One reason veganism isn’t a cult is that it has too many leaders. Any self-respecting mind control venture should have one agreed-upon figure to worship, but in veganism, a surging crowd of authors, doctors and activists all promote disparate ways to live the cruelty-free life. Even Donald Watson, the inventor of the term “vegan,” never claimed to be the leader of veganism. Vegans get to choose which animal-abstaining guru to ally their thinking with, and if they want, they don’t have to pick one at all. Any cultish aspects of vegan behavior are not imposed upon vegans from above. Vegan obedience comes mostly from within.
Still, vegans often do find themselves aligning with charismatic, high-profile herbivores as they grope their way through the confusing and sometimes contradictory world of righteous eating.
Some of these respected experts were kind enough to greet vegans in person in San Francisco.
Did you know that John Robbins gave up his share of the Baskin Robbins fortune to defend the vegan way? If you didn’t, John Robbins would be more than happy to tell you about it. He enjoys recounting the Oedipal origins of his life path, and you can see why — turning down hundreds of millions of dollars shows he is a non-materialistic, uncorruptible person. It also proves veganism right. Because if veganism weren’t right, why would he give up so much to side with it?
When I was a vegan, I didn’t hear much about John Robbins, though I at least knew about the rebellion against his dairy-pushing dad. I guess I considered him to be old news. His first book came out in the late 1980s, but his relatively soft-spoken demeanor would have made him at home in the Moosewood Collective or with the New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook people.
Still, his lecture was the most popular one I saw at the World Veg Fest.
Would they have given up millions to follow the dairy-free dream?
This is Michael Klaper, M.D., the man who very enthusiastically introduced John Robbins. He runs the just-shy-of-too-self-consciously-reputable-sounding Institute of Nutrition Education and Research. But he ruins the illusion of professionalism with the quote from himself at the top of the page: “The human body has absolutely no requirement for animal flesh. Nobody has ever been found face-down 20 yards from the Burger King because they couldn’t get their Whopper in time.” Is the first sentence supposed to relate to the second sentence? And if so, is cruising fast food parking lots for human corpses what vegan doctors classify as research? Even taking photos of sickly vegans is more scientific than that!
The guy in the vegan hat is Bob Linden, host of Go Vegan radio.
If having a weekly radio show encouraging people to go vegan doesn’t convince you of his devotion, look — he’s vegan from behind as well.
His demeanor is bombastic and unforgiving (of meat eaters), but because of his mastery of the art of puns, also very corny. From a Vegetarians in Paradise interview with Linden:
I thought very differently in the 6th grade from what I think now. While then, normalcy was a breakfast of bacon and eggs, lunch was a burger and fries, and dinner was a lamb chop (finally, the animal is named…but even that is no deterrent), I now regard that normalcy as lunacy. How was I born into a family of savage barbarians? They seemed so nice. How were they coerced into the cult of the carnivore? How unevolved I was to salivate over the skin I would pull from murdered birds’ bodies, or to feast on tongue sandwich, or snack on intestine. Is there nothing more aberrant than a diet of body parts?
I think “abhorrent” is the word he means, since meat eating is actually quite common. But onto the puns. Here he speaks about the challenges of procuring ethical advertisers in a world of blood-thirsty murderers:
It’s no easy feat in that the universe of potential sponsors is limited to vegan and cruelty-free products and services and no McDevil’s, Murder King, When-Dies, Kill’s Jr, KFC (Killing For Cash) propaganda dollars are welcome here.
This is the sort of vegan who probably doesn’t have many non-vegan friends.
My favorite part of his interview is when he says, “I always wonder how the first meat salesperson got his first sale, and how it caught on so well. ‘You want us to eat what?’” How much wondering can you do before you realize that imaginary scenario makes absolutely no sense?
At least the audience loved him.
Howard Lyman got popular in the 1990s off the novelty of a cattle rancher going vegan, and for being named in a lawsuit against Oprah for disparaging meat. He then wrote Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat. I read it in college, and I’m pretty sure I gave it a good review in my student paper.
I guess Lyman accidentally left some stuff out of Mad Cowboy, because in 2005 he wrote a sequel called No More Bull! The Mad Cowboy Targets America’s Worst Enemy: Our Diet. Sounds like an alternative title for the first book, but the editorial reviews on Amazon.com are very favorable. The first, from John Robbins, calls it “an amazing experience.” The other, by T. Colin Campbell, says “This is a fun but serious book to read. Try it and I think you’ll like it!”
Will do, T.
They may not have Creutzfeldt-Jakob, but they sure have a bad case of Lyman Disease!
Michael Gregor, M.D. (the one on the right.) I see this guy so often that when he did his nutrition contest in San Francisco, I was one of the winners. Actually, though, it was the first time I had seen his entire presentation.
This is a man who knows how to manipulate a vegan crowd. He tells them almost exactly what they want to hear, with just enough bad news to make the good news even more credible. For instance, vegans believe that they have healthier bones than dairy eaters, because the acid and protein in dairy leeches more calcium than the calcium in dairy makes up for. That’s too optimistic, vegans, says Dr. Gregor: vegan bones are no better or worse than the bones of lactovores. This news, while not a total victory for vegans, is almost better because it is more plausible, while still letting vegans believe that their bones are just fine.
The good doctor warns vegans about B12 deficiency and steers them away from white potatoes, raw mushrooms, blue-green algae and coconut meat. To their relief, he lets them keep their wheat gluten and tofu, and he really wins them over by cataloging all the parasites that can be found in animal corpses.
He also brings up Mad Cow Disease. Even though Creutzfeldt-Jakob never took off the way it was supposed to, Gregor intones that it takes a while to show up, so even if it seems like nobody is getting it (you have a one in a million chance)… do you want to take that risk?
He layers the good news and bad news in perfect doses like a maestro, saving much of the good for last and building to the crescendo that if done right, the vegan diet is the healthiest possible diet in the world. If he doesn’t get a standing ovation at your vegan festival, your local vegans are simply too weak to stand.
These are the world’s healthiest people. As long as they take their B12.
Here’s Rory Freedman, the more popular of the two co-authors of the Skinny Bitch series. She was a speaker at the San Francisco World Veg Fest, but I missed her there, so these photos are from the D.C. VegFest.
She was the most watched speaker at the VegVest, but her speech was probably the worst. It was an aimless ramble about how vegans should treat meat eaters as equals, even though vegans are right and are better people.
I imagine that most of the audience members liked it well enough, but were disappointed by how short it was.
Afterward, she signed a few books.
Here she is signing Skinny Bastard for this aspiring illegitimate child. “You obviously haven’t read my book yet,” she quipped. What a Bitch!
But I don’t want to end in D.C. (who does?) Here is Dixie Mahy, the president of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society since the early 1970s. Going by her profile on Blogger, she is 76 and has been vegetarian for 45 years and vegan for 25 (depending on how recently she updated her profile). That’s a long time. So, alright, I guess it’s possible to pull it off, if that’s what you want to do.
