Temple Grandin

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Ten billion animals are slaughtered annually in the US and Canada and it costs a lot to maintain these animals. To feed and house them and much of the grain we grow goes towards feeding these animals. Maybe if we could convince people that it would be a wise decision to consume less meat and dairy products and base their diet on legumes, vegetables, and grains. We could offer the restaurant industry incentives to use less meat and offer affordable, appetizing vegetarian alternatives on the basis that this is an economic issue as well as an animal rights issue.

I heard that animal farts like cows are causing global warming. Perhaps this is the reason others say hot air rises?

Good ideas

I think one of the issues (or solutions), especially for people who like meat a lot, would be to find ways to make the same meals as the ones they like, but with vegetables (or ingredients like tofu, etc) instead of meat. It would have to taste and have a texture very similar to the dish made with meat tho. It may be very challenging but hopefully it is possible. I doubt it is possible to do this with steaks tho, but at least we would eat a lot less meat.

Honestly, I didn't even know who this person was or what she did when I came into this thread. I didn't even know it was a person. Temple Grandin, a stupid name. From what I've gathered from the posts in this thread she is just another person who's going to die. Another useless existence on this planet. If she helps you get over your problems, that's fine. Just understand that one day, I will take her place as a more valuable citizen of this earth. One who entertains, not one who contradicts himself. It's like the anime 'Naruto' except he's super pro as crap in music and films. That's who I'm gonna be. I'm gonna make everyone know How I suffered.
7 billion people.

(I'm implying that my thoughts are even considered in this forum.)
Also: Eat Meat. Win at Life.

I guess I'm lucky I never ate meat/eggs/dairy etc. I've been repulsed by it since I was a child, seriously allergic to eggs and dairy and I would throw up if anyone attempted to serve me a dish with meat or poultry due to the smell.

I think a good approach to getting people to test out the vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is to inform them of how much of the meat in the U.S. is produced in factory farms, and explain that factory farms are effectively the most filthy, vile places one can hope to never go. The animals are pumped full of antibiotics because they live in their own filth and would die of disease otherwise and this breeds anti-biotic resistant bacteria. This is a growing public health crisis. The animals are also pumped full of growth hormones. They grow at unnatural rates, people get their poo-contaminated meat faster! There are more and more sources claiming this is contributing to the obesity crisis in American children.

That's just a little tiny bit of the disturbing risk to the general health of the population. I don't tell people not to eat meat but I won't pretend it's not disgusting or keep quiet about it so as not to offend. The thought of eating an animal isn't morally bothersome for me,(of course the treatment of animals in factory farms is reprehensible) it's that factory farms are the source of almost all of Americas meat and poultry. It's the thought of eating antibiotics, poop, and growth hormones that really turns me off. So yeah, I guess I really am lucky I never developed a taste for meat and am still repulsed by the smell.

When we do certain events in Austin there is always an effort to provide information to the public, but most of the time they don't want to hear it. Luckily Austin seems to have a huge vegan/vegetarian population because almost every grocery store carries a multitude of vegan products. It's not really like that in other places around the state of Texas.

As far as the people who don't want to hear it... If I were accustomed to eating food like that, maybe I wouldn't want to think about it either. I don't blame them.

She is autistic, a primary trait of which is literal thinking. Maybe animals are nothing more than food to her, in a very LITERAL sense. It is entirely consistent to minimize their suffering even as they fulfill that purpose.

I suppose it is a pointless argument because I don't know her thinking any more than you do. I just find it rich to accuse someone of hypocrisy simply because their views don't mesh with yours, especially when that person is not here to defend themselves. Temple Grandin's narrative is not about being vegan, it is about succeeding in life even when impeded by autism. It seems to me she is being exploited to some extent by publishers and such, hence the cloying overkill of her website. She may even be aware of this but has decided that allowing it opens other doors for her advocacy work.

"I think a good approach to getting people to test out the vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is to inform them of how much of the meat in the U.S. is produced in factory farms, and explain that factory farms are effectively the most filthy, vile places one can hope to never go."

That might intimidate people to go cold turkey on meat (no pun intended. It would be easier make organic meat and other health foods more more affordable to appeal to less affluent people. I know it costs more to produce organic meat but organic meat-as all other trendy health foods is ridiculously overpriced-and poorer people can not afford organic meat or any other ridiculously overpriced health food, and more affluent people are duped into spending a lot of money for a product they believe is healthy such as light acai berry juice-$3.99 for a bottle the size of a coke can. The ridiculously high prices of the organic meat and health food in general turns off a lot of poorer people from a maintaining a more healthy diet. I call it the "Whole Foods effect."

Secondly, we have to make vegetarian or (reduced meat) meals more palatable to the average person and weight loss plans more attainable.

This is just bratty and narcissistic. You're not special. You're not the only person who's experienced suffering. And more importantly, you ave no right to afflict pain on others simply because you think your suffering is somehow more wrong than others' suffering. That's not autistic thinking, it's certainly not Aspergian thinking. That just being childish, ego-centric and narcissistic. And you're so weak-minded and ignorant, you have to look to a freaking cartoon--someone else's cartoon--for an identity. That's just sad. It really is. Get over yourself, kid. Asperger's or not, you need to grow up, learn something about the real world beyond your ego and your anime, and be accountable for yourself.

And most importantly, stop thinking the world owes you anything. It was here a long time before you and it will be here a long time after you're gone. Stop looking to the world to validate you--no, you're not famous like Grandin and in likelihood you'll never be, especially if you keep living in a fantasy world of anime, created by other people! Just accept who you are and go do something constructive with your life. Stop thinking your life has to be validated by the world worshiping you. You have one life here, and you're going to waste it being jealous of famous people and angry because you yourself aren't a celebrity? Pathetic.

I agree on all points.

When you are even remotely a public person, people think they have some kind of right to form opinions about who you are, based on what's essentially a media-constructed image of you. Temple Grandin is no more the image many have constructed of her than I am the image the media tried to construct of me. People see you as in control of that image though, when nothing can be further from the truth. It is not possible to control your media image, individual people rarely have that kind of power. People often get mad at me for not being what the media called me, and I would never want to do that to Temple.

Keep in mind she was among the first known-to-be-autistic people who wrote an autobiography and got it published. That's how she got famous. It would be as if any one of us on this board were to publish our autobiography among the first. And then imagine that everyone formed their opinion of what autism is based on your life story alone. That is what happened to her, even when she did not intend for people to generalize her experiences to all autistic people. And even nowadays any autistic person who gets recognized past a certain point is going to have others thinking "Gee every autistic person must be just like this person." Ridiculous but that's what happens.

Because I've experienced far lesser (but enough to leave an impression) versions of the above two situations, I would hate to judge someone on that situation. When you're even semi-public, everyone thinks they have a right to have an opinion on you. Not on your beliefs or writings. No, about you yourself, who you are. I find that really invasive and do not ever want to do it to her. I used to do it to people myself before I learned how invasive it is. But it's seriously invasive and is not a good thing to do to someone.

As far as what she actually says, I think it's perfectly okay to have opinions on that, as long as they don't spill over into deciding to have an opinion of her entire person as if she is her views and her publicly-identified self and nothing more. Any person is far more than their writing, and far more (and far different) than the illusory image created by the media and the assorted people who promote them. It's important to keep that in mind and not lose track of that when people assume they know the whole story about her or anyone else. You can't have the whole story unless you are on extremely intimate terms with someone.

Anyway, I do have opinions on what she actually says, and they're quite mixed.

I like a lot of her descriptions of her own experiences. Sometimes she goes too far with them though. Like she used to just flat-out say "autistic people are picture thinkers". When corrected on that, she eventually developed two other kinds of thinking she ascribed to autistic people in general. But she never seemed to realize how many different kinds of autistic thinking are possible. And it's far more than just "picture thinkers", "music/math/memory thinkers", and "verbal/logic thinkers". I'm certainly none of the above. (And when I say I "think in patterns", the patterns aren't the abstract patterns she ascribes to "music/math/memory thinkers", certainly nothing that would make me good at chess and strategy games.) So that's one thing I like and one thing I sometimes dislike with where she goes with it.

The only really major thing I don't like about what she says, is that she has (and promotes) a very mainstream American viewpoint about what makes a person's set of skills valuable. She's said numerous times (so it's not just a one-time glitch or something) things about how it's useful for autistic people like her who can contribute their skills to certain jobs to exist, but how autistic people who can't speak (and various other ways of characterizing people she sees as low functioning) would be better off weeded out of the gene pool. She's said right on this website somewhere that people with William's syndrome have excellent social skills but "nothing behind them" or something like that. The reality is that people with William's syndrome have plenty behind their surface appearance, just because it doesn't match a typical set of skills, or an autistic set of skills, doesn't mean they don't have their own way of contributing to the world or that their cognitive style is largely useless. She's said a lot of things about the general usefulness of "high functioning" autistic people and the uselessness of "low functioning" autistic people that just... it grates, it hurts, it hurts real people, it perpetuates stereotypes, it harms people like me and a lot of other people I know. There's just an elitism there that can be seriously harmful.

But don't be fooled by the fact that I have that major complaint and the other minor complaint about her stated viewpoints. I don't hate her. I just think that she has a lot of assumptions about the world that she picked up from the society she lives in, and that she would do better to seriously question. A person in as public a role as hers can have a serious effect on the people she talks about, because people look up to her for answers about autism. And it's too bad that she sometimes has to devalue those of us who need acceptance the most (because we can't so easily "buy" acceptance through jobs and the like).

There is a lot I like about her writing. It's just that... how do I explain. It's easier to write about something when it sparks my writing skills by saying something I disagree with. Something I agree with doesn't spark my writing skills so easily. So there is a whole lot of stuff she writes that I really appreciate. While her experiences are often different from mine (she does much of her thinking in a much more idea-based way than I do, which colors her experiences in one direction and mine in quite a different direction). But it's useful for understanding other people I know. And a surprising amount of it still applies to some degree to my life. I've also seen areas where she really does synthesize the experiences of several people into a general description, and that is also useful. I wish she did that more often. I liked some parts of her book on animals. Not all of it, but parts of it have really helped in my attempts to show people the cognitive abilities of other animals.

But all of that is my views of her writing. Not of her. She is not her writing. A person is not just their words and opinions. I would never claim to hate her just because there are aspects of her writing that I vehemently disagree with. I don't know her as a person and wouldn't judge her on such a personal level (a level I can't judge never having met her).

Temple does NOT advocate veganism; she has stated very clearly that she thinks it's an unhealthy diet.

She herself is omnivorous, and she is not hypocritical in her work nor her love of animals.

She has not used Autism Speaks in the reference section of any of her currently printed books, and has stated countless times that any "cure" for ASD would be a disaster for the human race.

Just watch her latest TED talk to see what I mean.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn_9f5x0f1Q[/youtube]

Alright, first of all, How much about me do you actually know. I love this "I'm gonna describe your life in a nutshell to make you feel sh***y even though there's a 75% chance I'm wrong about you and I am only making ret*d assumptions based on what little I actually know". Second of all, we all are dust in the wind. That woman is definitely going to die and the world will not spin differently because of it. I will die and the world will not spin differently because of it(If I don't play my cards right, I have High hopes for the future). I do no base my life on anime, I don't even watch that much anime. I read my Naruto chapter's every week and leave when I am done. It's very hard for me to type right now because I'm thinking in a British tone of voice (sorry). I know who I am and I am doing something constructive with my life (I wish my parents were capable of the same) yet it is hard because of the Aspergers/adhd. I'm not jealous of famous people. I loathe famous people because the way they look at their cause becomes corrupted and after a while worthless. You straight up misinterpreted my post. It wasn't even supposed to be taken seriously. I wish to raise Autism awareness as well, with a positive hope for understanding. You just got hardcore trolled. Plus about me never making it to her level of stardom: Read the damn signature.

You just made me lol so hard.

lol'd

She sure does. And I am grateful for that. A lot of NT parents of AS children are getting their child-raising info from NT professionals, which has its' place but it can be very misleading and sometimes downright unhelpful for a parent. She is one of the few autistic adults to reach out to NT parents about their kids with advice- among other things she is a regular contributor to the Autism magazine (which I subscribe to) which is aimed at NT parents and tells them what to do. Lucky NT parents stumble across WP and I thank all of you for the information I have gotten here, which has changed my parenting style drastically. But it's just purest chance if a parent happens to stumble across this website. For every parent who happens to find this, Temple Grandin has reached out to countless more.

She can do this because she is so famous. Yes, she has become something of a brand name. But that means she can influence NT parents and provide a counter-balance to Autism Speaks. She is idolized by NT parents of AS children because she provides such an alluring "what if..." model that parents cling to when worrying about their kid's future.


I also don't count her as a hypocrite for her career choice. She has quite logically realized that the U.S. is not going to become a vegetarian nation. She can't help the cows by convincing people not to eat them. She knows she can't convince an entire nation not to eat them. She accepts that the cows are doomed to be killed and eaten regardless of how many people convert to vegetarianism. If it's anything short of 100%, the cows are doomed. And so she helps them by designing slaughterhouses with the cows' fears and feelings in mind. Nobody ever did that before. Nobody ever cared enough to try. But she does and has made the last moments of many cows less awful with her designs. Those cows were going to die anyway no matter how many vegetarians told people to not eat meat. Only Temple Grandin stepped in to actually do something about their last moments.