• SuperVegan – The Doctor—Er, The Vegan Is In
  Every major city should have an "Ask a Vegan" booth.
  (tags: activism woodstock)

Careful — this video of the latest in “environmentally-friendly beef” might cause you to injure yourself from constant eye rolling.

The inane, low-IQ banter is too much to take. I’m not even going to provide any commentary because, really, it’s Fox News… you know what you’re going to get.

• Chihuahuas Confront Cougar in SoCal Garage
  The video report says that the cougar was "eventually taken away," but the print version verifies that "officers with the Department of Fish and Game were forced to shoot and kill the animal. They had hoped to return it to the wild."
  (tags: cougar chihuahuas news)
• Teen charged in Miami's 19 serial cat killings
  Glad they caught the kid. I also appreciate that they actually acknowledged the suffering of the cats:

  "The cruelty of these crimes were horrific for the animal victims, but there were many human victims as well," Mayor Paul Vrooman said.

  "Let's not forget the children and the families who found their pets mutilated. These awful scenes inflicted a human toll."

  (tags: animalcruelty murder news)

(This is a guest post by the always charming Gary Loewenthal of Animal Writings and Compassion for Animals. He’s heading up the first Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale, which you’ve hopefully heard about by now. I asked Gary to write a guest post to talk a little bit about the bake sale, which has gathered an awful lot of steam since he first told me about the project a few months ago. It’s a great example of what one person with one good idea can do.)

It’s my honor and privilege to be taking up valuable bandwidth on the premier animal rights and vegan blog of the Internet. Many thanks to Ryan. (ed. note: No neet to butter me up, Gary, you’ve already got the guest post spot. :) )

My life lately has been gradually consumed by the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS), culminating next week, so hopefully I’ve learned a few lessons and have some impressions that may be of interest to a few readers or more.

In a nutshell… The WVBS concept is simple: Groups (or individuals) around the world hold vegan bake sales around the same time – June 20-28, to be exact. It’s not a strict requirement that participants have to have a bake sale during that time period, but having a bunch of vegan bake sales across the globe in the same week makes it feel more like a festive, impactful event.

The idea is very unoriginal. It’s based on similar projects such as the Great American Bake Sale. The main difference – besides being vegan – is that participants can do whatever they want with the proceeds. That’s turned out to be a great feature, but the original reason for that decentralization was to make the project easier to organize. Speaking of which, the coordinator of the event as a whole is Compassion for Animals, a small DC-area grassroots animal group that a few of us started last fall. (The website will be finished as soon as I get a break from the WVBS!)

I randomly hoped for 30 bake sales the first year. Right now we have 75. Participants include an LA City Councilmember’s office, a preschool, a radical left sci-fi convention, vegan businesses, vegan food bloggers, local veg*an groups, internationally known animal protection organizations such as Farm Sanctuary and Compassion Over Killing, and ad hoc collaborations of friends. Proceeds are going to a river cleanup effort, an anti-discrimination program, a children’s shelter, a free mobile spay/neuter service, humane societies, farmed animal sanctuaries, Food not Bombs, Food For Life, and animal-related groups ranging from the Sea shepherd Conservation Society to Vegan Outreach – and many more places. One bake sale is a fundraiser for a sanctuary employee who was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor.

Lessons I’ve learned (or am learning) – which may be old hat to anyone who’s organized anything, or may just be common sense, but I’ll put them out there in case they’re useful to others who are thinking of embarking on an activism project:

“You can do it.” I’m not a great baker and I have almost no experience at bake sales or putting together events, yet I’m heading up a global vegan bake sale. I forget who said that the secret to writing a book is to start writing, but I think it’s the same thing with big projects: Just start doing the first steps, then the second steps, and so forth. Don’t worry that you’re not an expert or that you make mistakes along the way – we’ve made a ton. You learn from your mistakes and gather knowledge along the way.

If the project seems too big, scale it back. As mentioned before, we made the WVBS participation rules short and simple partly to save time on our end. You also might also be able to enlist help. I feel like I cashed in all my chips on this endeavor, but hopefully that’s ok – if we all help each other, it should come out even in the long run.

Prepare for success. The WVBS isn’t a household name, and it’s nowhere near the scale of, say, Meatout (shout-out to FARM, BTW, for their promotions of the WVBS), but compared to my low expectations, it’s a huge success – and the workload has expanded accordingly. In hindsight, I should have asked myself, “What kind of infrastructure and time commitment will we need if we get a lot more respondents than we’re expecting?”

Cupcake activism is powerful! I was slow to realize the power of introducing skeptics to the deliciousness and variety of vegan food. I may have been too vested for too long in trying to craft the perfect pro-vegan arguments to see that vegan chocolate chip cookies have their own persuasiveness which may go beyond words. I’m finding out that the positive, friendly atmosphere of vegan feed-ins and bake sales are somewhat disarming and conducive to productive conversations; non-vegans attending these events seem more open, more honest, less defensive, less inclined to play “stump the vegan.” Food is an amazing activism tool. And it tastes great!

Perhaps the most gratifying part of the WVBS is witnessing the enthusiasm and creativity of all the participants. They’re the ones doing the heavy lifting and are the reason that the project is a success; I can’t give them enough props or gratitude. Not only will the bake sales feature an assortment of cookies, cupcakes, pies, brownies, breads, and muffins; they’ll also include danishes, cinnamon rolls, scones, donuts, cheesecakes – you name it Some bake sales will be combined with jewelry and crafts, or music shows by national acts or local groups. And check out these amazing posters for Atlanta, Ithaca, and Auckland bake sales! The hard work and amazing output from the organizers and bakers for all the local bake sales has been nothing short of inspiring. If you get a chance over the next couple weeks, stop by one or more of these bake sales if they’re in your area. Take home some wonderful goodies and help out worthy causes in the process. And know that the offerings on the bake sale tables all over the world are not only produced with flour, sugar, nondairy milk, and other cruelty-free ingredients; they’re also made with love – which can be quite an effective outreach tool.

• High on the hog: Slaughtered pig traded for crack, Syracuse police say …
  "The half of pig and $10 were used to buy a $50 bag of crack cocaine, police said. … Veliz told police the pig was for a celebration for a relative being released from jail, Cecile said. As police arrested the pair, a crowd gathered around them. When the officers turned from the suspects, the pig was gone, Cecile said." (via Obscure Store)
  (tags: crime pigs drugs)

• Tofutti Brands Inc. Announces Precautionary Recall of 12 Pallets of Vanilla Cuties Due to Possible Trace Level Milk Contamination
  This is for those that are highly allergic to dairy.
  (tags: tofutti recall health)

(I am way, way behind in my cookbook reviews and I’ve been getting more and more to review — three just last week! — so this is the first in what I hope will be a frequent series of catch-up reviews.)

With so many great vegan cookbooks on the market, it’s easy for some to slip under the radar and get overlooked. Lacey Sher and Gail Doherty’s You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan! is one of those books surely due to a poorly chosen title that not only infers inherent poor quality of vegan food but also brings to mind stacks of overstocked, generic $5 cookbooks in a bin in front of Borders.

But guess what? This book is anything but generic. In fact, it’s often downright inspired.

Sher and Doherty may be known to vegans in the Northeast as the owners of New Jersey’s Down to the Earth, an organic vegan restaurant that they ran until 2006. Their 2008 reprint of their 2007 Down to Earth Cookbook falls neatly between an accessible everyday vegan cookbook and a gourmet cookbook like The Artful Vegan. The recipes are all within the reach of most home cooks, but combine to make dishes with an impressive complexity that isn’t always immediately obvious.

Our family’s tried a number of recipes so far. Among them, two soups: a filling Mediterranean Lentil Soup and an amazing Potato-Leek Soup with Lemon and Dill that far surpasses any other Potato-Leek soup we’ve tried. From the salad section, we enjoyed both the easy-but-satisfying Chickpea Untuna Salad and the Quinoa Salad with onion, peppers, and corn. Also, thumbs up for the tasty Tofu Hot Wings with Ranch Dressing. They definitely bring the flavor.

The most interesting dish we’ve encountered is the “Love Bowl,” a giant dish of layered brown rice, black beans, greens, and marinated tempeh, topped with scallions and sesame seeds. The recipe says “serves one,” but it’s huge bowl that is hearty and filling for two people, easy. (My notes for this one indicate it could have also been titled “A Bowl of Things Ryan Would Never Have Eaten Ten Years Ago.”)

The only not-so-great recipe we tried was the falafel, whose texture and flavor were off and not what we were hoping for. Thankfully things like the pizza and easy Raw Cashew Cheese recipes made up for the one subpar recipe.

You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan! features 200 recipes divided into breakfasts, drinks/juices/smoothies, sides, soups, salads, sandwiches/wraps, appetizers, entrees, raw/live foods, desserts, and there’s even a section for kids’ food. Beyond what we’ve tried already, I look forward to trying out their Chickpea Socca, Tortilla Torte with Creamy Pumpkin-Seed Pesto, and of course the entire dessert section.

Sher and Doherty’s book is a pleasant surprise that proves the old adage, don’t judge a book by its title. Or something like that.

You Won’t Believe It’s Vegan!
Lacey Sher and Gail Doherty
Da Capo Press
978-1-60094-070-5

Scientific American’s 60 Second Science recently featured another interesting animal story titled “Birds Bop to Beat.” Reporter Karen Hopkin describes how some birds, especially parrots, may be able to groove to music, suggesting that “neural circuits for vocal learning may also enable moving to the beat.” Below is the transcript.

Forget “Polly wanna cracker.” Polly wants to boogie. Or so say scientists in a pair of papers in the April 30th issue of the journal Current Biology. They found that some birds, especially parrots, can bob their heads, tap their feet and sway their bodies to a musical beat.

It’s long been thought that dancing is a uniquely human hobby. Chimps don’t move to the groove. And when was the last time you saw Fido or Fluffy shake their furry booties? But Snowball the cockatoo is another story. That bird’s got rhythm. Researchers found that Snowball can adjust the tempo of his dance moves to coincide with the speed of the music. In this study, the tune was “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, one of the cockatoo’s faves.

But Snowball’s not the only bird who likes to boogie. In a separate study, researchers searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Of the 1,000 they turned up, only 15 critters actually moved in sync with the beat. Fourteen of those were parrots, one was an elephant. Pachyderms, parrots and people are all vocal mimics. So the neural circuits for vocal learning may also enable moving to the beat.

Of course, I always knew that birds could get down.

Also interesting, an article linked below the podcast, “Bird Brains: Are Parrots Smarter Than a Human Two-Year-Old?“

I was getting really tired of the old template, so I installed a new one. There’s definitely tweaking to be done, so let me know if anything looks particularly awry.

Sunday marked the sixth annual Poplar Spring Run for the Animals. I’ve run this race each year, the first one just a couple of months after I’d started volunteering at the farm. I look forward to the race, hills and all, every year.

This year, my cheering squad was in Charlottesville for my brother-in-law’s graduation from UVa (congrats, John!), but I had the distant cheers of many generous sponsors in my head. We managed to raise $500 for the farm, so big thanks to Bahar, Barabara, Brandi, Chris, Deb, Katherine, Leeann, Mary, Michelle, Natala, Sunil, and Mom and Dad for the support!

I finished in just under 25 minutes, averaging about 8 minutes a mile (official time was a few seconds more), which for me was a big win. I’m not a hardcore runner and the course itself is really hilly, so I’ll take that time any day of the week. It was more than a minute faster than my previous best for this race, which was good enough to place to me 55th out of 320.

It was another great event for the farm — over 300 runners (plus quite a few walkers), great vegan eats after the race, and it was by far the greenest race I’ve ever run.

Race results are here and a few photos have been posted.