PETA's State of the Union Undress (warning: contains nudity)

from a marketing standpoint, it's effective. I bet you this message is heard in it's totality far more than any state ud the union address ever heard before. However, I must ask..why not a man and a woman? eh? Furthermore, she said nakeder. I heard it.

I have a hard time getting over the amateur and annoying quality of the reading/acting and the low rent production values. It cheapens the whole thing for me.

Ah, the good old-fashioned bait and switch.

While the video probably captured some people's attention, I wonder for how long? How many people hit the stop button as soon as they saw the butchery that followed? It's such a serious subject, and no matter where you stand on eating animals for food (and I eat animals) you can't glaze over the horror that followed. The kitty-cat stripping at the beginning, combined with images of the government and the awful soundtrack was a pretty funky set up for the horror-show punch-line.

It hindsight, I don't remember much about her. But I will have a hard time getting the images of the animals out of my head tonight.

And I suppose that's the point.

Well said, Karen. We do have a responsibility to treat other species humanely, and as a result of moving the mechanics of food production out of public view we've gotten into the habit of avoiding that responsibility, and that needs to change. But PETA does go too far - not by adopting clever marketing ploys (which they have a right to engage in, of course) but by adopting Peter Singer's philosophy that there is no qualitative difference between animal suffering and human suffering.

If that's true, then it's wrong to kill other things to go on living. But we do that every day! Building a house kills a lot of organisms. Paving a highway kills many more. You probably kill a few things driving to work, especially if it's rained recently (sorry). You're a vegetarian? OK. What do you think happens when the threshing machine goes through the wheat field?

If you're to go on living, other animals have to die, and that's because you're part of an ecosystem. If you don't eat meat, you're not saving anything - just missing some great meals. And if you stop pharmaceutical research, then somebody's loved one is going to suffer pain and death so that a rabbit can live.

I have, and I'm thoroughly persuaded by him, though sometimes he overstates his case. What if you could buy meat from farms like the one he describes? (It's near Charlottesville VA and called Polyface farms.) Would you still be a vegetarian?

The problem with this of course, is that is not yet economically sustainable at the scale needed to support the planet. "Organic" food and humanely treated animals cost more to produce and buy, and only the wealthy can afford to eat this way regularly. Those people cover a very small percentage of the humans on the planet, how do we go about feeding the rest of us?

And Mark you are very right. Closing our eyes about where our food comes from is terribly wrong. I have many friends who have said "I prefer to think it was always like that, wrapped in plastic at the store." Denial.

Bill, a friend of mine is a vegetarian who eats fish. He calls himself, somewhat in jest, an aquatarian. ;-)

Do pescaterian's come from Pescadero? Such a pretty place and right on the water. And can I just say how amused I am that all of our comments, listed on my home page, are warning me against PETA nudity?

I see your soapbox and raise you agricultural subsidies. Who was the genius who decided to pay people to grow food we don't actually need, can't sell and that in many cases can't or shouldn't be grown in certain geographies? And how is that not called money laundering?

Presenting my soapbox: rice farming. Paying people to grow rice in some of the hottest, dryest parts of California. Rice we don't need, can't afford to sell and which is often left to rot in 18 wheelers, or dumped. Rice grown with precious and subsidized water. Grown with pesticides that run into our water supply. Whew, is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

And you are so right, organic and free range don't mean much these days (thank you USDA), and I guess all I'm saying is that if they did, they wouldn't be sustainable. Not because humans can't do it, but because we've set up a system that rewards us for not doing it.

I'll never, ever, eat another Idaho Russet potato, for one thing.

Karen, your point is a good one; we're not really making the world a better place by making a buying choice that only the upper economic 1% of humanity can make. It's still reasonable to make that choice for one's own health, though - I think that meat from Salason's farm, or Polyface, or the cootie-free stuff at the Farmer's market are healthier for me. But you're right, it's not saving the planet.

So how do we save the planet? I don't think Pollan has an answer for this: what I read (and I could be corrected on this) is that our non-sustainable agriculture has increased our population to the point that we are now hooked on it, ie, we can't go back to Polyface farm, because 2 billion people would starve. Pollan's candidate for the most economically important invention of the 20th century was the Haber process, which allows us to 'fix' nitrogen into a form in which it can be used for artificial fertilizer. This fertilization is what's responsible for increasing corn yields from 40-50 to their present 200 bu/acre, which would be impossible without it, and apparently e coli is going to stop us from using 'natural' fertilizer on an industrial scale.

If true, this means that our population has increased to the point that it has no choice but to engage in self-destructive practices. And that's how population biology works, unfortunately - when you outgrow your niche, it abruptly becomes a very nasty place, and lots of you start dying. I guess the answer is, we don't save the planet - the planet saves itself, and we probably won't like the solution it comes up with.

I'm not sure that I can bring this back to naked women, but it does remind me of a bit from George Carlin:

Save the planet? No.

The planet will be fine.

The people will die.

The planet will be fine.

Joining the fray a bit late here...

I've always been slightly irked by PETA's sensationalist marketing. I've given them money on numerous occasions, but once I actually wrote a letter complaining that their marketing seems to be addressed to the extremely simple-minded. They make little effort to describe the complexity of some of these issues, and (as Karen points out) they don't differentiate the vastly different forms of abuse they fight.

I think using naked women can be very effective in getting the attention of people who might not respond as well to chicken factories or beagle-testing imagery. There's nothing sexist about nudity, in my book. I could write an essay about her bikini line, but I'm going to let it pass this time.

At the end of the day, did this get more people to ask questions about how animals are used? If it did, then I'm all for it. And although the video quality was so-so, I always enjoy a strip act. But did anyone pay attention to what she was saying?