“Early on the morning of Saturday, 28 June 1969, vegetarians and vegans rioted following a police raid on the StoneSoup Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. The StoneSoup Inn was a vegan restaurant which catered to an assortment of patrons, but which was popular with most people in the veggie community. The StoneSoup Inn riots are generally considered to be the beginning of the modern veggie movement, as it was the first time in modern history that a significant body of veggie people resisted arrest.”
If that seems vaguely familiar yet wrong, it should. That paragraph was taken from the Pride parade wikipedia entry swapping references with “veggie” people and I’ll get to why in a minute here.
LGBT people have long suffered oppression and marginalization for being who they are. It was in fact a crime in the United States and just recently became decriminalized with 14 states finally being forced to do so in 2003 by a Supreme Court decision. Their struggle against heterosexism continues to this day as they are discriminated against and victims of violence to a degree I can only allude to in this post and which I will assume you must be familiar. My point is that it’s a serious social justice cause that continues to this day.
Animal rights activists often look to lessons of past social justice movement to inspire and inform their own movement. For actions that take a more direct route they sometimes suffer the consequences of incarceration or legislation intended to mitigate their efforts. To the extent of which they are persecuted or inhibited for acting on the behalf of an oppressed group is a good and worthy conversation to have. Still though each justice movement is unique and requires a sensitivity in handling as to not diminish or misconstrue their efforts and goals. For example, think, um …well, most of PETA’s campaigns.1 Informing is much different than appropriating the hard-earned virtue past movements paid through blood, sweat and tears.
When I was working with a local “veg” advocacy group we sometimes got questioned about our role marching in the annual Chicago Pride Parade. Some were worried about co-opting their cause for ours but we shrugged it off for the most part. Mercy For Animals now makes a stronger representation wearing their “No one is free while others are oppressed.” shirts while passing out Why Vegetarian brochures. They’re not the worst of it though I guess. Co-opting Pride seems pretty much par for the course, these days at least.
VEGGIE PRIDE
That’s nothing though compared to a new effort gaining popularity called Veggie Pride. Their mission states one of the reasons for their parade is
“to denounce the discrimination which they {vegetarians and vegans} suffer”
I’m finding it hard to believe that “vegephobia” exists at least enough to warrant a march. I think Vegans of Color found it hard to believe as well but one brave commenter attempted to make the case citing lack of dietary accommodation as a major reason.
“1. Can you go out to eat in any city in the US and be certain that the foods you are served, as well as the dining decor, is not made from animal products? When a food server served me shrimp, I had already eaten a portion before I discovered it. Why is it alright to do this to a vegan but not alright to do it to someone with an allergy or religious reason for eating differently than the majority?”
It’s not like organizers are intentionally co-opting other social justice issues like same sex marriage right? Oh crap, waitaminute what’s this Veggie Pride wedding?! Aww c’mon now! Ok maybe that too is a naive stunt, but then they also use language like:
“I’m hoping that at this event people will see vegans and vegetarians come out of the shadows, once and for all.”2
Really?! Why not just go all the way and say “closets” instead of “shadows”? Oh no wait, they do:
With “Lesbian and Gay Pride” homosexuals were able to ‘come out of their closet‘, to announce in public that they weren’t embarrassed by their sexuality, and to denounce homophobia. Numerous vegetarians and vegans want to do the same thing with ‘vegephobia’. They want to be able to express their desire not to exploit animals.(emphasis mine)
And then they just come out and admit the appropriation:
The use of the term pride to defend the rights of vegetarians and vegans creates a parallel between the two demonstrations, which are similar in many ways.3
To so blatantly usurp a social justice movement like this is distasteful at best. The LGBT social movements have their own stories, heroes, victims and activists and they deserve to have those preserved and respected.
Ignorant of all that evidence to the contrary (granting the benefit of the doubt here), participants of veggie pride may see it as a celebration of…not eating animals, or something. It’s a beguiling idea to coalesce the factions of non-animal-eaters under one term. “Guys guys, let’s just all get along under one umbrella, imagine all we can accomplish together!“. But that too diminishes the goals, issues and members of these factions. Animal rights vegans may not give a shit about the $upreme Ma$ter Cha-Ching cultists marching alongside them. Rawfoodists leer at the Dr. Guruists, and breatharians say they’ll march but just pretend to. They try to use “veggie”, “veg*n” or just “veg” to avoid the politics of crossing borders but the act of not-eating-animals is just that, it’s no platform.
In my research for this article I only could find one dissenting piece. The extent to which appropriation of the LGBT social justice movement surprised even myself as I didn’t think it as intentional as discovered. This makes me wonder what’s going on here. Are people just not willing to speak up and stay complicit or are they being misled? When vegans and vegetarians wring their hands over Fur Free Friday marches invented by the animal rights movement for a particular cause yet happily bounce around a plagiarized pride march, what does that tell you? It tells me Veggie Pride is a ridiculous parody of a supposed ethical movement. Have they no shame?
Instead of “Veggie Pride” they should call it “Veggie Shameless”.
Welp, it happened again. Another (ex-)vegan gains prominence through a public admission of losing her veganism. A pseudo-vegan-nutrition-guru herself, Alex Jamieson declares “I’m not vegan anymore”. Who? You ask? She is the ex-girlfriend of Morgan Spurlock, the documentary filmaker who made Super Size Me. After that movie where he binged exclusively on McDonald’s food, Alex saves the day at the end putting him on a vegan detox diet. But after 13 years of being a vegan herself she declares herself no longer vegan.
So why did this Certified Holistic Health Counselor quit veganism? Cravings. Yeah, now there’s science for ya. While her typical blog post barely manages to scrape up a handful of comments, her ex-vegan post currently has greater than 1100 comments! Many are in support, many flame her but I did see the same tired fallacy employed to defend veganism.
NO TRUE SCOTSMAN
There’s a familiar defense from vegans when another denounces their lifestyle. It goes something like “oh they were never really vegan.” It’s actually a logical fallacy called the No True Scotsman. Requirements for membership of a group gets redefined to exclude the individual in question rather than owning up to failures for said group. Obviously Alex and apostates like her were never true vegans because veganism can’t be wrong. Or can it?
These ex-vegans can’t be shunned so easily. When people go vegan for health reasons or they espouse the virtues of health benefits for going vegan they are never1 I have never seen them similarly challenged by vegans. Clear skin? Sure! Lost weight? Naturally! Anything that gets people vegan is a good thing so shut the hell up and hope they stay that way, for the animals. Once they have that foot-in-the-door bias in place, they’re in! Score one for vegans the animals! Vegans hate to talk about the messy and complicated ethical arguments, well until they have to.
When those magic health effects wear away though and lacking any foundation for support, often they leave. When they do, other vegans are quick to throw them under the bus instead of exhibiting the compassion they are otherwise so well-known for. With their backs up against the wall they fall back to the supposed ethical underpinnings and shame the apostate for those assumed arguments. Alex is no noob though. Vegan for 13 years she knows the score. She knows the compassion vitriol she faces by renouncing her veganism. Maybe that’s why she went out of her way to explicitly state some of her beliefs like:
I believe you can love and care about animal welfare and still consume them.
Is that so shocking though? Advocates like Vegan Outreach avoid the animal rights arguments and focus on suffering, welfare. Alex is still on board with this and specifically mentions it, also here:
I believe we should restructure the way animals are raised so that they live in more natural, comfortable, humane surroundings and stop force-feeding them 80% of all antibiotics used in the US.
And Bob’s yer uncle.
VEGAN FUNDAMENTALISM
“Oh but veganism isn’t about health and welfare, it’s about the inherent interest of animals and let me quote the founder Donald Watson…” Stop. Well it took you long enough. By the way, where you when Derpy McDerpson here was gavage feeding Morgan Sperlock vegan detox green smoothies? Wasn’t convenient then was it? But here you are. Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that people are more likely to come to animal rights through veganism. Eventually they’ll have to confront cognitive dissonance like this and adopt a more abstract position, leave or reassert a custom interpretation. Yeah, about this “lifestyle, not a diet” interpretation of yours.
So this Watson guy made up the word in some zine long ago, big fucking whoop-di-doo. The Vegan Society comes by later and makes it even more vague lumping in the health and environment shit. Who next? Any of this ring a bell? When somebody has to enforce an interpretation of a word especially as it relates to identity or belief system they are being a fundamentalist. This is how wars get waged.
I may not be a linguist2 but I think I know a prescriptive appeal when I see one and they are common when vegans transgress. Insisting we look to the dictionary or coiner for meaning pulls you out of the organic function of communication for the sake of taking higher ground. But then you gotta defend that hill. The health, environmental and ethical vegans start fighting over their interpretation of vegan dogma appealing to the authority of some obscure English carpenter of the 1940s. And watch out, those health vegans, they’ll fuck your shit up lemme tell you what. OIL FREE FRO LYFE!
TL;DR
So vegans, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
•You can’t claim the health arguments and balk when those eventually fail you.
•You can’t flirt with new age pseudoscience and run to science to save you.
•You can’t brandish ploys of welfare and balk when people actually listen to you and eat “happy meat” because you could never conceive of such a market.
To do so will find you goalpost moving. Perhaps “vegan” meant one thing and people now do it for another. Who are you to insist otherwise? Are you gonna stamp your feet and call people names over it? Or are you gonna relax your grip on an assumed identity and find a new path to meet your true goals? What are those goals by the way?
So, another year has gone by and since then I did a refresh on the “Baloney Detection Guide” I created as an attempt to advocate critical thinking. Particularly in this case, to a niched population of people who share a common interest of “vegan”. This is a post-mortem on round two of my efforts so perhaps others might glean something if not from our success but from our failure.
The Baloney Detection Guide flier we found to be a bit unwieldy and expensive. It cost $1.60 a piece just in printing costs alone. As SkepticalVegan said, “fuck, i might as well pass out dollar bills with “be skeptical” scrawled across em.” Fair enough. So I got my designer on the horn and challenged him to squeeze the original down to be print-on-demand friendly to post publicly for sale on Zazzle down to 35¢. Now anybody could order a bunch at a more reasonable cost and even customize them with their contact info or whatever on it.
This would come in handy for a local fall vegan fest approaching. But last year we had to do a lot of pitching to encourage people to take one. I decided to bundle it up into a more enticing package which I dubbed the “Vegan Chicago Quick-Start Kit.” The point was to include all the bits of information and tips I wish I had when I first went vegan but also baloney proof them if possible.
VEGAN CHICAGO QUICK-START KIT
Actually this didn’t start as a “kit”. At first, the idea was to make a small pocket-sized “zine” full of all sorts of basic information any person going vegan would need including a baloney detection guide folded in. But getting all the info into it proved to be too challenging. I decided to just print the pieces separately and stuff them into a modest manilla envelope adorned with printed label dubbing it a “kit.” It sounded practical yet fun and I liked the rhythm and alliteration of “quick start kit”. This is what went in:
Baloney Proofing: If the Baloney Detection Guide wasn’t challenging enough I created this piece with “Red Flags” for common words associated with fallacies and “Twisted Topics” for misinformed issues.
Magnifying Glass: I wanted a cute “toy inside” and this cheap plastic magnifying glass alluded to skeptical inquiry but also had a practical interactive component which helped discern the tiny print on the “Twisted Topics” page.
Nutrition Food Guide: We were fortunate enough to host Virgina Messina, RD at our Vegan Chicago table this year and she generously offered us her brief “food guide” for reprint.
Restaurant Guide & Restaurant Card: From my leafletting days I’ve learned that people loved curated restaurant guides and stuffing one inside a pamphlet ensured a better acceptance rate.
Coming events: This had a list of upcoming Vegan Chicago events including our upcoming vaccine talk. We hosted an animal masquerade party later that night, the invite was on the reverse.
Vegan Chicago button: and of course we always give these out cuz, who don’t like buttons?
We stuffed two hundred of these and gave them away free of charge. They went like hotcakes and were gone in two hours. The rest of the time we put out the extra literature separately for people to pick. Most people, even if they hovered over the baloney stuff, left it. Unfortunately for the people who did take the baloney info they didn’t have an easy way to contact us. The feedback address I put on the Baloney Detection Guide got cropped off in the final print and I neglected to put it anywhere else. It’s not impossible to find us though.
For the most part the people who DID comment on the baloney stuff were people-in-the-know. Science champs who also were vegan. In a sense, that jives with our Vegan Chicago mission as a social group to draw together like-minded people. This wasn’t the intention though and would have been overkill if so. Other than that I have yet to hear a single anecdote where this clicked with somebody who actually needed it.
I’m not a professional educator nor am I an expert on this subject, so that’s another variable. I might be overreaching with this approach. Is critical thinking something that can be effectively advocated in such a way anyway? This brute-force attempt was fun and all but I’ll need to take a break from banging my head on this wall and maybe try something smarter next time.
A1: Two. One to get on their high horse and another to chastise them for oppressing the horse.
A2: One hundred and one. One hundred to crowdsource a website dedicated to finding out which brands satisfy a strict set of current vegan criteria and one to order the light bulb from an obscure online store in an overseas country.
A3: None. Vegan don’t change things, they be the change.
If you hadn’t heard of the movie Forks Over Knives (FOK) you probably aren’t vegan. It’s a movie based upon the work of a couple guru doctors who espouse a plant-based (read: vegan) diet for combating a plethora of human ailments. Released in 2011 it’s a little bit over a year-old now and injects a renewed interest in the waning popularity of the China Study book by T. Colin Campbell. A new fervor has been whipped up on the celluloid tip and a slew of new adherents have been spawned with many vegans soaking up this new batch of pseudoscience slop. These FOKers (heh) are a particularly rabid bunch and even started an onslaught os Forks Over Knives Meetups (albeit the membership numbers tend to be shallow)!
Now I must disclose that I haven’t seen the movie myself but I’m not repentant. I’m already quite familiar with all the guru doctors featured and the China Study as I was myself a China Study true believer back in the day. The benefit of the doubt isn’t well warranted especially after reading the following reports1:
Movie Review: Forks Over Knives | Let Them Eat Meat Ex-vegan Rhys Southan sits in with true believers on a screening. DERP ensues.
Roger Ebert’s review though was completely positive. The difference here is that he’s a movie critic being swayed by craft and not science.
There’s a bigger question here though. Should we be getting our science from movies? I mean, movies can maybe make science topics more palatable or entertaining for the masses but should the fringes be so flaunted? Whether or not the science is solid this is a bad precedent. If people are so swayed by this pseudoscientific display will they just as likely be swayed away by a paleo diet movie? Should we make our science decisions based upon the latest blockbuster movie utilizing emotion-tugging screenwriting and the latest in 3D CGI surround-sound technology?
Science is science and a plant-based diet panacea needs to go through the same rigors any other science–informed topic should. Until then it’s relegated to the realm of pseudoscience until it validates itself through peer-review and garners acceptance by the consensus of experts, not vegans. Anything less and vegans may have to eat crow and that’s just as NOT VEGAN as baloney.
Let’s just hope Skinny Bitch never becomes a movie. *shudder*
A new study by Gilles-Eric Séralini 1 was released condemning GMO and I found it dreadfully ironic that vegans would be so willing to glom onto such a thing. Here’s a population that claims to have animal interests at heart yet all they can do is gloat over this study where rats were bred and raised to get tumors untreated for 2 years. What ideology are vegans truly dedicated? Does their technophobia or anti-corporatism take precedence over their supposed concerns for animal justice? If we are to do animal testing then in the very least shouldn’t we be more judicious in the research we engage or at least make sure guidelines for the ethical treatment of animals are followed?23 With the safety record that GMO foods have, vegans should rather ask, ‘Is this really necessary given the scientific consensus on GMO?’ or at least ‘What is the scientific consensus on GMO?’
‘But Mr. Crank, the tests were done regardless and these animals ate GMOs and got tumors so shouldn’t we be worried?’. Ok, let’s say for the sake of argument that this study was true. Rats got tumors after eating Roundup GM maize. Let’s go even beyond that though and say several more rigorous scientific studies were done and the findings verified. Enough so that overturned the current scientific consensus on the safety of Roundup. Well congratulations, the world is a better place! We should maybe not use Roundup (Glyphosate)4 then…and go back to good ol’ atrazine5?
But how would that be an implication of GM? How can an entire technology be doomed for this particular trait? Perhaps this may lead to refined studies that take the larger picture into account but given this original hypothetical, all we know is that this particular instance (RoundUp) of this particular technology (GM) is found harmful. As Dr. Kevin Folta has said 6, he would be heralded if he could find such evidence. Any good scientist would strive to make such a contribution, no?
Now back to reality. The Séralini study was such 7 crap 8 that even Marion Nestle (who is wary of GMO) couldn’t find anything redeeming about it 9. Séralini has a history of trying hard to find some evidence of harm but nothing compelling has come up yet. If something does though, I’m not so misanthropic or conspiracy-minded to think it would be buried or squashed. It would probably be met with fierce and nasty resistance but that’s because it’s challenging the current consensus. That’s how science works. If the science is good though the truth would come out and that would be a win for science. That doesn’t seem to be the case here though, sorry.
What’s going to happen now? Those tumor rat pictures are going to be circulating around the internet for the next 10 years as evidence of harm of GMO foods. People are going to DERP that shit all over the place, damn the facts. How any vegan can exploit the fate of those rats to further their anti-GMO agenda confounds me and makes me pretty damn cranky. How many more animals are going to be sacrificed hunting for elusive harmful effects of something we know is safe10?
Anastasia Bodnar on Skeptically Speaking » #185 Genetically Modified Foods Revisited: “…I do think we can question whether or not the institutional review board that approved his study, was doing right by the animal that were involved. I think that there’s definitely a discussion to be had, another time about using animals in tests such as these but when rats who certainly can feel pain in some capacity are used in a study that is obviously flawed in design…I think we really should question that.” ↩
Letter to the editor, Erio Barale-Thomas “In our opinion, the study as reported (Ethics, §2.1) demonstrate a critical failure in the ethical supervision. First, it is not clear that the protocol was reviewed by a Committee of Animal Ethics/Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, a basic requirement in the industry to even allow the purchasing of laboratory animals. “Animal experiments were performed according to ethical guidelines…” is not the same than stating that the protocol and the procedures were approved by an Ethical Committee. This is especially important in view of the statement that 31 parameters were analyzed (Biochemical analyses, §2.4): the quantity of blood removed is not indicated, and this could have had an effect on the well being of the animals and on their sanitary status.”↩
Veganism is often referred to as a tool to “reduce suffering”. It’s a utilitarian ideal and it sounds pretty reasonable right? I mean, who would want to take any other course of action. So given a choice of evils, vegan advocates might ask people to eat cows instead of chickens because it takes less lives per pound of flesh therefore less suffering. Any way they could convince people to use less animals works to further their goal of suffering reduction. The ultimate cream-dream goal however is to convert people into veganism. Because that of course, is the most compassionate and least suffering lifestyle evar ya know. 1
A major problem for that gold-star leaflet award of a vegan convert is that for even people who are sympathetic it can be quite a daunting challenge. This barrier to entry is quite extreme and vegan evangelists have been pondering how they can help hurdle it. Well instead of jumping over that obstacle, how about making it smaller and still get to that ultimate goal? I believe I have a solution that will totally reduce suffering by empowering sympathizers with a tool to reduce suffering without having to make dramatic changes to their money spending habits.
I believe that reducing suffering is the ultimate good, and must be our bottom line. –Matt Ball, Vegan Outreach2
Ethical 3 Suffering Offsets
We’ve heard of carbon offsets before. Ya know like when you a company has a project that reduces carbon emissions somehow, like by creating renewable energy sources, they could sell the offset in emissions to industries that puts carbon dioxide into the environment. In this way you neutralize the effect of pollution. Well, what if companies like say a Burger King, had a “supersize”-like option but instead of more food it comes with an extra expense. That extra goes towards animal-based charities who save animal lives. Now, people who care about animals can have their animal and eat her too! Talk about a “happy meal”! Maybe it can be tokenized with little toys or maybe a punchcard or something.
Welfare advocates will love this too because say, that extra cost can even maybe go back into the production costs of the meal itself for better welfare. So far producers balk at such measures because of the extra expense but with ethical suffering offsets bigger cages for chickens, etc can be afforded. Improving the lives of these poor wretched creatures works directly in line with the goals of vegan advocates with minimal suffering of even consumers! Choking down wheat grass shots isn’t required here and non-vegans become allies, not enemies!
This will make the work of vegan activists much easier too. Instead of standing out in the cold handing out flier after flier begging people to go vegan they could meet them where they’re at and give out coupons to participating restaurants participating in the ethical suffering offsets program. The general public just isn’t ready to make the vegan commitment so this is a bold innovative approach that should make any activist quiver with non-suffering excitement!
So, it’s out there for you people of the internet! It’s my billion dollar idea gifted over to those true blue dedicated vegan activists. 4 Get out there and reduce the hell out of that suffering!
Recently I was having Sunday brunch at Chicago Diner 1 with my favorite 2 science-based nutrition experts 3. After the bloody mary started soaking into my freshly reanimated constitution the crank part of my brain started warming up and I boasted about my own non-vegan-ness. I said something to the effect on how I don’t consider the small animal ingredients in products I consume. I was asked for examples and that’s as far as that ethanol took me before I became stumped to provide as such.
A few days later that conversation was bouncing around my head and I brought the question to the Twitters via a hashtag dubbed #VeganNonVegan. 4 Here were some responses (many were mine).
“I was asked on-the-spot ‘what are the non-vegan things you eat’ and I was stumped. So you tell me vegan nonvegans at #VeganNonVegan“.
I eat the free fortune cookies that come with my vegan chinese food regardless of the ingredients.
I drink alcoholic beverages regardless of its status at the Book of @barnivore or what it was fucking filtered with.
I eat graham crackers even if they contain honey.
I will eat a veggie burger if I am somewhere and have no other options – without checking the ingredients.
I will eat the “vegan burger” without asking about the bun.
I will also eat fries without worrying if they were fried in oil used for frying other things. :O
In a pinch I’ll eat a Subway veggie patty sandwich because the rest is practically air anyways.
Sure, I’ll slum up on the fast-food tip and chow a Burger King BKVeggie. Yes, fries with that.
Sometimes I’ll order the onion rings without asking.
I bought silk ties at the thrift store.
I’ll eat vegan chocolate cake. According to Karyn’s Cooked vegan restaurant chocolate aint vegan.
I’ll use and eat artificial food coloring.
I think my rule of thumb is something along with if the ingredient is in the bottom 1/4 of the list.
I’ll eat food made on the same grill.
I drink Boddingtons beer which may contain honey but I give not enough fucks to find out.
The vegans in the audience are going D: after that list and the non-vegans are realizing how deep the rabbit hole goes with this whole vegan thing.
Veganism is a dubious and hazy line. Regardless of the choices there is likely to be some collateral damage no matter how hard we strive to avoid them. Now vegans have a litany of responses to these types of quandaries due to the barrage of disingenuous gotchas from animal eating trolls. But I KNOW THEM ALL MUTHAFUCKAHS. I was on the streets handing out the Vegan Outreaches, tabling fairs, administrating message boards, running vegan meetups for years and years, dude…I. know. And if you bust out the utilitarian abacus on me I will puke boredom all over you.
I’m a hypocrite? Damn straight I am! You too unless you like to shit on the majority of people5 on this planet starving while you post your 583rd vegan food pr0n instagram. I’ve met dedicated hardcore animal rights activists who only work for companion animals and eat animals. Because of that vegans have a special sort of vitriol for them and that’s shameful. I hate that sort of attitude and I don’t want any part of it.
Am I driving demand? Voting with my dollar? I really don’t think so. Boycotts are leveraged with purpose. A general application in the way veganism is wielded doesn’t inspire confidence in meaningful change. And what does that say of people who have less “votes”? 6
It’s actually been kinda hard to let some of my vegan-ness go. When I catch myself squinting at a label it just feels wrong and irrational. What magic vegan in the sky is peering down on me making sure I’m being good? What difference does it really make? Sometimes I make it a special point just to do so to remind me that I am not vegan, I am an animal liberationist. I’d rather seek paths of change than flagellate myself over a modicum of animal derived ingredients. The never-ending game of NOT VEGAN misses the forest for the trees. It’s less of a hassle for me to give up this “lifestyle” for the original reason I started in the first place than it is to continuously be undermined by vegans. The Vegan Police doesn’t have sway over me anymore, I’m out of their jurisdiction.
So, what non-vegan thing do you do, animal advocate? Do you dare to say or do you fear reprisal of the Vegan Police? Is that more important than the supposed issue of animal justice for which vegans sometimes give lip service?7 The comments are below,8 join me and free yourself!9 For the animals.10
Recently the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) pulled a PETA-like stunt spewing forth the ethical pollution byproduct I’ve come to expect of the vegan industrial complex. This time though I was surprised to actually see vegans finally take up some ire against the perpetrators! There were a few blog posts written and Facebook flamewars over it but this time something even bigger than that happened. Drink deep my friends, for this is what integrity looks like:
Due to PCRM’s recent obesity campaigns where they shame people’s bodies, Virginia (Ginny) Messina, The Vegan RD, resigns from their advisory board for which she was a member. PCRM is particularly on the hook for this stunt as Ginny explains:
…this doesn’t come from PETA, it comes from a group of doctors and dietitians. I think that was the thing that truly knocked the wind out of me when I saw it. Because in my 30 years as a dietitian, it would never have occurred to me—absolutely not ever—that it was okay to make someone feel ashamed of their body.
She even gave PCRM President, Neil Barnard a chance to defend his organization by adding his reply to the end of her post. A reply that was totally disappointing and failed to address her real concerns. He even tried to spin it by saying:
They depicted obesity exactly as it is and nothing more. However, some people called them “disgusting,” “ugly,” or even “pornographic,” reading all manner of values into these everyday images.
How disingenuous can you get? You fucking #fail Barnard, suckah. PCRM has severely damaged their reputation as a credible supposed science-based institution. I’m so glad Ginny left their advisory board because I was never particularly impressed by the company she kept there. Too bad for them, they lost a valuable resource and a boost to their reputation that having her on board supplied.
If veganism is a movement based upon ethics, for which I’ve already conceded it is not… but if it is, shouldn’t it be a particular high priority to maintain a level of ethical behavior? Read: police your own shit vegans, especially when it falls within your jurisdiction.
For somebody who does science-based nutrition, especially within the realm of veganism, this must have been a very hard choice for Ginny which could affect the very (vegan) food on her table. It was a matter of losing integrity or selling out and she made the honorable and ethical choice. Please be sure to go on over and add your support to the growing list of comments for her decision. This type of behavior needs to be recognized and encouraged in a movement that’s lost its way.
Vegans have been jumping on the bandwagon against the recent exposé of the so-called “pink slime”. It makes sense too because anything to disparage the evil industrial animal agriculture powers that be, the better for the animals, right? This is basically the bovine version of pink chicken goop for which I wrote about way back in 2010. The splash (or rather plop) this one made, for whatever reason, has been freaking out mainstream consumers.
Purveyors of ground beef are scrambling to respond to newly informed consumers’ disgust of this product and removing this pink slime filler. Ultimately this means more cows need to be killed (1.5 million estimated) to make up for the gap. Or consumers may turn to meat from smaller animals now that “pink goop” has been forgotten, which means even more lives sacrificed. But this is apparently still a “crucial win” for vegans. Will people turn away from meat altogether? I think it’s more likely that as the industry responds it will mean more animal deaths in the short term and then the long term as they win back consumers’ confidence. Something, something, new welfarist something, something (inside vegan joke).
But wait, wait! You know, that’s not really what I wanted to talk about since it’s being said much better and more often elsewhere*. What this issue now bears out is something that should really concern vegans. The same informed-consumer approach now sheds light upon a similar nefarious product making its way through vegan’s very own food supply! Some people taunted BigMeat publicly bragging how there is no vegan pink slime but being informed doesn’t always align with one’s own cherished bias. They may be right that there is no vegan pink slime but I was alerted to something not even as cute as pink. It is BROWN SLIME and yes, it is vegan!
One of the biggest manufacturers of vegan foods is Turtle Island and they were the subject of a Wired investigation. I’m not sure if this was a whistleblower or undercover sting operation but the process by which they frankenfacture their popular Tofurkey roasts has been documented and exposed step by step. Let’s take an informed look and break it down, shall we?
As you can see in the first picture, you would WISH to have vegan pink slime but this brown muck isn’t something even disgusting meat eaters would wolf down. They’re not sure the stuff is even natural so they have to run a “lateral-flow immunoassay” test on it. When was the last time you had to do that in your vegan kitchen?! Who knows what that even means too? Sounds and looks like something you would only concoct in an evil mad scientist’s laboratory, amirite?!
But wait a minute, it even gets worse. This is the part where they start adding the chemicals. Processed curds from coagulated glycine max liquid is re-liquified in an industrial sized blender and to bulk that up with texture they add vital wheat gluten. Yes, you read that right, the same stuff that can cause a laundry list of health problems including cancer! They call this concoction a slurry. Yum, doncha just want a big bowl of that? I’m in no hurry to eat no slurry, how ’bout you?!
Then comes the secret “natural flavors”. The one hint of what that might contain is the use yeasts which are eukaryotic micro-organisms and not even classified as a plant (NOT VEGAN)! They’re even used to make ethanol which acts as a solvent like paint thinner which is deadly if ingested!
To top it off, a corrosive acid is infused to denature any proteins that somehow yet have survived this brutal chemical processing bath so far.
Finally it’s extruded out all tawny, slimy and gooey grody, crammed into plastic tubes ready to be steamed and butchered. Then it’s off to the markets where Turtle Island cashes in, reaping profits picked from the pockets of unsuspecting naive vegans.
Hopefully, now in light of this, vegans can make informed decisions about whether they will be brown slime eating suckers or brown slime avoiding champions. You know what you must do, spread the news about #brownSlime and empower your fellow vegans! Don’t let BigVegan get away with their brown slime campaign!
“Early on the morning of Saturday, 28 June 1969, vegetarians and vegans rioted following a police raid on the StoneSoup Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. The StoneSoup Inn was a vegan restaurant which catered to an assortment of patrons, but which was popular with most people in the veggie community. The StoneSoup Inn riots are generally considered to be the beginning of the modern veggie movement, as it was the first time in modern history that a significant body of veggie people resisted arrest.”
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