Rudolf Steiner and Mad Cow Disease
In its issue No. 60 of February 2001, the magazine Sciences Frontières (http://www.sciencefrontieres.com) 8 bis rue du Chemin de Fer, 94110 Arcueil published a quite astonishing text, which is an excerpt from Health and Disease, by Rudolf Steiner, lecture of January 13, 1923 - Romand Anthroposophic Editions.
Well, gentlemen, you can cook a cabbage as long as you want,... Well, gentlemen, you can cook a cabbage as long as you want, you will not get meat from it. You will not get meat by putting it in your pan or your pot, any more than it is possible to transform a cake into meat. There is no technique that allows this. But in short, what cannot be done technically is done in the animal's body. But the necessary forces for this operation must first be present in the animal's body. Among all the technical forces we have, none allow us to transform plants into meat. We don't have them. Therefore, our body, as well as the animal's body, contains forces capable of transforming vegetable substances, vegetable matter, into meat...
Imagine that a cow suddenly decides:
" I am tired of walking around and just pulling up these grasses. An animal could do it for me. I will go and eat this animal right away! ". Let's see: the cow would start eating meat! However, it is capable of producing meat by itself! It has the forces to do so. What would happen if, instead of plants, the cow started eating meat? All the forces that could produce meat in it would then be idle.
Take any factory that has to produce something, and suppose you produce nothing but you start the whole factory running. Imagine the waste of energy that could occur. A considerable amount of energy would therefore be wasted. Now, gentlemen, the energy wasted in the animal's body cannot just dissipate like that. The cow is full of this energy, which does something else in it besides transforming vegetable matter. This energy remains, it is there, it acts differently in it. And what it does produces all sorts of waste. Instead of meat, harmful substances are produced. The cow would thus fill up with all possible harmful substances if it suddenly became carnivorous. It would especially fill up with uric acid and urates.
Now, urates have particular habits. The particular habits of urates is to have a weakness for the nervous system and the brain. If the cow ate meat directly, it would result in a huge secretion of urates, the urates would go to the brain and the cow would go mad (...). If we could carry out the experiment of feeding an entire herd of cows with doves, we would get an entire herd of completely mad cows....
....We have a couple of old friends who lost a son in his thirties. He died a few years ago, rather quickly, in a little over a year, of a disease 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. Looking back, the symptoms described by his family: loss of balance, then coma, are very similar to those of mad cow disease. I think that many cases of death are not made public. The reason is simple: the parents, the close relatives, are generally overwhelmed by the pain and the first reaction when an investigation is opened is to think "autopsy". Who would want to see their own child cut up after their unfortunate body has been exhumed? I confess I myself was faced with a similar problem more than ten years ago. My son died in a diving accident in Marseille, following intensive practice of deep free diving. Now, none of the testimonies I had gathered from the witnesses of the tragedy coincided. He died surrounded by four divers equipped with tanks, who saw him join them at the bottom and who were no more concerned about his fate than about a fly. And they were all professionals. One was a merchant, another had written books on the subject, the third was, ironically, "diving doctor". One of them, now deceased, told me "the clients, we take care of them like milk on the fire, but the friends, they do as they please". Lamentable words from a professional, father of a family, who had passed his sixties. Apparently remembering every detail, he only mentioned two diving companions, on the wreck of the "Saint-Dominique" lying thirty meters deep, near the entrance of Marseille. However, thanks to others I learned that there was a fourth diver, a Brazilian, whom I had great difficulty in tracking down and who immediately told me when I called him on the phone "how did you get my number?" It was not a homicide, of course, but simply a series of imprudences and accumulated negligence. You don't let a 23-year-old boy do the "ludion" at thirty meters depth (I didn't know my son was involved in such an extremely dangerous activity) without a minimum of supervision. You don't worry about the absence of a free diver on board, at the moment when the boat moves away, after having come back on board and hoisted the anchor. My son's mother wanted an investigation to be opened. I said "what's the point, it won't bring him back to life" and I was thinking of the first thing a judge would do: order an autopsy of the body.
....Returning to this mad cow disease story, it is only one of the first consequences of human madness. Others will follow. The primary cause is the pursuit of profit, the obsession with profitability. The spectators probably laughed a lot watching the film by de Funès titled "L'aile ou la cuisse" where the director put in a box the one that 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 sickening, obsessive worry, but considering it as a "militant act". If the public does not boycott the products that endanger their lives, it is not the public authorities who will worry about the problem, they who have their eyes fixed on polls and voting slips. The responsible ones are not the farmers, nor the peasants. They are those who are supposed to manage the country, those who "forget" to ban the import of animal meal banned in other countries. Now, nonsense accumulates, and it will continue. Until a fairly recent date, ecology seemed to be a movement of wealthy people, of soft dreamers. They spoke of "the greens" as one spoke of a lingering bourgeois generation of 1968. Had Daniel Cohn-Bendit not become one of the champions of this movement in Germany?
....Everyone is talking everywhere about "rebalancing the ecosystems" adding "it has always been like that". Yes, species disappear, and then? Dinosaurs also disappeared, right? Should we have worried about the ozone layer, the warming of the atmosphere? Wasn't all that a bit overestimated, with the help of the media?
....Everyone thinks what they want. I have seen Egypt; this winter. The famous Aswan dam has definitively regulated its course (but it was already the case with a more modest dam built by the English). This dam has given rise to a huge water reservoir: Lake Nasser, south of Aswan, which supplies electricity to all Egypt, which thus could experience a minimum of industrialization (or at least equipment). In exchange, the Nile, with its annual floods, has ceased to enrich the soil with the most fertile silt in the world. The Egyptians have to irrigate, to put fertilizer everywhere. But there is worse. No longer fed by the silt, the delta is eroded by the sea currents: the coast is receding, quickly. This was not foreseen. Yet, to govern is to foresee. But what was to be done? Egypt, whose birth rate is one of the highest in the world, should it miss out on a minimum of industrial development? One will just note that on both sides of this green strip, Ra shines his rays. Egypt lives surrounded by a powerful solar energy, which no one would have even thought of exploiting, not only with photo-voltaic sensors, but by focusing this energy with cylindrical mirrors, directing this free and non-polluting energy towards a thermal power plant. Other solutions were possible, since, to create energy, in any form, it is necessary, according to the Carnot principle, a hot source and a cold source. The Nile or even the nearby sea could serve as a cold source. But that would have meant thinking differently.
....Closer to us, the Somme was devastated by floods this spring of 2001. There was a lot of damage. Why? It had, certainly, rained a lot this winter and the groundwater was saturated, unable to absorb a large water supply. The Somme also flows very slowly. 43 meters of elevation only, until the English Channel. But there was also something else: intensive agriculture, as a old farmer remarked, has done away with the hedgerows. This set of hedges creates a loss of charge regarding any fluid flow. Water cannot thus rush down the plains without restraint. Compare two waterlogged lands, one with and one without hedgerows, it is like comparing the flow of water on a mat and on a concrete slab. It does not happen the same way. No need to be an engineer to imagine it.
....And the nonsense accumulates, to gain more, faster. After me, the deluge..... It's done.
....The Russians have diverted rivers to irrigate cotton crops, the only water supply for the Aral Sea, a closed sea, which eliminates this supply by evaporation. In a few decades this precious fresh water reserve has melted like snow in the sun. After me, the desert.
....I'm talking about Russia, but, as Souriau pointed out to me, go to any supermarket and head to the "fresh products" section. You will find many prepared dishes in trays. Everything is there, even the taste. A refrigeration system keeps these products at a pleasant temperature, nothing more. It is not frozen. In fact, these same trays could very well be stored and displayed at normal temperature, even in the sun. Why? Because they no longer contain the slightest bacteria, all of them having been eliminated by irradiation, after passing through a ... cyclotron. But imagine how consumers would react if these products were sold with the label "irradiation sterilized"?
....All of this is not new. I had a friend, an engineer at the CEA. Thirty years ago, the first tests of irradiation preservation began:
- You see, these strawberries. They have been subjected to a gamma bombardment, in their sealed plastic bag. It has been three months since then: they look like they were just picked.
We waited, then put it on the market. What happens to these biomolecules subjected to this intense bombardment? We don't know at all. Cancers have no smell, and nowadays there are so many ways to contract one. We have the choice, since we are told that fresh fruits, and particularly the "traditional fruits," are gradually disappearing from the shelves, replaced by others, which keep better, naturally providing us with anti-carcinogens.
....This same friend contacted me to have me illustrate, with drawings, a study that the CEA had just completed, intended to measure the amount of chemicals actually absorbed by the plants when they were watered with fertilizers. They had then used radioactive tracers and the conclusion was more than obvious: 95% of the fertilizers were simply not absorbed, all flowing into the groundwater. This was thirty years ago.
....Nature seems to have its own logic and we have ours and they are not the same, apparently. When you see the nonsense being committed, with serious consequences on all levels, the money wasted, especially in armaments, you end up dreaming of a gentle utopia, where the INRA biologists would let nature take care of itself, better than them, where we would stop grafting phosphorescent jellyfish genes onto rabbits, creating dangerous chimeras, and where we would just collect all the "soft" energy that is around (the sun sends more than a kilowatt per square meter!). It would be less sophisticated; less "high-tech" but certainly much less dangerous.
....Indeed, humanity seems to be sick of its science and technology, more than anything else.
