Weekly Roundup: 10 Vegan Stories You Don’t Want to Miss

Random Goat Cuteness

Have you been busy this week? Haven’t had time to sit down let alone catch up on all things awesomely vegan?  No worries, we’ve got you covered.  Here’s the 10 vegan stories from this week you don’t want to miss.

From the Daily Vegan Spin:

International Women’s Day: Empowering Women through Veganism

As individuals, the problems and solutions of something so widespread as global hunger feel much too big for us to make a difference on our own.  Increasing meat demand and high animal consumption are the primary reasons for such a skewed distribution of resources around the world.  As consumers with lots of choices, how we spend our money affects the demand of any product.  Think about how many times a day you sit down to eat.  Every single ones of those times, day in and day out, is an opportunity to not support a system that is increasing global hunger and disempowering women.  Veganism is a direct way every single person can actually make a difference to women all around the world.

Are Dietary Vegans Vegan at All?

It’s not a bad thing to adopt a plant-based diet for health. But if ethics are not a part of one’s choice to go “vegan” should the word even be used?  What do you think? Should ethical vegans take the word back? Should dietary vegans instead call themselves plant-based? Would clarifying help or harm the animals?  And how do we handle the “I’m no longer vegan” declarations that seem to come up every so often in the community?

Ad Nauseam:

Chobani: Go Real?  Get Real!  There’s nothing simple about what goes into a container of dairy-based yogurt. Chobani’s website states that they use “only milk from cows not treated with rBST.” No mention is made of where these cows live out their lives, of the potential for painful mastitis, of the calves that head to the veal crates so that customers can keep eating  ”authentic, simple” yogurt. According to their blog, it takes more than 30,000 cows to produce a day’s worth of milk for the company. Can we get real about what that means?

Current Gratitude Giveaways:

Not familiar with our Gratitude Giveaways?  It’s a month-long celebration of YDV Readers where we’ve partnered up with some fantastic companies to give you some awesome vegan swag.  After all, we’d be nowhere without our readers.  It’s our way of saying thank you for your constant support.  Really, thank you.

• Sanctuary: Portraits of Rescued Farm Animals  ENDS March 12, 2013

• YogaEarth Keen-Wah Decadence ENDS March 15, 2013

Recipe of the Week:

OMG Maqui Berry Oat Bars

Vegan Stories from around the globe:

Meat is bad for your health and otherwise quite deadly “…adding a three-ounce serving of red meat — a piece of steak about the size of a cassette tape — to your daily diet was associated with a 13% greater chance of dying during the course of the study. And an extra daily serving of processed red meat was linked to a 20% higher risk of death during the study.”

Google involved in the Ivory trade? “We were really shocked to be honest, to find that one of the world’s richest and successful technology companies with such incredible resources had taken no action to enforce their own policies,” EIA’s Allan Thornton told BBC News, “especially given that elephants are being slaughtered across Africa to provide these trinkets for the public in Japan.”

Local, organic dairy foods, and organic, imported spices, have high levels of phthalates. “…milk is collected by from cows’ udders through soft, flexible plastic tubing—the very kind that often contains phthalates, which are used to make plastic flexible.  ‘It’s warm milk going through soft plastic, and we know that when phthalates in plastic are heated, there’s leaching,’”

And finally, SNL brings some attention to veganism in a totally awesome way.