• At Vegan Feast, Turkeys on Guest List, Not Menu
  A peek at Poplar Spring’s Thanksgiving for the Turkeys.
  (tags: poplarspring animalsanctuary news thanksgiving turkey)

Since I did a lot of traveling in November, my wife and I decided to stick around home this Thanksgiving and spend some quality time with each other and way too much good food. I missed being with my family this year, but it was relaxing to be able to hang out at home with no travel further than the supermarket.

We decided to devote all of Thursday to cooking. After all, even though it was only two of us, what’s Thanksgiving without a feast to gorge yourself on, right?

Here’s a rundown of our menu:

• Bryanna Clark-Grogan’s Soy-Seitan “Turkey” - I’m bored of Tofurkeys at this point, but in an effort to have something familar and turkey-like on the table, we decided to make our own this year. It wasn’t terribly difficult and the end result was quite good. The texture was that kind of bouncy texture that seitan tends to have, but the flavor was pretty spot on. My wife gave it the thumbs up and it’s awesome on turkey sandwiches the next day.
• Mashed Potatoes with Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy - Isa’s gravy kicked butt (though I’ll probaby half the amount of lemon, as it was a tad sour) and the potatoes were delicious. Who would have thought chickpeas and a load of spices would make some of the most delicious gravy I’ve tasted?
• Cranberry Sauce - Another Bryanna Clark-Grogan recipe, we used agave nectar in place of the sugar this time around with great results.
• Pumpkin Bread - We made a veganized version of my mom’s pumpkin bread recipe, one of my favorite parts of this time of year. I’ll post the recipe here shortly.
• Pumpkin Pie - Another Bryanna recipe (the first link in this list points to a load of holiday recipes) that came out quite well. I’ve failed twice in my two previous attempts at pumpkin pies, so it was nice that this one worked for me. As a bonus, it doesn’t use tofu; I love tofu, but every time I’ve tried it in a pumpkin pie, it’s been grainy. We used a prepared crust which wasn’t so great, but the pie filling was excellent.

What’d you have to eat?

• Court of Appeal Sides With Adidas, Strikes Down Ban on Importation of Kangaroo Products
  Which, unfortunately, means that it’s legal for Adidas to import kangaroo for use in their shoes in the US because the species in question have been removed from the endangered list.
  (tags: viva animalrights kangroo australia adidas)
• Tasty tofu turkeys won’t woo meat gobblers
  “The bottom line on fake turkey is not to compare it to real turkey. It’s like comparing apple and pumpkin pie.”
  (tags: vegan food tofurkey unturkey thanksgiving)
• ‘Ugly dog’ Sam dies at 14
  He always reminded me of that one demon in Evil Dead II. RIP, Sam.
  (tags: sam dog obituary)

Federal Turkeys Wing It This Year

As I mentioned a few years ago, the whole presidential turkey pardon is a frustratingly annoying event. It’s meant to be this cutesy gesture, all “Hey, look, it’s so cute and funny! We’re pardoning turkeys from their death sentence! Tee-hee!” (Interestingly, as a blogger somewhere pointed out, it’s a gesture that the death row inmates in Texas rarely got…)

This year, after pressure from PETA, the turkeys won’t be going to Frying Pan Park in Herndon, VA. Many pardoned turkeys in recent years have died within a year. Frying Pan Park denies any wrongdoing and points to the unnatural weight these turkeys have to hold. I can’t say for sure whether the turkeys were treated well or not, but I know that we’ve got a number of would-have-been-Thanksgiving turkeys at Poplar Spring and all of them have lived long lives well beyond a year. This year’s birds will be flown first class to Disneyland.

Of course, this pardon doesn’t do much to bring to light the life and ultimate fate of 45 million other turkeys each Thanksgiving (that’s 15% of all turkey consumed each year in the United States). In honor of the millions of birds that wind up on Amercia’s table on the fourth Thursday of each November, some facts about turkeys and the conditions they’re raised in:

• Farm Sanctuary’s Turkey Industry Information
• PETA’s Top 10 Reasons Not to Eat Turkeys
• PETA’s information about turkeys (be sure to watch the videos, too)
• The Vegetarian Society’s Information Sheet on Turkeys
• National Wild Turkey Federation’s Wild Turkey facts - They’re a group that “preserves our hunting heritage,” but they’ve got some great information about types of wild turkeys
• Robyn’s Eastern Wild Turkey Page - “The only known web site on wild turkeys as pets.” Um, OK… still, lots of interesting info here.
• Wikipedia on turkeys
• Hybrid Turkeys - Another example of how the industry viewed farmed animals simply as units. Take this particularly cold text from the company’s “about” page: “Hybrid customers all over the world continue to profit from Hybrid’s ongoing research and development programs. Improvement in Hybrid’s well established, wide ranging gene pool ensures that various strains of turkeys are available to specifically address every market need.”

The veg blog Cafepress store is now open for business. Sure, if it were a real store, it would be a little off-putting to walk in and see only a single bumper sticker for sale, but more’s on the way… don’t worry. I just have to think of clever things that haven’t been said already.

Don’t know how I missed it up to this point, but Sarah Kramer’s 2005 Book Tour Blog has been going for a few months. Of course, it’s a good read and she’s going to continue writing there even with her tour now completed (damn it! I missed her in B’more).

I got a copy of Sarah’s latest, La Dolce Vegan, to review. Huyen and I have made a bunch of stuff from it already and loved it all, so expect a glowing review to appear here soon.

So, I watched last night’s episode of Wife Swap (jeez, the things I do for you people!) and I’ll be darned: it was actually a pretty even-handed, non-exploitative show. Well, as much as one named Wife Swap can be, I guess.

For one, no one person was made out to be the kook. Even the raw foodist’s desire to “eat sun” was handled with delicate humor (in the funniest moment, one of the little boys declares privately to the camera, “She eats sun. That’s creepy.”). The vegan family’s daughter stood up for her beliefs and refused to eat or buy meat and the hunting family’s husband even saw how a more gentle approach to child rearing can work with more hyper, violent kids.

The most important lesson, though, was the one that the vegan/raw foodist mother learned from the hunting father: one person can’t carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. Animal rights activists have a high rate of burnout and this is exactly why. It’s easy to become discouraged with the unending suffering that seems impossible to stop, and if we let that overtake us, we just end up as miserable grouches who either can’t get anyone to listen to us or who completely give up activism, seeing it as a lost cause. We’ve got to take time for ourselves and enjoy life. In the end, everyone benefits.

The only real frustrating point of the show came when the hunting mother (who was the only person on the whole show who didn’t seem to change at all) had a showdown with the vegan father and daughter. It was an unfortunate argument where the mother claimed that AR activists were trying to vilify her and her family because they need to hunt for food to survive. This could have been easily diffused by explaining that the majority of AR people focus their attention on “sport” hunters and not the few that actually need to (and do) hunt for their food. Of course, by the end of the episode, she was out hunting in what looked more like a sporting manner than one to supply needed food for the family.

All-in-all, it was a well handled episode that–though it lacked the sizzle of the God Warrior on Trading Spouses–showed two families learning something from each other and being (relatively) respectful of the other’s beliefs.

There’s something wrong with the world when I’m criticizing 60 Minutes for being uneven and praising Wife Swap for their fairness.

I’m heavy on the posts today, I know… last one for today:

You’ve surely heard all about the mess that was the vegan mother on Trading Spouses. Well, tonight on Wife Swap (what classy shows we have!) is a mother who hunts swapping with a raw foodist.

Uh-oh.

This weekend, an article in the Washington Post appeared titled “McNuggets of Wisdom.” The article focused on the question of whether or not chickens are as smart as dogs and takes place at none other than Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary, my favorite place to spend a Saturday.

It’s a cute article, lighthearted and generally positive towards chickens. But articles like this get me thinking: we spend an awful lot of time figuring out how “smart” one animal is versus another… pigs are more intelligent than dogs and can play video games, chickens aren’t as smart as cows because their brain is smaller, etc. When all is said and done, does any of that really matter?

In the west, we place a lot of value on intelligence in animals and seem to avoid eating those that are somehow “more intelligent” like horses, dogs, or cats. I don’t think that sentience or the will to live is dictated solely by intelligence, but we tend to tie these things together and use them to determine an animal’s “value.” Besides, it’s a pretty pointless exercise trying to compare the intelligence of chickens and dogs… they’re intelligent in different ways. Sure, a chicken won’t fetch a frisbee, but the social structures they form are surprisingly complex.

Just as a person’s true value doesn’t lie in his intelligence, any other animal’s value shouldn’t either.

Even though the blog has been around since July of last year, I didn’t come across Generation V until Veg Blog visitor Brandy pointed it out to me a week or two ago. Site proprietors Chris and Tammy have also just started a podcast worth checking out. Their most recent episode features audio from the PETA 25th anniversary gala that you’re not likely to find elsewhere.

The vegan blog community continues to grow!