What do you say to people who argue that vegetarians don’t get enough protein?

This may sound a bit snarky, but when someone says that, I know that I’m arguing with someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I have a bunch of longer posts lined up to get things back into gear, but let me just start you with an amusing dream I had the other night.

I was hanging out at Food Fight chatting with some folks there about how I was thinking about moving to Portland (in real life, I’m not, but if I were moving to the west coast, it would be my first choice). Then all of a sudden, Chad comes over and drops an almost cartoonishly large ham hock in my lap. I almost jump out of my seat, but then realize that, of course, it was a giant vegan ham hock. A mock hock, if you will.

Hey, they carry vegan haggis, so it could happen!

Like Eric, I’m not sure exactly what VegNews said about the site, but I’m looking forward to seeing the issue and want to welcome all readers from VegNews.  If this is your first time here, let me point you to a few posts to get you started so you can get a feel for what I do around here:

About
My about page gives a good intro to who I am and how I transitioned to veganism.  I’ve been meaning to update it for a while now, but it’s not like any of it is untrue now.

Why Veganism Is Not Extreme
I got tired of hearing people claim that they could understand being vegetarian but that veganism was just “too extreme.”  I argue that it’s meat-eating that’s really extreme, because veganism explicitly opts out of the death and torture.

Why We Need to Rethink Welfare
My thoughts on why claiming welfare changes as “victories” is doing more to hurt the cause in the long-term.

On Fishing and Entitlement
When I hear someone say something like, “The fish just eat and eat and eat because there’s no one there to catch them” to their kid, I can’t just let it go.

Know Thy Enemy Week
As activists, we need to know more about who we’re working against.  This 5-part series takes a shot at it.

I love the fact that there are enough veg-themed blogs out there that they’re able to choose 21 without any trouble.  Thanks to VegNews for the award and congrats to all of the other great sites mentioned.

^* Though they told me that this was the “First Annual Veg Bloggy Awards,” I could swear they did something like this a year or so ago with the same name…

The server the Veg Blog is hosted on hit some rough patches over the last few days. There was the 36 hour outage to start the weekend and then a disk failure to start this week. Fortunately, data was moved safely (with no loss, as far as I can tell) and things seem relatively stable now. Remind me to make a backup of things just in case, OK?

My presentation

Thanks to everyone who asked how my presentation at UMW went. While the crowd wasn’t enormous, about ten people, it was a decent enough size for me to start getting more comfortable talking about veganism and animal rights in front of a group. About half of the attendees were vegetarian or vegan and the other half were meat eaters, with one or two of them falling under the “considering vegetarianism” heading. I think the presentation itself went relatively well… I was a little nervous, probably went overboard with “um”s, and could stand to make more eye contact, but overall I think I hit a decent enough balance of information and humor.

Afterwards, there was a discussion amongst the veg*ns in the group about challenges faced with family, at school (like the cafeteria staff using “vegetarian” and “vegan” interchangeably when labeling food), and even a little talk about the welfare vs. abolition argument that was the fancy trend in 2007 and may rear its head again now that the AR and TAFA conferences are in sight. It took a little prodding to get an omni to talk, but eventually one did speak up and say while she respected vegans a lot, she “liked meat too much” (slide 3!) and wouldn’t ever give it up. While I didn’t get to delve into that any more deeply, she did say she thought that vegans needed to be more active than just being vegan. This sparked some good responses. Morgan, who organized the talk and heads up the AR group at UMW, said she thought that being vegan was the most active thing one could do because it’s taking a belief and living it every moment of your life. Another recently converted vegan spoke up and said she thought it was hypocritical for people that protested for animal rights to not be vegan.

All in all, it was a good talk and I hope everyone there enjoyed it. Thanks to the UMW crew for having me out. Let’s do it again.

I’d hoped to record my talk, but completely forgot until about 1/4 of the way through. Here are the slides if you want to take a look.

Lunch with Bazu

Today I had lunch at the always-excellent A Taste of Burma (their site is down as of this posting) with Bazu of Where’s the Revolution. Bazu’s been a long-time commenter on the Veg Blog, so I was happy she was able to take some time out of her visit with family to meet up for lunch. She’ll be posting pictures of our food over on her blog when she gets home.

A few minutes before she arrived, I had a chance to talk with the owner of A Taste of Burma, who’s possibly one of the nicest guys on the planet. I asked him a question that had been burning on my mind for the last couple of months. You may remember I wrote a while back about the amazing fermented tea leaf salad that they make using really hard-to-get leaves from Burma. I’d gotten addicted to it and eventually looked up the recipe only to be shocked to see that every recipe called for fish sauce and dried shrimp powder. I feared the worst, but was pleasantly surprised when he told me that while that’s the traditional way of making Lephet Thote, A Taste of Burma doesn’t use fish sauce or the dried shrimp. Phew. Crisis averted.

Guess what I ordered for lunch today.

Things look to be back to normal now.

The talk will be titled, “Why Isn’t Everybody Vegan?” and will focus on the multitude of reasons that people use for not changing their diet and lifestyle, even if it may be completely in line with their ethical beliefs.  It’s part of Animal Rights Week at the University of Mary Washington (Fredericksburg, VA), which is an ambitious week of outreach by a new and small (but dedicated) Animal Rights Club at UMW.

It just so happens that UMW is my alma mater and being the talk will be in my major’s building, so this talk should be extra fun.  Here are the details:

Why Isn’t Everybody Vegan?

When you make the transition to veganism, it’s hard not to be
enthusiastic about it.  It all seems so right and obvious and you
begin to wonder why everyone else isn’t making the same connection.
This talk will look at the reasons people aren’t vegan (“It’s too
extreme,” “I love cheese too much,” etc.) and how to counter those arguments in others (or yourself).

Where: University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA (Trinkle Hall Monroe Hall, room TBA)

When: Wednesday April 9, 2008; 6pm

What else?: There’ll be food.  So come, eat something, and listen to me blabber on about why veganism is the greatest thing since sliced (vegan) bread.

More info: The event’s Facebook page

If you’re in the area, come on by and say hi.  I’ll be the nervous one at the front of the room.

1. Try to counter their every comment. At first, I opted to pick apart every bit of their always weak arguments. Since they tended to post with lots of anger and with little in the way of actual facts, this was pretty easy. But before too long, I realized I was countering the same unsubstantiated, regurgitated “plants have feelings” and “we were meant to eat meat” tirades over and over again. So, then I took to a different tactic…
2. Let them make themselves look stupid. I’d say that 95% of the anti-veg comments that come into the site were borderline incomprehensible. For a while, I decided that perhaps it was best to let these people expose themselves for what they were: dummies simply out for a fight.

Then, a couple of days ago I got an e-mail from a reader:

Ryan, I just wanted to ask why you allow posts on your site from closed-minded, non-veg people? Allowing them a space to post about matters which they ‘really’ know nothing about, clearly evident with the same uneducated ramblings and arguments, is disgraceful. Give veganism the respect is deserves and monitor your postings! Just a polite plea from another veggie pal.

I thought about the note for the rest of the day and then noticed a comment that had recently come in:

Any of u Vegetarians and Vegans who think people are not ment to eat meat need to pull your heads out of your asses! I’m not going to get into evolution vs creation or hundreds of other factual data that indicate a need for humans to consume meat. I will simply leave you “enlightened Vegetarians/Vegans” with this…. if we were not ment to eat meat, then why in the hell do you think humans have “K9″ teeth? You think they are used to masticate berries and lettuce? (GET A CLUE CHRISTY TAYLOR, 11 Nov. 2004)

I hovered over the keyboard for a moment, almost reverting back to approach #1 and asking the person to let me know the next time they tore into the raw flesh of an animal they killed with their bare hands. Then I backed away and considered leaving the comment in place, taking approach #2. A moment later, I took a deep breath and hit “delete.”

So, it’s time to add a third approach, one which I’ll be following from here on out:

3. Delete stupid, antagonistic comments. This is not to say that I’m not going to allow comments that I may not agree with, but anyone that comes on and posts something similar to the nonsense above is going to get canned.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the future of this site and the direction I want to take (hence a lot of silence recently), and one thing is for sure: I’m done wasting time on the blowhards. They’re not the people I want coming back. You, the people nodding and thinking, “Jeez, it’s about time!”… you’re my people. You’re the ones I want to stick around.

Even though I haven’t been writing much, I have been doing some work on the site. For one, the recipes are back online. These are recipes that were posted on the previous version of the site, but didn’t make it over when I switched to Wordpress. A few people had written in asking for old recipes, specifically the hot chocolate and the khong nuoc mam recipes, so I thought I’d finally get them on the new site. The URLs are different, but I’ll set up some redirects eventually.

Let me know if you stumble into anything that looks really awkward or goofy.

First of all, I’m really starting to dislike this temporary design for the site. Expect a new (hopefully more permanent) version of the site shortly.

Secondly, I love Portland. Right now, I have my slave out picking up some vegan waffle sandwiches with maple spread and garden sausage from a food cart. Even if I don’t live here, a piece of my intestinal tract always will.

Thirdly, yesterday I met Julie Hasson, one of the three chefs on the new Everyday Dish DVD. We just met over e-mail recently, but it was nice to catch up with her in person and eat some food she made. I also got to meet and chat with the legendary Chad and Emiko from Food Fight. They were very excited about doing laundry.

More soon, including lots of pictures and restaurant reports from this trip to Portland. My slave is back, so I’m going to go eat.

I dig alternative viewpoints, but some of these folks seem to have flown in from way out in left right field.

Also, I’m slowly trying to re-launch the recipes section of the site, this time as a regular part of the blog. Of course, I went and made quite a stupid mistake on my first new recipe post for Terribly Tasty Teff Pancakes. I called for ground coriander when I meant ground cardamom. Coriander in pancakes would probably be pretty foul.

Sorry if any of you tried them as listed. My bad.

Adsense is gone for a while (no more Omaha Steaks ads!), though I’m toying around with the idea of reviving it in the RSS feeds, because it’s generally pretty unobtrusive there.  Feel free to tell me this idea sucks.