High Horses Are Meat Too, Vegans, So Stop Riding Them to Death

"In the strict scientific sense we all feed on death - even vegetarians."

Mr. Spock

For the longest time, more out of pure laziness than any other excuse, I have taken the word of a vegan acquaintance of mine and assumed that veganism is very much better for the environment than eating meat. At first blush, the maths do check out - farm animals belong to a higher trophic level & them smelly cows do fart a lot - so logically, meat production necessitates a higher burden on our resources than, for example, the humble workaday cabbage. The full vegan pitch is far longer and far more irritating, but that's really not my job to present it - or at least, it isn't anymore. While I lack the resolve to commit myself (and my family) to a vegan diet, I do try however to be mindful of the amount of delicious flesh I consume everyday and visit a local vegetarian joint semi-regularly. Whenever the topic of veganism and sustainability comes up, I just repeat what I learned from that vegan acquaintance of mine and shared much of the same references he shared with me. I recognise that I am holding out because bacon is fucking delicious of selfish reasons but I am all for more people embracing veganism if they are willing to take the plunge - though admittedly, I cannot reliably quantify the carbon footprint that will result from the combined annoyance experienced by us omnivores with the population surge of even more vegan prats, so there's that caveat.

Anyway, I have no cause to question what my herbivorous friend had told me (for years) until that same friend confronted me again regarding my choice to stick with a omnivore's diet this week on Twitter. Now, I am aware of the backfire effect - people confronted about their beliefs tended to dig in and double down rather than change their minds - and I am sure that that is precisely what occurred to me as that vegan friend prattled on and on about what a irresponsible jerk I am for not giving up meat.

However, in the process of backfiring and digging my trenches, I was forced to unearth and re-examine a lot of "facts" I had taken for granted and parroted in the veganism slash sustainability debates and in the process, I learned, for one thing, more about how alarmist vegans are great at cherry-picking stats and numbers to inflate their own contribution and sense of importance to the environment. I told that vegan friend that what he was doing to me was probably futile, given that I already agree with him on his talking points but because he couldn't shut up about how shitty a person I am for enjoying a chicken dinner, I went the extra mile to vindicate my own position. The sum result of all his high-horsing is that I now hold a less favourable position on veganism. Nice job breaking it, vegan.

The reason supplied to me for my tongue lashing from the vegan was because I tweeted a photo of my dinner. In the photo was a cut of chicken katsu I fried up myself. The vegan said,

And it triggered an urge in me to punch him in the teeth. True story.

"Trigger" is a word that is appropriated by the internet from psychiatric language and in my line of work, we usually use it to refer to "trauma triggers" and it is a serious thing. Judging from the vegan's words, I sincerely doubt that he was "triggered" in the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder sense of the word (just as I sincerely doubt he was actually diagnosed with PTSD). Furthermore, I pointed out to him that he is completely surrounded by "triggers" everywhere he goes considering that more than 95% of people eat meat and images of meat permeates the world. He should be a nervous wreck by now if he was genuinely triggered. Way to go in cheapening the experience of shell-shocked veterans and victims of sexual assault.

Speaking of "triggers" (in the annoying internet jackasses sense of the word), I went out of my way and ate a huge slab of sirloin steak last night after having abstained from beef for months - as a reward to myself for having suffered a bout of vegan evangelism. In fact, the last time I ate an honest-to-goodness beef steak was literally years ago. I am not even joking here: all that talk about the unsustainability of beef actually "triggered" me to crave for a medium-rare side of cow which I have been missing.

Here is what I had last night,

"Vegetarian: A person who eats only side dishes." ~Gerald Lieberman

But let's get to the meat of this post, which are mostly things which environmento-vegan rangers tend to gloss over or omit in their guilt-tripping sales pitch, in no particular order:




Fertilisers.

One of the basic things we can all agree on is that when applied intelligently, mixed farming (crops plus livestock) is the more sustainable model in food production. One very obvious advantage is that manure from the animals can be used to fertilise the plants but according to this report by the USDA,  only a measly 5% fraction of total planted acreage even received manure and it's not because manure is in short supply. In fact, the US is drowning in so much shit that it threatens to be an environmental disaster if handled improperly. Manure is cheaper than commercial synthetic fertiliser, so what gives?

The reason why all that poo doesn't get spread around more is because 52% of harvested crop acres in the US are on farms with no livestock production at all and the cost of transporting that much crap is proving to be a deterrent for most farmers. So, they settled on using synthetic fertilisers. And if vegans have their way, we would end up fertilising 100% of our crops with synthetic fertiliser since they want to to put an end to animal farming.

And what is synthetic fertiliser made out of? Non-renewable resources like natural gas. That's sustainable alright.



The Emission Impact of Farm Animals Versus Plants.

Cows and sheep are flatulent and they fart more than soy and corn. Agreed. But what are the numbers really like, and how do we come to a more nuanced understanding of the issue without resorting to ultimata of utter meat rejection?

Here is a chart on production emissions (including emissions from processing, transportation, et cetera after the food leave the farms) from the EWG,

Okay, what are people doing to potatoes after they leave the farm?

Lamb meat is the greatest offender here, with the production of 39.2 kilos of CO₂ per kilo of consumed food with beef winning silver in the agricultural fart Olympics at 27 kilos. The reason why lamb generate so much emissions per kilo is because they produce less edible meat relative to the sheep's live weight - so, aside from putting a stop to lamb chops we should really boycott wool clothing as well. Also, lamb makes up less than 1% of the meat consumed by Americans anyway so giving up sheep-meat isn't going to matter much at all.

You'll notice immediately that after ruminants (hoofed animals with 4-chambered fart-generating stomachs), the emission levels dropped precipitously when we look at other sources of meat protein like pork and chicken. And just eyeballing the chart, you can tell that pork produces about 6 times and chicken about 3 times as much emissions as most plant-based food. Which is still significant, if you ignore the fact that meat is faaar more calorie-dense compared to vegetables and grains. I mean, if you stop eating beef, you can’t replace a kilogram of it (which has 2,280 calories) with a kilogram of broccoli (340 calories). You have to replace it with 6.7 kilograms of broccoli to make up the caloric difference.

So, a fairer and more science-literate comparison would be to look at emissions per 1,000 calories,

Perspective, bitches.

You'll notice right away that tomatoes and broccoli farming actually produce MORE emissions than farmed salmon, pork, chicken, canned tuna, milk, yogurt, cheese and eggs. But do you hear vegans bothering people who eat brocolli and tomatoes? No. Why? Studies showed that it's because they are oversized, wet, flopping hypocrites.

Of course, vegans will moan "What about methane?!" Yes, methane is way worse than CO₂ when it comes to comparative impact on climate change.

I prefer chicken anyway.

You can see in the above graph that chicken produces nil enteric methane emissions. That's because physiologically, birds don't need to fart. While I can sort of see the point for abstaining or decreasing beef intake, I don't see any compelling environmental reason to give up poultry at all.

There is a reason why scaremongering documentaries like Cowspiracy place a lot of focus on beef production (aside from embarrassingly bad puns) because ruminant farming is an order of magnitude worse than poultry farming. While it is not outright lying, it is propaganda that downplays the fact that ruminant farming is exceptional in their negative impact on the environment and presenting numbers which look dire on face value, while playing pretendsies that a vegan diet is always better - ignoring the fact that pork and chicken can actually be better choices than some vegetarian alternatives. But of course, he chose to badger me because of my chicken katsu instead of giving his equally insufferable vegan friends friends pain for their marinara gluten-free pasta dinners.

Will my vegan friend give up tomatoes and broccoli and start eating chicken and pork again when faced with this evidence? I don't think so.



Vegan Culture's Obsession with Organic Farming, Fad Superfoods and Fighting GMO's.

There is no hard way to determine just how many vegetarians and vegans buy into organic farming - and how many of them unfairly malign the use of genetically modified organisms (GMO), but one can't help but notice a huge overlap in ideology there if one frequents blogs or pages which advocate plant-centric diets. It makes sense since they generally approach orthorexic levels of finickiness and scrutiny when it comes to what they stuff their faces with.

Organic farming produces about 20 to 30% less yield compared to conventional farming practices. That means that for every 100 kilos of zucchinis we produce through conventional farming practices, we can only produce 70 to 80 organic zucchinis.

Also, GMO use had also lead to higher yields and more sustainable farming practices like decreased reliance on pesticides and yes, prevented 203 million tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere from less soil disturbance as well. If anything, I think genetically modifying our food organisms will be how we eventually solve the sustainability problem.

And every new "superfood" that these eat-right clowns buy into (quinoa, chia seeds,
açaí berries, goji berries, et cetera) will in turn create demand for these products and thus, cause the opening of more farms to accommodate these specialised crops. Yes, non-vegans do get sucked into these fads as well but these are all technically plant-based food.

Now, my vegan friend may not necessarily buy into organic farming practices (and all its associated woo) and fad diets nor is he against GMO, as far as I know. I bring this up because this is one of those unquantified elements that put into perspective how the vegan movement isn't necessarily as great as they say it is when it comes to sustainability. Individual vegans may even be worse than an average omnivore like me who is pro-GMO, anti-organic farming and gets most of my meat protein from chicken - particularly if that vegan eats a lot of tomatoes and broccoli.



Vegan Evangelism Isn't Going to Work.

I have no doubt that one day in the distant radiant future, humanity will no longer butcher any animal for their food (I am wagering on flawless, sustainable lab grown meat) but until that day arrives, we will be eating our hoofed and beaked friends for many decades or even centuries to come. So, on a pragmatic and practical level, I asked him how successful he is as spreading the Good News about veganism.

His reply was this:

In his mind, rousing inspirational music must be playing while a cape billows dramatically behind him.

That tells me that I am dealing with someone who puts ideology above actually focusing on doing what is actually effective.

After much dodging, he later said he had only convinced just 3 or 4 people to adopt veganism in all the years of his "activism". I have no way of knowing if the converts did so due to his highly annoying proselytising or if those 3 or 4 individuals were going to go vegan anyway, but I will generously give him the benefit of the doubt. Still, at a rate of about one conversion a year, he would still have done almost no good at the end of his life, however prolonged he imagine it would be thanks to his vegan diet. He would have annoyed a great many people though.

We also know that throwing evidence in the face of people largely doesn't work, as this study on the effectiveness of vaccination information campaigns suggests (that article even mentions the "backfire effect"). I mean, I already buy the party line that veganism is more sustainable and environmentally-friendly and I still refuse to adopt vegetarianism because it meant that I would have to sacrifice my quality of life. This is a losing battle. I ought to know - I counsel alcoholics and nicotine addicts everyday in my day job. I am technically at the "precontemplation" stage in regards to giving up meat and if I already agree that meat-eating is less sustainable than eating greens, then the right thing to do is to step back and be available if I actually want more information - but instead, this vegan friend's persistence had actually caused me to be less convinced than before.

Likewise, burning fossil fuels is bad but hardly anyone is willing to give up the convenience of modern transportations or electric lights. The solution to that is creating more fuel-efficient cars (or developing equally good electric cars), inventing more energy-saving light bulbs, investing in nuclear power or resorting to renewable energy sources like solar or wind. Doing the equivalent of screaming on street corners with a sandwich board pronouncing the doom of the world if we do not "repent" by stopping the use of cars or the consumption of meat is actually counter-productive (especially if it comes with insults implying I am irresponsible or evil or smelly) and it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature: most of us will do what is easy rather than what is necessary. So real, practical solutions would have to come at no cost to our comfort in order for them be popular enough to make a significant difference. Adoption rate is key and king.



Veganism is not the Solution.

There are a million aspects of our lives which we can tweak to reduce our impact on the environment and on climate change but vegans like this Twitter friend of mine who harrassed me are disproportionately focused on their personal demons in their advocacy (meat, in this case).

You know what is far, far worse than eating meat? Having children. You can drive all the Priuses and eat all the kale in the world but that is but a drop in the ocean when you compare that to the carbon footprint of reproduction. I think all these vegans making sustainability arguments should sterilise themselves if they think that us omnivores aren't doing enough for the environment because they too are doing a half-assed job as well. It brings to mind this parable that Mencius told about a soldier who ran 50-paces away from the battlefield calling his fellow who ran 100-paces a coward (五十步笑百步).

In fact, I did say as much. I told that vegan friend to go kill himself if he really cares about the environment so much. To that, he said,

I nearly asked him if it "triggered" him because he attempted or contemplated suicide before,
but I realised that I have stopped caring by this point.

We had been enjoying an omnivorous diet since time immemorial and we never had a problem with animal husbandry until recent times because - get this - meat is not the problem. It is a herring and it is red. The reason why meat farming is unsustainable (and eventually, crops farming as well) is because this is actually the toll that the continuously rising human population is having on this planet.

That's the fucking problem. Fix that.



Conclusion.

I try to minimise my own effect on the environment whenever I can if it does not come at a sacrifice in my quality of life. For example, I reject plastic bags whenever I shop but I'd still accept one if I really need it. I am mindful of the amount of meat I consume, both for environmental and health reasons. After the sialic acid Neu5Gc in red meat was found last year to be implicated in the increased risk of cancer, I have further reduced my already infrequent indulgence in red meat. When I bought home appliances recently for my new house, I tried to get the most energy efficient ones. And I decided to only have one child, and that alone already qualifies me for a higher horse than pretty much every vegan who birthed two kids or more. I make many of these little decisions everyday that counts towards my total impact on our world but to demonise one aspect of my life - my homecooked chicken katsu (which was delicious, by the way) - is incredibly misguided, unhelpful and tone deaf.

I am an atheist and I believe that this is the only life I will ever get to experience. I certainly don't intend to live it without all the reasonable comfort and pleasures I can get out of it. I don't want the trouble of limiting my culinary and epicurean experience, making sure I am getting enough Vitamin B12 through supplementation, or being a perpetual pain of the ass of a guest with "special considerations" at every group meal, party or wedding - all in service of a poorly thought out, mostly masturbatory non-solution to a serious issue.



Thinks vegans are pricks now,
k0k s3n w4i

Going Bump at Night

"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"She's been having hallucinations and thought she's possessed," the medical officer on the other end told me. "We are admitting her for observation - in case it is really endometritis - but we would appreciate it if you can come and review her. She seems distressed though. Afraid. Especially after we told her that she would be admitted."

18 year old Malay woman. Just given birth to her first child a few days ago. Judging from the brief blurb my O&G colleague gave me, it might mean postpartum psychosis. It was 10 PM and I was not thrilled considering that I had to chase my last postpartum psychosis patient down a long hallway to stop her from "rescuing" her baby from the nursery.

I quickly found the ward and the patient's bed and I saw that both the patient's husband and mother was helping her to settle down. I know I should never make snap judgements from simple once-overs but the girl I was suppose to see appeared a lot saner than I thought she would be. Her name, for the purpose of this article, is Ruya.

After introducing myself, I interviewed everyone and this was the story I was given: When Ruya was twelve, her grandmother witnessed her rising from her bed after she had fallen asleep. She then tried to leave her room when her frightened grandmother gave her an urgent shake, jolting  her out of her blank, trance-like state. Ruya herself was surprised to find herself out of her bed and remembered none of her actions preceding her awakening. "It was like waking up from sleep," she told me.

Throughout the years, this odd nocturnal behaviour recurred alongside frequent nightmares. Ruya's baffled and terrified family then sought out the help of bomohs, shamans and medicine men who confirmed their worst suspicions - Ruya was being plagued by djinns and demons which possesses her to steal her away. However, nothing these witch doctors do could free Ruya from their clutches. "The spirits are too strong," they said in their failure.

Finally, they came into the care of a Muslim imam - a man they refer to simply as the Ustaz. The Ustaz gave them the same supernatural diagnosis and have told them that over the years, the spirits plaguing Ruya had multiplied in numbers due to the machinations of vengeful bomohs they have stopped patronising. And, with the help of this imam, the incidence of grand-theft-Ruya decreased as she grew older. Then it stopped altogether. Impressed by the spiritual mojo that this imam displayed, the family converted to Islam because clearly, it is the One True Religion™, is it not? Why else would Ruya's night visitors loosen their grips on her?

Keeping my face as straight as I could, I asked one very critical question: Did any of these "paranormal activities" occurred when Ruya is awake?

"No."

"My O&G colleague told me that you appeared very distressed and upset that you have to be admitted in this hospital. Why is that?" I asked further.

Ruya said that that's because she was afraid that she might have to stay in the hospital overnight alone. The Ustaz have apparently told her that she must never ever be alone or the spooks and djinns will take the opportunity to assault her again.

"Please tell O&G to discharge me tomorrow! Or my mother will have to sleep here with me for another night!"

At that moment, I felt very angry but since I'm a professional, I smiled instead. I started off by telling them that there are a lot of schools of knowledge and I happen to be from a school of medicine. I told them that what I know might bring Ruya some relief and proceeded to explain that Ruya is (or was) a somnambulist i.e. she walks in her sleep. Sleepwalking is very common in children and as a child grows older, the episodes will naturally decrease in frequency, as observed in Ruya's case.

After my brief lecture, Ruya's mother thanked me and mistakenly addressed me with the honorific of "Ustaz" (which I declined politely). Ruya's husband however incorporated the information I have given him into his worldview and agreed that the devious ghosts and ghoulies have been using sleepwalking to lure Ruya out of her bedroom. Holy crap, you can never win with these people!

Realising that this is a battle I don't want to fight so late in the evening, I politely excused myself, went down to the labour room and told the O&G team that they have just referred a case of sleepwalking to me. I gave Ruya an appointment, but not for her somnambulism.

Anyway, how did the imam "know" that it was evil spirits that's plaguing Ruya? Was he lying or did he fool himself into thinking he is able to detect supernatural entities just because he went to Qur'an school or something? And boy he must have considered it a great success to convert an entire family to his brand of magical thinking. Had Ruya's family consulted a Christian pastor or a Taoist priest just as her symptoms were abating, they would be following a very different god today.

I am frequently told that I should leave people's beliefs alone because, why take them away if it comforts them? Ruya is one of the reasons why. Thanks to pure superstitions peddled by the shamans and the imam, a young woman had become so afraid of the world around her that she must be accompanied by family members at all times. And this is not the first time I have one of my patients harmed by one of these charlatans.

This is the 21st fucking century, people. Stop being afraid of the dark.



He who bumps back,
k0k s3n w4i

Teach the Controversy, Teach the Katu's Origin of Mankind Story

"We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation."

Lily Tomlin

I was honeymooning in Laos with the Crazy Cat Lady™ earlier this year in February and on the 11th, while exploring the city of Luang Prabang, we came across the TAEC (Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre) which is an independent non-profit museum that aims to collect, preserve, and interpret the traditional arts and lifestyles of the country’s many and diverse ethnic groups. Even if you are not into tribal culturalism, the air-conditioning here is a welcome respite from the dusty Laotian dry season heat. Or monsoon rains, depending on when you're in the country.

The most interesting exhibit there was a pair of black wood carvings of a dog and an alleged woman which summarily represented the origins of the Katu people. It was said that long ago, a great flood covered the world which killed everything except a woman named Anoi Amek and a dog called Apuu Paner. The dog wished to marry the woman but she - quite understandably - refused the amorous pup. She said that she would only marry the dog if he fetched fire from the top of some mountain and in the first two attempts, the dog failed as the fire he carried was extinguished by the rivers and streams he crossed in his return. At the third attempt, he captured the fire in a gourd tied around his neck and with that prize, won Anoi Amek's hand in marriage. They somehow managed to produce human children who later intermarried, giving rise to the Katu people.

I think that there should be some deleted scenes here preceding the birth of their children but never mind that now.

You can see the fire gourd hanging from the neck of Apuu Paner.

Of course, aside from the impossibility of a global flood, fire surviving in a watertight gourd, a dog which can understand the concept of matrimony, and fertile human children resulting from the union between a Homo sapiens and a Canis lupus familiaris, this myth is no more fantastic than how some Middle Eastern desert people believed that a deity created the first man from dirt and the first woman from his rib, and then commanded them to never eat fruits from a particular tree. A talking snake supposedly tricked them later into disobeying, resulting in their creator cursing them and banishing them from paradise, after which they managed to populate the entire Earth with their incestuous descendants.

If creationists argue that we must teach creationism or intelligent design in schools as a competing theory to evolution, then we must teach the controversy in churches regarding the origins of mankind! It's only fair.



Advocate for the diversity of bullshit,
k0k s3n w4i

The Malaysian Pork Choc Controversy

"O you who have believed, eat from the good things which We have provided for you and be grateful to Allah if it is [indeed] Him that you worship. He has only forbidden to you dead animals, blood, the flesh of swine, and that which has been dedicated to other than Allah . But whoever is forced [by necessity], neither desiring [it] nor transgressing [its limit], there is no sin upon him. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful."

Verses 172 to 173, Surat Al-Baqarah (The Cow), Al-Qur'an

Malaysia, aside from having the recent distinction of being that country which lost a commercial jumbo jet in the middle of the Indian Ocean, is also a country with a Muslim majority populace and the shadow of Islam looms over all aspects of Malaysian life, regardless whether one believes in Islam or not. For example, many concerts by international artistes were protested by fundamentalist Muslims in this country and several of them were outright called off - the most famous being Ke$ha's last minute cancellation of her show in October last year. Affecting me personally is how I can no longer enjoy my favourite instant ramen after they changed the recipe of its condiments to cater to the halal market, destroying its awesome flavour in the process.

The Malaysian halal label.

Speaking of "halal" (حلال), the Arabic word basically means "permissible" in Arabic and a significant part of the concept focuses on the dietary restrictions of Muslims - much like the kosher laws of Judaism. There are a variety of comestibles that Muslims are not suppose to consume and according to the Qur'anic verses 2:173, 5:3, 5:90, and 6:12, the list includes,

• Pork
• Blood
• Animals slaughtered in the name of anyone or anything beside Allah, including anything offered or sacrificed to an idolatrous altar, saint or divine personages that are not Allah.
• Carrion or carcasses of dead animal
• Food over which Allah's name was not pronounced
• Intoxicants, including alcohol
• Animals that have been strangled, beaten (to death), killed by a fall, gored (to death), or savaged by a beast of prey (unless finished off by a human)

As with every other aspect of Islam, it is a Serious Business™. I mean, they have prosecuted two hapless bloggers for daring to invite Muslims to break their fast on bak-kut-teh during Ramadan last year in a tasteless if harmless captioned photo! If the mere idea of eating pork inflames them so much, imagine the outrage they will display when some products of a brand of famous chocolate bars that are ubiquitous in Malaysia were found to contain pork in them - which totally happened a few days ago.

The Malaysian Ministry of Health's official press statement.

Okay, for those who are unable to read Malay, the gist of it is that the Ministry of Health's Food Safety and Quality division blew the whistle on two batches of products from the British multinational confectionery company, Cadbury, after DNA testing found porcine DNA in them. One was designated Cadbury Dairy Milk Hazelnut and the other is Cadbury Dairy Milk Roast Almond (their batch numbers given in the statement above). The Ministry also said that all halal certification issues still lies in the purview of the Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM).

The rest of the statement is a very thoughtful (but strangely out of place) review of the recent X-Men: Days of Future Past film and how our Minister of Health really enjoyed James McAvoy's performance as young Charles Xavier and hopes that he will reprise his role in X-Men: Apocalypse. That's like totally the truth, bro.

The media statement from JAKIM.

In direct response to the Ministry of Health's published statement, Dato' Haji Othman Mustapha, Director General of the Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM), officially suspended the halal certification for the Cadbury products in question. He also said that investigations will be launched to find out how these goddamn pigs mysteriously turned up in chocolate.

One possibility is that industrial food packaging sometimes uses lubricants and stabilisers known as stearates, which are made from derivatives of animal products (including swine).

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health will do more DNA testing on more of Cadbury's products to see how deeply the contamination runs. I don't know about you but I find it amusing that entire labs are performing DNA tests on junk food.

And now that we are on the subject of labs,

The lab report.

The above report basically states that a sample (here labelled as milk chocolate with hazelnut from Ca[d]bury) that was sent to the National Public Health Lab on the 27th of February, 2014 was found to contain porcine DNA.

As this issue only came to public light on May 24, it meant that the Muslims of Malaysia have been unwittingly putting dirty, disgusting, super-haram chocolate-covered pork into their bodies while the Ministry of Health sat quietly on this information for almost 3 whole months! It says right in the report that the sample was analysed on the day of receipt, so yeah.

Now, I think that Malaysian Muslims would - to a substantial degree - put their trusts in the halal label because it helps them differentiate halal food from the haram ones. I wonder how much trust they still invest in that label now in light of this issue. They knew the chocolates were not halal since February after all.

Of course, a further question one might ask is, how much guarantee does the halal label even offer in the first place? Just look back to the list of non-halal food I have provided earlier. Are any tests performed on food to look for blood contaminants? Is it even possible to avoid absolute contamination of blood in meat products during their preparation? How would they know if the ingredients contained in any food was consecrated in the name of Allah, or that it had not been offered or sacrificed to any kafir idols, deities or saints? How can they tell the difference between carrion meat or slaughtered meat? Are there magical lab tests that can tell you if a particular piece of meat come from an animal that was strangled, beaten, gored, fallen from great height or killed by a predator?

Presumably, they don't test food for DNA of other animals so it is possible that Cadbury's chocolate bars also contain the remains of a dead alcoholic buffalo which died when it committed suicide to escape its gambling debts by leaping off the roof of a Cadbury factory into a tub of chocolate, therefore making it technically as haram as pork. You don't know that they don't. You don't know if any products bearing the halal label in the market don't, is my point.

It was not explicitly stated in any of the recent news articles covering this story but they probably detected the porcine DNA via a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR), looking specifically for genetic sequences that are unique to Sus sp. and are not found in any other animals. This raises a profound philosophical issue in my mind.

If exclusively porcine DNA is non-halal, what about DNA sequences and genes that pigs share with human beings? As with all other mammals, pigs share a lot of common genetic heritage with human beings. Before the advent of recombinant DNA tech, we used porcine insulin to treat diabetics because it was only one amino acid removed from human insulin (compared to bovine insulin which is three amino acid removed). According to animal geneticist Lawrence Schook who mapped the pig genome, we are so similar to pigs that he claimed that he was able to take the human genome, "cut it into 173 puzzle pieces and rearranged it to make a pig." He added that, "Everything matches up perfectly. The pig is genetically very close to humans."

Does it then mean that the parts of our own DNA which are identical to pigs haram? To pose the reverse of this dilemma: are parts of porcine DNA therefore halal because the same genes are found in the human genome?

Hey, I am just glad I don't have to think about all these tough questions whenever I put anything into my mouth.



Contains porcine DNA,
k0k s3n w4i

The Mismanagement of Alfred Russel Wallace's Heritage in Sarawak

"Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree."

Timeline (1999) by Michael Crichton

Picture of Bukit Serumbu from Kampung Peninjau, after I descended from it.

Last month on April 13, I climbed Bukit Serumbu near the town of Siniawan in Bau. The local Bidayuhs call it Bung Muan while Sarawak's first White Rajah, James Brooke, have used it as a lookout point and have built a cottage at the 424 metres height of the mountain - giving the place its third name, Peninjau (which is the Malay word for "observer" or "surveyor"). Indeed, the modern villages that now fringe the foothills of Bukit Serumbu are called Kampung Peninjau Lama and Kampung Peninjau Baru.

That cottage that Brooke erected came to be known today as the Brooke Cottage and it was said that the original White Rajah have entertained guests there, including a certain British naturalist who would be later known (and then mostly forgotten) as the co-originator of the theory of evolution through natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. Here is an excerpt from Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1869),

"On reaching Sarawak early in December, I found there would not be an opportunity of returning to Singapore until the latter end of January. I therefore accepted Sir James Brooke's invitation to spend a week with him and Mr. St. John at his cottage on Peninjauh. This is a very steep pyramidal mountain of crystalline basaltic rock, about a thousand feet high, and covered with luxuriant forest. There are three Dyak villages upon it, and on a little platform near the summit is the rude wooden lodge where the English Rajah was accustomed to go for relaxation and cool fresh air. It is only twenty miles up the river, but the road up the mountain is a succession of ladders on the face of precipices, bamboo bridges over gullies and chasms, and slippery paths over rocks and tree-trunks and huge boulders as big as houses. A cool spring under an overhanging rock just below the cottage furnished us with refreshing baths and delicious drinking water, and the Dyaks brought us daily heaped-up baskets of Mangosteens and Lansats, two of the most delicious of the subacid tropical fruits. We returned to Sarawak for Christmas (the second I had spent with Sir James Brooke), when all the Europeans both in the town and from the out-stations enjoyed the hospitality of the Rajah, who possessed in a pre-eminent degree the art of making every one around him comfortable and happy."

The "cool spring under an overhanging rock just below the cottage" mentioned in the excerpt.
The site is known as Rajah Cave or Ngiroyan Raja.
I could not locate the Renee Spring or Pool and fear that it must have dried up.

Wallace apparently enjoyed Brooke's hospitality and Sarawak so much that he would end up sticking around for 14 months, longer than any other place he visited in this region. In fact, Wallace's first published paper mentioning evolution, On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species (1855), was written when he was in Sarawak and the natural law he proposed in it would come to be referred to vernacularly as the "Sarawak Law". This foreshadowed the joint presentation of Darwin and Wallace's works three years later in 1858 in front of the Linnean Society of London, marking the official birth of evolution as a serious scientific theory.

I myself have looked for the site of Brooke Cottage in my visit there but that endeavour was met with disappointment when I found out that what remains of it was a nondescript clearing, completely unremarkable except for a small sign nailed to a tree that proclaims it to be the famous "Brooke Cottage site".

The Brooke Cottage site.

The site was apparently lost to obscurity until its rediscovery in 1988 by the State Museum Department thanks to efforts by renowned zoologist, biologist and former Universiti Malaya lecturer Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy, the 5th Earl of Cranbrook (otherwise known as Datuk Seri Lord Cranbrook) who said,

"The first one I discovered was Rajah Brooke’s bungalow in Matang. I have been looking for this one (Brooke’s Cottage in Bung Muan, Bukit Peninjau) for a long time. This had led me to visit Kampung Peninjau and from the visit, I discovered that the villagers here knew the way to the site."

Anyway, given its story, Bukit Serumbu should rightly be recognised as a location of  great historical import to both scientific inquiry and the people of Sarawak, and restoration efforts were finally announced in March 2012, to begin in earnest in June. According to project consultant Rangen Sangum, the first phase of the project will involve the construction of tourist information centre, car park, access road, Wallace Point and Brooke observation platform. It was estimated to cost RM1 million with a projected duration of 9 months to completion.

Now, before I climbed Bukit Serumbu on the 13th of April 2014, I visited Kampung Peninjau after my Mount Singai trek and found a wooden hut there that stands in for the tourist information centre. There was a laminated and yellowed notice pinned on its front,

Rules, schmules.

I followed the rules. I called up the contacts given in the week before I intended to make my climb, but found that most of the numbers were no longer operational. When I finally managed to get through to one of them, he said that he was no longer part of the committee and gave me his brother's digits, asking me to contact him instead. The bloke I finally talked to sounded clueless, but he had no objections to me making my climb.

When I turned up on the day of my trek, there was no one inside the wooden hut tourist information centre to collect my nominal entrance fee of RM5 (and since there was no one, I save RM50 in hiring a guide, which I didn't want anyway). The "access road" and "parking lot" that were supposed to be constructed in phase one of the restoration project were practically nonexistent. There were, however, a dirt road leading to the tourist information hut and an uneven dirt field nearby that looks hazardous to any vehicle that does not run on caterpillar tracks - so I opted to park my car by the roadside within the village instead. It took me about 5 minutes surveying the edges of the dirt field before I even found the start of the Wallace Trail. The "Wallace Point" and "Brooke observation platform" were nowhere to be seen at any stage of my trek as well and they were about a year overdue. Whatever that was present certainly did not look like it costed a million ringgit.

The second phase of the restoration project expected to cost between RM2 million and RM3 million would involve the construction of a ceremonial house, longhouses, an outdoor bath, and replica of the Brooke Cottage itself based on site survey data and written descriptions of the structure. As I've mentioned earlier, the only thing they have to show for this is a piece of paper wrapped in clear plastic and nailed to a tree marking the Brooke Cottage site.

I want to know who won the tender to run this restoration project. I want to know if funds were ever infused into it and if it was, where did all the money go?

According to this sign, the project is an initiative of the Sarawak Ministry of Tourism and Heritage, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS), the Rajah Brooke Heritage Committee of Bung Muan, Peninjau and a 4th body that had been painted over. Funding was suppose to come from the Malaysian Ministry of Tourism and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme.

I got a feeling that before long, the Wallace Trail and Brooke Cottage will be lost to the murky currents of time again.



RELATED POST: Retracing Wallace's Trail at Bukit Serumbu



Unhappy fan of Wallace,
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Retracing Wallace's Trail at Bukit Serumbu

"But whether there be a God and whatever be His nature; whether we have an immortal soul or not, or whatever may be our state after death, I can have no fear of having to suffer for the study of nature and the search for truth, or believe that those will be better off in a future state who have lived in the belief of doctrines inculcated from childhood, and which are to them rather a matter of blind faith than intelligent conviction."

Alfred Russel Wallace

In a letter to his brother.

Panorama of mist-shawled Bukit Serumbu from Kampung Peninjau.

I first heard about "Wallace Trail" from Ashraf who accompanied me on my hike up Mount Santubong earlier this year on the 31st of January and I had been intrigued by it ever since. A bit of Google-fu revealed to me that it lays on an elevated piece of real estate 446 to 488 metres high (depending on what source you use) that is called Bukit Serumbu, Bung Muan or Peninjau (depending on who you ask). It consists of a single massive lump of porphyry diorite rock with very little old growth forest covering it as it had been a site of habitation for the local Bidayuh since time immemorial. Knowing of its existence, of course, meant that I must climb it.

I started my hike at about 8:00 in the morning (13th of April) from its starting point in Kampung Peninjau armed with some energy bars, two large bottles of fluids and a simple diagram of the trail which I photographed at the front of the Visitors' Info Centre.

They don't seem to be able to decide on whether to call it a Visitors Info Centre or a Tourist Info Centre.

The Bori Guna or "Skull Hut" is the first landmark you'll encounter. It appears to be some sort of local shrine.

The hazards of venturing into the wilderness at so early an hour included stepping stones along the trail that are still slippery with dew and pesky mosquitoes, but I enjoy taking a walk in a jungle when the cold of the previous night still lingers before it gets replaced by the malarial heat of Borneo. The trail was not very clearly marked, but someone seemed to have dropped pieces of scrap paper along it to mark their ascent - so followed the paper trail I did. Large boulders littered the path up, lots of them featuring uncannily smooth cracks and splits. One of these cleft rocks, the batu tikopog, is actually a feature of the trail.

Yeap, you are suppose to walk through the cleft. And you can see some of the paper scraps marking the trail in this picture.

The view at batu tikopog. Note the altocumulus clouds in the sky.

In The Malay Archipelago (1869) by Alfred Russel Wallace, in his account of his time spent here at Bukit Serumbu, he wrote about dem rocks too,

"Huge boulders, as big as the houses themselves, rise among them, and hang over them in the most extraordinary manner. Every one is a picturesque object stained with lichens, and on the shady side covered with mosses, while the tops are generally more are less clothed with curious ferns and orchids."

The natural second leg of the trek after batu tikopog takes you through a gently-inclined walk through some bamboo grooves and it had to be the most pleasant part of the climb. Dry, rustly bamboo leaves carpeted the ground while rays of sunlight streamed in from between the bamboo trunks (or "stalks", since some Grammar/Botany Nazis will argue that bamboos are phylogenetically grass).

Through the bamboo groves.

Anyway, it would be amiss of me to not feature some of the faunae I encountered on my retracing of a famous naturalist's footsteps here on Serumbu. Here they are,

A frequently seen Vestalis sp. with and emerald body and shimmery blue wings.
Without a good, hard look at its anal appendages, I can't pinpoint the species.

The horny ass of an orange, yellow and black curved spiny spider (Gasteracantha arcuata).

A cup-shaped Cookeina sp. mushroom from the Sarcoscyphaceae family of cup fungi.

A curled up polydesmid millipede.

Another millipede from the polydesmida order. This one was just taking a stroll through the leaf litter.

A unidentified grey-green spiny grasshopper with an orange streak on its back.

A Bothrobelum rugosum curled up in a defensive position like an armadillo.

The B. rugosum is a pill millipede, of course.

I have discussed about how one can distinguish pill millipedes
from pill bugs in my post about climbing Mount Penrissen.

This B. rugosum is the same one in the previous picture.

A rather battered looking male Striped Blue Crow (Euploea mulciber) on the ground.

A Straight-banded Fivering or Malayan Six Ring (Ypthima fasciata torone) perched on some greenery.

A pretty scratched-up Horsfield's Baron (Tanaecia iapis) basking on a leaf.

The Rajah Cave or Ngiroyan Raja - which is more of a massive overhanging boulder than an actual cave - marks a sort of halfway point on the trail and it looks to be a frequently used camp site with bamboo pallets built beneath its shade.

The Rajah Cave.

Right round a corner, the villagers have installed a couple of dirt basic privies complete with porcelain squat toilets planted right onto the ground. I did not try them out but I strongly suspect that there were no actual plumbing attached.

A pair of privies. A couple of commodes. A twin of toilets.

Looks like the last bloke who went here had trouble digesting cellulose.

Almost immediately after that, the incline rose to a steeper 30 to 40° rope-assisted trudge, and I found myself missing my gloves which I left in my car at the base of the mountain. It was no more than a warm-up compared to what Mount Santubong has to offer, but it definitely topped Mount Serapi for a workout.

The trail after Rajah Cave.

A lookout point a short while before the top. Click to enlarge.

At about 11:00AM, I arrived at the well-shaded top ridge of Serumbu where I saw my very first wild pitcher plant in all my time in Borneo (though I would see millions more in my later trip to Bako National Park, but that's another post for another day). Maybe I haven't been observant or gone out enough, but I am a tad embarrassed by this gaping hole in my Bornean experience, having lived in Sarawak for two and a half years by now.

A nest of Nepenthes ampullaria upper pitchers dangling from its climbing stems.

Pitcher plants are known to produce two types of pitchers - the lower and the upper pitchers - and apparently, the upper pitchers of the ampullaria are said to be extremely rare and had only been seen a few time. It was thought that they only produce them when they are placed under great environmental duress, so it was quite a cool sight. All the other pitchers I encountered after this were lower ones.

Nepenthes ampullaria is also quite morphologically distinct being urceolate or urn-shaped in appearance, so it is difficult to confuse with another member of the Nepenthes genus. Also, unlike other pitcher plants which have a stronger commitment to carnivory, ampullaria's diet consists of whatever it is that falls into its pots - dead leaves, faeces, the occasional animal, et cetera. You can see that in its reduced and reflexed lid that leave the pitcher's opening wide open. Their lids also have far reduced numbers of nectar glands (sometimes absent completely) which in other Nepenthes species play a crucial role in baiting insects.

Of course, they are by no means picky and insects do still fall in from time to time.

Dead mosquitoes inside a N. ampullaria's lower pitcher.

A single lower pitcher of N. ampullaria.

A developing N. ampullaria lower pitcher.

Aside from the abundance of N. ampullaria pitchers, the path of the summit ridge was also practically covered every inch of the way by spider webs built by innumerable, tiny spiders so arachnophobes should stay the hell away from this place. Every step I took destroyed several of the tiny silken traps the spiders painstakingly wove onto the ground.

Two unidentified spiders with metallic markings scurrying away from my huge, destructive feet.

An unidentified tiny, shiny scarlet bug seen at the top of Mount Serumbu.

It wasn't long until I arrived at the base of an oblong boulder aimed at the sky over a precipitous cliffside on the southwest side of the mountain. The path sort of ended here, so I assumed that this must be the summit of Serumbu (though the lack of obvious signage left me with some doubt). Against my better judgment, I crawled up that huge stone to get a better view.

The boulder at the end of the trail.

The groovy surface of the boulder.

The southwestern view from the maybe-summit of Bukit Serumbu.

Climbing down is the hard part.

When I had enough of pretending to be Simba posing atop of my mini Pride Rock, I started scaling down from the monolith - noticing that the base of it also teeters at the edge of another drop. Should I slip on the descent, I would be riding on a one way train to Deadtown or Cripplesville. It didn't look like a place where my corpse would be discovered any time soon either.

Anyway, I evidently got down with my viscera still enclosed within my flabby corporeal self, more or less, or I wouldn't be blogging about this now.

After a quick lunch of some energy bars I packed with me on this outing, I began my leisurely walk down Bukit Serumbu. I was in no real hurry to go anywhere and I still have quite a lot of juice left in my camera's battery.

A brown grasshopper camouflaged against the dead bamboo leaf litter by the site of Brooke's Cottage (more on that in my next post)

A male Common Archduke (Lexias pardalis borneensis) resting on the forest floor.

The plainer and browner spotty female counterpart of the L. pardalis.

A spiny orb-weaver that looks very much like Hasselt's spiny spider (Gasteracantha hasselti).

A close-up of the same G. hasselti.

A less-than-pristine specimen of Xanthotaenia busiris or Yellow-banded Nymph.
Probably the Bornean burra subspecies.

About halfway down, I was treated to a familiar cacophony that I encountered previously at the Kubah National Park - the ear-splitting tymbalisation of jade-green cicadas (Dundubia vaginata). Like previously, they reached a crescendo at about 1:00PM but tried as I could, I was unable to approach one closely enough to photograph it. Of course, at the time I am writing this, I have already remedied that deficiency twice over: once on a repeat climb of Santubong and more recently, during my one week at the Mulu National Park. I will tell more in my forthcoming posts about those expeditions.

Even at my unhurried pace, I reached the base of the mountain after just two hours, and that includes the time I took poking around the historical site where the Brooke Cottage once stood. As with my trek up the mountain, I did not meet a single other trekker on my way down, which suits me just fine. I don't like people very much. As my past history with meeting people on mountain trails can attest, they tended to do stunningly selfish and inconsiderate things like smoke cigarettes in my presence without even asking me if I am okay with it. Did they think that I wasn't trekking for my own health? Or that I have no inclinations in enjoying the clean mountain air which I spend hours trying to access?

Still, I hope that the flow of pilgrims coming to Bukit Serumbu to retrace Wallace's steps would remain a trickle. It isn't everyday that one can claim an entire mountain of solitude for himself, you know.



RELATED POST: The Mismanagement of Alfred Russel Wallace's Heritage in Sarawak



Treading on natural history,
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