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.

I spent a very vegan half-day with an old macrobiotic friend of mine. Traffic and vegan food aside, I was glad I did. One reason is that she let me in on an interesting rumor.

You know the new Alicia Silverstone vegan book, The Kind Diet?

Ignore that name at the top of the book cover. Alicia Silverstone didn’t really write The Kind Diet. Well, not the majority of it. The real writer was Jessica Porter, author of The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics. According to my friend, Silverstone and Porter teamed up on The Kind Diet, supposedly as co-writers.

But since Silverstone can’t write, Porter wrote most of what actually appears in the book. [That might explain why Alicia Silverstone, who as far as I know had always been just a normal vegan, is suddenly a macrobiotic now.] Then right before publication, Silverstone reneged on her promise to give Porter co-writing credit. Porter didn’t even get a “With Jessica Porter” ghostwriter-style nod. She got nothing.

No, that’s not fair, Porter didn’t get nothing. I assume she got paid. And she did get a small-print mention in the acknowledgements at the end of The Kind Diet.

After Silverstone thanks her dead dog Sampson, “all the animals,” her husband, Mother Nature, animal rights activists, macrobiotics advocate Mina Dobic, her grandfather and her dad, Silverstone finally thanks “my collaborator, Jessica Porter. The dream to write this book has been alive in me for well over 8 years, and I was lucky enough to find you to help me realize it with your sass, wisdom, kindness and fun. Thank you, rice and universe, for introducing us!”

Small consolation when Porter was expecting “The Kind Diet, by Alicia Silverstone and Jessica Porter.”

Luckily, Alicia Silverstone was going to be doing a Q&A and book signing in Los Angeles the very next day, so I decided to go ask her about all this.

It was at The Barnes & Noble on the 3rd St. Promenade on Oct. 17.

The man who introduced Alicia Silverstone. “No photography allowed while Ms. Silverstone is speaking,” he lectured us. “And no video taping.”

Out came Alicia Silverstone, who didn’t seem to recognize her own book.

There, that’s better.

Silverstone didn’t have a speech prepared. Instead, she went straight into the Q&A. My hand shot up first, but — perhaps sensing I was going to ask something controversial — she answered a couple of questions before she got to me. But get to me she did.

“What was it like to work with your collaborator Jessica Porter?” I asked.

Silverstone’s lips tightened into a sort of angry half smile.

“Good. It was good,” she said abruptly, a drastic change from her loquacious responses to the previous questions. She seemed ready to move on, but I persisted.

“Could you tell us more about what it was like?” I asked.

“Are you friends with Jessica?” she asked, her tone steeped in accusation.

“No, I just saw that you credited her in your acknowledgements, and I was wondering how the collaboration went.”

“Why are you asking this?” she asked, almost ferociously. “That’s kind of a strange question, don’t you think?”

“I just want to know what the writing process was like,” I said, feeling like I had to give her an out, or it would become too awkward to bear.

Silverstone, less tense, admitted that she tends to write with overly exuberant incomplete sentences and thickets of exclamation marks, which Jessica Porter and her editor had to correct. I smiled and nodded politely as Silverstone then swiftly ushered her answer into completely generic Q&A territory, discussing her attachment to material that had to go, editor comments, etc.

Based on her defensiveness and paranoia when I first mentioned her collaborator’s name, however, I have to believe my friend. Jessica Porter got screwed.

Maybe this isn’t a big deal, though. When I told some of my other L.A. friends about my encounter with Alicia Silverstone, they were unimpressed. “That sounds pretty typical,” one of them said. “I’d be more surprised if she actually had written it herself,” another said. Oh, you Hollywood cynics.

There was only one other provoking question during the entire Q&A, and I have to mention it, since it was pertinent to this blog. It came from this sleazy looking guy (full disclosure — before he spoke, I had him pegged as a sickly vegan):

“Almost everyone here is vegan,” he said. “And they all look so thin and sickly. How can you stand up there and tell us this diet is healthy?”

A reader of this blog, clearly. I had no idea you all slicked your hair back like that.

Silverstone handled this question much better than mine. “I’m not denying that there are some bad looking people here,” she said. (Frustratingly, she did not point them all out.) “But I guarantee you could go into any room filled with meat eaters and find just as many unhealthy looking people, if not more.”

To an extent, she’s right. But that misses the point. Yes, the Standard American Diet can make people overweight and unhealthy. But nobody claims that eating junk food gives them a healthy glow and allows them to live longer than everyone else. Despite evidence to the contrary, Alicia Silverstone says a vegan diet will make you light and juicy. The only juiciness that junk food meat eaters talk about is in regards to their ground beef patties. Veganism is not the only way to be unhealthy. But it is the least healthy diet I know of that claims to be the most healthy diet.

But back to the cruel triumph of celebrities over little people. Even if Alicia Silverstone unfairly hoarding all the credit for The Kind Diet is just another day in Hollywood, I still found her initial panic at my question amusing, and I wanted her crime to haunt her longer. I went to her blog and saw that she still had more cities to hit on her tour, so I emailed my friends in those cities to see if they would go and ask her the same question I did. “I can almost guarantee that she will say ‘Who sent you here?’” I told them.

But no one cared enough to do it.

Damn it people, why can’t you all be as obsessed with veganism as me?

The reason I think this is such a low ebb for Paul McCartney is not only that he’s sold his artistic soul to push a cause (a lot of artists fall into that trap), but that the cause itself is such a weak compromise. He doesn’t want there to be a Meat-Free Monday. He wants there to be a Meat-Free Forever.

Yet here he is, quivering with desperation, artlessly begging the meat eaters of the world to band togethr and agree on one day a week in which to give up the sinful flesh they covet. And the only reason he can give for this is that it would be a “funday.”