Posts from September 2005


Woof!
29 September 2005

Our readings in class the other day focused on racism, stereotypes, and whiteness. We had a fairly long and protracted discussion on where racial stereotypes come from, what they mean for people who must live with them, and how they continue in society. Overall, things went pretty well. No one offended anyone else, nobody got into nasty arguments, and on the whole, it was a pretty thoughtful discussion.

After class, though, I was approached by a student from China. During the discussion, someone had mentioned stereotypes about ‘orientals’ and she was curious as to what these stereotypes were. She literally wanted me to tell her so that she could know in case she had to deal with them.

So, I told her.

“Well, probably the biggest stereotype is that Asians are smart and good at math and science.”

“But we are,” she replied.

Holding back a laugh, I said “Maybe so. But isn’t it maybe a little limiting? I mean, what if you aren’t good at math and you’re Asian?”

She agreed. “Okay, what else? Isn’t there something about our food?”

Gulp. How the hell was I going to say this?

“Uhhh, some people will make jokes that dogs and cats disappear when an Asian restaurant opens. Or that Asians eat dogs. They use this as a way of making Asians sound less civilized.”

She looked confused. “We do eat dogs. But they’re raised for that purpose. They don’t know any better.”

“Yeah, well, for some Americans, that’s really troubling. They think of pets as family, and so even Americans that eat meat would probably vomit if they ate dog knowingly. In America, people think it is wrong.”

She looked even more confused. “Of course you think that, you’re a strict vegetarian. But everyone else? Aren’t they being hypocrites? They eat pigs and cows and think dogs are any different?”

“Hey, I agree with you! I don’t eat any of it because I think eating any animal is wrong.”

“Yeah, but the rest of these people, they’re hypocrites. Who are they to judge us for eating dogs when they eat every other animal?”

“Good question.”

And it was a good question. There’s something really troubling to me about people who go to a McDonald’s drive thru with their dog in the back seat while they order a sausage McMuffin. How can people have such a massive disconnect between the animals they’re eating and the animals that they’re petting? And how can we make the connections to help them see the similarities?

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

scenes from a cafeteria
19 September 2005

Last week the smoking vegan and I met for lunch. For a variety of unimportant reasons, we ended up in the cafeteria near my office.

Here’s what went down:

After grabbing our trays, we slid up to the section of the cafeteria that sometimes has vegetarian entrees, desperately scanning for something good. In the past few weeks, there had been some nice vegan food. On this day, though, we’d not be so lucky.

“Is that vegan?” I asked, pointing to something fried, circular, and mysteriously labeled as “cutlet patty.”

The food service worker behind the counter looked at me blankly.

“I mean, does that have any eggs, meat, fish, dairy, honey, or anything else that comes from an animal in it?”

“Nah, it is VAY-gun,” replied the food service worker. Hearing this, the Smoking Vegan turned to me and flashed me a “if you believe that you’re on crack you fucking idiot” look. Taking note, I went on:

“Are you sure?” I asked, worried I was getting the blow off.

“Well, all this stuff is VAY-gun,” the food service worker said, casting her hand over a few steam trays, one of which contained pasta floating in a bath of cream sauce. Yellow oil was unattractively pooled in places where the pasta had not been disturbed. All in all, it was nasty looking, even for the ontologically nasty pasta alfredo itself.

“This is labeled ‘pasta alfredo,’ and that’s not usually vegan. Is it made with soymilk?” I asked, trying to politely remind the food service worker that milk was an animal product.

“I’m not sure. Let me go find someone.”

“There’s absolutely no fucking way that fucking pasta is vegan,” the Smoking Vegan interjected (note all the ‘fuckings’; we are, of course, talking about the Smoking Vegan). “Look at that shit, they’d never make that with soymilk. That’s heavy fucking cream. Vegan my ass.”

“Well, technically, your ass is vegan,” I responded.

“Fuck this, I’m getting a veggie burger. At least they’re vegan,” and with that, the Smoking Vegan skulked off to the burger station.

I hung around, waiting for another food service worker. I wasn’t going to eat any of this stuff, but I thought I should at least wait around to be polite. After all, I had started this quest.

Finally, minutes later, a higher-up appears.

“Well, these cutlet-things are VAY-gun but they have honey in them.”

“Okay, thanks, but lots of vegans don’t eat honey….”

At that point, the Smoking Vegan returns from the burger station, and hearing about the honey-vegan thing, is clearly on the verge of a brain hemorrhage. Before he can flip out, I interject.

“So, what about this pasta? Is that vegan?”

“Oh, that has cream and milk in it. It isn’t VAY-gun. But this other stuff is.”

“Okay, thanks.”

And with that, I do what I should have done to begin with: I get a veggie burger and french fries, and resign myself to eating VAY-gun junk food yet again.

Oh well, at least the company was good.

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

Honey IS vegan?
14 September 2005

Don’t vegans just love to argue about honey? Today, as I picked up my latest copy of Satya Magazine, I was surprised to see an article by Dr. Michael Greger suggesting that honey is vegan.

Yeah, that’s right. He says that honey is vegan.

The following paragraph sums up his view pretty well:

I’m afraid that our public avoidance of honey is hurting us as a movement. A certain number of bees are undeniably killed by honey production, but far more insects are killed, for example, in sugar production. And if we really cared about bugs we would never again eat anything either at home or in a restaurant that wasn’t strictly organically grown—after all, killing bugs is what pesticides do best. And organic production uses pesticides too (albeit “natural�). Researchers measure up to approximately 10,000 bugs per square foot of soil—that’s over 400 million per acre, 250 trillion per square mile. Even “veganically� grown produce involves the deaths of countless bugs in lost habitat, tilling, harvesting and transportation. We probably kill more bugs driving to the grocery store to get some honey-sweetened product than are killed in the product’s production.

These are good points overall, but they miss one thing: honey is unnecessary cruelty. We may not be able to avoid killing insects when producing crops, driving to the store, or doing other daily activities. But it is really simple to avoid honey, and no one needs it to live. Why should we recklessly abandon our commitment to reducing cruelty in this area of our lives, particularly when it is so easy to avoid? As Dr. Greger points out, we can probably dissect our lives in a million ways to figure out all of the ways that we knowingly or unknowingly exploit animals, and this can lead to pointless navel-gazing. Nevertheless, this isn’t one of those marginal cases like animal products being in tires, or insects being killed to produce food. This is a clear-cut case. Honey kills bees. Honey is easy to avoid. Therefore, if reducing suffering matters to you, you should avoid honey.

Finally, to fend off a common critique:

Veganism isn’t about perfection, but it is about reducing cruelty to the greatest extent possible and respecting the life of other beings when we can. When possible, we should make choices that respect compassion and life. So why eat honey for the sake of expediency? Also, Dr. Greger makes it seem like this will help improve the public standing of vegans. I have my doubts. Most of the world sees us as so marginal to begin with that something like this isn’t likely to improve our standing much. With that being the case, why engage in what is an avoidable form of cruelty?

(p.s. should you doubt that bees deserve some consideration, I’d encourage you to read this article. )

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

Milk or Pus?
11 September 2005

The Harbourfront Centre hosts the Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair. One of the major sponsors of the Harbourfont itself is apparently a Canadian milk interest.

Put vegans around milk ads, and you can see what happens. (make sure you check the note on the picture!)

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

Flexitarians
07 September 2005

This, from MSNBC.com:

CONCORD, N.H. – Even after five years, Christy Pugh has no trouble sticking to her vegetarian regimen.

The secret to her success? Eating meat.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a bad vegetarian, that I’m not strict enough or good enough,� the 28-year-old bookkeeper from Concord said recently. “I really like vegetarian food but I’m just not 100 percent committed.�

(thanks to True Blue Semi-Crunchy Mama for the pointer).

Well, Christy, you aren’t a bad vegetarian. Know why? Because you’re not a vegetarian at all. The equation is actually pretty simple. Vegetarians don’t eat meat. If you eat meat, you’re not a vegetarian. It is really that simple.

Carol Adams calls these pseudo-vegetarians ‘saboteurs’ because they’re screwing with the very meaning of what it is to be vegetarian. If vegetarian means eating meat and chicken ‘on occasion’ then it might as well mean absolutely nothing. It loses all of its power and meaning.

This is where the article above comes in. The MSNBC piece uses the new term ‘flexitarian’ to describe people who are ‘mostly vegetarian’ but who just aren’t “100% committed” (the words of our friend, Christy, above). The article itself is about how wishy washy fools flexitarians are changing vegetarianism itself, and how some vegetarian publications are more than eager to go along. To wit:

“To target the part-timers many [publications] have softened their approach to meatless diets, even at risk of alienating the far smaller reader pool of true vegetarians.”

Their prime example, without surprise, is the dairy and egg industry lovefest of Vegetarian Times, which used to annoy me with its abundance of cheese-covered egg dishes even when I was an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

It is good that people are limiting their intake of meat. I applaud that. But why hijack vegetarianism with your flexitarian ways? My real gripe is that flexitarianism lends further legitimacy to the narcissism of american culture and the way it understands the choices of vegetarians (e.g. being veg*n for health is fine; being veg*n for ethics is weird).

I’m not trying to be the vegan police. I’m not trying to create an exclusive club. But this flexitarian shit is annoying, pointless, and threatens to confuse the meaning of vegetarianism. If you’re a flexitarian, congratulations! We’re here to help you go all the way. But don’t sabotage us by screwing with the meaning of vegetarianism.

(oh, and p.s. Molly Katzen, you suck! (if you don’t get it, read the article)).

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

Free Range Idiots
01 September 2005

I think the world is one giant free range idiot farm.

Apparently, we’re just growing idiots and letting them run around out in society. Free range idiots seem to be everywhere, just going about their business, getting in your way, slowing you down, and generally annoying you. But for some reason, there seem to be no shortage of free range idiots who think that free range animal agriculture is god’s greatest gift to people who can afford to eat free range meat.

By now, most lefty vegans are used to the right-wing attacks. You must know the familiar litany: meat is good for you, meat makes you manly, meat is traditional, meat is right, meat is good, meat makes you strong, meat gives you a big weenie, meat makes you happy, ‘i like the taste,’ etc., you name it. We’ve all heard it all a million and one times.

As a lefty vegan, the last place you might expect to get shit is from your lefty companions who—surely!—understand that your veganism is just another part of rejecting yet another form of intolerable oppression. But cross a meat-eating lefty, and man, you just may find yourself doing a birkenstock-ectomy from your own meaty bum. If you try talking to a meat-eating leftist about veganism or animal rights, you’re apt to hear in whiny tones just how great free range meat is, how we really can raise animals sustainably, and how free range is better because the animals “die happier.” (I’ve noticed that the person saying this is always forcing a smile under which they’re hiding a tiny bit of horror).

For the record, I’m tired of this shit, and I’ll never understand why these otherwise good-hearted lefties have to be so damn stupid on this point.

I’m a vegan (duh). I think using animals for our own purposes is wrong. I think eating animals is wrong. To me, it is pretty damn nice that animals enjoy the fresh air, frolic in the field, and have a good time before they die a horribly bloody death, but free range and organic production is still horrible exploitation. Organic milk is still about forced pregnancy, still about animals and their ‘productivity’ and still about the fact that if the animals aren’t productive enough, they’re killed. This may be more “sustainable” than conventional factory farming, but it certainly isn’t a joyous outcome, and it still reinforces the idea that animals are ours to exploit as we see fit.

When I’ve raised these points to the free range idiots, they always tell me that they’re happier eating meat if they know the animal lived a happy life and was raised well, as if this justifies the death. To me, it doesn’t justify the death; it simply helps the free range idiot justify the creeping feeling that what they’re doing isn’t right. For them, free range isn’t about making animals feel better: it is about making themselves feel better.

  Posted by Bob Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

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