Thanks to Chris for pointing out this puff piece on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In it, it describes Romney packing up the family for a summer trip:

Before beginning the drive, Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

I echo Chris’ sentiment of “WTF?”  Who the heck puts their dog on the roof of their car?  And we’re supposed to be all “Wow, he’s so caring about his dog!” when he builds a windshield for the carrier?

Here’s some news for Romney: dude, your dog isn’t a piece of luggage.  If the family were to get into a car accident, the dog wouldn’t stand a chance.  At least inside the car he has the protection of the vehicle’s frame.  What if the carrier came loose and fell off the car?  Again, the dog has no chance.

This is just another example of “animals as property” that so pervades our lives.  To Romney, the family dog isn’t worth space in the car.  Having him dangerously perched on the roof as they fly down the roads at 65mph is a risk that’s reasonable to him.  Would he consider that same risk with his kids?  Of course not.

Want another example of how Seamus gets treated as property?  OK.

A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

Animals rarely get much respect from the oval office.  Sure, President Bush’s dog Barney gets a nicer home page than most people have, but he’s also used to create stupid White House promotional videos.  Then, of course, there’s the debacle that is the presidential turkey pardon at Thanksgiving.  But if Romney were to become president, Seamus would be the worst-treated First Dog since Warren G. Harding’s lab named Seat Cushion.  (That last sentence was said in a manner imitating Jon Stewart.  Imagine me looking coyly at the camera.)

How you treat animals is usually a good indicator of how you treat people.  Perhaps we should keep that in mind when looking at presidential candidates.

I suspect everyone with a veg-themed blog will be thwacking this terrible NY Times op-ed piece.  I know Erik has, though I haven’t had a chance to listen yet and Isa took a good shot that I read earlier this morning.  Here’s what I’ve got to add, with apologies for repeating any arguments you may have read elsewhere.

Nina Planck is the author of “Real Food: What to Eat and Why.”

I wanted to start with the byline.  Please note that this was written by somebody with something to sell.  She has no formal training in nutrition (note: neither do I, but I’m not writing books about the subject).  Just saying.

I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.

This is purely anecdotal evidence, but everyone I’ve ever met who was “once a vegan” either a.) really wasn’t a vegan or b.) did it for a couple weeks for health purposes (never mind that veganism is an ethical way of life and not just a diet).  I’d like to hear a little bit more about her stint as a vegan.  I’m really curious because she must have been doing something pretty wrong in her own diet to conclude that it was “irresponsible” to be a pregnant vegan.

There are no vegan societies for a simple reason: a vegan diet is not adequate in the long run.

Source please?  I suspect it’s less a reason of a vegan diet’s adequacy and more a reason of availability, control of food production, or reliance on historical/cultural precedent.  Our current world is much different than it was even 100 years ago.

Besides, if she says a vegan diet’s not adequate in the long run, she might want to read up on Donald Watson.  I’d say mid-90s classifies as the “long run.”  And what’s interesting is that I’m still trying to find these vegans with deficiencies.  It’s a lot easier to find omnis suffering from excesses.

Protein deficiency is one danger of a vegan diet for babies. Nutritionists used to speak of proteins as “first class” (from meat, fish, eggs and milk) and “second class” (from plants), but today this is considered denigrating to vegetarians.

I believe that this idea of “first class” and “second class” proteins goes along with the outdated notion of protein combining en vogue in the 1970s.  As long as you’re eating a varied diet of primarily whole foods, protein’s not an issue.  Back in 1982, Francis Lappe updated her classic Diet for a Small Planet to note that “In all other diets [other than fruit-based, tuber-based, or junk food-based], if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.”

A vegan diet may lack vitamin B12, found only in animal foods;

A lot of this is due to the pesticides we use when growing vegetables, which makes them unsafe to eat unless they’re thoroughly cleaned.  However, a simple supplement takes care of this without much problem.

usable vitamins A and D, found in meat, fish, eggs and butter; and necessary minerals like calcium and zinc. When babies are deprived of all these nutrients, they will suffer from retarded growth, rickets and nerve damage.

Vitamins A and D as well as calcium and zinc are easy to get in a vegan diet.

Yet even a breast-fed baby is at risk. Studies show that vegan breast milk lacks enough docosahexaenoic acid, or DHA, the omega-3 fat found in fatty fish. It is difficult to overstate the importance of DHA, vital as it is for eye and brain development.

Most people can properly convert the Omega-3s in flax seed into EPA and DHA, but even for those that can’t, there are a number of vegan sources.

A vegan diet is equally dangerous for weaned babies and toddlers, who need plenty of protein and calcium. Too often, vegans turn to soy, which actually inhibits growth and reduces absorption of protein and minerals. That’s why health officials in Britain, Canada and other countries express caution about soy for babies. (Not here, though — perhaps because our farm policy is so soy-friendly.)

Again, I’d like to see a source quoted here, but I’m willing to bet it’s somehow tied to the dairy industry (as most anti-soy studies so far have been).  John Robbins has some useful info about mineral absorption and soy:

It is true that soybeans are high in phytates, as are many plant foods such as other beans, grains, nuts and seeds, and it is true that phytates can block the uptake of essential minerals, and particularly zinc. This would be a problem if a person consumed large amounts of phytates; for example, if they ate nothing but soybeans or wheat bran. But the phytic acid levels found in a plant-based diet including a serving or two of soy a day are not high enough to cause mineral absorption problems for most people eating varied diets. Furthermore, when soy products are fermented - as they are in tempeh, miso, and many other soyfoods - phytate levels are reduced to about a third their initial level. Other methods of soy preparation such as soaking, roasting and sprouting also significantly reduce phytate content.

While phytates can compromise mineral absorption to some degree, there is absolutely no reliable evidence that vegetarians who eat soyfoods “risk severe mineral deficiencies.” The complete adequacy of vegetarian diets is now so thoroughly proven and documented that even the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has acknowledged the legitimacy of meatless diets. In an official statement, these representatives of the beef industry declared, “Well planned vegetarian diets can meet dietary recommendations for essential nutrients.”

Back to Ms. Planck:

Historically, diet honored tradition: we ate the foods that our mothers, and their mothers, ate. Now, your neighbor or sibling may be a meat-eater or vegetarian, may ferment his foods or eat them raw. This fragmentation of the American menu reflects admirable diversity and tolerance, but food is more important than fashion. Though it’s not politically correct to say so, all diets are not created equal.

‘Tis true, but take a look at a whole foods vegan diet versus any of the fad diets and you’ll see one major difference: a vegan diet is sustainable for a lifetime while most others aren’t.

An adult who was well-nourished in utero and in infancy may choose to get by on a vegan diet, but babies are built from protein, calcium, cholesterol and fish oil. Children fed only plants will not get the precious things they need to live and grow.

I think someone needs to make a t-shirt based on the quote “Babies are built from protein, calcium, cholesterol and fish oil.”

Pieces like this one by Nina Planck seem to exist not to foster any sort of serious discussion about nutrition and diet, but for other purposes (selling books, selling papers).  Without citing any sources, it’s hard to take any claims that Planck makes seriously.  If you go out there and do the research, you’ll find that a well-planned vegan diet can be every bit as healthy as a well-planned omni diet.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

We all need to look at what we eat.  It’s not a “vegan thing.”  If you shovel food down your gullet and don’t have any concept about what’s good for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re omnivore, vegan, or breatharian — you’re going to have problems.

I’d challenge Ms. Planck or anyone else looking to cash in on the latest “VEGAN PARENTZ KILL BABY, OMG~!!” headline to debate with a dietician like Vesanto Melina or a vegan nutritionist so people can make up their minds based on facts rather than a piece of marketing fluff masquerading as an op-ed piece.

Vegans Sentenced for Starving Their Baby

ARGH.

Some variation of this story pops up about once a year in the mainstream press.  You may remember the baby that died thanks to his supposedly vegan parents that fed him cod liver oil (NOT VEGAN).  Or the fruitarian parents who were spared jail after their baby died.

The thing is, if you look at this story, the fact that the parents were raising their children vegan has no bearing whatsoever on the story.  The child didn’t die because he wasn’t eating meat, he died because he was (allegedly) fed only soy milk and apple juice.  I’ve got news for you: if you feed your child only cow’s milk and apple juice, they’re going to die, too.

Veganism is not the issue here.  It’s poor parenting.

But thanks to the obsession with making vegans look like crazy loons, readers will continue to take away the wrong message from the story.  Instead of it being a terrible tragedy (allegedly) brought on by neglectful parents, it becomes a sweeping generalization about vegans.  In fact, as I was writing this post, an e-mail came in with a link to the story, followed by this witty comment:

Save a cow …. Kill your baby!
Vegans are sick SOB’s

As regular readers surely know by now, it can be perfectly healthy to raise a child as a vegan.  In fact, all of the vegan kids I’ve met have been healthy, vibrant, and well-adjusted.  Yeah, parents need to do a little research to make sure their child’s nutritional needs are met, but that’s not limited to vegans.  Every parent needs to read up on diet and nutrition.

Unfortunately, these unfair portraits of vegan (or supposedly vegan) parents are catchy news fodder for press and pundits.  It’d be nice if the press would leave “vegan” out of the story (and here, the headline) if it doesn’t have any real bearing on the story itself, but that doesn’t generate the same kind of buzz.

(This is fair warning: I’m not going to let this degrade into a flurry of idiotic comments.  If you’re commenting on the story, bring your A-game.)

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)

The current Vegan Freak podcast talks about two stories in the news recently that have really gotten my blood boiling. The first is about Tony Blair’s vocal support for animal testing and his classification of animal rights activists as “terrorists.” Blair was crafty in his use of implying a (non-existent) connection between a letter-writing campaign targeted at shareholders of GlaxoSmithKline and an isolated incident of a weirdo exhuming a someone’s corpse. We have to be very careful when things like this hit the press to remind friends and family that a.) only a select few animals rights activists (like any other group) are wacky, and b.) a significant portion of animal experimentation has nothing to do with finding life-saving answers to diseases but rather with developing drugs for things like erectile dysfunction.

A related story worth mentioning is one from Germany where researchers say that stem-cell testing can be used to replace hundreds of thousands of experiments on animals. That’s outstanding news, but may not matter much here in the United States until we (and by “we” I mean he) wisen up with regards to the use of stem cells.

The second story that raised my ire is about how animal rights activist Adam Durand was sentenced to six months in jail for a misdemeanor. The misdemeanor? Trespassing in Wegmans’ egg facility to gather the footage for Wegmans Cruelty. This is the maximum sentence Durand could have received and no one was actually expecting any jail time for him. It’s an absurd judgement and I won’t speak any more on it at this point, but I will redirect you to what I wrote about Wegmans a month or so ago. If you’d like to help Adam out or just write him to show your support, Compassionate Consumers has the information.

It’s getting more than a little scary with the government declaring animal rights’ activists “terrorists,” legal action being taken against those that do open rescues, and rights for food animals being stripped more and more. But as scary as it is, these actions wouldn’t be taken if an impact weren’t being made. The average consumer is becoming much more aware of what’s happening to make their food and that scares the industry to death. And, really, it’s not privacy matters or even property destruction the industry is most worried about… they’re worried about industry practices becoming common knowledge which can only serve to hurt them in a big way financially.

If you haven’t checked out this week’s Vegan Freak podcast, make sure you do soon. The Freaks’ interview with SHAC 7 defendant Josh Harper is essential. Even if you’re not down with direct action, this case goes far beyond that, with some seriously scary implications for the future of free speech.

The most mind-blowing fact I heard in this interview: in 2003, the FBI spent used money and resources investigating animal rights groups (who collectively have caused exactly zero fatalities in the last three or more decades) than they did Al-Qaeda (anyone have a source for that? I’d love to link it up…).

It seems that Yahoo! now has a separate news category for Animal Rights and Welfare. Even more stuff here. Even though the news feed isn’t updated very frequently and seems to focus a lot on stories about “animal rights extremists,” it’s still kind of nice… but where’s the RSS feed? (via greeniv.com)

2006 Food Forecast

The good news:

More allergy information will be included on labels, which is not only good for people with severe food allergies, but for vegans since dairy and eggs are common allergens. The best parts:

• “If there are any egg, peanut, nut, fish, shellfish, wheat or soy in a product, the label will have to say so.”
• ” Goodbye to non-descriptive words such as “artificial” or “natural” flavors, colors or additives. Labels with those ingredients also will have to specify which allergens they contain.” Whether this means that any animal-derived products in the natural flavoring will need to be labeled is not clear.
• “If “casein” is included, “milk” would be listed after it.”

Also good: trans-fat will appear on labels. As a result of having to add this to the label, many food companies have cut back significantly or eliminated trans-fat from their products.

The bad news:

There’s still no universally accepted “Vegan” symbol on food packages. This may actually be a good thing, because really there hasn’t been enough discussion on the issue. For instance, if something is produced on equipment that is also used for dairy, should it be labeled vegan? If a product is made by a company that also makes meat products, is that product vegan? There are some tricky issues.

Also bad/stupid: well, I’ll let the article do the talking:

[F]ood forecasters are predicting some provocative trends, including such possibilities as Christian-raised chicken…

Trend expert Faith Popcorn, keynote speaker at the Future of Food conference last month in Washington, and the person who predicted the “cocooning” craze of the 1990s, sees faith-friendly food showing up in the marketplace, an outgrowth of what her company calls “clanning,” or the desire to belong to groups with common ideas.

Tyson Foods, which makes chicken, beef and pork products, already has begun offering free downloadable prayer booklets on its Web site. The booklets provide mealtime prayers in a variety of faiths.

Before I comment, I love the fact that the food trend expert’s name is “Faith Popcorn.” I would have killed to be born with that name.

I hadn’t heard of the idea of “Christian-raised chicken” before, and predictably, it strikes me as pretty stupid. If you’re that concerned about how your religious beliefs coincide with how your food is raised, shouldn’t you consider just, you know, not eating meat? I suspect that this kind of falls into the same category as halal meats, but without the long-standing tradition.

And does anyone else find it hilarious — and at the same time, deeply troubling — that Tyson Foods is producing prayer booklets?

Feel free to suggest prayers in the comments that Tyson could include on their web site.

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.”

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.

Last night’s piece titled “Burning Rage” on 60 Minutes was predictably uneven, as are all stories that focus on “eco terrorists” (isn’t that a term that should be reserved for people that terrorist the environment like, say, our president?). Subjects included Rod Coronado, an unnamed, masked ALF activist, and Dr. Jerry Vlasak. Needless to say that these three aren’t exactly representing the mainstream animal rights movement, but as I’ve said before: more disturbing to me than animal testing labs getting burned down is the fact that conditions exist bad enough to move people to act in this way.

While I don’t know much about the context of the quotes from Coronado and Vlasak with regards to “assassinating” people involved with corporations that conduct animal testing and such, I suspect there’s more to it than the 60 Minutes piece allowed for. I certainly hope that no AR activists act in such a way to inflict death on other humans, but rather work to directly help the animals that need it. Otherwise, it’s just misplaced energy that will do nothing to help the animals or the movement.

The most telling portion of the 60 Minutes piece is this section discussing “speciesists” (emphasis mine):

Vlasak says someone who believes that the life of an animal is not akin to the life of a human being is “species-ist.”

Species-ists, he says, are akin to racists or sexists. Animals, he says, should be accorded the same rights as human beings, despite their place on the food chain.

I yelled at the screen (an act usually reserved for the Dallas Cowboys when they’re blowing a big lead in the fourth quarter), “FUCK the food chain.” Seriously, what kind of reporting is that? The food chain “argument” is about the lamest way to justify the way we treat animals, yet here’s a supposedly respected journalist spouting the same tired nonsense we hear from, say, people on the Nuge Board.

As I figured, “Burning Rage” was frustrating, gleefully showing fires set by activists but not showing a single image of what was going on inside those labs during the day. And, boy am I glad to know that people burning SUVs are considered “the country’s biggest domestic terrorist threat.”

Some bad news on the animal sanctuary front: Ooh-Mah-Nee is closing after ten years due to financial difficulties.

Now the animals have one less place to go. We really need to support these sanctuaries financially to make sure that they can continue doing their incredibly important work.

Thankfully, places like Woodstock are popping up to fill the void.

Clone-Generated Milk, Meat May Be Approved: Favorable FDA Ruling Seen as Imminent

Yikes. I’m happier than ever to be a vegan.

Let’s take a look at this article:

Many in agriculture believe such genetic copies are the next logical step in improving the nation’s livestock.

Notice how they mention improving the livestock itself and not the conditions the livestock live in? As Erik Marcus says, animals are units.

Consumer groups counter that many Americans are likely to be revolted by the idea of serving clone milk to their children or tossing meat from the progeny of clones onto the backyard grill. This “yuck factor,” as it’s often called, has come to light repeatedly in public opinion surveys. Asked earlier this year in a poll by the International Food Information Council whether they would willingly buy meat, milk and eggs that come from clones if the FDA declared them to be safe, 63 percent of consumers said no.

Hearing things like this makes me think that Erik’s hopes for vat-grown meat as a way to reduce the amount of suffering may have trouble getting off the ground in the consumer market. Of course, to me, the “yuck factor” associated with cloned meat is on part with the “yuck factor” regular ol’, factory farmed meat.

The article also mentions how cloned animals’ milk will hit the shelves soon, but probably not the meat from the cloned animals themselves because the clones are so expensive to create. For a second I thought, “Well, at least there are no dairy cow offspring that will become veal this way, right? Maybe it’s an ever-so-slightly more compassionate glass of milk.” Turns out, not really:

[Clones would] be used as breeding stock, so the real question is whether their sexually produced offspring would be safe.

The animals don’t get cut any break here. They may be able to clone a cow, but that can’t cut out the sentience gene.

He’s a merchant of boar semen, keeping about 80 valuable animals. Rural students, usually members of 4-H clubs or the Future Farmers of America, order semen from these champion animals at $50 to $150 a vial and use it to inseminate local sows in hopes of creating a winning pig.

I really have no intelligent comment about this paragraph. I just wanted to quote “He’s a merchant of boar semen.” Wasn’t that a Shakespearean comedy, The Merchant of Boar Semen?

One recent morning, two cloned calves pranced around a field outside Austin. Their progenitors were not living animals, but rather cattle that had already been butchered and hung on a hook in a slaughterhouse. The calves were selected for cloning after receiving high grades for meat quality and yield, judgments that couldn’t have been made while the originals were still alive.

Priscilla, born in April, and Elvis, born in June, were created by ViaGen. They’re destined to be bred together in an effort to create prime stock. If it works, ViaGen will clone a large population of once-dead cattle, aiming to sell them or their offspring for breeding.

This is kind of sad. Sure, they’re “pranc[ing] around a field,” which most calves don’t get to do, but the whole idea of creating “prime stock” for breeding purposes from “once-dead” cattle comes off as a some sort of crazy zombie-cow experiment. And the cloned cows and their offspring are the only ones who suffer if something goes wrong. This doesn’t really matter to those benefitting financially, as the following quote shows:

Published research shows risks to the health of clones at all stages of their lives. But the genetic problems aren’t likely to alter the food value of clones…

“Food value.” There’s another one of those “animals are units” phrases.

As long as the industry is looking for ways to produce milk, eggs, and meat at an even cheaper cost-per-”unit,” we’ll continue to see things like this. Unfortunately, there’s no going back to family farming and the idea that we may be paying too little for our food is foreign to most people.

I have no doubt that the industry and science will continue to find ways to lower the cost of meat production. They always have. The problem is that it’s always at the expense of animal welfare. Whether it’s by cramming more hens into a cage to produce cheaper eggs or by cloning dairy cows, the animals come up on the losing end of the stick, again.

Rare white bison born in British Columbia

Blatz said the calf will remain under her care for several more months, but she is considering selling him.” It could be to the native Americans, or even if a circus or a zoo wants something rare to put in there – to draw the crowds. That would be good too, but he definitely needs more exposure than where we live.”

Um… no he doesn’t.

(via)

Scott passes on a disturbing news story out of Utah where a substitute teacher dissected a live dog in front of a high school biology class.

“I thought that it would be just really a good experience if they could see the digestive system in the living animal,” [the substitute teacher Doug] Bierregaard said.

You have got to be kidding me.

The excuse, that even the school’s principal is using?: oh, the dog’s going to be euthanized anyway. Sounds an awful lot like people’s reasoning for eating meat, “Oh, the animal would die whether I ate it or not.”

This is entirely inappropriate for a high school classroom when there are so many alternatives. If showing the digestive system in a living animal is so important to this substitute teacher, why doesn’t he, say, use a videotape?

I hope the teacher and his school are properly ridiculed and reprimanded for this.

The folks over at VeganFreaks take on Newsweek and their coverage of the battle over foie gras.

Animal cruelty is reduced to a “huge misunderstanding,” making animal rights activists look like sub-intellectual fools. And of course, the authors couldn’t resist mentioning our “struggle to the top of the food chain” (another anti-vegan/AR quip that I hear pretty often). Let’s chuck the authors in a cage with some hungry lions, and then we can talk about million year struggles to the “top” of the food chain….

This is one of the arguments from non-vegetarians that really gets me… the whole “top of the food chain” or “if we don’t eat them, they’d eat us” argument. My first question for them is: what animals do you eat?

Chicken. Ah, an herbivore.

Cow. Another herbivore.

Pig. Omnivore, but the ones you’re eating certainly aren’t out there eating snakes and worms.

Duck, deer, sheep, etc… all of the meat we eat comes from animals that are primarily plant-eating animals (though there are some exceptions). When was the last time you saw someone snacking on a tiger leg or lion foot?

The way I see it is that the reason we eat the calm, gentle animals that generally don’t eat other animals is because they’re the only ones we can physically dominate and force into factory farm situations. How quickly most of us would become vegetarian if we had a choice between attacking a bear and eating a potato.

So, yeah… “top of the food chain” my arse. (For further commentary on the “food chain” argument, see comment #16 on this post.)

While I keep hearing that annoying phrase “liberal media bias,” I think we need to be more concerned with lazy reporting, lack of research, and general disinterest in anything beyond shock value.

Paul mentioned a story that aired on the WGN news in Chicago last night, summarized here (scroll to “Vegetarians”). The summary reads:

Vegetarians may be in danger of serious bone loss. Those who eat only raw plant-derived foods have abnormally low bone mass, an early sign of the bone thinning disease osteoporosis. In a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers found the extreme raw food vegetarian diet does not provide enough calcium or Vitamin D, both crucial for bone strength. The study looked at people who ate a vegetarian diet for three years.

In this summary, and according to Paul, even more so in the broadcast, it makes it seem that the raw diet = the vegetarian diet. Look at the opening and closing sentences: “Vegetarians may be in danger of serious bone loss.” and “The study looked at people who ate a vegetarian diet for three years.” That’s just wrong.

This shock value piece makes misleading connections that many people will walk away from thinking, “Vegetarianism isn’t healthy.” Do you have any idea how infinitesimally small the number of pure raw foodists there are in this country? I don’t know the exact number, but I’m willing to bet that not a single one was watching that broadcast.

Of course, you’re unlikely to see any news stories on the studies that have shown that frequent consumers of dairy tend to have more bone breaks and a higher incidence of osteoporosis than those who eat less or no dairy. That might piss off the advertisers.

Baby hippo and adopted “mother,” a 120-year-old Kenyan sanctuary tortoise: picture one, picture two.

The hippo survived the tsunami and has been inseparable from the tortoise since then. Seriously, how cute is that?

Read more.

Nell On Earth: An interview with Nell Newman, creator of Newman’s Own Organics

An enlightening interview on Grist.com about the business of organics, but what’s up with her answer to “are you vegetarian?”:

I was a vegetarian for three years as a kid. Now I am a “flexitarian.” My friends say it’s a PC name for hypocrite. I eat a little bit of everything. Ninety percent of what I eat is organic, and any meat I buy is organic, but when I go out to dinner, I don’t always investigate the ingredients. I don’t say no when I go to a friend’s for dinner and they’ve prepared a non-organic meal.

Isn’t she answering two totally separate questions there?

That aside, Nell’s got some interesting things to say about big business/mainstream organics:

Oh, it’s good that someone’s mainstreaming this industry. Adopting big-business practices is one thing, and adopting agribusiness practices that would dilute the meaning of organic is another. On the whole, I think we’re doing a pretty good job of preserving the integrity of organic foods.

As for business practices, you have to be realistic. Even running a small organics company, I’ve got constraints. I would love to not have to ship anything and use nasty packaging, but you know what, that’s not a reality. You want to do everything regionally, and just support local small farmers regionally, and then you find out there are no good pretzel manufacturers anywhere on the West Coast, so you have to make your pretzels on the East Coast and ship them. So you do as best you can, but most of the time, it’s difficult to have those high ideals and stick to them, in terms of how you produce stuff. People would love us to put our pretzels in wax paper, but would they really like it when they bought a stale pretzel? It’s a very difficult balance.

Fur flies as mayor won’t wear robes

Councillor Linda Turton, a strict vegetarian, told Sandwell Council staff that she could not wear the robes - normally worn when the new mayor is sworn into office.

Instead, for the official ceremony in June Councillor Turton wore a “borrowed” robe that had a black material collar instead of the traditional fur collar.

Up Close & Personal Meet Chicken Plucky Amandah Povilitus

This here’s a good interview with a high school animal rights activist who works for McDonald’s, two things you normally wouldn’t think would peacefully co-exist.

They don’t get mad or make me work in the back. As long as I don’t protest them, it’s fine. I don’t fight customers or anything. I turned a couple co-workers vegetarian, and I helped reduce waste, which they love.

Here’s a cool story that’s slipped under the radar: The Father of Veganism Turns 94.

Donald Watson is the man who in 1944 coined the term “vegan.” Back then, it wasn’t so easy to become a vegan, I’d imagine.

Sixty years. That’s some serious resolve.

AlterNet has a good article titled Vegan, Head to Toe that looks at various online shops targeted toward vegan consumers (think MooShoes).

Did I mention I bought a hemp wallet recently to replace a leather one I had received as a gift? I really like it. Except it has Velcro, which I couldn’t tell from the site when I ordered it. But I’m thinking a little fabric sewn over top of it should do the trick. I can’t stand that r-r-r-r-rip! noise when I open it in a quiet store.

(via Vegan.com)

A man tries to shoot his seven puppies, but one of them shoots him. Nice.

Even though I’m embarrassed to live in a state that doesn’t even recognize civil unions, I’m at least proud that now Virginia requires alternatives to dissection for high school students who wish to “opt out” of the standard slice-and-dice curriculum. It seems pretty silly to me that dissection has been required in high school biology classes even though the majority of people in those classes will never go into anything requiring the knowledge of what a frog spleen looks like. It’s nice to see more states requiring alternatives to students that object for ethical reasons.

In addition to Virginia, Florida, California, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island, and Illinois have similar laws and New Jersey is also considering it. Argentina, India, and Israel outright ban dissection in schools.

For more information, visit the Humane Society’s page on dissection laws.

Sheep put brave face on stress

Scientists at the Babraham Institute in the eastern English city of Cambridge discovered that when sheep were isolated, showing them faces of familiar sheep helped to soothe them.

…

When the sheep were shown faces of sheep familiar to them, they became less stressed, and showed fewer signs of agitation than when they were shown goat faces or triangles, researchers found, according the UK’s Press Association.

…

The researchers were conducting more tests on the sheep by showing them videos of sheep with different facial expressions, to see what effect this has on their stress levels.

While these tests don’t sound nearly as cruel as most animal experiments, is this really something researchers need to be studying?

The new head of HSUS, Wayne Pacelle, was a guest on today’s Diane Rehm Show on NPR. I only got a chance to hear a few minutes of it in the car, but Pacelle struck me as a well-spoken, respectable guy that is determined to shake things up and put pressure on those causing the inhumane treatment of animals (including farm animals). Give it a listen.

(Interesting side note: when searching on “Wayne Pacelle” to find the above link, Google’s first result was this page… looks familiar!)

In the “Why Does This Type of Thing Even Exist” category: 105-pound woman wins the World Lobster Eating Contest by wolfing down 38 lobsters in 12 minutes.

Erik Marcus has posted a great piece covering Gourmet’s recent article about lobsters. In the magazine’s article, writer David Foster Wallace penned a lengthy piece about the cooking of live lobsters and the ethics associated with it, as well as meat eating in general. You wouldn’t expect a foodie magazine like Gourmet to print such an item, so Erik has examined the possible reasons why they’d risk alienating a large part of their audience. I’m going to try and pick up a copy of the magazine… one paragraph that Erik quoted really caught my attention:

Given the (possible) moral status and (very possible) physical suffering of the animals involved, what ethical convictions do gourmets evolve that allow them not just to eat but to savor and enjoy flesh-based viands (since of course refined enjoyment, rather than just ingestion, is the whole purpose of gastronomy)? And for those gourmets who’ll have no truck with convictions or rationales and who regard stuff like the previous paragraph [about a lobster’s attempts to get out of a pot of boiling water] as just so much pointless navel-gazing, what makes it feel okay, inside, to dismiss the whole issue out of hand? That is, is their refusal to think about any of this the product of actual thought, or is it just that they don’t want to think about it? Do they ever think about their reluctance to think about it? After all, isn’t being extra aware and attentive and thoughtful about one’s food and its overall context part of what distinguishes a real gourmet? Or is all the gourmet’s extra attention and sensibility just supposed to be aesthetic, gustatory?

The Washington Post has a great article on Wayne Pacelle, the new head of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The big news: he’s a vegan and he’s serious about fighting hunting and farm animal cruelty. The article is very flattering and his critics come off like bitter and angry people who love claiming about how they have a “right” to raise chickens for cockfights or to have “canned hunts.”

I have a feeling there will be a lot of vitriol towards Pacelle as well as a lot of twisted opinions and outright lies (some are mentioned and dealt with in the article). Me, I’m anxious to see what a dedicated vegan can do in a post like his. Call me crazy, but when an organization like the HSUS was serving meat at their events, I don’t quite understand how they could claim to be an advocate for humane treatment of animals. The coming years will be interesting, that’s for sure.

I’ll skip right over the puppy on a gas grill story (sorta) and go into something only slightly less painful to read about: cattle escaping from an Omaha beef packing plant. This pretty much says it all:

Three officers with shotguns fired six shots. The cow ran a little more, then collapsed.

The crowd groaned.

“We gave that one every chance we could,” said Campbell. Police decided to kill it when it became clear that the animal would not allow itself to be captured.

In other words, they gave the cow every opportunity to go back to the packing plant, be hung from its leg, catch a bolt to the skull, and then have its throat slit, but it put up a fight and they had to shoot it. Gee, imagine the cow not “allow[ing] itself to be captured.” Why in the world would the cow not “allow” that?

I apologize to you now for starting the week off with a story like this one: Woman who offered pig to lure tiger faces cruelty charge.

Linda Meredith drove from her home to C Road and Okeechobee Road with her Yorkshire pig Monday shortly after learning that the 600-pound tiger belonging to a one-time B-movie Tarzan Steve Sipek had escaped his 5-acre compound.

Meredith, wearing a tiger print and a gold lion medallion, pleaded with deputies to take the piglet named Baby by its hind legs or twist its ears to make it squeal and attract the hungry tiger.

It should be noted that Ms. Meredith transported the pig in the trunk of her car in 90 degree heat. “Even pigs transported for slaughter are required by law to be moved humanely,” Animal Care and Control Director Diane Sauve said. (Of course, we all know that the law may say that, but the reality is much different.)

I feel I should balance out that story a bit with this one: ‘Moody’ pooch alerts family in time to escape fire.

Rhonda McCrory’s friends and family members don’t really like her Pomeranian, Buddy, because of his grumpy disposition. They’ll probably change their minds now.

As flames swept through the kitchen of her Pecan Boulevard home, his barking awakened her just in time so she and her children could escape without injury.

(Both stories via Obscure Store)

Two Jailed for Eating Rare Tiger

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has sentenced two farmers to jail terms of up to nine years for eating a rare Manchurian tiger after leaving it to die in a trap, the Beijing Evening News reported Thursday.

A court in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang convicted Zhang Lichen and Gong Weisheng of killing an endangered rare species recently, the paper said.

The two men found the tiger caught in a trap in a mountain last year but did not report it to the authorities. They left the tiger to die and returned six days later to bring the beast home, skin it and eat its meat.

“The two men knew selling a tiger was a crime, but they thought eating a dead tiger’s meat did not break the law,” the newspaper said.

Bessemer lays claim to world’s oldest chicken

Matilda, a [14-year-old] bantam hen in Bessemer who has been a prop in the magic act of “Mort the Mystifying and Donna” for years, recently was designated as the World’s Oldest Living Chicken. She has a letter and a certificate from Guinness World Records to prove it.

…

[Donna] Barton noted also that Matilda receives the best of care and is petted and pampered and even tucked in at night.

“Most chickens live outside and put up with the cold, wind,’coons,’possums. … I don’t know if that chicken ever hits dirt,” she said.

Raw food diet: As a way of life, simply not so hot

This Chicago Tribune article takes a look at the raw food lifestyle. The author decides it’s not for her:

But raw, which is supposed to encourage a simple life and a return to nature, is just too complicated for its own good. It’s great in theory but has strayed seriously from its roots. Not only are pricey appliances like a juicer, dehydrator and blender helpful if you want to eat more than lettuce, but it’s also a labor- and time-intensive lifestyle that requires soaking and sprouting various foods and recognizing deadly herbs.

I think Charlie Trotter, author of Raw has it right:

“There’s nothing wrong with mixing a little raw and cooked food,” Trotter said during a cooking demonstration. “I just want great food. And by the way, I want to live to eat another day.”

Chickens injured by student prank (BugMeNot login)

Apparently a student left the chickens in a knapsack inside a locked car before the joke, leaving one of the animals close to death as a result of the excessive heat, police said.

*sigh*

It might seem odd for me to deconstruct an article in The New York Times (login info) that mentions vegetarian food in a positive light, but a number of things in this article really jumped out at me. Let’s take them one by one, extracted from the original article (which you should read first, of course):

When I hear the term “vegetarian lifestyle,” I reach for my skirt steak.

Jeez. Another one of “those people?” Why are ethical vegetarians (which who I assume he’s talking about here) so scary to some people?

No one, after all, says you have to be a committed, converted, proselytizing vegetarian to eat a diet less oriented to meat. Besides, many self-described vegetarians are not, strictly speaking, vegetarians. Today’s rules seem pretty flexible, sometimes to the point where there is not much difference between vegetarians and people who eat moderate amounts of meat.

These are those “rules” and half-assed labels I’ve complained about before. Again, any move to a more plant-based diet is A Good Thing, but to say that “there is not much difference between vegetarians and people who eat moderate amounts of meat” is to imply that, hey, vegetarians won’t mind if you give them soup with chicken stock.

We do not hear, either, that a vegetarian diet promotes weight loss, probably because studies have not been done. But I don’t know any overweight vegetarians, though maybe they are walking around hungry.

I’m going to avoid going on a long rant here, but I have a big problem when vegetarianism is promoted as the ultimate weight loss solution or some such. For one, overweight does not automatically mean unhealthy just as thin doesn’t always mean healthy. There are a lot of factors that come into play, like genetics. To me, it’s more constructive to be physically active and to try and eat a healthy, varied diet (leaving ethics aside for the moment) with a focus on whole grains, vegetables, and fruits. If you eat well and are active and are considered “healthy” by metrics other than weight or BMI, then don’t stress out about a number.

Secondly, I know a number of “overweight” vegetarians… and vegans for that matter. I also know a number of unhealthy vegetarians/vegans. Giving up meat isn’t a miracle cure that will automatically make you instantly healthy if you don’t exercise and continue to eat heavily processed snacks in place of meals.

Lastly, the “walking around hungry” part… what the hell is that even supposed to mean?

Still, it sometimes takes a bit more technique to produce vegetarian food that pleases the spoiled palate. For example, I generally make chickpea soup with chicken stock and sausage. But I found that I could create a soup with just as much flavor and body as my original version by slow-cooking the onions until they are brown; by exploiting the fact that, unlike other dried legumes, chickpeas produce a delicious broth as they cook; and by adding spinach, whose character is just as distinctive as that of sausage. Serve this with homemade croutons if you can, or at least with good bread.

Though it may have been implied, it’s something that needs to be explicitly stated for a mainstream publication: use a one-to-one replacement of vegetable stock for chicken stock. It’s easy to do and personally, I could never taste the difference. Even the powdered stuff or bullion cubes you buy in the store taste just fine.

If you visit a Chinese market, you should find prepressed tofu, often cut into strips. Also known as pressed bean curd or extra-firm tofu, it has a brown exterior and is usually packed in plastic, without water.

Extra-firm tofu doesn’t mean prepressed and the kind I’ve bought have never had a brown exterior unless they’ve been pre-cooked and marinated.

Even with all these minor annoyances, the overall message of the article is right on: the idea that vegetarian cooking is boring is extremely outdated. I can honestly say that since I’ve become vegetarian, I’ve never eaten so well. No cuisine of the world is off-limits (OK, well maybe Hungarian food because every recipe I’ve ever seen has lard, but otherwise…) and there are as many preparation styles as there are cooks. It’s always heartening to see the mainstream press confirm this for themselves.

The Washington Post is running a story about how low-carb product sales are declining, which I would never have guessed with the myriad new products claiming “low carb” on their labels, even if they never had any carbs to begin with. Really, if I never hear the abbreviation “carb” again, I’ll be happy.

The one good thing that came about from the Atkins/Zone/South Beach/etc. diets is that now it’s not so hard to find whole wheat hot dog and hamburger buns for my not dogs and veggie burgers.

(Yeah, that’s a pretty stupid title.)

Inside Triathlon is running a feature called Coast to Coast where an Oregon man named Barry Holman joins two friends for a two week, 900-mile trek from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Little Rock, Arkansas as they train for a triathlon. Barry’s vegan and has a funny story on
Day 12:

Can’t kill “The Vegan”

I’ve developed a nickname on this odyssey. It’s “The Vegan.” I don’t eat any meat or animal products (dairy, eggs, etc.). It’s not a huge deal for me; I’ve been eating like that for more than three years, and it predates my first Ironman. But it freaks out a lot of people who think I might tip over at any minute from a meat deficiency. Gordo isn’t a reactionary and was curious about my eating. I’d even call him vegan friendly because when I’m cooking he always asks, “Can you make a little extra of that? I’d like some.”

Still, he was pretty sure that at some point I’d crack from fatigue. About my fifth day he said to me, “I thought you’d blow up after the third day. That’s usually when the guys on Epic Camp [the 12-day camps he and 1988 Ironman Hawaii champ Scott Molina organize] crumble. But you’re hanging in there pretty well — better than I thought a vegan would.”

With only two full days of training left (my flight leaves at 12:30 on May 5, so I’ll only get in an early swim and run), Gordo felt as though I’d made it through enough of the training for him to give me an assessment of my strengths and the areas I need to address to improve. He started the conversation by saying, “We’ve thrown everything at you we have in terms of volume, and you just absorb it and bounce back. I’m really amazed, especially given your diet. I keep saying to Clas, ‘What are we going to do? We’ve tried everything and we just can’t kill the vegan!’”

I think I pretty well failed at concealing a big smile when he said that, because on days seven to 10, when things were feeling pretty dark, I wrote a note to myself that I was, “Carrying the weight of Vegandom.” A ridiculous self-absorbed fatigue-induced delusion, I know. I was, however, concerned that if I had a day where I simply couldn’t go on physically or mentally that it might be perceived as a weakness not as much in me as in the way I eat. The upside of that particular delusion was that it was a really great motivator and gave me something outside of the deep fatigue to focus on.

This is a good accompanying story for a piece I wrote on one of my other web sites about ultramarathons (imagine a marathon, but stretched to 100 miles) and vegan “ultramarathonner” Scott Jurek. Jurek is also featured in this month’s Herbivore.

In the “Meat as Weapon” category, a Tompkinsville, NY father has been charged with beating his son with beef jerky.

I don’t recall any Tofurky Jerky-related incidents like this one.

(via Obscure Store)

CNN recently ran an article titled Experts stress post-exercise eating, where they discuss how low-carb diets can be harmful because of the body’s need for carbohydrates during the recovery stages of strenuous exercise. I was struck by the juxtaposition of the article and banner ads for the Atkins diet, especially the first time I loaded page:

Not only is it an Atkins’ ad, but an ad featuring a woman stretching, presumably post-exercise.

Now this is just strange: Cow Caught Walking Through Bank.

According to this February news blurb, a dairy cow that was meant to be the “guest of honor” at a wedding in Wunstorf, Germany (presumably the bride was going to milk her, as is tradition) “took a detour” and wandered into a bank. She walked in, looked around a bit, and left without incident. The story above has a slideshow that includes security camera footage from the bank.

(Thanks to Amy for sending this along.)

‘Flexitarians’: Vegetarians who eat meat

I’ll say this one more time: if you eat meat, don’t claim you’re a vegetarian.

Sometimes I feel like labels and classifications just get in the way of the real issues, but if the terms vegetarian and vegan are not very clearly delineated in people’s minds, then vegetarians are going to continue to be served soups based on chicken stock in restaurants because servers or chefs don’t know any better.

To avoid being flogged by meat-eating visitors, I should also repeat this: yes, I think cutting that any effort made to cut back on meat is a good thing. It’s this ambiguous labeling that I have an issue with.

If there was ever any doubt that some people just don’t deserve to exist: