Soup!

I've never been a food blogger and have no interest in being one for various reasons, including that others are doing a much better job at it than I ever could. I have, however, spent many (many!) years experimenting in the kitchen. Those who've been around when that experimentation spiked as a passionate indulgence rarely complained about the outcome--including my mostly omni friends. One of my biggest loves over the years has been making soup (or stews) and I have a couple of favourite recipes I'd like to share.

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First up is a variation on a green lentil soup recipe I've been making forever (and which I've posted here before). I've no idea of whether there was a specific recipe of origin for it--it's become so "off the cuff" for me. The tarragon is really a worthwhile addition!

Lentil Soup

What you need:

1-1/2 cups lentils, washed
1-1/2 quarts veggie stock or water
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbs nutritional yeast
2 stalks celery & tops, chopped
1 Tbs celery seed, ground
1 onion, diced 2 carrots, diced
1-1/2 to 2 cups tomatoes, stewed (I just use the canned and diced)
2 Tbs olive oil
1 Tbs lemon juice
1/2 or 1 tsp fresh tarragon, shredded (optional but recommended!)

What you do:

Place lentils in pot. Add water / veggie stock, salt and yeast. Cover and simmer until almost tender. Add remainder of ingredients. Cover. Simmer until carrots are done (about 15 minutes or longer). Add the tarragon during the last 5 minutes of cooking.

This soup is great with fresh whole grain rolls smeared with vegan "cream cheese" or a bit of Earth Balance margarine sprinkled with nutritional yeast. Serves 5-6.

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Next is an adaptation of Dorothy R. Bates' "Noodle Soup", from The TVP Cookbook. This soup is a ridiculously easy to make side for a sandwich, and reminds me a lot of the canned chicken noodle soup mom would often serve up when I was a kid.

Not-Chicken Noodle Soup

What you need:

1 cup of onions, chopped
2 Tbs olive oil
6 cups of hot water
1 cup TVP granules (smallish)
2 cups noodles, broken
1 tsp (or less) salt
1 tsp dried parsley, heaping
1/3 cup nutritional yeast flakes
1 cup frozen vegetables of your choice (optional)

What you do:

Heat the oil in a large pan and sauté the onion until it's just beginning to brown. Then add the 6 cups of hot water, TVP, noodles and salt and bring to a brisk boil and simmer for around 5 minutes. Add dried parsley and frozen vegetables (if using) and simmer for another 5-10 minutes. When done, stir in nutritional yeast flakes and serve. Garnish with chopped fresh parsley. Serves 6

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Each spring, I have a moment of veritable "doh!" when I remember that I've once again forgotten to place an advance catalog order for tomatillo seed to have time to sprout them early enough to grow seedlings to transplant into my garden. You can't get fresh tomatillos here and local seed choices are (sadly) limited. If I manage to find a way to get my hands on some soon so that I can grow them, I'll surely be making the following amazing soup by late summer. It's an adaptation of a recipe that was given to me in a vegan recipes forum years ago, and I'm unsure of its origins but ended up tweaking it and making it several times the two summers I didn't forget to buy seed.

Tomatillo Soup

What you need:

2-3 Tbs olive oil
2-1/2 cups chopped onion
5 medium fresh poblano or Anaheim chili peppers (or if you need to substitute, see here)
2-3 Tbs garlic, crushed and / or minced
2 tsp salt
2 Tbs chili powder
6 cups tomatillos, husked and chopped
4 cups water
2-3 Tbs sweetener
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

What you do:

In a large pot, heat the oil and sauté the onion for 4-5 minutes. Mix the peppers, garlic, salt and chili powder into them and continue to sauté for another 5 minutes or so. Add the tomatillos and mix well, cover and continue to cook for another 8-10 minutes, allowing the tomatillos to begin to soften. Add the water and bring to a quick boil, then lower to a simmer, cover the pot and allow to cook another 10-12 minutes. Purée some or all of the soup in a blender or food processor and return to the pot to heat. Stir in the cilantro, saving some to garnish, and serve immediately. Serves 6.

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General Soup Tips:

If you're serving hot soup, preheat the bowls and tureens you're using to serve it. If you're serving cold soup, chill the bowls or tureens you're using to serve it. It really makes a difference!

Garnish your soup! Although soups often turn out looking quite lovely and colourful, I often add a little something to individual serving bowls. Suggestions include:

-Chopped fresh herbs (e.g. dill, parsley, cilantro, et al., depending on herbs used in soup)
-Grated citrus rind (organic is ideal)
-Croutons
-A dollop of soy yogurt topped with a thin slice of lemon or lime
-Minced scallions or chives
-A sprinkle of paprika
-Thinly sliced radish, carrot
-Chopped nuts (e.g. walnuts, pecans, peanuts)
-A spoonful of chutney
-Black olive slivers
-Toasted almond slivers

You get the point... Now go make soup!

"My Transition to Vegan Wasn't Easy"

This headline caught my eye earlier today: "My Transition to Vegan Wasn't Easy". It's an interview with someone called P. K. Mohankumar, featured in this weekend's Business Standard in India. I stifled a slight groan at the hint of "veganism-is-hard" I detected with a slight sense of hope, triggered by the use of the word "transition" with a past-tense verb. The first paragraph belies anything positive as soon as Mohankumar states that he is sharing his favourite fish-based recipe with the Business Standard. Mohankumar goes on to talk about his conversion to "veganism" from having been a "hard core non-vegetarian" and lists off a wide variety of healthy fruits, vegetables, grains, seeds and legumes he regularly consumes. And then:

My transition to being a committed vegan took 90 grueling days. So, every Sunday is a ‘fun’ day for me and I indulge my palate with a typical south Indian breakfast of steaming idlis, home dosas or puttu followed by an appetising fish curry, masala grilled mackerels and sardines, with rice and tomato-garlic rasam.

He goes on to mention loving "probiotic ice-creams [and] flavoured yogurt", and of course since I wander in the world of vegan alternatives, I'm used to assuming that when people self-identify as vegan that when they say "ice cream" or "yogurt" they mean the soy- or coconut-based kinds. I can't say that I feel comfortable giving Mohankumar the benefit of the doubt, however, since he goes on to describe some of his favourite non-Indian dishes as follows:

I like Italian cuisine a lot. Penne arrabbiata, herb-crusted John Dory with grainy mustard sauce or tomato vinaigrette with olives and capers, is what I usually order when I eat Italian food. I also like Mediterranean cuisine, especially olive oil-poached salmon and grilled cod with caper sauce.

So, rather than say that his transition to veganism "wasn't easy", I think it's safer to say that Mohankumar's transition to veganism just plain old "wasn't".

On Goodall and Hummus (i.e. More Things Overheard)

In a Huffington Post interview with Marianne Schnall today, Dr. Jane Goodall displayed a disappointing and marked lack of consistency in her view of whether nonhuman animals exist solely for human use and pleasure. To defend her own choice to use nonhuman animals, Dr. Goodall fell back on that old familiar excuse that veganism is "just too hard". When asked about the hypocrisy of calling one species 'pet', while calling another 'pest' (in this case, with reference to hamsters kept in cages vs. mice killed in traps), she responded:

And you get the white coated scientist who has a dog at home who's part of the family who understands ever word I say - but then he goes and puts on his white coat and does unspeakable things to dogs in the name of science. There's a real schizophrenia. Yes, we are very peculiar [laughs].

Then, after describing the health benefits she experienced when she chose to stop eating meat, she was asked about going vegan and responded:

Well, I can't go vegan because travelling like I do, I really, really don't think I could. You know, it's really difficult. And I stay with people - we had a vegan staying us one time, and it's very difficult. Three hundred days on the road - you go to North Korea - it's jolly hard to be vegetarian much less a vegan [laughs]. But I do my best. And if people would think about intensive farming - if they would think of the damage to the environment of growing all this corn or raising all these cattle. If they would think about the torture of the animals on the intensive farms. And then if they would realize about the antibiotics getting out into the environment, the bacteria building up resistance and the superbugs that we are breeding, more people would become vegetarians.

So she has no difficulty promoting vegetarianism for the environment, for one's health and because of "the torture of the animals on the intensive farms" -- but veganism (i.e. refraining from using animals and their products altogether) is off her radar because it's "very difficult". Considering that as recently as 2007, Goodall was asserting that some cases of vivisection could be justifiable, and that vegetarianism is "not necessarily an option that everyone has to adopt" ("Goodall on Vivisection and Vegetarianism", from Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach), her own schizophrenia today isn't all that surprising. There were bits in the rest of her interview that I also found disconcerting. For instance, a) she presented what she called "good zoos" as perhaps being a better place for primates to be than in the wild where they still experience "fear" and "pain", yet b) states later that chimpanzees or the "voice of the natural world" would, if given the opportunity, tell us to bug off and stop interfering and then c) asserts that humans need to get involved--that we "have to go in and manage very often". The one thing that is clear from the interview is that Dr. Jane Goodall thinks that some animals are ours to use--just not the specific ones that she doesn't want us to use.

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I found an interesting looking recipe for hummus this morning that uses ginger and heaps of fresh mint to flavour it. The filler in the article that leads up to the recipe, however, left me with a (yep--here I go) bad taste in my mouth.

Because they don’t eat dairy products or meat, vegans can have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet. Combining grains and legumes can be a good source of protein. This hummous can be made with a whole grain to ensure for maximum protein intake.

Vegans do not have difficulty getting enough protein in their diet and the whole protein combining theory has been discredited. Why, oh why do people not take 10-15 minutes to do a little bit of background research before perpetuating misinformation? The folks at the University of Victoria's independent paper The Martlet should know better!

Link Updates

I just wanted to take a second to mention recent link updates for the "Ethics of Consumption and Otherwise" list on My Face Is on Fire. I've recently added:

• Abolition of Speciesism (Spanish/English)
  

• Derechos Animales Humanos y Nohumanos (Spanish)
  

• Ánima (Spanish/Portuguese/English)
  

• Coolwater4animals (Jeffrey Coolwater's blog)
  

• Porolita's YouTube Channel
  

• Vegan Ireland (The website for the Vegan Society of Ireland)

• Vegans for Peace

I've also added the following two links to the "Vegan Cooking and Nutrition" links:

• Full Irish Vegan

• Vegan Dinners

(If any of these sites belong to you and I've misnamed them, please do leave a comment or drop me a line at m.of.the.maritimes at gmail.com. Thanks!)

Things Overheard

Sometimes you hear someone say something and it makes so little sense that you almost do a double-take. Think "Dan Quayle". In this case, something I read had that effect on me:

[T]he treatment of animals that land on our grocery store shelves each day is deplorable. [...] While I am not vegetarian, I do make vegetarian choices on a regular basis in an effort to lessen my meat consumption.

What on earth does it mean to make "vegetarian choices"? Eating an apple? Having a bowl of cereal with soy milk? Having a bowl of cereal with dairy milk? Eating an apple somewhere between having pepperoni pizza for lunch and a T-bone steak with egg salad for dinner? This is where concern about treatment seems to fall short, with the "every little bit counts" mentality shows itself to be ineffective, as does this half-hearted lip-service to animals called 'vegetarianism'.

I'm just sayin'.

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Speaking of paying lip-service to animals: In an article on "flirting" with Alicia Silverstone's Kind Diet, an aspiring foodie was no doubt chuckling to herself at her own cleverness when she wrote:

I decided to be kind to myself and try this diet in moderation. After all, who can go cold turkey from donuts, ice cream and fried onion rings? Plus, Easter is coming and I can’t miss pigging out on the Easter ham.

It seems to have become the latest thing to review vegan cookbooks and intersperse parts of the actual review with references to delectable animal flesh--where eating animals (or animal products) is presented as the equivalent of eating a decadently fattening slice of cake. Such is the new interest in so-called ethical eating.

What Other Abolitionists Have Been Doing

This is something I should do much more often, and will try to feature at least monthly from now on. There is so much being done right now to promote vegan education and abolitionist animal rights all over the world. I often share links to other abolitionists' blog updates or new projects on Twitter and Facebook, but think that having a monthly rundown in one spot of some highlights would be beneficial. There's more room this way for me to provide context where it's warranted, and it makes it easier for others to weigh in and discuss what's being shared. I'll start with a few mentions today, but will post many more later in the week.

So, where to start?

Prof. Gary L. Francione has a new book coming out in May. The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation was co-written with Prof. Robert Garner of the University of Leicester (U.K.), and will be published by Columbia University Press. In the first section of the book, Prof. Francione defends an abolitionist approach to animal rights; in the second half, Prof. Garner defends the new welfarist approach (what Garner calls "protectionist"). I'll post the exact release date as soon as it's revealed (or you can go right to the source by keeping an eye on the Abolitionist Approach website, or by following the man himself on Twitter). Prof. Francione's also been busy updating his site with various essays over this past month:

• "Veganism: Just Another Way of Reducing Suffering or a Fundamental Principle of Justice & Nonviolence?"

• "Eight Animals" was about an AOL news story on the shockingly high number of animals relinquished to its shelters killed by PeTA.
  

• "Partners in Exploitation" was an essay on various animal welfare organizations' rubber-stamping the so-called "humane" consumption of animals and in doing so, merely effectively perpetuating the status quo by making consumers feel more comfortable about continuing to consume and otherwise use non-human animals.
  

• "Euphoria? For Whom?" was an elaboration upon the previous essay. This one singled out a group called Humane Farm Animal Care and how it misleads the public, through its certification or labelling program, into thinking that dairy cows can lead delightfully happy lives as they're enslaved and used for their secretions.

• "Singer Approves Again of Animal Exploitation; Drayson on Vivisection in the UK" was about Peter Singer's now fairly consistent public condoning of animal use, and on the rise of vivisection in the UK.

Prof. Francione also recorded and shared his 16th Abolitionist Approach Commentary podcast this month. A short while ago on Twitter, he had asked people to submit questions to him for the podcast and in this commentary, he responded to those concerning single-issue campaigns, as well as "with the issue about why many of those who promote violence are opposed to the abolitionist approach". You can listen to it here.

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Along with participating in ARZone's Live Guest Chat as a featured guest on March 9 (and later being invited to join its moderation team), Dan Cudahy wrote a couple of pieces for his popular Unpopular Vegan Essays blog:

• "Basic Economics and Four Types of Advocacy" compared and contrasted advocacy focused on supply vs. demand and / or welfarism vs. veganism.

• "On Veganism and Being Fully Human" provided some insight--written quite beautifully and succinctly--into how accepting or rejecting speciesism qualifies the traits we customarily understand or present as typifying what it means to be "human".
  

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Kerry Wyler set up a Facebook page for Vegan Maine, to promote abolitionist animal rights through creative and non-violent vegan education in the state of Maine.

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Elizabeth Collins recently recorded and made available Episode 54 of her New Zealand Vegan Podcast! In it, she talks about her street activism with fellow-abolitionist William Paul. She also mentions Veganicious Barbara Degrande's brand new podcast and highlights a couple of new YouTube videos by Ben Frost, which feature him performing his songs "I Am Someone - A Call for Veganism" and "Killed for Taste, Loved for Companionship - The Notes of Moral Schizophrenia".

If you haven't yet checked out the New Zealand Vegan Podcast, do so now--there's a wealth of information and interviews to be enjoyed. Also check out the numerous links her blog provides to sites and presentations by abolitionist vegan activists around the world.

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Check back in later this week for more updates on what other abolitionists have been doing and remember:

Waiting for the Great (Vegan) Leap Forwards

Here's a video posted a little over two years ago that I stumbled across of a reworking of a classic Billy Bragg song to promote veganism and abolitionist animal rights. It's by a guy called Ben Edwards. The sound quality is a little iffy at times, but have a listen!

Animals Don't Need Our Pity

Here's another great video from porolita22's YouTube channel.

Non-human animals don't need our pity; what they need is for us to stop using them and to talk to others about not using them.

Go vegan and talk to someone else about veganism today!

Vegan Eats?

Back in September, I traveled to a town around an hour or so outside of Philadelphia to visit with a certain floppy-haired boy. The trip involved a lot of firsts for me. Aside from the fact that I hadn't ventured out of the country in well over seven years, it was my first time traveling through the US on a bus and setting foot in the states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It was the first time I've ever fallen asleep listening to a loud chorus of cicadas. I also met a couple of vegans for the first time since going vegan, myself, when we got to share a meal in a fantastic and unassuming little vegan restaurant. The trip also provided me with rare (for me) opportunities to explore a wide variety of other vegan options.

Online vegan friends and acquaintances from the Philadelphia area had recommended Govinda's Gourmet Vegetarian to me. More specifically, they'd recommended the fast-food / takeout part of the restaurant called Govinda's To Go. Although it had been described to me as a vegan establishment, I soon discovered that it wasn't. When the floppy-haired one and I arrived, I noticed that the menu posted on their wall stated that they offered (dairy) mozzarella cheese as an option for their sandwiches and other dishes. Having had their cheese steak sandwiches recommended by one of the vegan friends who'd suggested the place, the floppy-haired one ordered their Chicken Cheese Steak and I ordered their Pepper Steak Sandwich, both of us making sure to confirm that we wanted dairy-free cheese on them.

After a short wait, our food was ready and we carried it outside to eat, due to limited seating inside. I then noticed that we'd each been prepared Chicken Cheese Steak sandwiches, and after my sweetie and I discussed our disappointment with the amount of filling in them, I took a bite. We'd spent part of the ride into Philly laughing over his stories of the notoriously sky-high-piled classic Philly cheese steak sandwiches he and his family had enjoyed when he was a kid; these sandwiches had a modest amount of "chicken" in them, with some grilled peppers and just enough of a very, very tasty gravy to moisten them. The bread was whole grain, hearty and delicious and to make my sandwich a little less "dry", I eventually took some of the small bit of plain mesclun mix on the side and tucked it into the bread. Don't get me wrong--it was good. In fact, it was good enough that I took yet another bite before remembering to either stuff in the mesclun mix or take a photo.

When we got home, I took a look at the takeout menu I'd grabbed as a "souvenir" and noticed how the words "vegan" and "vegetarian" were both used as descriptors in it, but that although the front of the menu had the words "fresh", "healthy", "vegan" and "fast" written on it, the back of the menu stated that all items on the menu were either "vegetarian or vegan". I decided to visit the Govinda's website to see what it had to say and found the following general disclaimer:

All of our Selections are Either Vegan or Vegetarian - No Meat, Poultry, Fish or Egg products are used in the preparation of our dishes although for familiarity we utilize the names of meat products. We are committed to the protection of animals.

I then noticed that the menu on their site also mentions that "Authentic Mozzarella Cow Cheese" or casein-free soy cheese are both offered as options for their sandwiches. What was really disappointing, however, was reading that the meat substitute used in their version of the classic Philly cheese steak--the Philly Pepper Steak Sandwich I'd initially ordered and (thankfully) not been given--is not vegan. Curious, I did some searching using Google and brought up a few ads for the restaurant where they described their menu as "90% dairy-free".

I live in a small city where vegan options in restaurants or other eating establishments are limited to a small handful of decent ethnic places or the local pita place. I rarely eat out aside from the occasional workplace-related lunch (and even then, I often opt out). The bottom line is that the very few times a year I do eat out, it's at the few places in my city where I know the menu and know the staff and am sure that there's little chance of cross-contamination. I know that many vegans feel that eating at non-vegan establishments is wrong since it entails supporting businesses that also profit off the exploitation of non-humans or that some vegans make exceptions for "vegetarian" non-vegan restaurants. There are no "vegetarian" restaurants here in my city, and even if there were, I wouldn't view them any differently than I would ordinary restaurants (i.e. where animal products including flesh are served) and wouldn't feel compelled to support them any more than I would ordinary restaurants. I have mixed feelings about consuming animal-free products at establishments that otherwise profit off the sale and use of animal products, hence my generally refraining from eating out here, since although I can't avoid buying groceries, I can avoid restaurants. For years, I felt that it was important to provide a demand for vegan options at ordinary establishments, but I'm no longer sure of how (or even whether) this is effective.

I'd been excited about Govinda's, as I'd been excited getting to eat at SuTao Cafe earlier in my visit, where for the first time since going vegan, every single thing on a restaurant's menu was up for grabs. I'd been excited and my disappointment with the place ended up being twofold: First, given how the overwhelming majority of their menu offerings are vegan, I don't understand why on earth they couldn't go the extra step to eliminate the rest of their animal-based options. Secondly, I felt that for a place that half-markets itself as vegan, they should really be more forthright about the animal products contained in their dishes. The fact that the meat sub in their Philly Pepper Steak Sandwich is described as being "not vegan" on their website, while no mention of this is made on their posted or paper menus is disconcerting and--whether deliberately so or not--misleading to vegans. I should have done it months ago, but I do intend to contact them about this over the next few days to get clarification and to express my disappointment.

Hegans, Indeed!

Vegan-friendly Twitter streams were abuzz with snide exchanges yesterday about an article on so-called "hegans" that had just appeared in the Boston Globe. What is a "hegan"? According to Boston Globe writer Kathleen Pierce, it represents:

the new face of veganism: men in their 40s and 50s embracing a restrictive lifestyle to look better, rectify a gluttonous past, or cheat death.

So according to Pierce, the "new face of veganism" focuses on animal products you eat, and on improving your own health or appearance. Animals shmanimals! Pierce presents this as a departure from ordinary veganism (in this case, it's really strict vegetarianism), leaving one to think that vegan men had, up to that point, mostly consisted of effeminate and emaciated shells of human beings.

Salon writer Thomas Rogers picked up on this, yesterday, and shared a few of his own thoughts on Pierce's invention of a new word to describe "the supposed hot new trend of the male vegan -- men who refuse to eat meat and animal products and yet somehow manage to hold on to their masculinity" . He quips that "the succinct catchiness of the word is almost enough to forgive the weaknesses of the article". Me, I think that Pierce is just another in a long line of food writers hopping on the recent interest in variations on purported ethical eating, who attempt to bring attention to themselves by inventing new terms -- like former vegetarian Atlantic food writer Max Fisher did last year, while failing abysmally to carve out a niche for himself as a vegan-hating pseudo-vegetarian.

Us and Them

I read an article in the food section of AlterNet this morning that I felt needed to be addressed. Heather Wood Rúdolph wrote about her recent "slimming detox diet" ("6 Things I Learned When I Went Vegan for a Month") . Self-described as having been raised vegan, the writer went on to follow "some version of a vegetarian diet for most of [her] life" (albeit a "happy fish-and-poultry eater for a few years"). She was seeking something to make her feel clean--to make her feel less "full" after "each meal". So? She cut animal products out of her diet for a month, but upon finding herself craving things like tuna, she decided that "eating this way all the time wasn’t for [her]--at least not right now".

What things did she learn from refraining from eating animal products for a month? To become a better cook, that increasing plant-based sources of fibre in one's diet clears out your (uh) system, that when you force yourself into eating something you don't want to be eating (e.g. "when faced with another soy-based dinner or carb-loaded breakfast") you'll crave something else, you can find tons of fresh produce at the farmer's market, that "wine is vegan" (uh, it's actually not all vegan) and, that "[i]t's OK to eat dairy and meat--if you do it responsibly". She elaborates:

Realizing I don’t want to be totally vegan all the time makes the meat/dairy choices I do make seem that much more valuable.

Knowing that you want to keep using animals makes your choices to use animals more "valuable"? What does she mean by this? Perhaps she's been reading Michael Pollan (or Jonathan Safran Foer, since I think it's meant to sound sort of profound). What does she mean by "responsibly"? Basically, that since dairy leaves her bloated, she should eat less of it. Oh, and that she should ask grocers or farmers "how the food they’re selling was raised, processed and shipped", since letting oneself get talked into believing that an animal hop-skipped her way to one's plate joyfully absolves one of any moral accountability to consider whether or not one should be consuming them at all for one's own pleasure. What did she not learn? Sadly, for someone who claims to have been raised vegan, she didn't seem to learn what veganism is really about.

I write articles about pieces like hers on my blog because it confounds me how people conflate things when it comes to discussing (or referencing) veganism. It confounds me that so many are eager to co-opt the term "vegan" and apply it to any variation of actually eating and otherwise using nonhuman animals. A friend of mine who sometimes reads my blog tells me that I'm mostly just nitpicking and judging when I write about this sort of thing. I'll admit that after hearing someone self-identify as a part-time vegan by virtue of having an occasional animal-free meal, that the sound my eyes make when they roll probably finds some way to nestle itself between the lines of text that I write. I'm not perfect and am as prone to frustration as the next critter. The thing is, though, that when I write these articles, it's because when others write about veganism and confuse it with variations of the deliberate use and exploitation of animals, however much (or little) of it, it makes it really hard for me to talk to people about veganism.

"But, this-or-that famous celebrity wears leather pants and she's vegan!"

"But, Mark Bittman says you can be 'vegan before six!'"

"You're just being an absolutist by telling me that I can't be like them and call myself a vegan!"

The thing is that if I talk to you about veganism, I'm not trying to interfere with your ability to choose. I'm not trying to tell you what to do. I'm merely trying to give you the information to make the best possible choices that will take into account the interests nonhuman animals have in not being enslaved for our use. If I tell you that veganism means eschewing the deliberate use or exploitation of all animals at all times as much as is it is possible for you--in good faith--to do so, I'm just explaining the meaning of a term to you. Part of that involves pointing out when and where people are completely mangling the definition or meaning of veganism and setting things straight. When I tell you that not eating meat on Mondays doesn't make you a part-time vegan, I'm not trying to make you feel bad for not eating meat on Mondays, but am just trying to explain to you that part-time animal consumption is not vegan. As a vegan (particularly, as an abolitionist vegan who strives to educate people so that they make the decision to stop using nonhuman animals), it makes no sense for me to condone the use of animals; in condoning the part-time use of animals, I would condone the use of animals. "But every little bit helps," you say?

If I convince a housemate to give up eating eggs for a month, there may be one less chicken (out of the millions of laying hens used in North America each year) thrust into the hellish existence of being kept to produce eggs for human consumption that month. But what about the next month? And the following year? If that housemate kept a cat she'd raised from a kitten in a shoebox all year-round and agreed to let the cat out for one single month, what about the rest of the year? "Of course one month is not enough," most would respond. "It's 'cruel' to keep a cat in a shoebox and the housemate should be made to stop it altogether." But for some reason (let's call it what it is: speciesism), most don't get the same warm fuzzies when considering chickens than they do when considering the animals we usually like to cuddle on our laps. To say that one egg-free month was one of those "every little bit helps" actions, or acknowledging the housemate's effort as having had any moral significance in terms of the rest of that chicken's life (or the lives of the millions of other chickens who continue to be used) makes as much sense as it would to praise the housemate for having let the cat out of the shoebox--much less so, even, considering what chickens go through. We're outraged that a cat would be treated as such, but not so outraged at the treatment of chickens enslaved to provide us with "food".

The problem is that when we get hung up on discussing treatment, we filter it through this preset notion we have of nonhuman animals existing for our use--as our property. While one type of animal (e.g. a cat) is understood to exist as our "pet", another (e.g. a cow) is understood to exist as our "food". We love our pets and eat our food, and to reconcile ourselves to doing either, we deem one worthy of different treatment than the other. But the truth is that chickens and cats (like humans) are sentient; both chickens and cats (like humans) will react to and avoid pain if permitted to do so. When it comes to sentience, the only thing that differentiates a chicken from a cat is what we humans impose on them when we follow through with our need to classify our "things" into convenient categories to make sense of how we use them. It's artificially imposed by us. This is why the root of the problem, when it comes to addressing the moral confusion we humans have when considering what we do--or more often "hire" others to do on our behalf--to nonhuman animals, is that we think of them as our property. We need to focus on their sentience and acknowledge that a chicken is no more a "thing" than a cat and that a cat is no more a "thing" than is a human.

We humans go through most of our lives justifying our moral actions in a ruthless game of "us-and-them", by which we're perpetually imposing a "them" on others with whom we interact. This has been made obvious through justifications given to repress women for centuries, to enslave fellow-humans, to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and so on. It's at the root of racism, sexism, heterosexism and speciesism. Where nonhuman animals are concerned, they become the "other"--different from us, and therefore fair game to be used by "us".

What's become alarming is how some non-vegans--particularly vegetarians--have come to filter abolitionist vegans through this whole "us-and-them" manner of thinking. For instance, you may think as a vegetarian that I'm lumping you into a convenient "them" to set you apart and vilify you when I assert that I won't condone any sort of animal consumption or exploitation, when in fact, I'm trying to include you in my "us" by showing you that nonhuman animals are also "us". By talking to you about veganism, I'm trying to give you the information you need to understand this--not vilify or condemn you for not seeing it, but waving you over to talk to you and to give you the facts so that you can give up your own "us-and-them" mentality. By trying to talk to you about veganism, not mincing words or couching facts, and not trying to acknowledge anything less than not using other sentient animals as being the right thing to do, I'm telling you that I truly believe that you're like me--that you want to do the right thing. I'm trying to convey to you that I believe that you're courageous enough to look at the facts and admit that what we put nonhumans through when we treat them as ours to use is simply awful and that it needs to stop.

When I refuse to listen to other vegans who insist that a vegan message is too hard for you to handle, and who insist that that calling for veganism as the absolute least we can do for nonhuman animals, I'm trying to tell you that I think that you can handle it. I'm not making you a "them" to my abolitionist vegan "us". I'm trying to tell you that if you can move beyond speciesism that you're capable of coming to the same conclusions and that I'm ready and willing to do whatever I can to help you get to those conclusions and to help you act upon them once you do. That's what vegan education is about to me; that's what it means to get rid of the "us-and-them" mentality and to tackle speciesism. And at the very least, to be able to get to that point, we need to have a clear understanding of what is or isn't meant by "veganism".

Learn more at Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach.

What Vegans Eat

OK, so it's two "What Vegans Eat" posts in a month. What can I say? I have food on the brain and food bloggers I follow have been cooking like mad. I can't help but share some of the things that caught my attention:

Krista over at Disposable Aardvarks Inc. has been posting more photos of the bento meals she prepares for her family, sharing logs of what she consumes and reviewing restaurants in the Boston area. Check out her latest post from just yesterday.

Batgirl at Veganincognito recently shared a recipe for "The Best Blended Salsa of All Time".

Over at This Busy (Happy!) Vegan, Allison posted about her love of DIY vegan pizza. I'm a homemade pizza fan, myself. With the right tasty toppings, it's actually become pretty irrelevant to me whether the pizza is cheeseless, or topped with homemade or store-bought cheese subs. Although sometimes I'll shred some Follow Your Heart mozzarella over it or add a bit of nutritional yeast "melty cheeze" sauce, I just as often add a few dollops of hummus or just nothing at all except the sauce and vegetable toppings. Favourite toppings of mine include: bell peppers (green, yellow or red), zucchini, red onion, crushed garlic, spinach, hot banana or jalapeno peppers (fresh or pickled), olives (green or red), broccoli, pineapple, sundried tomatoes, kale and capers--but not all together!

Melissa from The Papaya Chronicles posted a delicious recipe for "Three Sisters Stew" a few days ago, complete with suggestions for different variations on it depending on the ingredients at your disposal or your taste preferences. I made it yesterday and loved it!

Amanda's Vegan Mafia blog continues to offer upbeat product and Salt Lake City restaurant reviews, quick meal ideas, and the occasional mention of the ever elusive and lovely pooch Darby.

Since no "What Vegans Eat" post feel write without the inclusion of something sweet and decadent to round things out, I'll refer you to Jessy's happyveganface blog, where last last month she posted a recipe for "Gluten-Free Chunky Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies". Enjoy!

If you have any vegan food blog recommendations, recipe requests or vegan cooking advice questions, please feel free to ask away by leaving a comment. I'll do my best to answer or lure in someone else in who'd be better able to weigh in.

Terry Bisson's "They're Made Out of Meat"

I'd posted a snippet from this Nebula Award nominated science-fiction short story by Terry Bisson a couple of years ago. It first appeared in OMNI in April 1991. It provides an interesting twist on how most humans view other animals. (Yes, I'm outing myself as a sci-fi geek!)

A short film adaptation of it by director Stephen O'Regan won the Grand Prize at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame's 2006 Film Festival. It's available on YouTube:

Veganism in the Media

Veganism Is _______?

In Long Island University's The Post Pioneer yesterday, its features editor Diane Agulnick shared a couple of paragraphs describing veganism and why she's a vegan ("Veganism Is Not a Religion"). She starts off emphasizing that being vegan is a personal choice for her, writing: "I'm not trying to convert you, I'm not trying to convince you, and I'm not trying to persuade you." She contextualizes this by describing how people often react defensively--even apparently fearfully--upon finding out that she is vegan. What is a vegan? According to Agulnick:

The truth is, a vegan is just an extreme vegetarian. I'm sure most of you know that a vegetarian is someone who does not eat any animal meat, including beef, chicken, fish, etc. The difference between vegans and vegetarians is that vegans also don't eat any dairy, eggs, or any animal products whatsoever.

So after defining veganism as dietary, Agulnick goes on to emphasize the horrible conditions of factory farming to explain why she would refrain from eating animal products other than meat, adding that cow's milk is for calves and that both cows and chickens are "pumped full of hormones" and forced to make them "lactate or shoot out eggs multiple times a day". For emphasis, she adds:

Girls know how hard it is to deal with that one egg once a month; having to go through this on an even more regular basis doesn't sound too pleasant, does it?

I'm not sure I've ever heard this approach used to appeal to either people's empathy or sense of justice to get them to reconsider using nonhuman animals, but then again, as Agulnick restates at the end of her piece to make it clear, it doesn't bother her if people agree or disagree with her "reasoning" since it's just her personal choice. (But hey, if anyone happens to rethink their "carnivorous" ways, it's a bonus.)

Although I appreciate that more people are discussing veganism in mainstream media (or college papers, as in this case), I find it troubling that the "go to" places for so many vegans talking about their veganism is still to overstate how they've no intention of changing others' minds about exploiting nonhuman animals--as if it's rude or shameful to either do so or seek to do so. Adopting this posture does nothing but perpetuate this mindset amongst vegans--and non-vegans alike--that a good vegan is a quiet vegan and that merely talking to a non-vegan about veganism is somehow wrong. How can we possibly educate others about the interests of nonhuman animals within this context?

The Difference Between Man and Animal

Yesterday, on the website for First Things, a publication of The Institute on Religion and Public Life, I found a short opinion piece by a guy called David Wills. He wanted to throw in his own two cents after having attended "a forum on the ethics of food animal product hosted by the National Catholic Bioethics Centre (and after having read a Times Literary Supplement review of Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals). He doesn't talk about veganism, necessarily, but after bringing it up and discussing it with a few people on Twitter, I went back to his piece a few times yesterday sort of amazed at intensity of the man's speciesism, as he takes issue with what he calls "a lack of clarity about what man is and animals are". Particularly, he takes issue with Foer book's reviewer's assertion that what Wills calls "food animals" deserve to live long fulfilling lives:

The reviewer seems to assume, but does not even try to argue, that food animals deserve a long and fulfilling life (whatever fulfilling means for them), and therefore to kill them for our use is wrong. But since they have no real consciousness or memory, how can they know, much less care, that their life is shorter than it might have been?

[...]

Would a beef cow fall into despair if told he was being slaughtered on Monday? Would he start lamenting the books he had not read, the symphonies he had not written, the fact that he won’t be grazing in the field with his great-grandchildren? Animals don’t live in time as man does, and therefore being deprived of time is not an injustice.

In its blurring the fairly obvious difference between man and animal, that argument is typical of the kind of argument often offered against the current use of food animals. Whatever is the argument for treating food animals better than we do, that is not it.

So nonhuman animals "don't live in time as" humans do and therefore have no interest in living lives of their own and we should thus view their use as justifiable? One could say the same of humans who are senile.

That Wills misses the point of why nonhuman animals deserve to live long fulfilling lives makes itself evident in that he describes them as having "no real consciousness or memory". Anyone who has spent any long stretch of time with any nonhuman animal can certainly refute that nonhumans have no memory. As for consciousness, I think that Wills convolutes the issue by focusing on intellect (e.g. "lamenting the books he had not read") rather than acknowledging its most basic and important aspect: Sentience. That nonhumans are able to feel or perceive things around themselves, seeking pleasures and avoiding pain and developing / maintaining relationships with kin and others, is what truly irrefutably reveals their similarities to humans. Wills chooses to ignore this altogether in his short piece, however, finishing it off instead with some martini-phobic ramblings.

He's Not a Vegan... Because He Eats Fish

Finally, I just wanted to throw in this short mangling of the meaning of "vegan" I found in a short review of a weight loss book by the actor who provided the voice for the captain of the Axiom spaceship in the hit animated movie Wall-E (a movie I thought was tremendously overrated, by the way--something I've always wanted an excuse to say aloud or write somewhere), The Oregonian's Jeff Baker gives us some insight into what a vegan is or isn't:

Garlin eventually managed to start losing weight by eliminating meat, chicken, sugar and processed foods from his diet. He is not a vegan because he eats fish, but he is in that neighborhood and happy about it.

In that neighborhood, huh? Uh, OK. Is that like calling the state of Texas or the city of Los Angeles "neighbourhoods"?

Shuffling Out This or That Animal Part as Self-Deprivation

I stumbled across an upbeat little lifestyles piece in the Denton Daily news early this morning ("Lenten sacrifice prompts family to try vegetarianism"), which had I been caffeinated, would have possibly left me shaking my head a little. Just a little. As a vegan, I sometimes encounter people who will say things to me from across a table like: "It's a real shame that you can't try this; you don't know what you're missing!" More often than not, the mindset underlying this is revealed more clearly when folks come right out and tell me that "it must be so hard to not be able to eat anything normal". I always reassure them that when it comes to what I eat, I do just fine, and that if anything, going vegan has left me eating a wider and more healthy variety of foods. I hardly view it as a sacrifice to have made changes in my life that leave me lessening the role I had previously played in the cycle by which animals are bred and then slaughtered for our use--whether as food, personal care products, clothing, entertainment (and so on). So it irks me when I see mainstream media articles describing veganism as hard, or as being about self-sacrifice, when veganism is actually quite easy once you get the hang of it, and is less self-sacrifice than it is a relief.

When I read articles like this one conveying that vegetarianism is difficult, particularly about it being hard to eat vegetarian in restaurants, I really have to roll my eyes. As many vegans know, if anything, the reason non-meat options in restaurants are generally also non-vegan is that they're generally saturated with dairy or eggs. Shuffling animal flesh out for other animal products certainly didn't leave me lacking options in most restaurants I'd encountered back before I became vegan. This article irked me a little, as well, because of its reiteration of what's now become standard in most food-related articles discussing so-called ethical eating--presenting the eating of animal flesh as either funny or sexy. In this case, the piece's writer quotes her youngest daughter as quipping in response to their discussion of going vegetarian for lent: “Are you kidding? I’m going to the grocery and getting a steak!” I mean, in someone's mind, is this really a Hallmark moment?

Another thing the article illustrates is how the slippery sloping involved in the shuffling out of one animal product for another that led to the big fish-eating 'vegetarian' trend has now led to the mainstream acceptance of the definition of 'vegetarianism' as including the eating of fishes. This is less ethically problematic, really, than it is irksome that the definition of a term that denotes a diet excluding the consumption of animal flesh is now assumed to include the consumption of the flesh of some animals deemed less worthy. The pescatarianism thing used to really get under my skin, but the truth is that now it pretty much makes sense to me that it evolved and that many once-upon-a-time vegetarians are now also shuffling fish in and out of their diets and not viewing it as morally inconsistent to do so.

The truth is that it's not. All of this just merely adds more weight to the argument that if you do really take the interests and rights of nonhuman animals seriously, you should go vegan. It also adds weight to the argument that it really makes no sense for vegans to promote a vegetarian diet. Animal exploitation is animal exploitation, whether it involves using animals for their flesh, their secretions, their skin/fur, their ability to entertain us, et al. To condemn one and condone the other is inconsistent and confusing. Don't we owe nonhuman animals more than that?