Food

In Figures - Heart Disease

Analysing the top causes of death worldwide, one finds that 13% of all human deaths are now caused by heart attacks; in the richest countries, 16% and in the poorest, 6%.

In Figures - Global Population

With global population now exceeding 7 billion, National Geographic examined provided a broad overview of demographic trends that got us to today and will impact us tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the global population is still growing by an estimated 79 million per year.

It was just over two centuries ago that the global population was 1 billion — in 1804. But better medicine and improved agriculture resulted in higher life expectancy for children, dramatically increasing the world population, especially in the West. U.N. forecasts suggest the world population could hit a peak of 10.1 billion by 2100 before beginning to decline.

On Animals

Juxtaposing this EU communication on animal welfare with the video below illustrates clearly how, so often, poetry trumps policy. 

Utopian perhaps, but the video nonetheless conveys simply the awakening realisation that I myself have been through about how we should treat non-human animals, and captures perfectly why I protested against animal exports many years ago and eventually stopped eating meat entirely. 

In contrast, the dull but worthy EU prose (perhaps it contains good news for animals, perhaps it doesn't, but who's going to wade through it to find out?) appears orthogonal to this simple act of visual emotion.  All this in the one continent which - above all others - should remember and recoil from shipping sentient beings in trucks.

See video
Syndicate content