Cloning opens door to ‘farmyard freaks’

However, GM scientists are actively investigating ways to remove the stress and aggression gene from animals, effectively turning them into complacent zombies.

The professor said it might become technically possible to produce “animal vegetables” - beasts which are “highly prolific and oblivious to their physical and mental status”.

DAMN IT. Seriously. When will we stop acting like idiots trying to invent sentience-free animals and just, you know, stop eating animals that don’t want to be eaten?!

(via BoingBoing)

• What Does 200 Calories Look Like?
  Calorie counting bores me, but this visual representation of 200 calories’ worth of different foods is an interesting exercise, if nothing else.
  (tags: food photos)
• Vegetarians and Vegans in America Today — www.greenwood.com
  Hey, they quoted me in chapter three. That’s happened few enough times that it’s still novel to me. Now, where’s my free copy?
  (tags: books quotes)
• PETA Media Center > Recent News Releases : BROOKLYN COOKBOOK AUTHOR GRABS NATIONAL AWARD FOR PERFECTING THE RECIPE FOR COMPASSION
  VWaV wins a Proggy! Rock on, Isa!
  (tags: isaforkingrules vwav peta proggies award)

There are a lot of great companies out there, large and small, that are making products with sustainability and ethics in mind. A lot of them started small and got acquired by larger companies, which causes some justified concern about the integrity, ongoing direction, and ultimate intentions of the company going forward, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

My New Year’s wish is directed at those companies, big and small, that are “nearly vegan”… companies that have always made products without meat, that market themselves to vegetarians, and make it very clear which of their products are vegan. There are a lot of these types of companies, but for no reason other than their visibility, I’ll single out two: Amy’s Kitchen and Endangered Species Chocolate. Both companies are well aware of vegans and make it clear which of their products are vegan-safe, which is great. But here’s the question: why not go all the way?

While Amy’s doesn’t come right out and mention ethics or animal rights in their mission statement, but they hint at it. Endangered Species, though, uses animals as their primary focus. They donate a percentage of their profits to animal-related charities and they use only “ethically traded” cocoa. Shoot, their mission statement even starts off: “Here, our core value is Reverence for Life…”

Why, then, do both companies use dairy-based ingredients in their products? It’s been well-argued by Erik Marcus and others^* that dairy is an even worse ethical choice than beef, so it’s not ethically consistent for pro-animal companies to involve themselves in any sort of animal exploitation, let alone something as egregiously exploitative as dairy.

Amy’s: you already leave out eggs. Your recent deal with Follow Your Heart means you can ditch the dairy and non-vegan soy cheese. Your spinach and soy cheese pizza on rice crust is incredible. So, c’mon, just do it! And Endangered Species: everyone knows that milk chocolate is inferior to dark chocolate. Why not go all the way and offer strictly dark chocolate, sans dairy?

^* Beware the second-to-last paragraph in that linked article–it’s garbage.

If history’s your thing and you’re vegetarian, there’s a new book on the shelves that may be worth your time to check out: The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times by Tristram Stuart.

When the book’s press agent (a vegetarian, it should be noted) sent this along, I got really excited about it. It’s got to be the most comprehensive and thorough book on the subject of the history of vegetarianism. But here’s the thing: there’s no chance I’m going to get a chance to read and review this book with the attention it deserves anytime before Rasine goes off to college.

At over 450 pages of content, it’s a dense book, to say the least. The bibliography is insane. The references are impeccably noted. It’s an impressive book and (from what I can tell so far), a well-written one, to boot. Here’s a brief rundown of what you can expect:

How Western Christianity and Eastern philosophy merged to spawn a political movement that had the prohibition of meat at its core

The Bloodless Revolution is a pioneering history of puritanical revolutionaries, European Hinduphiles, and visionary scientists who embraced radical ideas from the East and conspired to overthrow Western society’s voracious hunger for meat. At the heart of this compelling history are the stories of John Zephaniah Holwell, survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and John Stewart and John Oswald, who traveled to India in the eighteenth century, converted to the animal-friendly tenets of Hinduism, and returned to Europe to spread the word. Leading figures of the Enlightenment–among them Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin–gave intellectual backing to the vegetarians, sowing the seeds for everything from Victorian soup kitchens to contemporary animal rights and environmentalism.

Since there won’t be a proper review here for The Bloodless Revolution before 2024, I encourage you to check the book out if history’s your thing. It may well become one of those books that we’ll be referring to 15, 20 years from now.

• 15 Foods You Shouldn’t Live Without
  And only one isn’t vegan (and it’s not fish!).
  (tags: food health nutrition)

• Macaulay Library Catalog
  Thousands of animal sounds and videos.
  (tags: audio video animals)

• Not a Tiger, but Maybe a Chicken in Your Tank - washingtonpost.com
  Yes, yes, we need a good alternative fuel source, but can we maybe look for one that doesn’t require the death of animals to produce it?
  (tags: fuel energy chickens biofuel news)

• veg blog: Taste of Vietnam
  Reading over this entry from almost six years ago makes me laugh. It was apparently the first time I tried seitan.
  (tags: meta seitan)

Hi there! I hope everyone had a safe and happy holiday season without too many “I could be a vegan… except for cheese”-type conversations.

For Christmas, the family converged on my parents house for three days filled with family visits, cooking, and other assorted holiday mayhem. The “food situation” wasn’t too bad… my mom’s nearly vegetarian and always makes sure there’s something vegan for me. She and my dad have even taken to preparing certain things vegan only rather than having two versions available (Christmas cookies, mashed potatoes, etc.), which is nice, because people simply don’t notice unless you tell them.

Other family continued to be a bit baffled by my veganism (c’mon, folks, I’ve been veggie for over six years now!), but at least it allowed for some decent conversation and education on the subject. One relative surprised me by trying a piece of my tofu cheesecake and enjoying it and I had to break down the “free range myth” for another. Another made me laugh a little bit when she told me, “Since you’re vegan, I made the fish with fake bacon bits instead of bacon,” to which I paused and replied, “Yes… but there’s still the fish…” She laughed and realized her mistake pretty quickly after that.

My sister gave Rasine the very cool Tofu Bear, a soft little teddy bear made out of “soy silk,” a “a cutting edge fiber made from the waste produced during the manufacture of tofu.” Replace “fiber” with “product” and “tofu” with “meat” and you’d be talking about leather! Does this mean that meat eaters that eschew tofu will have to say they don’t support soy silk because it “still supports The Industry”?

My cousin and I also chatted about Big Antifreeze and how they’re suckers for not using taste-aversive additives to deter dogs and cats from ingesting it (though, interestingly, the ASPCA is “neutral” on the subject).

Food I made for the holidays that turned out well: a yellow split-pea soup from a Polish cookbook, the very Toll House-ish cookies from Don’t Feed the Bears, Dreena’s Sublime Chocolate Bark, and chocolate chip tofu cheesecake from the Chicago Diner cookbook.

Any good hoilday stories to share as we kick off this new year?