Vegan
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Children's Underestimated Compassion and Understanding
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Jonathan Safran Foer and Eating and Killing Animals
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World Vegan Day and Remembering Where We Started
Are Vegans Responsible for More Deaths in the Fields? No Way
Published October 31, 2009 @ 09:08AM PT
The comment threads around here have been home to a lot of arguments over the last year, and a few discussions have a habit of resurfacing from time to time. One of these typically starts with a defender of animal-eating accusing vegans of being responsible for more animals' deaths than animal-eaters because of the animals who die as a result of raising and harvesting crops. The person making the argument assumes that people who eat plant-based diets must be responsible for more deaths in the fields than those who eat animal-based diets full of flesh, dairy, and eggs, failing to acknowledge, of course, the enormous amounts of plant foods that must be raised and fed to the animals people kill to eat -- more than must be raised for direct consumption by vegans. As has been discussed in those comment threads each time, the logic fails. And recently, Animal Visuals gave animal advocates a great new tool to answer this weak but common argument. Continue after the jump to view the powerful graph settling the debate.
Save the Animals, Save the Planet: Blog Action Day '09, Climate Change
Published October 15, 2009 @ 08:02AM PT
'Tis Blog Action Day. And we're talking about climate change, an easy topic for an animal rights blog, given the intersection between what we're doing to tens of billions of animals on this planet and what's happening to the planet as a result: Even mainstream scientists agree that our insistence on unnecessarily exploiting and killing animals en masse for food is one of the most significant contributors to climate change. The most impactful change each of us can, and should, personally make to stop climate change is something that we can do immediately and easily (and that we have other excellent reasons to undertake as well). It makes little sense to petition our governments for new policies and technologies and complain that inherently slow processes are indeed moving slowly if we personally are refusing to make the truly important and significant changes we could be making now, without waiting for governments, industries, and nonprofits to get it together on the other fronts. We won't be able to justify our inaction in the decades to come. "But I like meat" and "I can't live without cheese" won't be valid excuses.
All Animal Agriculture: A Greenhouse Gas and Environmental Disaster
As many of you know by now, animal agriculture accounts for nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than all the world's cars, planes, and other transportation combined, and the numbers only get more disturbing when you break them down into specific greenhouse gases: animal agriculture contributes 65 percent of nitrous oxide emissions (a gas with a global warming potential [GWP] 296 times that of CO2) and 37 percent of methane (GWP 23 times that of CO2).
How You Can Help the "Why Honey Is Not Vegan" Site
Published October 13, 2009 @ 07:25AM PT
We haven't had the honey conversation on this blog yet, and it tends to be an issue vegans discuss more among themselves than with others, for better or for worse. But there's a widely cited resource out there where you can get solid, thoughtful information on the harm caused for honey production (or, more accurately, theft) and why it isn't vegan.
More than 10 years ago, an animal advocate named Noah created the "Why Honey Is Not Vegan" page with comprehensive, well-thought-out information and arguments in defense of bees and in support of letting them keep their honey. If you plug the words "vegan" and "honey" into Google, your first hit is going to be his page. A decade later, the page needs an overhaul and has the potential to become a new, more comprehensive and impressive resource, and Noah is now in the last couple days of a Kickstarter fundraiser to help him work full-time on the site for a few months.
Rather than try to reword what's already been said, I want to ask you to check out two thoughtful posts about this project that are already out there in the blogosphere: (1) Steven at L.O.V.E. has covered not only the Kickstarter fundraiser but also the broader issues at play here, in "focusing on the most marginalized groups" such as insects; and (2) Ida at The Vegan Ideal has published an interview with the "Why Honey Is Not Vegan" creator. Please read those posts, and to read (and hear) more about the project directly from the creator himself and/or pledge some support for it, visit the Kickstarter page.
Finally, my thanks to Victor of L.O.V.E. for alerting me to the project (and my apologies for not catching his e-mail sooner, before doing an inbox cleanup yesterday).
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Photo by Flickr user cygnus921
VeganMoFo Headquarters and a Mashup
Published October 07, 2009 @ 06:07AM PT
When I mentioned VeganMoFo in last week's edition of Friday Food, I failed to link to Vegan MoFo Headquarters International -- because I did not know there was such a space. But you should definitely be checking in there, where you can find regular roundups of some of the great recipes and photos being posted during MoFo. But there are far more bloggers participating than can be included in those roundups, so check out the looong list of participants in this post and in this public feed for more. Another way to keep up with the VeganMoFo madness, for Twitter users, is to search for the #veganmofo hashtag.
And finally, for another sampling of VeganMoFo yumminess, check out the "Monday Masterpiece Mashup" below that the oh-so-creative Kelly of easyVegan.info put together earlier this week. Click through to her post, and you'll be able to follow links to each individual photo's Flickr page, for details and links to recipes.
Babysitters, Tofu, Sesame Street, and School Lunches
Published September 23, 2009 @ 07:03AM PT
I was a grade-school fan of the Baby-Sitters Club books. (In my defense, the books I remember most from that same time period are Island of the Blue Dolphins and Bridge to Terabithia, not Baby-Sitters Club.) I mention this here because in the series, one of the club members was a vegetarian (I think). And in at least one of these books, the word "tofu" came up. I had no idea what this was -- and continued not knowing for years. Likely because of whatever the context (or dish) was when the tofu was mentioned, I spent a decade thinking it was some kind of weird, healthy-but-disgusting casserole. I'm pretty sure I was nearing the end of college before I had a clue; I had only one truly vegetarian friend in college (whom I teased -- yeah, I was that person), but I don't recall her ever mentioning, never mind eating, tofu. And I'd graduated by the time I tried it for the first time, in some Thai takeout.
Maybe I wouldn't have been so oblivious if I'd not grown up in a rural area and in a meat-and-potatoes family and community that knew all about raising animals for slaughter but to whom even "vegetarian," let alone "vegan," was a baffling, almost blasphemous concept. But I am also absolutely convinced that much has changed in the last couple decades, that adults and kids alike are more aware of what's out there in the way of non-animal foods, not only for health reasons, but also because of growing awareness of animals, who they are, and what we do to them in the name of "food."
Compassionate Hockey Players and "Militant" Vegans
Published September 16, 2009 @ 01:48PM PT
Canada's Globe and Mail published a story today on Georges Laraque, NHL star and -- yes -- vegan. The piece is mostly positive, but with a few annoying, condescending remarks that the journalist apparently felt obligated to get (and publish) from others in the world of hockey and one quick, three-word commentary from the journalist himself that troubled me. Here's an extract from the good parts:
No dairy, no poultry, no fish, no more leather shoes or animal byproducts, Laraque has been on a strict diet of vegetables, fruits, grains and legumes since June 1.
While he says he was partly motivated to improve his health for the hockey season, Laraque insists the decision was made primarily for political, rather than nutritional, reasons.
Everything changed, Laraque said, after he saw Earthlings, a 2006 documentary that is widely celebrated in animal-rights circles.
On the Disheartening Aspects of Animal Advocacy and Beginning Again
Published August 18, 2009 @ 01:19PM PT
In animal rights advocacy, moments or days of feeling encouraged and heartened are too often countered or overshadowed by experiences that frustrate, dishearten, and discourage. It can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward movement. Sometimes what you think is progress isn't. Sometimes what you think is change is more of the same. Sometimes what you put all your faith into disappoints. And especially if you devote much of yourself to this movement, if you're immersed in it every day, those steps backward, those disheartening moments, those discouraging not-changes or missed opportunities can wear you down and come awfully close to breaking your spirit. When you know that you're fighting for the most oppressed, most abused, greatest-suffering beings on this planet, and literally tens of millions of them are being brutally slaughtered every single day after a too-short life full of exploitation and suffering, and yet people still seem not to care and are content to push it all aside--simply because, for example, they like how those animals taste and consider change to be inconvenient--and the movement's efforts are still mocked and marginalized rather than supported, it can be absolutely crushing.
