i'm alive!

Hello interwebs. I am still alive and still blogging, but have been traveling a lot lately and have been somewhat low in time/Internet connection. But! Something really exciting and Generation V-related is happening soon. Yippee. You'll see. I am finally back home in Portland and have had a happy day being love-tackled by friends at airports, writing and walking with other friends, and generally feeling warm and fuzzy over the life I have in this beautiful, rainbow-making city. Something vegan related to make this an actual post: food pr0n from recently!

curry-coconut udon noodles from Herbivore in San Francisco

roasted chickpeas for a picnic in Kansas City: mix a can of chickpeas with enough oil to lightly coat, some salt and pepper and garlic, and bake at 450 for around 20 or 25 minutes. Delicious!

the breakfast of all breakfasts. yum. Grill veggies one night, throw the leftovers in tofu scrambler the next morning, enjoy.

I love food. I promised a good dinner recipe for the house tonight but we forgot to get most of the ingredients while we were at the grocery. I've no idea. Pasta!

1.5 tons more carbon per year

Happy Earth Day! It's cheesy but true to say that every day is Earth day. It's Earth Day if you're on Earth and getting anything - e.g. food, water, air, a place to live - from her. If you live on Earth, you have an obligation to take care of her as she cares for you. And there is simply no way that eating animals fits into that. According to New Scientist and researchers at the University of Chicago,going from an omnivorous diet to a vegan one does more for the environment than going from a gas-guzzler to a Prius. "The typical US diet, about 28 per cent of which comes from animal sources, generates the equivalent of nearly 1.5 tonnes more carbon dioxide per person per year than a vegan diet with the same number of calories." 3000 pounds per year! The bottom line is that the animal agriculture industry is wasteful and inefficient. The majority of grain grown in the US is not fed to humans but to animals, and because it takes around 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, this is a really wasteful use of land, water, and fossil fuel. Think about it: you could grow plants, send them to a processor (if you must), and then to the grocery. Or you could grow plants, send them to feed mills, send the feed to factory farms, send the animals from the factory farms to slaughter, send the slaughtered animals to processing plants, and then send the meat to the grocery. Each of those additional steps requires enormously more amounts of fossil fuel, land, and water, not to mention the fact that animals produce methane and "the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2." (source)


If you are serious about climate change and protecting the Earth, you have to stop eating animal products. This is not about superiority. I am a vegan and I am not the savior of all the earth. But the science is there. To ignore it is selfishness. Yeah, you want to eat meat. But don't you also want to take long showers? And wouldn't it be more convenient to drive somewhere than bike or walk? Local food is sometimes harder to find than non-local, right? If you're reading this, chances are you're already making other sacrifices in your life to protect the Earth. Giving up meat is no different.


If you want more info, I encourage you to check out the UN's report "Livestock's Long Shadow."

oysters & consistency

A friend of mine recently shared this article from Slate with me. The author, Christopher Cox, says that he doesn't eat meat, dairy, or eggs, but that he does eat oysters. His reasoning is that oyster farming is environmentally friendly and there's much question about what oysters can feel, as they have no central nervous system the way we and other animals do. Cox seems to believe that any vegan who wouldn't eat oysters is just being nitpicky. "Eating ethically is not a purity pissing contest, and the more vegans or vegetarians pretend that it is, the more their diets start to resemble mere fashion - and thus risk being dismissed as such." I agree wholeheartedly. Being vegan isn't about a checklist of foods you can and can't eat, and you don't get a gold star for thinking you're the purest of the pure. But Cox implies that all vegans who don't eat oysters (which, sorry Cox, is all vegans) are taking part in this "purity pissing contest", and that is where I find real fault. To be vegan, you have to embrace the fact that it simply isn't possible to never, ever, ever use animal products in some way (however indirect). There are animal products in tires (yes, really), and even harvesting plants is going to kill some worms or mice. Such is life. Veganism is not being pure or obeying a set of dietary laws, it's about doing what is possible and practical to end oppression. It isn't really possible in our world today to not use tires somehow, it's not possible to not use medications tested on animals, it's not possible to harvest plants without killing some insects, and that's just how it is.

It is, however,

abortion and veganism

and a whole lot more, too...

One of the biggest stumbling blocks to widespread acceptance of abolitionist veganism is the rift between progressive vegans and progressive omnivores (yes, conservative vegans exist, but that's the shortest story ever written). The fact of the matter is that welfarism, "happy meat" and cage-free free-range hoof-massaged bedtime-storied animal agriculture are en vogue in a major way. Walk into any grocery store, be it Wal-Mart or the mom & pop hippie co-op, and there's going to be a laser beam show around a display of "free-range" crap and a picture book you can buy to show your children where your eggs, wanting factory farms, actually come from and blah blah blah.

This is not news to anyone reading this, and I think it should be easily understandable why this is the case. It's shiny! It's trendy! It's meat! It doesn't actually require ethics! I have no problems with laser beams. I have no problems with picture books. While I do have very serious problems with welfarism/"happy meat"/etc., that is another topic for another day, and believe you me, on that day, it's gonna be long. But briefly, both welfarism and abolitionism seek to answer the problem of animal oppression. Welfarism calls for regulation of animal agriculture, while abolitionism calls to end it entirely. Bigger cages versus no cages. With me? (For more, Gary Francione's outline)

Welfarism has taken over the hearts and wallets of many a progressive soul. At this point, I'm not sure if more progressives eat happy meat than are simply happy to eat any meat, regardless of how it was produced, but either way, I believe and will argue that consumption of animal products is directly at odds with the values and ideals of the progressive movement. I do not think you can call yourself progressive if you eat any kind of animal product, be it a McDonald's hamburger or the milk of your pet goat. Likewise, I do not think you can call yourself vegan if you are not progressive.

an open letter to natalie angier

(note: Natalie Angier is the author of “Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too”, which recently appeared in the NYT)

Dear Ms. Angier,
As a lover of nature, I enjoyed your article. The natural world always seems to be far more complex – and far more beautiful – than we can ever really know. But as a longtime vegan, I had a lot of problems with it. For one thing, you present this information as worthy of ethical consideration without ever really stating why, or what this – if it’s so important – means in practical terms for ethical eating. I’m not being facetious. Obviously, I understand that you’re saying that plants are more sentient than we assume, and that this implies that they are worthy of our ethical consideration, since the sentience of the beings we eat is a major factor in ethical eating, for some, the biggest factor. But judging by the title and your hurry to not “cede the entire moral penthouse” to vegetarians and vegans, your article – at least in its practical impacts on ethics – is directed towards vegans only. Are ethics all or nothing? Should we either eat in a way that harms no one and no thing or not try at all? No, and this is not the view your article itself presents. Food choices are indeed complex, and there is no way to be a perfect eater.

Even in a world where plants were as sentient as animals, a plant-based diet would still be the most ethical. Animals don’t grow themselves. They eat plants, too. According to a Cornell University study (http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/aug97/livestock.hrs.html), every year, 41 million tons of plant protein are fed to livestock, resulting in only 7 million tons of animal protein for human consumption. The commonly accepted ratio is that it takes sixteen pounds of plants to create one pound of meat. If humans just ate plants directly in a vegan diet, far fewer sentient beings – no animals, and drastically fewer plants (bearing in mind that this is a hypothetical world where plants are entirely sentient) – would be killed overall. As you say, “It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive.” We both agree that while it would be ethically ideal to self-sustain, this simply isn’t possible. However, this is no excuse to throw in the towel entirely. Just because we have to eat does not mean we can’t eat ethically, and just because it’s not possible to do absolutely no harm to any other being does not mean we aren’t obligated to minimize that harm as much as is possible and practical.

"You're so brave!"

Today, boys and girls, we will examine something that is both well-intentioned misconception and carefully crafted excuse, the “You’re so brave for being vegan!” So often do I tell someone I am vegan only to hear people ooze with amazement at my stores of courage, bravery, and strength. After all, to someone who has never had to wrap their brains around the idea of giving up convenience for ethical principles, it would seem like a lot, and it seems like it would be a nice thing to say to a vegan friend. It hardly needs to be said that veganism is a big change from the normal omnivorous lifestyle (at first, but that’s another post). But really, it’s not hard. I don’t wake up in the morning biting my lip, getting ready for another difficult day of ethical challenges, glad I was blessed with the heart of a lion.

Are you strong for not enslaving another human being even though it would be easier for you to have someone else do all your work?

Does it take courage and grit for you to not throw around gender epithets (e.g. slut, skank) with abandon even though other people around you may do so?

Is the bravest thing you do all day refrain from narrowing your eyes at a homeless person because it’s their fault for being lazy and stupid?

No, no, and no. You just wake up and do those things because it’s second nature to you. Veganism is no different. I wake up and live my life in line with my ethics, square against the things I think are wrong and cruel and shameful, celebrating the things I think are good and true and beneficial for the world. That's all I do. That's what veganism (and other things, like feminism) means to me, and it's not hard at all. To an omnivore it may seem as ridiculous or unnecessary as not wearing the color purple for ethical reasons, but for vegans it’s something that goes far beyond simply not eating x, y, or z. It’s believing that all creatures – animals, humans, men, women, the poor, the rich, all who share this earth – deserve, at the very least, to belong to themselves and no other, to be in control of their lives and happiness. No matter who you are or what you eat or care about, it takes far greater strength and effort to silence one’s conscience than it ever would to live it.

So in other ways the “You’re so brave” is just an excuse, a justification, however subconscious, for inaction. After all, if being vegan takes extraordinary courage, then it’s automatically beyond the call for “normal” people. If it’s something only the truly strong can hack, then no one should feel bad for not being able to handle it, right? In the post of mine in another blog on which this one based, Gary Francione summed nicely, “As we know, however, a better way to avoid cognitive dissonance - in this scenario, at least - is to not engage in the morally troubling activities that cause the dissonance.” Wait, you mean, not do things that are ethically wrong? Crazy talk…

And to round out the overall tone of this post, here is Gus the bulldog having a snack. I love you, internets!