LA Zoo--Zeitgeist Betwixt Animals and Man

Went to the LA Zoo yesterday.

As a kid I mused, "how do they know what to feed these animals". Turns out it's pretty simple--grass, veggies and fruits. The Cambodian elephant eats 300lbs of grass per day. Man, that sure makes for a lot of shit.

Watching four of the biggest animals-elephant, giraffe, hippo and gorilla-they all ate a vegetarian diet. Yet as a vegan I'm always asked, "But where do you get your protein?". A protein deficiency is called Kwashiorkor, and as far as I know, besides parents who severely abuse their children, there hasn't been a case in America, since I don't know how long. But I bet it's been a long time.

It's comforting to see the animals are fed a whole food plant based (WFPB) diet. They had a few monkeys quarantined because they had diabetes. My guess is the kids fed them their ice creams. Just kidding, but monkeys get diabetes just like we do.

Two things disheartened me during my visit. It just felt wrong being a voyeur looking in on them and that these animals are captive for our viewing pleasure.

The other thing that bothered me was noticing that we feed the animals better than we feed our own children. If the animals ate was was offered to the children, there'd be a hell of a lot more cases of diabetes.

But we're setting up our children for diabetes, because there's no doubt, what these kids are eating is incubating and eventually will manifest itself in diseases that western man gets. What we do see though now is manifested in their obesity. See a kid obese? No need to do further  tests. An obese child will have health problems.

The offerings at the park were churros, ice cream, cokes, candy, popcorn--you get the idea. Why not have at least one eatery that offered WFPB food? Fact is, it'd go out of business. Let's be honest.

So when a child does decide to eat a WFPB diet, he's SOL, because the average restaurant defaults to a highly refined/deep fried/meat/dairy menu.

When potatoes are not allowed on the WIC program, but if schools do not offer cow's milk they lose government funding, you know we have a problem with children's nutrition.

The animals might not know they're eating a WFPB diet, but that's their reality. If someone asked me what I ate and I told them a whole foods plant based diet, they'd ask--"What's that?".