By Andrea Widburg
Two news stories broke yesterday that seem entirely different superficially but that are, in fact, closely related. The first involves John Kerry. The second is the sad death of “vegan influencer” Zhanna Samsonova.
John Kerry is a weasel. I don’t say this because of his political positions. I say this because when it’s pointed out that he owns or has owned five homes, a yacht, a private jet, and multiple very big cars, he always denies it. Those aren’t mine, he self-righteously puffs; they’re my wife’s. In addition to being a kept man, Kerry has never made the slightest push to relieve himself of the burden of all this luxury. Indeed, he believes he’s so important that it’s only right and just that he benefits from these privileges of wealth.
Why do I mention this? Because John Kerry has now joined Holland and Ireland in waging a war on farmers:
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry was blasted on social media over the weekend by critics who accused him of trying to destroy the agriculture industry in order to achieve “net zero” emissions.
“Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world depending a little bit on how you count it but it’s anywhere from 26 to 33 and we can’t get to net zero, we don’t get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution,” Kerry told a climate change summit in May.
“You just can’t continue to both warm the planet, while also expecting to feed it,” Kerry added. “It doesn’t work. So we have to reduce emissions from the food system.”
Waging a war on farmers and farming means waging a war on food. When Sri Lankan pushed its farmers to all-organic farming, people starved, and the government collapsed. Meanwhile, the Netherlands and Ireland, in obedience to World Economic Forum dictates, are planning to seize farmland to wage an utterly pointless war on CO2, which is the fuel for plant life on our planet.
I’m not saying that farmers can’t be more water efficient (copy Israel) or have better practices when it comes to feeding livestock or handling their waste. But you know that’s not what Kerry’s talking about. He wants you eating veggies that are uncooked because you won’t own a stove.
And that leads me to Samsonova’s tragic death. As a vegan, she was ahead of the curve when it came to eating the WEF’s preferred diet (for the little people only, of course). She was also respectful of CO2 emissions because she did not cook her food. And eventually, she starved:
Vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova has reportedly “died of starvation” after subsisting exclusively off a diet of exotic fruit in Malaysia, according to her friends and family.
She was 39.
The Russian national — who frequently promoted raw foods on social media where she was known to her millions of viewers on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram as Zhanna D’Art — reportedly died July 21 after finally seeking medical treatment during a tour in Southeast Asia, according to local media outlet reports.
“A few months ago, in Sri Lanka, she already looked exhausted, with swollen legs oozing lymph,” one unidentified friend told Newsflash. “They sent her home to seek treatment. However, she ran away again. When I saw her in Phuket, I was horrified.”
(See Monica Schowalter’s excellent analysis of Samsonova’s death and the implications of veganism.)
Of course, Samsonova took it too far, and most vegans and raw foodies chug along fairly well—but they’re always undernourished unless they have perfectly balanced diets and careful supplements.
I’ve read two splendid books about human nutrition. The first was about how women’s need for iron in their diet to reproduce helped drive human civilization because it made animal husbandry the most efficient way to make that happen. Unfortunately, I read the book about 20 years ago and, for the life of me, can’t remember the name. One point the book repeatedly made, though, was that meat is the single most effective way to deliver important nutrients. And no, I’m not eating crickets that carry E.coli.
The second book was called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. The author, Richard Wrangham, pointed out that raw foodies are almost invariably malnourished because the best way to get nutrients out of food is heat. When our simian ancestors discovered cooking, especially cooking meat, they gave our brains a nutritional feast that sent us on a dazzling evolutionary development.
John Kerry, from the comfort of his wife’s houses, yachts, planes, and cars, wants us all to be Samsonovas, scrabbling for nutrients from plants that, under Biden policies, we won’t be able to cook.