April 2010
39 posts
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“I can say with complete confidence that no one in the world loves food the way...”
– The Shannons
"Boy, Two, Left in Tears as Nursery Staff... →
I feel for this kid. I had my Rolos confiscated in kindergarten at Montessori school. What upset me the most about it was when the Rolo thieving teacher chastised my dad for slipping such poison into my lunch box. The Rolo slogan was “Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?” The way I see it, my dad was merely expressing his love for me, which meddling school marms...
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“As we totally abolish institutionalized animal slavery, we will continue to face...”
– Animal Equality and Insecticide
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"What to Do When a Child Brings Meat To Your... →
The Council of Vegan Parents discusses coping strategies for when a speciesist child brings non-vegan food into an anti-speciesism zone.
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Low Fat: Another Wrong Way to Do Veganism
Are you an ex-vegan? If so, I’m probably not the first one to tell you this, but you did veganism wrong. Credible organizations have touted the benefits of a vegan diet. Veganism is appropriate for all stages of the life cycle — science has proven this. Therefore, if you didn’t function well as a long-term vegan, there’s only one possible explanation: you fucked up....
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“Veganism is an ethical choice, and nutrition professionals have an obligation to...”
– Virgina Messina
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"How Do You Solve A Problem Like Ex-Vegans?" →
Why do ex-vegans rail so passionately against veganism, and how can we stop them?
As Stephanie Ernst at Animal Rights & AntiOppression explains, there are three possible reasons someone might quit veganism:
1. Sheer selfishness (most common). These ex-vegans could manage to be (or pretend to be) caring and compassionate for a little while, but they were never truly good inside, so when the...
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“I don’t care about the health of non-vegans. In fact, I hope they all get...”
– ieshido
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Interview With an Alien Hunter: Jackson Landers
Some people imagine hunters to be the gleeful grim reapers of the forest, macho sadists blasting away at cute things just to watch them die. But could hunting ever be just as ethical as buying packaged goods covered with little green V’s?
About six years ago, Jackson Landers realized there was something wrong with his relationship (or lack thereof) to the meat on his plate. But he...
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Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Melissa McEwen
Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few months, you probably read “New Age Caveman in the City,” the New York Times feature on aspiring Stone Agers in NYC. If so, you may remember Melissa McEwen as the lone cavewoman of the group, providing some refreshing gender balance to the paleo diet argument that rice cakes and rolled oats aren’t health foods — meat...
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"Marginal Cases" Don't Give Animals Rights →
Jean Kazez at “In Living Color” explains why she thinks the marginal cases argument for animal rights isn’t a good one.
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Vegan Leaders: Dr. William C. Roberts, M.D.
Dr. William Roberts isn’t a major vegan leader or anything, but he always gets quoted whenever a vegan insists that humans are natural herbivores. Here’s his most popular quote about that (quoted on Goveg.com):
[A]lthough we think we are one and we act as if we are one, human beings are not natural carnivores. When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us because their...
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Cornucopia Institute Kind of Stretching it in MJ... →
Journalist Kiera Butler followed up on her Mother Jones piece about hexane in isolated soy protein by interviewing Charlotte Vallaeys from the Cornucopia Institute (the group warning us about this neurotoxin used in the processing of fake meat and other fake protein products). Most of Butler’s questions regarding how dangerous hexane extraction really is were plucked straight out of the...
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Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Pamela
Pamela is pursuing a PhD in philosophy and education, mostly studying moral education and school reform. I would have loved to talk to her about educational philosopher John Holt’s unschooling movement (she’s a fan), but Pamela was an ex-vegan and first I needed to find out — how could someone who once knew it was evil to eat even trace amounts of animal products ever go back...
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"Popular Veggie Burgers Contain Poisonous... →
A lot of soy-based veggie products contain hexane, a hazardous air pollutant and neurotoxin that the EPA doesn’t like. It’s used to take the fat out of soy in the process of making texturized vegetable protein.
From Mother Jones:
Says Cornucopia Institute senior researcher Charlotte Vallaeys, ‘If a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or...
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Pepperoni, Oysters and Vegan Purity
After witnessing a vegetarian friend pick off all the meat from a pepperoni pizza she received instead of the cheese pizza she ordered, Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking considered the issue of vegetarian purity:
People adopt a general behavioral rule, or “heuristic,” that works for most cases, but then they stick to it even in those particular cases where it doesn’t apply....
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Former Raw Vegan Trades Dehydrator For Hunting Bow
It’s now pretty much official that goji berries, dehydrated flax crackers and young coconut & cacao smoothies are not the harbingers of vitality and enlightenment that raw foodists once thought they were. According to a growing number of raw defectors, sparing your food from the denaturing and enzyme-murdering ravages of warmth might be missing the bigger picture.
In February, The Raw...
Erik Marcus of Vegan.com Learns It's Okay to Eat... →
After reading the Christopher Cox piece in Slate arguing that eating oysters is compatible with vegan values, Erik Marcus (author of Meat Market and Vegan.com) concedes that thanks to oysters, purity veganism may not be necessary. The real villains here, he says, are vegans who too rigidly stick to their no-animal-products-ever dogma in the face of reasoning like this.
However, he won’t eat...
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Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Lindsay Starbuck
After commenting a couple of times on this blog, Lindsay wrote to me:
“I was vegan for 5 years and vegetarian for about 8 years. Now I’m a full-blown meat eater.
“I never had any serious health problems from veganism. For me, the vegan diet was a natural progression from an ultra-low fat eating disorder. Moving away from veganism/vegetarian was about slowly accepting my body...
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VeganOutreach to Vegans: Please Don't Make the... →
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Did Oysters Just Kill Veganism?
“Cox makes some worthy arguments. I’m sure eating local oysters is (in an immediate, direct sense) more environmentally friendly than, say, eating vegan fake meat shipped from a factory halfway around the world. But that’s neither here nor there in regards to veganism.”
— SuperVegan
Is it just me, or is April 7, 2010 the day that veganism died? I’m pretty...
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Fruits and Vegetables Might Not Diminish Cancer... →
At least the study didn’t find that fruits and veggies go out of their way to actively promote cancer.
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Christopher Cox on Bivalve Curious Veganism →
I’ve heard of many vegans who are philosophically okay with eating bivalves, yet most of them don’t anyway. It’s odd because vegans get so excited about a new vegan cheese or meat substitute. How can they contain themselves from sucking down a plate of delicious oysters once they decide it is ethically permissible to do so?
My guess is vegan purity, habit, or wanting to avoid...
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Interview With an Animal Rights Professor: Jean...
Jean Kazez is a professor of animal rights at SMU and author of the recently published Animalkind: What We Owe The Animals. She also blogs at the excellent In Living Color, which is how I discovered her.
What struck me about her site, and then inspired me to ask her for an interview, was the nuance in her discussions of animal rights, morality and her vegetarianism. Unlike some blogs (*ahem* let...
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Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Zooey Deschanel →
Unfortunately, it’s not me interviewing her, it’s Health.com. And despite being a site all about health, the interviewer seems to care more about Zooey’s movie career and marriage than about whether she got vegan brain fog or not. In fact, the only question she asks about Deschanel’s veganism is: “You used to be vegan right?”
Not a bad question, though....
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Animal Liberation Front Sends Chickens to "A... →
According to unrepentant animal lover Peter Young, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) recently struck a decisive blow for animal liberty. An official release from the group said:
In the late hours of April 1st and the early morning of April 2nd our cell liberated 72 hens from Shepherds Egg Farm near Spanish Fork, Utah. The hens are now being transferred to a better place.
“A better...
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RawForLife Still Raw For Life. Just Not Raw Vegan. →
I recently got a couple of Vegan Quotes of the Day from Debbie Took’s raw vegan blog rawforlife. I can’t do that anymore, because after testing low for B12, she added dairy back into her diet.
No doubt she was vegan for the wrong reasons, and would have easily traversed the rest of her life herbivorously if she hadn’t been so insistent on preserving enzymes.
Raw vegans get flak...
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“To be frank, I would guess that even among people without a previous history of...”
– Jack Norris, RD
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“Living vegan values in the midst of persons who are indifferent, apathetic, or...”
– HarryH
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Raw Vegan Quail Eggs →
Vegan.com linked to this photo-demonstration of how to make raw vegan quail eggs for Easter. Raw food often requires an insane amount of preparation, particularly when it’s mimicking enzyme-ravaged non-vegan food (you think you open a young coconut and there are a bunch of raw vegan empanadas inside?); apparently, raw vegan quail eggs are no exception.
In the spirit of Easter and the...
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“Now suppose I am a practical-minded, hardheaded slaveholder whose neighbor has,...”
– Cora Diamond, “Eating Meat and Eating People”
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Vegan Quote of the Day
Fitting_username: I love beans, but they mess with my stomach. Is this normal? How do other vegans deal with this? Kidney beans, for example, give me gas (and occasionally diarrhea) an hour or so after eating them. I’ve tried taking bean-zyme (like Beano) pills, but they don’t help. Legumes are my only source of protein, so this is something I need to deal with. Any suggestions?
...
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“For longtime vegans, daily life in a carnist world can be extremely stressful,...”
– SuperVegan
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Why Vegans Don’t Join Freegan Omnivores
When vegans are challenged on the impact that their consumer vegan lifestyles have on the planet — the destruction to animal habitats caused by supporting agriculture, the fossil fuel burned in all stages of food production, the animals that are killed in the harvesting of grains, etc. — they typically admit that their diets are not entirely death-free, even though there are no dead animals...