Addiction Commonality

Alcohol, Opiates, Fat and Sugar are all Addictive Substances: this blog is about that "addiction sameness".

Butter Pig Family

* A butter sculpture of a sow and her piglets

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Information Overload is the Bane of my Life


My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet.  


What can and should be ignored?  

Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? 

Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge?  

What do I hope to accomplish?



“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."

Yuval Noah Harari   

  

And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.


“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Friday, April 19, 2019

The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream


Smiling Cow

Happy Cow supports Vegan Revolution


The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream 


Health, climate change, animal welfare... what’s driving more people and brands to embrace a plant-based lifestyle?

by Dan Hancox


Thu 9 Aug 2018

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A 2016 poll found Britain’s vegan population had increased from 150,000 to 542,000 in 10 years. 


Late on a Thursday afternoon in early March, just off Brick Lane in the heart of London’s nightlife hotspot Shoreditch, 23-year-old Louisa Davidson is taking calls and co-ordinating cables and scaffolds, as shocking pink Vegan Nights banners are hung around the expansive courtyards of the Truman Brewery. There is a chill in the air, quickly warmed by a buzzing atmosphere more like a music festival than an ethical food fair, as BBC Radio 1Xtra and House of Camden DJs play records, cocktails are poured and entrepreneurs sell zines and street wear alongside the vegan sushi, patisserie and “filthy vegan junk food”.




Davidson had been running weekend markets at the venue when she noticed a sharp increase in the number of vegan food businesses and vegan menus on offer. So last September, with her colleagues, she decided to put on a one-off vegan night market, with music, drinks and food. “On the day there were queues around the corner,” she says. “We were not prepared for it at all! There was so much interest that by Christmas we decided to make it a monthly thing. It’s all happened very quickly.” Inspired by its success, and the traders she was working with, Davidson switched from vegetarian to a vegan diet in January.

“We’re riding on that wave of veganism getting into the mainstream,” Davidson says. “People are curious about it and they’re finding out that vegan food is not just a boring salad, it’s experimental, and the food traders are amazing – people can have a drink, listen to music and hang out. First and foremost, we want to offer a positive platform, whether you’ve never had a fried jackfruit before or you’re a longstanding vegan.” Many of the traders are new to it as well, with a couple of them having launched their businesses at Vegan Nights. “It is a community and everyone supports each other’s businesses. It’s great to be a part of it.”








Quick guide Veganism in numbers Show




350% Rise in the number of vegans in Britain from 2006-2016;

542,000 people said they were vegans in 2016.

168,000 Veganuary 2018 participants, of which 60% were under 35, up from 3,300 on its 2014 launch.

185% Increase in vegan products launched in the UK between 2012 and 2016.


1944 The year the term vegan was coined by woodwork teacher Donald Watson.
Rejected words include ‘dairyban’, ‘vitan’ and ‘benevore’.


20% Percentage of under-35s who have a vegan diet.





Veganism might have recently acquired a hipster cache at buzzy London events such as Vegan Nights and the weekly Hackney Downs market established by influential blogger Sean O’Callaghan, AKA “the Fat Gay Vegan”, but its surging popularity is a national phenomenon, with plant-based food festivals and businesses booming from Bristol to Inverness.

The high street is adapting with incredible speed. Big chains such as Marks & Spencer and Pret a Manger have introduced vegan ranges, Wagamama has a new vegan menu, Pizza Hut recently joined Pizza Express and Zizzi in offering vegan pizzas, while last year Guinness went vegan and stopped using fish bladders in its brewing process, after two and a half centuries. Scrolling through Twitter’s popular #veganhour (an hour of online recipes and ideas running 7-8pm every Tuesday, and trending at number seven nationally when I looked), alongside less surprising corporate interventions from Holland & Barrett and Heavenly Organics is a tweet from Toby Carvery, trumpeting its vegan cherry and chocolate torte. Sainsbury’s and Tesco have introduced extended new ranges of vegan products, while the latter recently appointed American chef Derek Sarno to the impressive job title of director of plant-based innovation.

If this is the year of mainstream veganism, as every trend forecaster and market analyst seems to agree, then there is not one single cause, but a perfect plant-based storm of factors. People cite one or more of three key motives for going vegan – animal welfare, environmental concerns and personal health – and it is being accompanied by an endless array of new business startups, cookbooks, YouTube channels, trendy events and polemical documentaries. The traditional food industry is desperately trying to catch up with the flourishing grassroots demand. “What do you mean, weak, limp and weedy? In 2017, the vegan category is robust, energetic, and flush with crowdfunding cash,” ran an article headlined “Vegan Nation” in industry bible the Grocer in November, pointing to new plant-based burger company Vurger, which hit its £150,000 investment target in little more than 24 hours.



The rapid explosion of the annual Veganuary campaign, in which curious omnivores and vegetarians sign up to try out veganism for a month and are then plied with recipes and other advice, shows how fast veganism is growing. (The choice of January is significant, given the resonances of fresh starts, good intentions and post-Christmas diets.) Veganuary was launched in 2014, with 3,300 people signing up; by 2016, there were 23,000 participants, then 59,500 in 2017, and a staggering 168,000 this year – and these are just the numbers that signed up officially online. Notably, 84% of this year’s registered participants were female, while 60% were aged under 35. Showbiz magazines and websites are full of lists of fully vegan celebrities – Ellie Goulding, Natalie Portman, Ariana Grande, Woody Harrelson, JME, Ellen DeGeneres, Liam Hemsworth; we could go on – all of them making Beyoncé and Jay-Z look a bit wet, having tried a vegan diet for just 22 days.

A weekend outing to Blackpool in 2018 offers much of what it always did: seagulls, slot machines, big-screen sport, family meal deals, “traditional fish and chips”, pirate rides, poncho vendors, palm-readers and pound shops. But there are other, newer diversions, too. On a grey Saturday morning in low season, at St Thomas’ church, north of the city centre, the Blackpool Vegan and Green festival is humming with people. Something of the church’s evangelical spirit is alive here, too.

“We’re in a non-vegan world,” says volunteer Elizabeth King, delivering her “10 steps to going vegan” talk in a back-room. “But things are changing rapidly – and if you’re trying to go vegan, you’re a pioneer.” She talks about shopping challenges and getting around social stigma, meal-planning and vitamin supplements, how to make holidays and dining out easier, how to check labels and online resources – and the group of new vegans and could-be-vegans asks keen questions and shares local tips. “People have an assumption you live off lettuce, don’t they? But that’s changing.”


Play Video
1:02 Watch an introduction to east London's Vegan Nights food festival – video

With almond milk and vegan ranges now available in supermarkets, it’s a testament to soaring public curiosity that people are being drawn to once specialist events in such numbers. “It’s jam-packed isn’t it!” says Michelle Makita, with a laugh, from the Little Blue Hen vegan soap stall. Over the course of the day, hundreds of people stream in; visitors from across Blackpool, the north-west, even Spain.

There is an African superfoods stand, a Glaswegian jerk pie company, Turkish gözleme flatbreads, cakes, curries, wraps, sushi, vegan candles, vegan pet food, shlocky T-shirts and accessories (“Zombies eat flesh, go vegan”). Darting around in a high-vis jacket, organiser Roddy Hanson squeezes past the prams, teenagers, bearded veterans in earth-tone baja tops, normies and newbies.



Grabbing some air and calm when the lunch rush has finally subsided (at about 4pm), Hanson is a mine of information about vegan history and culture and has seen a tightly bound, activism-driven outsider community become an accepted phenomenon in a matter of a few years. “When I went vegan in the 1980s, it was primarily two groups: hippies and punks. Some people who come to our events think it’s going to be wall-to-wall people with pink hair and piercings, but the whole culture has changed – it’s a very broad cross‑section.”

He has been vegan for 30 years, a veteran of animal rights activism, but this convivial, family-day-out approach to winning converts is more his speed. “I’ve never been the sort of person who wants to stand outside fur shops and get into arguments with people. It’s more positive this way and you can choose to engage with it if you want, rather than be confrontational. I’ve been involved in anti-circus demos where fights have broken out with some of the protesters and the circus staff; that kind of thing was a lot bigger in the 80s. Now it’s based around vegan groups and fairs, which didn’t really exist then.”

Last summer, Paul White opened Faringo’s, the first vegan restaurant in Blackpool. Only a year ago, he was an omnivore, running a hotel with an Italian steakhouse attached in which he was also head chef. One weekend, they had a vegan guest staying, which prompted “lots of lengthy conversations” about veganism and he decided to try running a small vegan menu alongside the existing one. “Within two weeks, we had more people eating vegan food than anything else,” he recalls. “What surprised us was people were coming from all over Blackpool. There were hidden vegans in Blackpool who were struggling in silence! That was June last year and at that point we decided to turn the restaurant 100% vegan and it just exploded on Facebook. I went vegan as well, as head chef, and I feel better for it. We have such a wide range of people coming in: we’ll have a table of six people who are protesters from an anti-fracking demonstration [Preston New Road fracking site is just three miles away], sat next to a table of two people who are multimillionaires, sat next to international rugby players.”


Whereas before, veganism may have been viewed like you were giving up something, now it’s been reframed as what you gainKip Andersen, Cowspiracy co-director

There’s been a knock-on effect to their success, he says, with numerous other restaurants in the city beginning to offer vegan options on their menus – and White is preparing to open the first vegan food shop in Blackpool, too. One of the main drivers, he says, is the critical mass of information available online, both motivating people to change in the first place and making it easier than ever to do so. “When people see documentaries like Cowspiracy, one is enough. The fact social media is as big as it is now, it spreads things so much faster. I think that’s why it’s mushrooming right now. And it is mushrooming.”

In May 2016, the Vegan Society commissioned Ipsos Mori to poll 10,000 people on their dietary habits and found that Britain’s vegan population had increased from 150,000 to 542,000 in the space of a decade (alongside a vegetarian population of 1.14 million). Of those, 63% were female and, significantly for veganism’s future growth, almost half were in the 15-34 age category. What is astonishing is that the pace of change in the two years since the survey was carried out has been seemingly exponential – it seems plausible to speculate the number may have doubled again in that time.


Tim Barford, manager of Europe’s largest vegan events company, VegfestUK, has been vegan for three decades and points to the deeper roots of this recent explosion of interest. “There is a big plant-based shift culturally,” he says, “a systemic change in the way that we’re approaching food and the way that we feed ourselves. Remember that successive governments over 15 years have been ploughing money into persuading people to eat more fruit and vegetables, with the five-a-day campaign. Then you’ve got a real cultural change among millennials, which is very much built around justice and the way we look at animals.”

He also points to a new non-violent breed of millennial activist, such as James Aspey, who took a year’s vow of silence to raise awareness of animal rights issues. “Thirty years ago, it was more balaclavas and intimidation, almost verging on terrorist activities. This new breed are not playing up to that stereotype – they recognise the danger of it. There’s a real understanding and compassion among today’s activists. I’m a bit older and that wasn’t there in the radical 70s and 80s, with the punk rock, ‘fuck you’ kind of attitude – it’s now more reflective and therefore more effective.”

That less aggressive approach is winning a lot of new converts, but for veterans such as Barford it’s still an evangelical movement with an irreducible political message. “Our challenge with VegFest is to combine the feelgood factor, the fun and sociable atmosphere, with quite a strong moral and ethical standpoint. We want to attract people in without putting them off, but then once we’ve got them in, we don’t want them to walk away thinking this is just a health fad, just food and shopping and entertainment.”


A sample of the ever-growing range of vegan products. Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian

He thinks the rise of Jeremy Corbyn – a vegetarian of almost 50 years, who has recently spoken about his admiration for his vegan friends – has helped fuel “a definite appetite for justice. Justice is no longer a dirty word, people can have a conversation about justice for the 70bn animals killed for food, without being shot down and screamed at as a radical extremist – and I think Corbyn has helped a bit, with the way he’s won over a bit of the middle ground.”



One influential factor that comes up regularly when talking to new vegan converts is a series of polemical online documentaries, or “advocacy films”, many of them on streaming services such as Netflix, documenting the damage animal agriculture does to the environment, or meat-eating does to human health, or exposing gory scenes in slaughterhouses and factory farms. In Blackpool, Michelle Makita tells me the 2005 film Earthlings, with its harrowing, hidden-camera footage of animal suffering, was the epiphany that led her to switch to veganism. “I think I cried for about three days – I was hysterical,” she says. The thriving sub-genre’s titles tell their story in microcosm: Vegucated, Planeat, Forks Over Knives, Live and Let Live, Peaceable Kingdom. A common trope among recent converts is that the revelations about the brutality of the meat, dairy and egg industries were hidden from view, until these documentaries exposed them.

The genre’s influential break-out hit was the 2014 documentary Cowspiracy, which looks at the environmental impact of animal agriculture, its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation and excessive water use. It is a film about climate crisis in the first place, which argues that meat and dairy farming is the hidden evil responsible for a dying planet. Made by Californian documentary-makers Keegan Kuhn and Kip Andersen, amiable frontman Andersen tells the story of how Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth changed his life as a young man (“It scared the emojis out of me”) and committed him to an environmentally conscious lifestyle. With Kuhn, he has now no doubt changed the lives of countless others by persuading them that turning off the taps, cycling everywhere and home composting is not enough: that worldwide conversion to veganism is the only possible way to save the planet.

Cowspiracy’s marketing strapline claims it is “the film environmental organisations don’t want you to see”. The alleged conspiracy of the title is that environmental groups such as Greenpeace, Sierra Club and the Rainforest Action Network are focusing all their efforts on fossil fuels and renewable energy, while ignoring the real threat from livestock farming. The evasiveness of their spokespeople on camera is often embarrassing, although perhaps the reason these NGOs wouldn’t want people building their politics around the film is its fast-and-loose use of highly questionable statistics. The original version of the film claimed 51% of global greenhouse gases were produced by animal agriculture, based on a single, non-peer-reviewed academic paper – the scientific consensus is closer to 15%. “Don’t use the 51% figure. Please. You’re making us all look bad,” vegan author Danny Chivers wrote in the New Internationalist. “If you want more people to understand that animal agriculture is a significant part of the climate change picture, bear in mind that there are lots of good reasons why many people are focusing on the fossil fuel industry and it’s not an either/or issue.”

For the version that premiered on Netflix in 2015, Andersen and Kuhn changed the figure and Leonardo DiCaprio came onboard as executive producer. Since then, they have made an equally hard-hitting follow-up, What the Health, which looked at the effect of meat and dairy on human diseases. While their films have been controversial (registered dietician and vegan Virginia Messina called What the Health “junk science”), their impact as polemicists is undeniable in a world where different strategies of evangelism are always being debated. Cowspiracy’s original crowdfunding pitch speaks volumes about its appeal: “Together, we aren’t just creating a movie, we are creating a movement.”


Cowspiracy trailer.



Of course, the vegan movement already existed, but Cowspiracy’s success reflects a new emphasis on animal agriculture, in particular cattle farming, in the context of the deepening climate crisis. Critical in this refocusing from animal welfare as the primary motive for veganism was a 2006 report produced by the UN, Livestock’s Long Shadow, which described the livestock sector as one of the most significant contributors to environmental degradation, both globally and locally. A follow-up UN report in 2010 warned that rising meat and dairy consumption, and a global population predicted to be 9.1 billion by 2050, meant a shift towards veganism was vital to save the world from climate catastrophe and food shortages. Overall, agriculture accounts for 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of total land use and 19% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions; within this, the footprint of meat and dairy production is heavily disproportionate.

Oxford academic Dr Marco Springmann has attempted to model what a vegan planet would look like, especially as climate change, food shortages and population growth intensify. He projected that were the world to adopt a vegan diet by 2050, the global economy would benefit to the tune of $1.1tn savings in healthcare costs and environmental savings of $0.5tn and a cut in greenhouse gas emissions by two-thirds. It’s quite hard to argue with numbers that speculative – especially when one is not a fellow of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future Of Food – but what is certain is that the makers of Cowspiracy were right in their general argument, if not some of the key specifics.



“Our motivation was that animal agriculture was so under-discussed,” says Kuhn. “We really felt promoting a plant-based lifestyle had to be at the forefront of the environmental movement and environmental veganism had to be a movement in itself, versus animal rights or health.”

The speed of change they have witnessed since then has been exhilarating – even in just four years. “Information can pass so freely and easily now,” Anderson says. “It was only a matter of time before the truth about animal agriculture was revealed. It’s not in your face like racism or sexism – it’s deeply ingrained in our culture, and financially ingrained, but now that it’s revealed, people just don’t want to be a part of that horrific industry. It’s like a weight off their shoulders; getting clean of the lies and the destruction.

“People feel empowered, it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. That’s a huge shift. Whereas before, veganism may have been viewed like you were giving up something, now it’s been reframed as what you gain: you gain health, you gain a greater sense of living in bounds with your values, you gain all the environmental benefits.”


Kuhn says that consumer pressure from below will create a domino effect. “These corporations are just going to follow the dollar, and follow consumer demand, which hopefully will force them to switch to sustainable, plant-based agriculture.” The next step, he says, is to push governments to abandon tax breaks and subsidies to animal farmers. They are keeping the advocacy-via-documentary ball rolling. Currently in production are Seaspiracy, which focuses on the oceans and “the myth of sustainable fishing”, and Running for Good, a sports documentary following British marathon runner Fiona Oakes, “to break the stereotypes that veganism holds you back from any kind of athletics”.



Rapidly growing consumer awareness and changing eating habits have combined with a dawning realisation about the extent of the sustainability crisis to send shockwaves through the food production industries. With broad agreement that the future of animal agriculture has to change, the big money investors are moving quickly. Richard Branson announced last year that he was investing in a startup called Memphis Meats, which is developing lab-grown meat from animal cells as an alternative to animal agriculture, sometimes called “clean meat”. “In 30 years or so, I believe we will be shocked [that] we killed animals en masse for food,” he wrote. “Tyson Foods, one of the biggest meat businesses in the world, has recently invested, joining the likes of Bill Gates and Cargill, the second-largest beef producer in the world. It’s no surprise that the meat and dairy substitutes industry is predicted to be worth $40bn by 2020.”

The executive vice president at Tyson, Justin Whitmore, made a telling comment in explaining the company’s diversification in the face of a looming crisis of sustainability. “We don’t want to be disrupted,” he said in February. “We want to be part of the disruption.” While clean meat is not vegan, by definition, it is a parallel response to the same problem – and is accompanied by the soaring popularity of alternative vegan proteins such as tempeh, amaranth, seitan and nutritional yeast.

Even within the hard-headed world of big capital, there are serious manoeuvres afoot to push food production away from meat and dairy. In 2016, a group called Fairr (Farm Animal Investment Risk & Return) co-ordinated a group of 40 large institutional investment funds, including Swedish state pension funds, worth $1.25tn (almost £900bn) publicly to urge major food producers and retailers such as Kraft Heinz, Nestlé, Unilever, Tesco and Walmart to develop alternative, plant-based sources.

“There’s growing investor support,” says Rosie Wardle, who worked on the project for Fairr. “Across the board now, market research firms, food analysts, industry commentators, they’re all talking about alternative proteins and flexitarian diets – they’re the key food trends for this year. The risks around intensive livestock production are becoming harder to ignore and people recognise that is going to impact business as usual.”


Vegan Nights at the Truman Brewery, Brick Lane.



Fairr’s latest report, Plant-Based Profits, points to the rise of flexitarian diets among young adults who may not be full-time vegans. Fairr’s head of research, Aarti Ramachandran, sees the industry moving only in one direction. “Companies are investing in a lot of research and development because they know that today’s millennials are tomorrow’s consumers and they’re going to be setting the stage in terms of future growth prospects. That’s a key point that our investors are interested in: this is a market that’s not going to go away. Plant-based diets aren’t a trend or a fad; we see this very much being the basis of consumer growth.”

The business world seems to agree. In the last few months, you can scarcely move on Forbes.com for articles with headlines such as “Here’s Why You Should Turn Your Business Vegan In 2018”. With this kind of money swirling around, and a combination of hipster entrepreneurs, hedge funds and major supermarket chains defining veganism in 2018, it’s easy to see why some vegans feel that the movement’s traditional association with anti-capitalism is a position rapidly disappearing in a fog of marketing hype. Popular, youth-orientated vegan cookery startups such as Bosh.TV, which scored 1m followers on Facebook within a year of launching, as well as a Bosh! book deal, define the new spirit of veganism as a lifestyle, rather than the cornerstone of a political worldview. “Just three years ago, we weren’t even vegan ourselves,” wrote cheerful founders Henry Firth and Ian Theasby, recalling late-night kebabs on the way home from the pub. “Back then, the ‘V’ word had a touch of anger associated with it; it was loaded with political and ethical connotations.”

The promotion of a flexitarian approach of reducing the use of animal products, without cutting them out altogether, has raised hackles among some activists. In 2014, the Vegan Society rebranded with a “love vegan” campaign to mark its 70th anniversary, which proposed “a few small changes” if full veganism seemed a step too far. This prompted a backlash among some animal rights activists and claims that the organisation was more interested in being a marketing body for vegan businesses than an ethically driven campaign group. “Is veganism no more than a capitalist lifestyle choice?” ran a rhetorical question on the Red Black Green blog. “Veganism was for a long time associated with the counter-culture and seen as difficult,” wrote Vegan Society CEO, Jasmijn de Boo, in 2013. She spoke of softening the movement’s image: “One can become vegan in stages – there are no rules and you are only answerable to your own conscience.”

Veganism’s mainstream rise has certainly benefited from this conscious rebranding: for better or worse, it is much cooler than it used to be. “It’s a lifestyle, a community, a culture, an ever-expanding club where the only price of entry is being mindful and making a positive change,” goes the motto of the Young Vegans pie and mash shop in north London. Social media has spread the word with incredible speed, via Twitter hashtags, thriving “wellness” and cookery YouTube vloggers and Instagram influencers. It’s not just the obvious clean-eating celebrities and channels that have taken up the subject: even Unilad, a site not exactly known as a bastion of compassion and political sensitivity, commissioned a powerful 20-minute documentary,Meat the End, about “the horror and abuse” of animal agriculture.

Animal agriculture is choking the ​Earth and making us sick. We must act now
James Cameron and Suzy Amis Cameron



With a seemingly growing number of young people trying out vegan diets for personal health reasons (39% of the generally young, generally female Veganuary participants cited this as their motive), and its association with often controversial social media influencers, concerns have been raised that veganism provides a socially acceptable cover for disordered eating. “Are you depriving yourself or finding plant-based alternatives? This is where a lot of my problems lay,” wrote Lila Flint Roberts in an open letter on the Not Plant-Based blog. “I was just another individual who turned veganism into an eating disorder.”

British Dietetic Association spokeswoman and registered dietician Linia Patel is more than familiar with the problem. “We do see this. It’s very easy for people who have problems with disordered eating to take on veganism as a mask for something deeper that’s going on, because it’s cutting out huge food groups and for them it’s a way to control their diet that’s socially acceptable.

“At the moment, it’s so faddy, and there are Instagram influencers who are becoming vegan, and maybe it works for them, in their specific scenarios. The key point is always individualisation and research – to know why you’re doing it and how to do it properly, rather than just jumping on a trend. People can run the risk of being deficient in b12, even protein and iron.” She is keen to point out though that, done correctly, going vegan can be very good for health.

With a potential post-Brexit trade deal with the US threatening to flood the British market with farming practices currently prohibited in the UK by EU regulations – chlorinated chicken, beef with growth hormones and bacon with banned additives – the appeal of a plant-based diet could get another substantial spike in the near future. With or without such a trigger, a major shift in the way British people think about the food they eat and how it is produced is underway – driven by an increasingly networked, savvy millennial generation who realise that the certainties of the world they are growing up in are deteriorating fast. Veganism is no longer niche or difficult and, as industrial agriculture bends to adapt to consumer demand and its own crisis of sustainability, it is only going to get more accessible – and more popular.
Meet the vegans: four examples of modern meat-free living

Kishani Widyaratna, 32: ‘‘My veganism fits in with the rest of my politics, which are very left-leaning’
Works in publishing and runs the Tinie Tempeh vegan Instagram account



FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I’m glad to add to the visible vegan women of colour’: Kishani Widyaratna at the Spread Eagle, east London. Photograph: Sonka Horsman for the Observer New Review for the Observer
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I’ve been vegan 10 years. In 2008, Jamie Oliver made a TV show, Jamie’s Fowl Dinners, going behind the scenes of egg and chicken farming, and he showed male chicks that are useless for the egg industry being suffocated in a Perspex, oxygen-deprived box, live on television. It sounds like Black Mirrorbut it happened. I’d been vegetarian since I was 13 and seeing that pushed me to look into how dairy and eggs are farmed on an industrial scale; it went from there. It’s an extension of the basis of my vegetarianism: I didn’t want to kill anything to live.

I’ve always loved food and cooked from a broad range of cuisines. My heritage is Sri Lankan and food and eating are important elements of that. Starting my Tinie Tempeh Instagram, I wanted to do something that would encourage me to cook, but also I wanted to create something fun and positive. So hopefully you can look at my feed and see the variety in what I eat as an enthusiastic home cook with a big appetite. I wanted to help show how easy it has become [to be vegan]. The transparency of social media means it’s not so much of a leap of imagination for people any more.

A significant part of vegan Instagram has these unhealthy trappings of being super body-conscious and clean eating-focused: there are a lot of thin, lean, white bodies and, frustratingly, you don’t have as high a visibility for the vegans who are people of colour or queer or fat or eating whatever they want. But things are slowly changing, with the vegan junk food movement for example and I’m glad to add to the visible women of colour in that space.

I’m also inspired by people such as Ruby Tandoh and Bethany Rutter and their desire to liberate our personal relationships to food and the body, so I wanted to showcase vegan food that was about enjoyment without shame. I’ve also made a group of vegan friends through Instagram and I’ve learned so much about places to eat, things that I can cook; it’s educational, too.

My veganism fits in with the rest of my politics, which are very left-leaning, informed by an intersectional feminist approach and also I’m a person of colour moving through the world. So while I am passionate about animal welfare and the environment, there are other struggles that are equally important to me and each feeds into the other.

Jamie Kidd, 35: ‘Glasgow is a great place to be vegan. There’s a real community’


Founder, Cool Jerk Vegan Pies, Glasgow
 

‘The biggest seller is the macaro-nae cheese pie’: Jamie Kidd. Photograph: Jon Super for the Observer
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I run a vegan scotch pie business. I always had a passion for food and being from Dundee, which is pie country in Scotland, I felt inspired and thought no one else was doing it. I started two and a half years ago and the response was great; we couldn’t keep up with demand to begin with. The biggest seller here is the “macaro-nae cheese pie” – because macaroni pies are a bit of a Scottish delicacy. I travel all around Scotland and north England, sometimes as far as Brighton and London to do vegan festivals. The haggis and mash always seems to do really well when I go down to England, maybe because haggis is seen as slightly exotic. I’m really into Glasgow’s music scene and





xpress your beliefs. I also own a lot of vegan tote bags and I always use them when I go shopping; it’s a bit of subtle campaigning. Veganism is a community and it’s growing. Hopefully one day it won’t be a community, it will be everyone.

Dan Strettle, 66: ‘There is a domino effect within families – parents are listening to their children’

Owner, Alternative Stores, Newcastle upon Tyne
 


Dan Strettle, a vegan for 50 years, and daughter, Zahra, in his shop. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose for the Observer
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I was in sixth-form at school, and I was anti-vivisection, and this lad in my class says: “If you don’t believe in experimenting on live animals, why do you eat them?” So I thought about it, woke up the next morning and said: “I’m going vegetarian.” But my concept of vegetarian was veganism; I didn’t realise there was a halfway stage. I was fully vegan by 1969 – next February it will be 50 years. I’ve never felt better.

When I changed, they said: “Oh, it’s a fad, give him six weeks, we don’t even know any vegetarians, let alone vegans – he’s one of these hippies, I mean look at his hair.” For school lunches I took in something called Nutmeat. It comes in a tin – it’s nuts and flour, combined to make what looks like luncheon meat, and you slide it out of the tin, cut it into slices. You had to go to a health food shop and there was one called Milburns in Newcastle; we used to go there every week.

There’s a bunch of vegan places in Newcastle now; we’re catching up with Berlin – that’s the leader. Vegans have never had it so easy! I run a vegan shop. We have a little bit of opposition from the supermarkets now, but we’re all right because people go in the supermarkets, see there’s one flavour of vegan cheese and then they come to my shop and see there’s 12 flavours. We don’t mind the supermarkets – they’re like a gateway drug: we’ve got the variety that the vegans and vegetarians want. They come to us for perfume, soap powder, toothpaste, all the groceries and the whole foods. Our bestseller is probably Sosmix. We sold 4 tonnes this year – that’s the same stuff I was eating in the 1970s!

We must be getting half-a-dozen new people a week coming in and saying: “Someone in my family has gone vegan and I don’t know what to feed them; can you help?” Or: “My son went vegan three months ago and we’ve all joined him now.” There is a domino effect within families and parents are listening to their children. There was a lad who came in who was 10 – he had made his own decision to be vegan; he was so determined, and his parents were so supportive. It’s great to see.


How diet became the latest front in the culture wars







How diet became the latest front in the culture wars

The Observer
Food



The latest study warning us to eat less meat has brought angry sceptics out in droves. But who should we believe?



Andrew Anthony

Sun 17 Mar 2019



Animal rights activists in Brisbane, 2014. Photograph: Dan Peled/AAP


Sometimes, particularly when looking at the weekend newspapers, it can seem that our obsession with food and health has reached a pitch of pure hysteria. “Eat!” screams one headline. “Diet!” shouts another. Cut out carbohydrates, suggests one report. Carbs are good for you, says a different one. Lower your fat intake. No, fat’s healthy, sugar’s the problem. Coffee raises the risk of heart disease. But it lowers the risk of diabetes. And so on, until you just want to ditch the papers and watch TheGreat British Bake Off or MasterChef.

Food, how to cook it, what it does to you and what growing or rearing it does to the planet are issues that crowd the media. And yet, as the clamour grows, clarity recedes. An estimated 820 million people went hungry last year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. A third of all people were vitamin-deficient. Two billion were classified as overweight and 600 million as obese. It’s also estimated that 1bn tonnes of food are wasted every year – a third of the total produced. A plethora of academic reports concerning food consumption and production have been published in recent years. The latest and arguably the most far-reaching is Food in the Anthropocene: the Eat-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, which was conducted over three years by 37 senior scientists from around the world and published earlier this year.

To combat the world’s growing demand for food – there will be 10 billion people to feed by 2050 – we need to cut meat almost entirely out of our diet, say the authors of the report. The argument they put forward is that eating more plant-based foods will lower the incidences of heart disease, diabetes and cancer, enable more environmentally helpful use of land and reduce carbon emissions.


European farms could grow green and still be able to feed population

Read more

The report provides a “planetary health diet” based on eating vegetables, grains, pulses and nuts, which limits red meat to one serving a week and other animal protein to greatly reduced amounts, as little as an ounce a day of fish or chicken. This, say the authors, is what we should all be eating if we’re concerned about our health and that of the planet.

The response has been mixed. In mainstream food science, the reaction has been overwhelmingly supportive, with leading figures noting the report’s findings are in broad agreement with nearly all previous large-scale studies. There has also been enthusiastic reception from interest groups such as, for example, the Soil Association. However, there have been critics, who have used traditional and social media to air a variety of grievances. Their first target was the Norwegian couple Petter and Gunhild Stordalen whose foundation is one of the partners in Eat, the nonprofit organisation dedicated to food-system reform, which collaborated with the Lancet to produce the report. The Daily Mail was one of the newspapers that focused on the couple’s globetrotting lifestyle, while the influential campaigning food writer Joanna Blythman described the report as “a top-down attempt by a small, unrepresentative dogmatic global elite to mould public agriculture policy”.
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In fact, the report was wholly financed by the Wellcome Trust, which is also a participant in Eat, which supplied staff, but they were paid for by Wellcome Trust.

Another criticism Blythman raised was the prospect of “cranky diets and nutritional deficiencies in affluent countries and acute protein shortages in the poorer ones”. She’s not alone, with many bloggers weighing in to question Eat-Lancet’s findings. One critic was Zoë Harcombe, who has a PhD in public health nutrition and has previously questioned dietary fat guidelines. Harcombe said that the Eat-Lancet diet was “nutritionally deficient” in vitamins B12, D, sodium, potassium and iron.



Beef cattle in Texas, 2018. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

The National Farmers’ Union argued that the Eat-Lancet Commission report was a global report that neglected local differences. “For example,” it said, “65% of UK farmland is highly suitable for grass production over other crops, so the UK is well placed to produce food from sustainable livestock grazing systems. Also, grassland is a very good store of carbon, helping to mitigate the effects of climate change.”

Then the official-sounding European Food Agency protested that the report would “result in an anti-livestock narrative”. The EFA is, in fact, an independent agricultural news agency located in Italy. But a piece it ran by Frédéric Leroy, professor of food science and biotechnology at the University of Brussels, and Martin Cohen, a research fellow in philosophy, gained a lot of attention on social media.

“Isn’t it remarkable,” wrote Leroy and Cohen, “how meat, symbolising health and vitality since millennia, is now often depicted as detrimental to our bodies, the animals and the planet? Why exactly is the minoritarian discourse of vegetarianism and veganism currently all over the media?”

They spoke of “Big Ag” and a corporate conspiracy to push a vegan agenda for profit. They also claimed, as others have, that most of the research on which the report was based consists of epidemiological studies that can identify correlations but not prove causation. In other words, though there may be strong links between red meat eaters and the incidence of, say, bowel cancer, this could be attributable to other factors. Is it possible that a combination of well-meaning philanthropists and large agricultural concerns have united to exploit health fears for financial gain, while neglecting the nutritional shortcomings in their recommendations?

“Oh come on.” says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City, University of London and a contributor to the Eat-Lancet Commission. “That’s people scrabbling who don’t understand science. The point of exercises like the Eat-Lancet is to draw upon the best knowledge available. The people who criticise it usually haven’t got any knowledge at all.”

Professor Lang says there is a scientific consensus on both the prognosis and diagnosis in terms of the world’s food systems, which he describes as “driving us towards massive ecosystems damage, massive diet-related ill-health at unbearable cost to poor and developing countries”. He mentions the three-year InterAcademy Partnership report, which came out in November last year. It, too, argued that the global food system was responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions and that meat consumption would have to be drastically reduced.

But how do lay people make sense of the arguments? Is this like climate change, where a majority of scientists agree on the problem and a vociferous minority maintain that it’s been overstated? Or is this just another battlefield in the culture wars – the diet wars – in which politics determine perspective?


The way we see food will determine the way we are seen

Dr Tara Garnett is principal investigator at the Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food. She was also one of the contributors to the Eat-Lancet Commission report. “There is no way we all agree on everything that was written in that report,” she says. “I certainly have reservations about aspects of it. But it was a useful piece of work. There’s nothing new in there really. But it puts it all in one place. The fundamental message is that we’re not going to address our environmental problems unless we address the problems caused by the food system and we’re not going to address the problems caused by the food system unless we shift the way we eat collectively and globally.”
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The problem with these kinds of stark warnings is that there is a tendency to switch off unless danger is imminent. In the west, our sense of urgency is dulled by the sheer abundance of food, even if it’s often not healthily consumed.

“Let’s put it this way,” says Giles Yeo, University of Cambridge geneticist and author of the anti-diet book Gene Eating, “if everyone in the world was able to eat like us in Europe, the world would collapse immediately. Which means if we’re going to get the other people in the world to eat like us, our diets are going to have to change.”

From a health perspective, Yeo is sceptical about one-size-fits-all diets. People respond differently to different foods, he says, depending on their genetic makeup. “The problem is the representation of risk. If I eat a steak, is that going to give me cancer? Probably not. For some people the risk of getting cancer from eating meat will be zero. And obesity doesn’t cause cancer. It’s a risk factor in cancer.”

But having raised these caveats, Yeo also believes that a flexitarian approach, what he calls “vegan with a small v”, is the most sensible way of reconciling all the issues presented by personal and environmental health.

At the moment, we still look at food largely from a gastronomic perspective. But as global population continues to rise and, along with it, concerns about environmental damage, climate change and the spiralling health costs of an obese and diabetic population, it is increasingly becoming a moral issue. The way we see food will determine the way we are seen.




The unstoppable rise of veganism: how a fringe movement went mainstream



If “you are what you eat” is a statement that refers to personal identity, then “you are what you don’t eat” may well govern individual morality in the years ahead. It isn’t difficult to imagine that meat eaters could soon be seen as akin to smokers. 

Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, recently said that meat eaters should be treated like smokers and be made to sit outside restaurants, because meat is “bad for the planet and our health”. It’s an attitude that raises the spectacle of meat-shaming and using social guilt as a means of altering behaviour.




“I’m not sure guilt is helpful,” says Garnett. “I think it leads to an attitude of ‘might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb’. And it places undue emphasis on the individual, when the problems are systemic – as are the actions needed.”

For all the Eat-Lancet report’s detailed prescriptions, it makes more sense to see it as a general advisory statement designed to raise global awareness. After all, it’s not a text that customers are going to be studying while waiting for their Big Macs to be served.

“At last count there were 8.5 million food-insecure people in this country,” says Yeo. “So who are we to judge Mrs Smith going to Iceland to buy pizzas to feed the kids? Can we make the healthier choice the cheaper choice? It’s surely not beyond the wit of man. If you do that, people in the lower social class will choose the cheaper choice because it’s cheaper.”

Not beyond the wit of man, perhaps, but not yet within the interests of governments or food producers.







Discovering the Secret Power of Hanuman


  

Discovering the Secret Power of Hanuman


A Devoted Yogi‏ @ADevotedYogi

The latest post from Vedanet: "Discovering the Secret Power of Hanuman"


Hanuman endows us with the Atma-Shakti or self-power to realize our highest potential and accomplish what is magical.


Hanuman is the great hero of the Ramayana, the wonderful story’s most fascinating character. Though having the form of a monkey, he is said to be the greatest sage, yogi and devotee. What is the inner meaning of this magical figure and his relevance for everyone?
Hanuman is portrayed as the son of Vayu, the wind God. This explains his speed of movement, his power to become as small or large as he likes, and his incredible strength. But there are many other yogic secrets hidden behind his symbolism.

Hanuman and cosmic energy

Today our world prides itself in a new information technology, with a rapid speed of data, calculation and communication. Modern science has learned to tap the latent powers of nature to transform our outer lives. Yet at a cosmic level, there is a deeper energy that runs everything in the universe, pulsating everywhere.
This universal energy is called “Vayu”, which is not just a force of the wind or air element, but the Kriya Shakti or power of action that governs all inanimate and animate forces. It is the source of all cosmic powers, not just wind as a force in the atmosphere. Vayu is inherent in space or Akasha as its force of movement and expression.
Vayu manifests as lightning, electrical or propulsive force (vidyut) in all of its forms. This is not just the lightning that arises from clouds but the kinetic energy that permeates all space and time. Vayu is the energy operative from a subatomic level to the very Big Bang behind the universe as a whole. Tapping into that supreme cosmic power is what the methodology of Yoga is all about.
Vayu at an individual level becomes prana, which is not just the breath but the life force that holds all our motivations and sustains our inner strength and will power. It is not just our physical prana but the prana of mind and ultimately the prana of consciousness itself, the universal life that manifests through the cosmic vibration OM.
Hanuman as the son of Vayu represents the cosmic Vayu manifesting through our individual prana. This occurs when we dedicate our lives to the Divine Self or Rama within us, letting go of our attachment to the external world of appearances and connecting to the unlimited potentials we have.
Hanuman endows us with the Atma-shakti or Self-power through which we can realize our highest potential and accomplish what is magical and transformational. He grants us fearlessness, self-confidence, daring and boldness to attempt the impossible and succeed.
The cosmic Vayu is inherently a force of intelligence, linking us to the cosmic intelligence that aligns all minds together in an interconnected network of thought. That is why Hanuman is the most wise and observant, holding the power of buddhi, the discriminating inner intelligence that reveals the highest truth.


Hanuman and the power of Yoga

This cosmic Vayu is the true power of Yoga. It gives flexibility of body, boundless vitality, indomitable will power, and dynamic concentration of mind. Our highest prana is to reach out and merge into the immortal Prana, which is to dedicate ourselves as Hanuman to Rama, to offer our mortality or temporal existence to the immortal and infinite.
Hanuman grants all yoga siddhis of movement, energy, will power and wisdom, extending to the highest Self-realization, allowing us to master all cosmic energies.
Hanuman is the conduit of the power of Rama as the universal Self. Rama represents the Self who guides all nature – through which the wind blows, out of which the Sun and Moon move, which holds the Earth in place through gravity.
The real yogi works through that cosmic Vayu and universal Prana, in attunement and harmony with the whole of life.
The true bhakta or devotee surrenders to the Divine will which is the motivating force of Vayu, the power of Rama behind it.
Vayu’s vibration is OM or Pranava, the primal sound behind all creation and the source of all mantras.
The Upanishads teach us that Vayu is the directly perceivable form of Brahman, the Cosmic Reality.


Becoming Hanuman

To become Hanuman we must awaken to our inner nature as a portion of cosmic consciousness, a servant of the Universal Self that is Sri Rama. Each one of us has the power of the entire universe within us, but only when we surrender to Lord Rama within.
We can only recognize this when we become aware of our inner Self, what the Upanishads call the antaryami or inner controller. Hanuman is the force of Rama working within us, the strength of our innermost self that is the ruler of al and the master of the universe.
It is Hanuman alone who can discover Sita Devi. Sita represents the deeper Self-knowledge or Atma Vidya, through which Rama or the self can be fully realised.
Sita is the feminine principle of space and receptivity that the cosmic Vayu depends upon and must protect. Without Hanuman, we cannot find Sita, and Rama cannot fulfill his destiny of the highest dharma.
Let us not forget our own deeper cosmic energy in our fascination with the latest information technology that is but its shadow. Hanuman reveals to us the way of transcendence, so that we can work with all the energies of the universe, the cosmic mind and the transcendent Self. With the power of Hanuman we can master our new information technology and bring a true Ram Rajya into the world, which is about aligning our human society with the universal Dharma and supreme Self of Sri Rama!

Jai Sri Ram! Jai Jai Hanuman!







Thursday, April 18, 2019

Hygiene can be overdone


  










Watch a Diving Bird Pluck a Suckerfish Off a Shark | Nat Geo Wild

  

 Watch a Diving Bird Pluck a Suckerfish Off a Shark

Divers off Cabo San Lucas, Mexico captured the only known footage showing a bird called a cormorant pulling remoras, or suckerfish, off a whale shark.








Save the Bees

  





The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions



The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions

Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain’s ravenous energy needs.






Pablo Alfieri for Quanta Magazine

Emily Singer

Former Senior Writer


August 23, 2016

BiologyEconomicsNeurosciencePodcast



Humans often make bad decisions. If you like Snickers more than Milky Way, it seems obvious which candy bar you’d pick, given a choice of the two. Traditional economic models follow this logical intuition, suggesting that people assign a value to each choice — say, Snickers: 10, Milky Way: 5 — and select the top scorer. But our decision-making system is subject to glitches.

In one recent experiment, Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at New York University, and collaborators asked people to choose among a variety of candy bars, including their favorite — say, a Snickers. If offered a Snickers, a Milky Way and an Almond Joy, participants would always choose the Snickers. But if they were offered 20 candy bars, including a Snickers, the choice became less clear. They would sometimes pick something other than the Snickers, even though it was still their favorite. When Glimcher would remove all the choices except the Snickers and the selected candy, participants would wonder why they hadn’t chosen their favorite.

Economists have spent more than 50 years cataloging irrational choices like these. Nobel Prizes have been earned; millions of copies of Freakonomics have been sold. But economists still aren’t sure why they happen. “There had been a real cottage industry in how to explain them and lots of attempts to make them go away,” said Eric Johnson, a psychologist and co-director of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University. But none of the half-dozen or so explanations are clear winners, he said.

In the last 15 to 20 years, neuroscientists have begun to peer directly into the brain in search of answers. “Knowing something about how information is represented in the brain and the computational principles of the brain helps you understand why people make decisions how they do,” said Angela Yu, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego.

Glimcher is using both the brain and behavior to try to explain our irrationality. He has combined results from studies like the candy bar experiment with neuroscience data — measurements of electrical activity in the brains of animals as they make decisions — to develop a theory of how we make decisions and why that can lead to mistakes. combined results from studies like the candy bar experiment with neuroscience data — measurements of electrical activity in the brains of animals as they make decisions — to develop a theory of how

Glimcher has been one of the driving forces in the still young field of neuroeconomics. His theory merges far-reaching research in brain activity, neuronal networks, fMRI and human behavior. “He’s famous for arguing that neuroscience and economics should be brought together,” said Nathaniel Daw, a neuroscientist at Princeton University. One of Glimcher’s most important contributions, Daw said, has been figuring out how to quantify abstract notions such as value and study them in the lab.

In a new working paper, Glimcher and his co-authors — Kenway Louie, also of NYU, and Ryan Webb of the University of Toronto — argue that their neuroscience-based model outperforms standard economic theory at explaining how people behave when faced with lots of choices. “The neural model, described in biology and tested in neurons, works well to describe something economists couldn’t explain,” Glimcher said.

At the core of the model lies the brain’s insatiable appetite. The brain is the most metabolically expensive tissue in the body. It consumes 20 percent of our energy despite taking up only 2 to 3 percent of our mass. Because neurons are so energy-hungry, the brain is a battleground where precision and efficiency are opponents. Glimcher argues that the costs of boosting our decision-making precision outweigh the benefits. Thus we’re left to be confounded by the choices of the modern American cereal aisle.

Glimcher’s proposal has attracted interest from both economists and neuroscientists, but not everyone is sold. “I think it’s exciting but at this point remains a hypothesis,” said Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. Neuroeconomics is still a young field; scientists don’t even agree on what part of the brain makes decisions, let alone how.

So far, Glimcher has shown that his theory works under specific conditions, like those of the candy bar experiment. He aims to expand that range, searching for other Freakonomics-esque mistakes and using them to test his model. “We are aiming for a grand unified theory of choice,” he said.


 
Courtesy of Paul Glimcher
Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at NYU, has developed a model for how we make economic decisions and why we sometimes make poor ones. He’s shown here with a device that tracks eye movement, which scientists use to study decision-making in animals.



Paul Glimcher, a neuroscientist at NYU, has developed a model for how we make economic 



Divide and Conquer

The brain is a power-hungry organ; neurons are constantly sending each other information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes or action potentials. Just as with an electrical burst, prepping and firing these signals take a lot of energy.

In the 1960s, scientists proposed that the brain dealt with this challenge by encoding information as efficiently as possible, a model called the efficient coding hypothesis. It predicts that neurons will encode data using the fewest possible spikes, just as communication networks strive to transmit information in the fewest bits.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, scientists showed that this principleis indeed at work in the visual system. The brain efficiently encodes the visual world by ignoring predictable information and focusing on the surprising stuff. If one part of a wall is yellow, chances are the rest is also yellow, and neurons can gloss over the details of that section. But a giant red splotch on the wall is unexpected, and neurons will pay special attention to it.

Glimcher proposes that the brain’s decision-making machinery works the same way. Imagine a simple decision-making scenario: a monkey choosing between two cups of juice. For simplicity’s sake, assume the monkey’s brain represents each choice with a single neuron. The more attractive the choice is, the faster the neuron fires. The monkey then compares neuron-firing rates to make his selection.

The first thing the experimenter does is present the monkey with an easy choice: a teaspoon of yummy juice versus an entire jug. The teaspoon neuron might fire one spike per second while the jug neuron fires 100 spikes per second. In that case, it’s easy to tell the difference between the two options; one neuron sounds like a ticking clock, the other the beating wings of a dragonfly.

The situation gets muddled when the monkey is then offered the choice between a full jug of juice and one that’s nearly full. A neuron might represent that newest offer with 80 spikes per second. It’s much more challenging for the monkey to distinguish between a neuron firing 80 spikes per second and 100 spikes per second. That’s like telling the difference between the dragonfly’s flutter and the hum of a locust.

Glimcher proposes that the brain avoids this problem by recalibrating the scale to best represent the new choice. The neuron representing the almost-full jug — now the worst of the two choices — scales down to a much lower firing rate. Once again it’s easy for the monkey to differentiate between the two choices.

Glimcher’s model, based on an earlier model known as divisive normalization, spells out the math behind this recalibration process. It proposes that neurons can send more efficient messages if they encode in their sequence of spikes only the relative differences among the choices. “Choice sets have a lot of shared information; they are not random and independent,” Glimcher said. “Normalization is sucking out redundant information so that the information coming out is as relevant as possible, wasting as little energy as possible.” He notes that engineers, who are used to working with adaptive systems, aren’t surprised by this idea. But people who study choice often are.

According to Daw, “What’s great about divisive normalization is that it takes these principles we know from vision and applies them to value in ways that make sense but are out of the box.”

The juice example above is theoretical, but Glimcher and collaborators have recorded electrical activity from monkeys’ brains as they make different kinds of choices. These studies show that decision-making neurons behave as the model predicts. If scientists increase the value of one choice, the equivalent of swapping out a so-so Milky Way with a delicious Snickers, the neurons representing that choice increase their firing rate. (Scientists had already known about this pattern.)

If you increase the value of the other choices — king-size the non-Snickers options, which decreases the relative value of the Snickers — the model predicts that its firing rate should go down. Glimcher and collaborators have shown that neurons in part of the brain called the parietal cortex do indeed behave this way, adding physiological support for the model. “The divisive normalization function did a superb job of describing the data in all conditions,” Glimcher said. “It supports the idea that neurons are doing something identical to, or darn close to, divisive normalization.”

The system works well most of the time. But just like the temporary blindness we experience when exiting a dark movie theater into bright sunlight, our decision-making machinery can sometimes be overwhelmed. That may be particularly true with the staggering variety of choices we’re often faced with in the modern world. Glimcher and collaborators use these types of mistakes to test their model. The researchers are now examining whether these same algorithms can predict human error in other scenarios in which people tend to make poor choices.


Economic Insurgency

Neuroeconomics is still a young field, filled with questions and controversy. Glimcher isn’t the only neuroscientist to have found signs of economic value in the brain. Scientists have measured these neural signatures in different brain regions, using both non-invasive brain imaging in humans and direct brain recordings in animals. But researchers disagree over which part of the brain makes the actual decision. What part of the brain calculates that the Snickers bar rates higher than the Milky Way? “There is no single accepted concept of where and how decisions — the comparison of values — are made,” Padoa-Schioppa said.

Glimcher’s neural recording experiments took place in the parietal cortex, but Padoa-Schioppa is “skeptical that the parietal cortex has anything to do with economic decisions.” Damaging the parietal cortex doesn’t impair value-based choices, he said, while damaging the frontal lobe does. For that reason, Padoa-Schioppa is somewhat dubious of Glimcher’s model. When it comes to a neuroscience-based model of choice, “at this point, no one has a compelling theory,” Padoa-Schioppa said.

Other scientists like the general concept of divisive normalization but suggest it can be refined to account for more complex aspects of human decision-making. Yu, for example, says it works well for simple decisions but may falter under more sophisticated conditions. “The divisive normalization model does make sense, but the experimental setting in which they were probing decision-making is very simplistic,” Yu said. “To account for the broader array of phenomena in human decision-making, we need to augment the model and look at more complex decision-making scenarios.”

The divisive normalization framework emerged from work in the visual system. Yu suggests that applying it to decision-making is more complex. Scientists know a lot about the information that the visual system is trying to encode: a two-dimensional scene painted in color, light and shadow. Natural scenes conform to a set of general, easy-to-calculate properties that the brain can use to filter out redundant information. In simple terms, if one pixel is green, its neighboring pixels are more likely to be green than red.

But the decision-making system operates under more complex constraints and has to consider many different types of information. For example, a person might choose which house to buy depending on its location, size or style. But the relative importance of each of these factors, as well as their optimal value — city or suburbs, Victorian or modern — is fundamentally subjective. It varies from person to person and may even change for an individual depending on their stage of life. “There is not one simple, easy-to-measure mathematical quantity like redundancy that decision scientists universally agree on as being a key factor in the comparison of competing alternatives,” Yu said.

She suggests that uncertainty in how we value different options is behind some of our poor decisions. “If you’ve bought a lot of houses, you’ll evaluate houses differently than if you were a first-time homebuyer,” Yu said. “Or if your parents bought a house during the housing crisis, it may later affect how you buy a house.”

Moreover, Yu argues, the visual and decision-making systems have different end-goals. “Vision is a sensory system whose job is to recover as much information as possible from the world,” she said. “Decision-making is about trying to make a decision you’ll enjoy. I think the computational goal is not just information, it’s something more behaviorally relevant like total enjoyment.”

For many of us, the main concern over decision-making is practical — how can we make better decisions? Glimcher said that his research has helped him develop specific strategies. “Rather than pick what I hope is the best, instead I now always start by eliminating the worst element from a choice set,” he said, reducing the number of options to something manageable, like three. “I find that this really works, and it derives from our study of the math. Sometimes you learn something simple from the most complex stuff, and it really can improve your decision-making.”

This article was reprinted on TheAtlantic.com.

Note: This article was updated on September 1, 2016, to clarify that Glimcher’s model was derived from an earlier model called divisive normalization.






Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-neuroscience-behind-bad-decisions-20160823/