellyfish
onto rabbits, creating dangerous chimeras, and where
one would content oneself with gathering all the "gentle" energy that
is lying around ( the sun sends us more than a kilowatt per square meter
!). That would be less sophisticated; less "hi-tech" but doubtless
much less dangerous.
....Decidedly, humanity
seems sick with its science and its technology, more than anything else.
