My first reaction to Dirty Rotten Vegan Cheaters by Annie Hartnett was positive.  I can appreciate other vegans encouraging other vegans- especially if they fall off of the “vegan wagon” so to speak.  Annie’s point is that you’ll “slip up” in your journey to be vegan.  Okay, I agree.  I’ve been vegan for more than 5 years now and I still make mistakes.  I simply learn from them and more on.

But then I came across this:

And I don’t miss the way I ate before veganism, but I cheat when I’m careless or lazy. Vegan food isn’t always readily available.

Annie implies that it’s okay to choose to eat animal products every once in awhile.  That, if you do, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it- just move on.

Let me ask you, would you want me to careless or lazy with your life?

Then why is it acceptable to be careless or lazy with someone else’s?

And please, don’t give me any BS that vegan food isn’t “readily available.”  Since when is it hard to find an apple or a banana?  They sell them at freaking gas stations these days.  Brown rice and dried beans, just to name a few, can be found at (icky) Walmart.  It’s not rocket science to know that whole foods like these are readily available to most people, even college students.

Am I getting worked up over nothing?  Annie might be a vegan, she does advocate for animals- all of that is a good thing.  But, as a vegan, why give the impression to non-vegans that it’s fine to be lazy or careless?  Doesn’t that go against what real veganism is?

Can you still be a vegan if you are careless and lazy?  Or does that make you a flexitarian with a heavier emphasis on vegan foods?

Or, am I just being a pissy vegan?  Chime in, I’d love to know what you think.

An intern at the Environmental Protection Agency posted this on the EPA’s official blog:

Regulations can be made to help prevent the effects of meat production, but the easiest way to lessen the environmental impacts is to become a vegetarian or vegan.

via thehill.com

Check out the beginning of the article:

“Hey, we’re not proud, but we’re honest. And we have discovered a few things along the way that are amazing, that just happen to be vegan. Some are junk food. Some are processed frozen foods. But cut us some slack. As much as we’d love to whip out a list that starts with marinated hijiki, lentils and rosemary and ends with watercress salad topped with glazed beets and walnuts de-shelled with love, we live in a different kind of reality. So we present you now with the less sophisticated, I’m-lucky-I-have-time-to-eat-at-all version.”

As much as I’d like to agree, I can’t.  I am a firm believer of eating healthy and do so the majority of the time.  I do have a sweet tooth and enjoy vegan junk food from time to time.  But I would never, honestly never, pick up a box of pop-tarts because I was too busy to walk down a different aisle in the store to grab an apple or banana.  The food you put in your body is one of the most important things you do each day.  The choices you make either fuels your body, thereby working with your body’s natural processes, or bogs your body down with unfamiliar ingredients that your body can’t process.  That’s it, there is no middle ground.  And for most people, unfortunately, their choices are the latter.  They can’t seem to make a connection about the food you eat and their health.  I know folks who baby their vehicles.  They never miss a scheduled maintenance task and wash (and hand wax) the car lovingly every week.  They use premium gasoline and talk about their car as if it were a child.  But the same people will ignore the foods that they choose to put in their bodies.  The car gets better “ingredients” than their own bodies.  It’s baffling.  And yes, even vegans can eat unhealthy.

But at the same time, just because you want to eat vegan and healthy doesn’t mean that you require hours of time to prepare “marinated hijiki, lentils and rosemary and ends with watercress salad topped with glazed beets and walnuts de-shelled with love.”  It’s a ridiculous example to make a point, I get that.  But it’s the underlying message that healthy vegan food takes a long time to prepare that I have a problem with.  Because that is just simply not true.

But, I’m sure I am reading too much into the article.  The author just wanted to tell you that Pop-tarts are vegan.  They probably didn’t think about the bigger picture of one’s health.  I can accept that.  Just don’t ask me to understand why, at the “precise moment, when stress, hunger and pain blend into chaos”, you can’t choose something healthy (and vegan).  Because I could and so could you.

Oh, one more thing, how the hell did Earth Balance (vegan buttery spread) make a list of convenient vegan food?  Was butter like, an issue before?  In a hurry?  No time for butter?  Earth Balance has the answer!  No more messy buttery spread spills, Earth Balance comes in a convenient, portable plastic tub.  And Earth Balance is easy and fun to eat!  Simply remove the top of the container and dig in!

Bizzare.

via longislandpress.com

Who deserves the priority of living – cows, dogs, coyotes?  Well, we have to kill the cows because steak tastes good, and we have to kill the coyotes so they don’t kill the cows; but we certainly can’t kill dogs!  If they have their own department store for food, fun, and fashion, we certainly can’t kill them.

Lee Won-bok understands the challenges of changing peoples minds.  We meet Lee Won-bok in a LA Times article.  He is a 45-year old animal rights activist who stages graphic photo displays to protest the use of dogs for food.  The images show dogs kept in cages, hanged and butchered, and the meat that is prepared for market.  Won-bok knows the images are hard to look at, and that is precisely his point.  He wants to show the “harsh treatment of an animal that many South Koreans now view as companions, not cuisine.”

Koreans have eaten dogs for centuries and, for years foreign advocates have protested the practice.  But the Koreans dismissed these protests as “unwanted opinions of outsiders.”  Now that the country has adopted more of the Western culture, there are more “pet” owners than ever.  And Won-bok wants people to know what is going on with the dogs.

“People don’t comprehend the suffering these dogs endure…they may vaguely realize that people still eat dogs. But they need to know what happens to the animals.”

And, he remains optimistic saying, “South Koreans (are starting to) question their cultural traditions.”  But not all South Koreans.

The cuisine remains popular among some government officials.  Cham Lee, known to enjoy dog dishes, is director of the Korean Tourism Organization.  Ironically, he also raises Korean Jindo dogs as companion animals.  Lee even had a private wine and dog-tasting seminar, deciding that dog goes best with a light Shiraz or Riesling.  Lee was criticized for the tasting.

Lee had this to say, “Parisians can eat horse meat because France is considered high culture.  But South Korea gets no such pass.  Westerners eat one type of animal and tell the world they can’t eat another.  I say, if you eat animals, you eat animals.”

And, I’d have to agree with him on that one point (and one point only).  If you eat animals, you eat animals – it doesn’t matter which species you choose.  We must stop placing animals into moral categories and making excuses for the human palate.  All sentient life deserves better.

Won-bok has pledged to campaign for the dogs, exposing the cruel conditions the dogs endure, until dog-eating ends in his country.

via latimes.com

Here’s a snippet:

“The first thing to note is that there is a risk in analogizing the struggle for gay rights with the struggle for animal rights. The danger that concerns me is not, as some might think, that of offending people. People were (and some continue to be) offended by comparisons between struggles against racial oppression and struggles against homophobia, but it is precisely the resistance to an unfamiliar claim (especially a claim that implicates one’s own behavior) that makes it seem “offensive.”

If inflicting terrible suffering and death on nonhuman animals who can feel pleasure, pain, and a wide range of emotions represents a real harm – and most people acknowledge, at some level, that it does – then no one should be offended by the suggestion that this harm must stop, just as other harms, once taken for granted as permissible, are now almost universally condemned.

The risk, though, is that of missing the real connection. The proper analogue to a gay person seeking gay rights is not a nonhuman animal, for the latter is not able to seek justice for herself (except by appearing, occasionally, in the public consciousness and awakening rare pangs of conscience and empathy). The proper analogue to the gay person struggling for gay rights is, instead, the vegan struggling for animal rights.

When I use the word “animal rights” here, I mean something very basic – an entitlement to have one’s interests seriously considered in people’s decision-making process. No one, to my knowledge, is advocating that nonhuman animals be permitted to vote, hold public office, or receive scholarships to state colleges, any more than one would advocate similar entitlements for a three-year-old human. But if a being’s interests are taken seriously, then surely one may not inflict torture, misery, and slaughter on that being simply to satisfy one’s culinary and fashion preferences.”

The first thing that strikes me about Colb’s article is her attention to the opposition.  She purposefully makes it clear who she is speaking about, and debunks some of the more ridiculous rebuttals (when the opponent is downplaying the animals right to life by means of human domination) that non-vegans will attempt to use during discussions with vegans.  It’s unfortunately necessary, but highly refreshing.

Colb goes on to say:

“Ethical vegans face related challenges. By living as we do, we implicitly communicate to others a critique of the status quo and, necessarily, a critique of the behavior of those who follow it. Vegans suggest – without necessarily saying anything explicitly – that people ought to examine their consumption decisions, rather than accept the notion that eating animals and animal products is inevitable or natural for human beings. Despite increasingly available information about how unhealthy and toxic the consumption of animal proteins (including fish, and especially dairy and eggs) is for human wellbeing – at both the individual and the global levels – many non-vegans insist that people were simply meant to eat animals. Of course, the parallel within the gay rights struggle has been the claim by anti-gay advocates that people were simply meant to be straight and that anything else is “unnatural.”"

And ends with an intelligent…

“As we have seen over the last decades, however, visibility is a useful antidote to ignorance and fear. As people learn – from vegans who are “out and proud” – that farming animals causes unspeakable suffering, destroys the planet, and contributes to diseases of affluence (including cancer, heart disease, and diabetes), they will likely become more open to questioning the false proposition that meat, dairy, or eggs are necessary to a pleasurable and fulfilling human life.”

Be out.  Be Proud.  Be unapologetic, but respectful.  Make a difference, go vegan.

via writ.news.findlaw.com