June 2010
21 posts
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"Vegetarian friends find the perfect way to... →
This is a cute enough story if you don’t have a moral problem with eating meat. For vegans, though, there is something deeply offensive about these “vegetarian” friends eating Texas barbecue together before one of them moves to California.
When you see meat as rape and murder, a celebratory meal between friends looks more like Alex and his droogs bonding over a bit of...
"Cattle Feedlots Are Like a Holiday Inn" →
Erik Marcus from Vegan.com reacts kind of hilariously to an article by Ryan Andrews, a vegan body builder who went on a tour of a factory farm and came away telling the cattle men to “rock on.” It didn’t even take a small farm to impress this guy!
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“And for those ignorant folks who STILL think I’m bonkers and do not...”
– PETA’s Sexiest Vegetarian, 2007
Diet Wars →
Melissa McEwen pointed me to this article about the current state of the food wars. It seems that the paleo diet and veganism are the main players in the battle over “American’s waistline.” Annoyingly for vegans, there is no reference to the ethics of meat eating, and the main vegan they interviewed likes to hunt for fun (he just eats his trail mix rather than his prey).
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“There are many reasons I’m vegan. And one is that I’m too damned lazy, and much...”
– Vegan.com
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When Veganism is Not Symbolic
A few weeks ago I wrote that veganism was nothing but a symbolic act. That inspired a retort from vegan dietitian Jack Norris, who quoted a paper called Expected Utility, Contributory Causation, and Vegetarianism. In it, Jason Gaverick Matheny (founder of New Harvest, a company developing lab-grown meat) argues in sciencey prose that a single vegetarian’s meat abstinence could lead to fewer...
“We could always become even better examples of a vegan. After 31 years, I still...”
– Veganism: A Truth Whose Time Has Come
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Vegan Banned From Commenting on Huffington Post... →
I once compared “Rob,” the former serial commenter at my blog, to a vegan Ignatius Reilly, but that was before this entry by Dan Cudahy at Unpopular Vegan Essays:
Perhaps I was banned because the combination of the cogency of the arguments set forth in the above comments with how deeply prejudiced the moderators and average readers are at HuffPo generated such irrational...
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“The arson at the Sheepskin Factory in Denver was done in defense and retaliation...”
– ALF Lone Wolf
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“If you’ve been a good boy or girl and know cheese is nothing but the product of...”
– Vegetarian Star
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Interview With an Ex-Adventist: Sondra
I found Sondra while researching my entry about the recent mood study on Seventh-Day Adventists, which found that vegetarian Adventists were in a slightly better mood than their meat-eating brethren. Sondra is an ex-Adventist who now blogs about her new faith at 8thDay4Life. In her entry SDA Health Message, she wrote:
I cannot find any scriptural foundation for teaching that your choice of ...
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“The thought of the flesh of another once living animal lying in your stomach...”
– Sandra
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“English is full of ‘speciesist’ phrases, and ‘ratting...”
– Vegan.com
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The Vegan Dietitian to Ex-Vegans: Don't Be Fooled... →
“The Vegan Dietitian,” Virgina Messina, has commented on the growing legion of ex-vegans. The gist? They should have stayed vegan.
These are her main points about vegan apostates:
1. They were never fully committed as vegans.
2. They thought veganism required too much sacrifice.
3. They believed a mythological conception of nutrition that deems protein and fat to be especially...
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“Don’t apologize for your choice to be vegan. When you have to make special...”
– “Living Vegan (In a Carnivore’s World)”
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"Can Meat Eaters Also Be Environmentalists?" →
“Yes,” says Nicolette Niman in The Atlantic Monthly (link from Hunt Gather Love).
In case anyone missed the San Francisco debate over this subject between Nicolette Niman and mad cowboy Howard Liman, Alternet has a summary. I’d say Lyman lost definitively when he claimed that humans evolved to be herbivores.
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Survey Says: Vegetarian Adventists in a Jolly Mood
A new study averaged the mood swings of 60 vegetarian Seventh-Day Adventists and 78 meat-eating Adventists. Each participant took a 30 minute survey, listing some meals and ranking their moods from the previous week.
The expected result would be for omnivores to be happier because of the DHA they get from fish, but no, it turned out the vegetarian Adventists were in a better mood than their...
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“Beef steak is gross. Bloody, nasty, rotting meat. How can anyone cut into a...”
– Vegan Crunk
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Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Devon Crosby Helms
After a vegan blog called me out for claiming that nobody becomes vegan purely for athletic purposes, I realized I could stand to learn a little more about vegan athletes. But then, my biases being what they are, I thought it might be even more interesting to learn about ex-vegan athletes. So I interviewed Devon Crosby Helms, a runner who tried out veganism and vegetarianism until she discovered...