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!
The cover of our vegan baloney detection guide. -click to unfold.
The irony for which I currently find myself embroiled, is that as I sit here and crank on veganism week after week I also happen to organize a huge honking vegan support group. The two rarely make the connection and the friends in between don’t tend to make a deal of it so it somehow works…for now. Years ago, when I had my vegan falling out, I downgraded our group’s mission statement from one of advocacy to one of simple support. It was the only way I could resolve the cognitive dissonance I dug up, but that’s something I’ll save for a whole ‘nother post. In that spirit of support I wanted to empower our niched vegan membership the power of critical thinking. Smacking down woo is a game of whack-a-molé (please, don’t smack moles) no person can win. The best thing to do is inoculate the population and hope for the best. This also protects them from me as it’s more likely than not that I’m biased, wrong, and simply unqualified. I gotta assume I’m fulla baloney, if history is any judge.
In the book Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan outlines what he calls “the baloney detection kit”, which is basically a guide to critical thinking. That book changed my life and I had a yearning to share it with others. I felt a deep connection between critical thinking and my recognition of animal injustice. Sagan himself alluded to this and while vegans would love to have seen Sagan vegan (say that three times fast) I think his ideas regarding other animals were far more powerful than any lentil burger. I believe the eventual outcome of reason, especially with all science has discovered about evolution, is to afford other animals a bit more recognition even if that means elevating ourselves above our supposed natural disposition.
Of course, I could just be yet another crank who thinks he’s thinking critically but really conforming it around a cherished bias. But how can one go wrong with advocating critical thinking? This, I think, is my new platform. I feel compelled to leverage my years of vegan advocacy experience to adopt this cause in the same manner. It’s a cause that is so fundamental that every other justice issue could benefit. It’s not just a solution, it’s a toolkit to empower the thinker to discover and invent their own solutions. As far as I know there hasn’t been a leaflet made up and passed out on the matter. That is my challenge.
So when the annual local vegan fest sprung up for which we would usually table as our vegan group I decide to use that as an excuse to finally finish the critical thinking advocacy piece, for which I was working on for months on PlantBasedPeople.com. I took Sagan’s “baloney detection kit” and attempted to distill it down to something palatable for the vegan masses. I made a play on the word “baloney” with the title saying “Baloney isn’t vegan!” to try to appeal to their interests. I added a “red flags” section that both exemplified fallacies and were commonly seen with vegan issues.
Within the course of a few weeks I rushed a designer through whipping up a tent card for 200 prints with 100 ‘No Baloney’ buttons made up to stick on the back of half. I spent the night before the event scoring, folding and sticking buttons on the cards with the help of my assistant organizer and somehow we pulled it off. I expected to give away maybe 50 or so the next day but people were way more receptive than I thought. We gave away almost every single one!
Throughout the course of the day me and my assistant organizers honed our pitch trying to explain the value of thinking critically. For every pitch we watched each other and borrowed and improved the process, it was so fun! We got some confused looks and some high fives but for the most part people seemed to get it and took a baloney detection guide (especially if it had a free ‘no baloney’ button on the back). It went a little like this:
So baloney isn’t vegan, right? And when it comes to eating animals vegans are critical thinkers, right? Shouldn’t though, critical thinking be practiced with everything? Just because something might claim to be vegan it might not be true, it might be baloney. This guide, [open and present] based upon the baloney detection kit from Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, [point at book on display] helps you detect what might be baloney and what might be true. Also, it comes with a free ‘no baloney’ button on the back! [flip around and show button] [hand over]
Since we were situated near the entrance we were often one of the first tables visited. Hopefully these guides came in handy when confronted by the anti-GMO, anti-vaccine, anti-gluten & chiropractor exhibitors tabling alongside us. Vegans are particularly preyed upon by those willing to exploit their distrust of mainstream culture. Baloney detection would go far to offset this vulnerability.
The guide isn’t perfect by any means and you could never fit a comprehensive guide on a leaflet. To make up for that we added a url to a page on our site <http://baloneydetection.veganchicago.com/> as a supplement and ongoing updates. There we will hone and shape our own take on making critical thinking palatable. As I get feedback I intend to update the content and smooth out the rough patches and print a version 2. I was quite happy with the result of version 1 though and the support of so many people really help pull this off. If you, dear reader, have a critique of this guide I invite you to do so in the comments here.
Critical thinking, science, skepticism and animal rights are all subject for which people often associate with unattainable ideas for the common person. This, I don’t believe is, true. It’s just a matter of putting it within reach. While ideally this stuff would be taught in schools we have to bridge that gap and advocate this cause on all fronts just like any cause. It’s a fixable problem with an iterative solution but we need activists to do so. The skeptics are starting to catch on from what I saw at TAM 9 and each of us has a niche to fill. Outreach is going to have to be a bigger part of our repertoire if we’re serious about making things better.
A long time ago a wise vegan activist, let’s call him Johnnycakes, once said in a meeting that veganism was not animal rights. At the time I balked zealously arguing that veganism was the embodiment of animal rights, they were one and the same. If there’s something I’m learning about the way my particular brain works is that it’s as slow on the uptake of new ideas as it is tenacious on the grip of old ones. I guess I get so happy to understand an idea that just I hang on to it for dear life. This poor stoopit, dense, abused brain of mine is barely hanging in there already as it is. Many ideas (like the one JohnnyCakes dropped on me) in the past have been coming home to roost recently. The death grip veganism had upon me is slowly loosening its grasp as its corpse cools and withers. Maybe, now after several years, I’m misinterpreting Mr. Johnnycakes words with a fair dose of confirmation bias but I think the salient nugget holds true.
While animal justice advocates often practice something akin to veganism it does not means that people who practice veganism are animal justice advocates. For many this is well understood but for me who was so bought into veganism, it was relatively recent that I was able to grok this. Veganism is not animal justice. In a movement, it’s important to understand who your allies are. If your interest is justice for animals, the quicker you realize that vegans are not your allies the less strife you will have. Let me illustrate:
Every year around the world, as some of you dear readers may know, people meet in cities on the Friday after Thanksgiving for a protest called Fur Free Friday. They march with placards along city streets stopping in front of local fur stores to chant and protest the despicable nature of fur. The way animals are oppressed and butchered for their skin is something even the few of the most ardent animals eaters can justify. I started my activist career as a participant at one of these events and I found it invigorating. It went beyond the passive nature of daily abstention of veganism and felt cathartically constructive.
And every year there is a Fur Free Friday protest, the vegan activists present public dissent over the discordant tactics of protest. They fear it is a waste of time to focus on the 1% of animals abused when 99% are involved in food. They fear that it turns the public off. They lament the effort of attendees at the protest who otherwise never commit to the vegan utilitarian brand of activism on the street day after day like they do. Valid concerns, no? Well let’s unpack a few things… (if this gets TL;DR for you, you have my permission to skip to the conclusion punchline)
On Vegans
And what population would better care about the issues a protest like Fur Free Friday drags out than vegans? For now, let’s just concentrate on ethical veganism. In this context, veganism has strong utilitarian underpinnings. Utilitarian-what? Sorry, I’ve spoken on it before but as a short cut lets say it’s a belief that hinges upon causing the least amount of suffering. As a philosophy, any action you take should conform to this general principle. People practice veganism to avoid contributing to the suffering of other animals so it’s a very utilitarian ideal. Sounds all good right? Right. The more people go vegan means the less suffering there is naturally. Within that utilitarian framework it behooves activists to hone their technique to go for quality not quantity. Dress nice, be non-threatening, read How to Win Friends and Influence People, “meet them where they’re at” by connecting to their own interests like health. Get people vegan – “Go vegan!”
On Animal Justice
Animals other than humans happen to inhabit this spec of dust we call Earth. We Earthlings have been constructing ideas of justice within our own particular tiny twig of a branch in the tree of life here. We’re noticing that it’s not fair to treat others of our species different for attributes that are a result of the genetic lottery. Slowly, as we discover more of our place here we become more apt to include others in our ideas of justice. How could we not?
On Activism
Doing something in support of a cause makes you an activist. Whether it’s camping out on the street or writing letters to representatives. It is something you do to affect a change. A movement is made up of activists who share similar goals. Sometimes these activists argue about tactics. After all, their time is precious and they want to be effective and efficient in spending resources. Done constructively this is a good thing. Ideas lead to acts. The acts that make up activism.
On Acts
Vegans judge by acts. It is their daily act that identifies them. Vegan activists who work to get other people vegan care less of ideas. Their utilitarian agenda makes acts the highest priority. Acts are good though. They are the tangible, real world, rubber-hitting-the-road difference in reality. As somebody who may be suffering in a cage somewhere, acts make all the difference. Get me the fuck outta this cage NOW!
On Ideas
Just because though somebody makes an act it doesn’t mean they have the idea that drives it. Ideas are important and they inspire acts. Sometimes people have done the thinking for you and decided what the proper act is for a particular idea but sometimes they could be wrong. It is one of human’s great strengths that we can take previous ideas and build upon and improve them. Also ideas are not sacred, they should be open to be challenged. To be open-minded one must ready and willing to accept a new idea if valid and discard one if not.
On Protest
When there is an issue people feel strongly about they tend to gather together and display their emotion through public protest. It’s a well-established and understood form of communication that shows that people are so passionate about something that they are willing to, in the very least, spend their time doing it. When bystanders are confronted by this they sometimes counter with derision or mockery but the reason for this is to resolve the strong emotional dissonance they are witnessing. This is not a bad response. Fancy monkeys don’t like the boat rocked. When that happens they take notice and sometimes they hoot ‘n holler and sometimes they come to aid. It’s the nature of fancy monkeys. Protest is an attempt to communicate an idea in the most primal and expedient way possible combining emotion and reason through act.
Boundaries
Vegan and animal justice advocates need to realize that they have different goals. In order to maintain friendly ally status it would do both parties well to recognize this distinction and respect the boundaries. Doing anything less will cause internal strife and stunted progress when each assumes something of the other. In the activist context, the arguments over tactics will never find harmony for the goals are deceptively different. Vegans have their goal of making more vegans. Animal justice advocates want justice. Veganism can be an expression of justice, but it is not the end-all-be-all. It is a tiny cul-de-sac in the animal justice movement township. Depending on the particular vegan abode it could reflect the greater ideology of said township or it can be a crazy cult holed up in the basement.
Conclusion
Protest is valid. Emotional reactions to injustice should not be shamed or denigrated as some utilitarian canon. It is ok for other people to be made uncomfortable, it is a goal of protest. Protest is also valuable for participants and can inspire future work. Whether or not they are vegan or come out the rest of the year should not be judged. Fur Free Friday is one of the few animal justice events that doesn’t shy away from the tenets of animal justice. Attempting to co-opt this protest with planning stage dissent or vegan literature supplementation is an act of co-option that threatens and waters down the important essence of the event. What does it say to bystanders who see a protest about fur and get inundated with literature on another issue like asking them to go vegan?
Ideas of animal justice stand on their own. They don’t rely on consumer habits. They don’t rely on a particular human’s propensity to love another animal. They don’t subtract justice from another or cause further injustice. Justice is not a zero-sum game. The effort to advocate on the behalf of a fraction of the total does not diminish the idea or limit its scope. Just as advocating on behalf of non-humans does not take away from doing so for other oppressed human classes. The same hold true for any animal oppressed whether it’s for fur or food.
PROTEST!
So if you had any concerns about going to a protest for fear that it will delegitimize or work against the cause I hope you might feel better about it. There’s no shame in this game, get out there and make noise! It is not an outreach event, it’s fine to show your emotional reaction and don the madface. Vegan, vegetarian, meat eater, who cares. Be unabashedly rowdy and angry! This is your time to speak up for the millions who have died, the millions who have suffered, and hopefully contribute to a movement that will work to save lives of the future. The life of a fox in a cage is not less worthy of one in a gestation crate or battery cage. If numbers mean anything it is the long-term effects short-term gains will deny the movement. Don’t let your vegan buddies derail your fight. Empower the people, advocate for justice, free other animals. I think FFF is missing one more “F”.
Fur Free Fucking Friday!
* Post title changed to “Vegan Interlopers” to add crankiness.
True story: A guy at work loves the McRib so much that every once in a while, when McRib isn’t on McDonald’s menu, he’ll hack together a pseudo McRib lunch and invite other coworkers. People invited are tasked to bring one ingredient each and meet for lunch to cobble together these sandwiches. I attended a few of these luncheons because here’s the kicker: they’ve found that MorningStar Farm’s® Hickory BBQ Riblets patties are the closest approximation to the actual McDonald’s McRib sandwich!
But recently McRib has been in the news because it’s back on the menu and McRib enthusiasts are shitting themselves again while the rest of us scratch our heads and shrug. We’ll maybe not all of us because when there’s love, there’s haters. When there are haters, there’s hate. Cuz internet rule #472 is: haters gonna hate. So it’s no surprise that haters gonna pick up on all this joy over a food item and target these daring food fanatics to bring them down a notch for a crumb of attention.
Some random internet writer was able to dig up, after much in-depth investigation (going to McDonald’s website), the secret (widely available) list of ingredients that they don’t want you to know (make public) that are in the McRib. The big news here is that there are over 70 ingredients in that sandwich. *GASP!* Not only that, but it is “jam-packed” fulla synthetic ingredients. The scariest one is also used in the manufacturing of foamed plastics!
When I initially saw that article I thought to myself “Yeah, I bet it’s a patty full of fakey fake fake filler and preservatives, who cares anyways?”. Well haters who gonna hate care and vegans are a special niche of that group. They got a whiff of that 300 word article and it was enough to flaunt it in the faces of those who eat said products. Erik Marcus, always on that forefront, declared this article akin to the epitaph on the tombstone of the doomed McRib sandwich:
Once upon a time, McDonald’s could get away with selling this dreck without being held accountable—but the internet has changed that forever.
If there are vegan haters out there then you might call this Pythagorean a vegan hater hater. Hey, it’s what I do. Now the discourse has been pushed into my territory and it made me curious enough to check the original claim. Turns out, the part of which vegans should take issue, the patty, has the least amount of ingredients (next to onions). Most of the ingredients reside in the bun, which for all intents and purposes, is itself vegan! In fact, the only part of the sandwich which DOES contain animal ingredients is the patty which consists mostly of pig.
The vegan version of this sandwich patty using Morningstar Farms Riblets would add 24 ingredients and because it comes with its own sauce and we do the math it comes out to be one ingredient less than the original in total. 69 Ingredients! Does one ingredient make the difference to garner so much ire? Or is it once again the quality of the ingredients. Let’s look at that.
The vegan riblet version contains some shocking ingredients:
methylcellulose: also used in construction materials and wallpaper pastes.
phosphate: also used in paints, aluminum polish, flame-retardants and cleaning solutions.
So there you go folks. If you want a more wholesome sandwich you might want to line up at McDonalds and load up on McRibs sandwiches. If you’re vegan then I guess you’re out of luck with yet another thing NOT VEGAN. If you would rather just avoid animal flesh though, then make vegans squirm and enjoy a Morningstar Farms Riblet sandwich!
Being a proper vegan means eschewing all forms of animal products. Those of us old-skool vegans remember studying our vegan bible and breaking out the magnifying glass on labels just to be lucky enough to scrounge up a few lentils to sustain us. Nowadays though, with the abundance of vegan products available it takes more of a commitment to locate a non-vegan item and raise the alarm. Not only must vegans worry about products containing animal ingredients but there are more obscure ways items could not be vegan. This opens up a frontier to whole new categories of non-vegan products for vegans looking to be a pioneer. Some may disparage these vegans as being the “vegan police” but those people only are trying to justify their own vegan failings. Pay no mind to them, true vegans like Gary Francione will say anything less is not very vegan.
Any vegan who finds a previously unknown vegan item where one was thought to be otherwise can announce proudly: “NOT VEGAN!”. Vegans will adulate you for devotion to the cause by adding to the list of NOT VEGAN ingredients that even the vegan bible may not contain. For the newly vegan or those looking to be vegan here are some areas which you might need to watch out for as exemplified by popular vegan blogs:
Animal ingredients in “vegan items”
Vegan blog QuarryGirl is the elite detective squad of the vegan police. VegNews magazine even went so far as to bestow QuarryGirl with the “Scandal Breakers of the Year” award for their Operation Pancake investigation. In that investigation they tested “vegan” menu items from local restaurants for animal ingredients and many came out positive. With that taste of success they have outedseveralother restaurants in rich delectable schadenfreudic detail. Score a major vegan victory against restaurants attempting to offer vegan options! Be sure to keep an eye on their NOT VEGAN tag blog updates lest you may find yourself at a NOT VEGAN vegan restaurant. Think you can relax in a vegan restaurant? Oh no! Be sure to analyze each ingredient in the dish even if they claim it’s vegan. Interrogate each server because they’ll each have a different answer. Try to find the inconsistencies in their stories. If you discover something NOT VEGAN, blog the hell out of it and break that scandal so that it becomes part of public record and forever discredits their reputation with little chance of redemption. It’s their fault for trying to pull a fast one on vegans and you will have done your righteous duty.
Animal testing
So most vegans know that items tested on animals like cosmetics are NOT VEGAN already but did you consider things that were tested but not anymore? Give thanks to Your Daily Vegan blog for their pioneering efforts to bring this often-overlooked category to light in their post: Warning: What You Don’t Know About Food Colors. Not only were artificial food colors once tested on animals but they are made up of chemicals! Fear not though because they offer natural alternatives to manufactured synthetic colorants. From art school I remember natural cadmium pigments made great colors. I’d think twice about ingesting those though. In any case, this exposed issue by Your Daily Vegan surrounding synthetic food colors have wiped hundreds of products off the map for vegans. Their animal testing past make them forever NOT VEGAN!
Let’s extend though the animal testing vegan alarm further by looking at how the money you buy from a vegan product goes into the pocket of somebody who then donates to a school who then tests on animals! Ok did you catch all that? Well The Informed Vegan did and exposed this maker of grain foodstuffs in their post: Bob’s Red Mill Funds Animal Testing. Nevermind that Bob’s Red Mill isn’t even a vegan company and that the company isn’t actually donating money(the ex-owners are), and that the donation isn’t even funding animal research. They dared to offer products that were accidentally vegan, getting them on the vegan radar. Once that happens, you’re guaranteed to be subject to their whims of boycott. By this logic we can extrapolate all sorts of ways pristine vegan dollars are eventually funding animal research. The government for example certainly is responsible for much of this so one would think a good vegan should also stop paying taxes. Taxes yup, you guessed it, NOT VEGAN.
Animal molecules rubbing up against vegan molecules
Even though no animal ingredient is actually in a product it could be deemed NOT VEGAN if molecules of it brushed up against another animal molecule. Every good vegan knows to avoid any product that has a warning on the labels that says it was made on the same machinery as animal products but do they know about the non-labeled stuff?
Some sugar companies use bone char to filter their product. Most food items that list “sugar” won’t even say whether it was filtered using animal ingredients! Anytime you buy a product that has “sugar” in it or eat a restaurant that uses sugar or an ingredient containing sugar, be sure to inquire from which sugar processing plant it came from. Some municipal water processing plants will use bone char to filter their water so watch out for tap water. When you travel, be sure to quiz the locals on how their water is processed before hitting the tap or taking a shower. Don’t even think about buying bottled water unless it has the vegan label on it! Oh, before I forget, water has been found to containcopepod crustaceans so just avoid that NOT VEGAN processed BigWater and stick to the natural pure vegan stuff.
Alcoholic beverages like beer and wine are often clarified using isinglass so put down that Guinness! Even though there isn’t any trace of the animal ingredient left behind, this molecule rubbing clause obviously applies. But how then is a vegan able to imbibe? Luckily the Barnivore website is on the case crowd-sourcing and cataloging information. There’s even apps for that so when you belly-up to a bar and the bartender asks your order, be sure to squint into your mobile device and check their selection one by one until you find a confirmed vegan drink. I had to learn this the hard way when my favorite brew at Chicago Diner was taken off the menu because of its NOT VEGAN status. Somebody from Barnivore must have cited them on it. The cage-free eggs they serve however, are somehow more vegan. Anyway, today’s vegans are lucky enough to have this terrific resource of Barnivore to scour any last remaining bit of NOT VEGAN fun from their already diminished vegan lifestyles.
Images of animal products
VegNews magazine was the center of a controversy when ironically, the same people they awarded “Scandal Breakers of the Year” set their sights on VegNews itself and discovered they were using stock imagery of actual animal products and airbrushing them to look vegan! QuarryGirl’s RANT: VegNews is putting the MEAT into vegan issues challenged their questionable practices making vegans drool over pictures of food they thought was vegan but actually wasn’t! That is definitely NOT VEGAN. Don’t you dare get caught with a copy of VegNews tucked under your arm you animal exploiter! Some day perhaps vegans will achieve Muslim-like devotion to the cause and make even drawing animal ingredients verboten. Stock photography is a good start. Just be sure it was created using a digital camera and not traditional NOT VEGAN gelatin film.
And beyond…
So I hope those examples have inspired you investigate other tiny nooks and crannies of the complicated world of voting with your dollar and discover more NOT VEGAN products. Other avenues I have yet to see people explore further are third party materials like the inks and dyes on food packages, or the glues that hold on labels or used in shipping boxes. Also, there’s third party services like the people that benefit from selling you vegan products. Are they vegan themselves or will the money they earn go to buy NOT VEGAN items? Are vehicles shipping vegan products made of or powered by non-vegan ingredients? That’s just to start you off, be creative! There’s plenty of NOT VEGAN items out there just waiting to be discovered! Be sure to especially concentrate on any so-called “vegan” products and/or services and needle the hell out of it until you uncover the slightest tenuous NOT VEGAN connection. Businesses might then think twice about extorting hard earned vegan dollars from the pockets of unsuspecting vegans again and you will have gained major vegan cred. That’ll show them. Your work is cut out for you. Now go forth and be the best vegan activist you can be!
PeTA has a history of objectifying women in their campaigns. It’s no big secret and it’s been the bane of most vegans. Reactions are not always dissenting though. Some shrug and say “Well they make big differences in other areas.” as though that somehow lets them off the hook. It’s how vegans deal with the cognitive dissonance of being connected to such unethical behavior displayed by the biggest organization supporting the vegan movement.
Their latest foray has them talking about launching a porn site with their newly registered domain name: peta.xxx. This leaves many, as always, scratching their heads on how exactly this furthers their goal. Before we start the typical water cooler jeers over PeTA once again let’s hold that thought and come back to that.
Everybody is wondering why PeTA does what it does, Skeptifem hit the nail on the head in the post: PETA launches a pornography site. This is the salient bit:
PETA is a utilitarian organization (meaning they believe that the positive outcome of activism is more important than being principled about the means of obtaining the positive outcome). They don’t care if you quit eating meat because of health or empathy or because you think aliens contaminate animal flesh with space bacteria. Any reason, so long as it is combined with action, is a win in their view.
A brilliant deduction but I’ll run with that ball. Utilitarianism is the mainstay of veganism. It is this that compels vegans to think that their tiniest daily actions compile somehow into animal liberation. It’s what drives them to stand on street corners handing out literature trying to make everybody else “go vegan”. The more vegan you are, the more moral you are. The more people you get vegan the more you have increased your veganositude. Erik Marcus even coined this effect as being an animal millionaire. It’s a tidy little equation that makes navigating the moral abyss less scary. All you need to do is weigh two options and decide where the most suffering lies, and avoid or fight against it. Life doesn’t always plays by those dichotomous rules though.
In this utilitarian context does it not make sense PeTA would see saving lives as less morally reprehensible as objectifying women? Can you exploit one animal to save another? Apparently the answer is yes because the suffering is much worse when animals are killed than when women are objectified. So when vegans gnash their teeth at PeTA’s sexist campaigns they can hardly blame them for the context they themselves help perpetuate.
People wonder: “How does this crazy stunt help PeTA’s cause?”. They then argue over it, make jokes with their friends, blog about it, the news reports on it…you see where I’m going here? The real goal here is not to launch a porn site to further the cause but to pull a ridiculous stunt to get people talking about it. If it wasn’t itself an ethical train wreck it might be a fine, clever tactic. But PeTA pulled the switch to derail that trolley so rubber-neckers would gawks slack-jawed just enough to hopefully jolt them up out of their daily routine and maybe recognize their cause. In the wake of this disaster, women are the victims. That’s ok though because the other train (ok, I’m beating this metaphor to freakin death!) had a bunch of farm animals’ lives on the line. Women have served their utility.
And this is what so many have missed about PeTA’s actions. It’s the utilitarian nature of the movement that drives them as Skeptifem continues:
This is very important when understanding how to get groups like PETA to stop exploiting the position of women in society to sell their message. They don’t care about the well thought-out arguments of feminists regarding how pornography harms women. If it gets people to stop eating meat, they will continue with their porn campaign.
PeTA claims their controversial campaigns are the bait that gets people in and that they wouldn’t do this if it was ineffective. Skeptifem says we should challenge them on this because “it doesn’t fucking work” anyways. But let’s, for the sake of argument say it actually does work. Is it still worth the ethical footprint they leave behind? The problem is much deeper than a simple PeTA tactic. To understand their strategy one must understand the utilitarian context for which they operate. It’s the same framework behind veganism. It’s how they justify the ethical pollution they pump out into the culture disregardful for the people they exploit. This is what vegan utilitarianism can get you. It turns vegans into tools and condones exchanging oppression of one for another. If vegans would like to maintain their foothold on ethical behavior they would do well to re-evaluate the culture they think they’re building.
Gosh, it was nearly a year ago now that I wrote a post on agriculture technology utilizing genetic modification referred to as “GMO”. The post You Say Tomahto, I Say Flavr Savr was written when I was just barely getting my feet wet in the matter. It’s about time for a quick update.
At the end of last year in December of 2010 I sponsored a Meetup featuring Dr. Kevin Folta, a molecular biologist from the University of Florida, to talk on the science of genetically modifying food. It was a talk entitled: Frankenfoods: Cornerstones of the Next Green Revolution. We partnered with the Chicago Skeptics and it turned out to be a great event. We even recorded it and posted it as a podcast which you can find on itunes under Vegan Chicago or here: Vegan Chicago Podcast. At over 2 hours long it’s a bit of a marathon and only a shadow of the experience (with no slideshow visuals) but if you’re unfamiliar it might be a good primer.
There were good message board discussions before and after with Dr. Folta chiming in to help quell the vegans having conniption fits. Some interesting vegan related issues came up during the discussions which sparked in me wonder, excitement and hope for the future. Where most see GMO as a dire doomsday scenario concocted by evil minions of multinational biotech corporations I see people meaning well, trying to do good. Yes, even the anti-GMO proponents I believe, have their heart in the right place. Dr. Folta cleverly co-opted the term “Frankenfoods” to try to connect the luddism-type sentiments with the fear of GM. While anti-GM proponents attempt to poke hole after hole in current use of GM or corporations who wield it they misplace concerns. None of that makes a case against the technology itself. As the saying goes: “it’s a bit more complicated than that”.
So around a month ago a blog of the vegan restaurant chain, Native Foods posted an article about Greenpeace activists destroying GM wheat (wearing scary looking hazmat suits, natch) and I had to respond. I made the vegan case for GMOs outlining some points why this could be a boon for vegans:
1) Animal testing – The more we insist on unfounded safety testing the more animals are harmed to do so.
2) Animal alternatives – GM technology can help create animal alternatives like it did with insulin which used to be obtained from animals. It could also be possible to do the same with animal foods like cheese which has been difficult to mock.
3) Nutrition – Developing this technology can benefit vegans by creating plants that can offer nutrients vegans lack like B12 and DHA. This would make it easier for people to go and stay vegan. Recently CSIRO scientists have been enabling canola plants to produce DHA. People who are vegan need DHA and it can help save the lives of fish who are often used as a source of omega-3 fatty acids. It could help fortified food for essential nutrients for starving populations or even as a vaccine delivery. People are animals too and there are many in dire need of help.
4) Environment – Creating plants that use less pesticides and fertilizers will help strive for sustainable agriculture that’s less detrimental for all life on this planet. Less insects are killed, less runoff that kills fish…you know the drill.
While most of that is currently so out of reach to be nearly science fiction it won’t help us get any closer to unnecessarily for no good reason to monger fear against GM. Apparently the author of the original post thought similarly enough to followup with a very amiable post entitled: Vegans Who Support GMO’s (Say What?). It felt good to finally get through to somebody at least enough where I didn’t get drenched in frothy spittle covered flaming.
Slowly I am finding allies like Skeptical Vegan who have an appreciation of science and rational thinking surrounding issues of veganism. His recent posts on GMO entitled: Frankenfood Fears and Bt Cotton, Farmer Suicides, and Fluffy Thinking do well to shed light on the matter. We intend to work more in concert focusing on this subject alone. I feel this might be a good strategy by which we can foster critical thinking in the minds of vegans.
Vegans live a lifestyle that attempts change though daily actions, here’s an opportunity to do the same. Every time they deride GMO they do the movement harm, and when others do it they should be challenged. It is in vegans’ best interest to embrace this technology and explore the benefits it can have on the future treatment of our animal cousins.
Zoiks Skoob! There’s a scary sounding ingredient lurking within our food! Double-check those Skooby Snacks because they may very well contain a protein called GLUTEN! WooOOOOoooOOo!
Running in fear from this ingredient people are seeking gluten-free diets. This is usually a dietary restriction reserved for people with celiac disease or wheat allergies but all-a-sudden people everywhere are going gluten-free, especially vegans. Gluten is a protein found in wheat and it’s harmless unless you have these specific medical conditions. For more info about this I’ll point to a post by Skeptoid: Gluten Free Diets and one by Skeptical Vegan: Gluten-free Faddists. So why are vegans in particular going gluten-free? I have a few hypotheses.
Alternative Medicine Quacks
Years ago I noticed a trend. Vegans were getting diagnosed by alt med quack practitioners (read: “nutritionists”) who were prescribing gluten-free diets as a panacea. Using allergies and supplements as a placebo are a great low-risk way of flying under the radar of medical responsibility. The That Mitchell and Webb Look show satirized this in their skit: Lifestyle Nutritionists
The beauty of using diet change as a diagnosis is that if the client feels different, then it usually feels better. If the client feels worse then it’s a detox reaction or they are doing it wrong. Either way, the chance of it going wrong is far less than it going great especially in the short term. On top of all that muscle testing has gotten popular as a form of testing for allergies which has no scientific validity.
Self-Diagnosing
Well if Dr. Joe Quack can get some sheepskin from an online diploma mill why not skip the middle-duck altogether and quack myself? Going through the newage rawfood wringer on the subjectiveness of diet I’ve fell for the confirmation bias long and hard enough to recognize it at a glance. The symptoms are vague enough that anybody can convince themselves they have them or just got rid of them. Getting diagnosed for real with you know, science, is an arduous and not-fun process. I don’t blame people for wanting to avoid it but I will blame them for jumping to the conclusion even if they are fooling themselves. As Richard Feyman said:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.
Cuz it’s Vegan Stoopit!
Another aspect of the gluten-free fad is that it’s often lumped in with other sensitivities like dairy thereby making it vegan. In the same way rawfood restaurants are “vegan” here also we have a conflation of interests. If you’re going to make a gluten-free restaurant why not try to maximize your market and include all types of allergies? Oh but it doesn’t just stop at allergies though. If it’s good for people with allergies then it must be good for all, no? The owner of a local gluten-free, dairy-free restaurant here took it to the (interest-conflicting) extreme and argued that actually everybody is allergic to gluten but most don’t recognize the symptoms. Yeah, wow.
Fancy Word Hurts Brainz
Gluten is also just a scary word, isn’t it? No wonder the word “seitan” was invented….although that one probably freaks out alotta religious folk. A local vegan restaurateur openly expressed that they would rather eat a turkey animal than that scary vital wheat g-g-g-gluten!
“11/26/2010 Tofurkey (tofu, vital wheat gluten and expeller pressed canola oil). No thank you. I’d rather eat a real turkey or human.”
They were so afraid of gluten that they would rather take an animal’s life. Before I ever made such a claim you can bet I would look a little further into the issue. Another example of how the lack of critical thinking can cause harm. This also reminds me of dihydrogen monoxide and how if you call something common like water by a science-y sounding name it becomes scary and bad.
Harder-core than Thou
‘Ya know, all those vegans who eat seitan are poseurs. Here they are trying to have their meat and eat it too by mocking up animal flesh but only hardcore vegans eschew any references to animal foods. Plus it’s just so processed, non-organic and GMO. I mean what kinda monster eats that sick shit?!‘
Isn’t that so ironic? All these vegan dishes that use gluten to substitute for animal flesh and even that isn’t vegan enough. Soon seitan won’t even be an option and vegans will have made it that much harder for others to go vegan. Isn’t that’s what it’s all about too? “Go vegan” indeed, how?
Disease Fetishcizing
Although, this should be a boon for the people who actually have a real sensitivity. All these products are being developed for them, isn’t that great? Well except for people who actually have celiac disease. Food is like their medicine and no, not in the goofy newage way vegans often espouse. For real here. Like they WILL INDEED get real non-subjective and negative life altering effects. When faddists come in and water down the standards it can put them in harms way. For example, reportedly a chef in New York admitted on his Facebook profile that he’s been secretly serving people requesting gluten-free pasta high-gluten pasta instead to no ill-effect.
“Gluten free is bullshit!! Flour and bread have been a staple of life for thousands, THOUSANDS of years. People who claim to be gluten intolerent [sic] dont [sic] realize that its [sic] all in there [sic] disturbed little heads. People ask me for gluten free pasta in my restaurant all the time, I tell em sure, Then I serve serve em our pasta, Which I make from scratch with high gluten flour. And you know what? nothing, NOTHING! ever happens! People leave talking about how good they feel gluten free and guess what, They just had a full dose! Idiots!”
That is an extreme example true, but it illustrates how co-opting this diet can create an environment where victims become more victimized. Celiac is a serious disease and one form won’t even allow for contact with skin. Contamination is always a danger and people must remain vigilant. Talk about label readers, these poor people must put vegans to shame. I really do sympathize with people why actually have this condition. My angst over this diet fad is in part in support and recognition of them. Fetishisizing this condition is insensitive, making light of their plight. Hypocritical behavior for a population that claims a compassionate and ethical lifestyle.
So, the irony in all of this is that the more vegans adopt gluten-free diets the more they:
Make vegan diets even harder by demonizing a great meat substitute as well as any food with gluten.
Take business away from companies who make these vegan substitutes and gluten-containing products.
Obfuscate issues of veganism by associating it with a disease.
If vegans really wanted to help animals and stay respectful of people with a serious medical condition I hope they think twice about jumping aboard the G-free bandwagon. Don’t be afraid of the gluten-ghost in wheat. Enjoy life a little and eat that seitan already, you can use the protein.
Ya know, vegans love to use arguments of animal adulation like “If you love animals the don’t eat them” or “Why love one but eat the other?”. They post images interpreted through anthropomorphic lenses as exemplified in my very first post on Pythagorean Crank: Ravenous Monkey Escapes Circus and Eats Puppy. Narrations accompanying such pictures often talk up the natural goodness of animals along with a dose of misanthropic lamentations. Even people who use and kill animals will fall into this trap exalting the value of animals while munching on a burger. Living with cognitive dissonance is a part of the human condition and we’re pretty good at it. The thing is though, this is a shitty argument either way you look at it.
I for one must come out of the closet and admit: I fucking hate animals.
Ok, maybe that was too harsh but if I hear one more vegan gushing about their “fur babies” or witness another human-pooch lick-a-tongue kiss I’m gonna puke my vegan lunch. C’mon though, animals don’t give a shit like The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger. They crap wherever they want and piss and puke and they don’t clean that up or pay any rent. Oh, and that’s just the domestic ones we live with! Ever try to get a kangaroo to flush the toilet? Fuhget about it!
When it comes to nonhumans, we don’t need to make loving them a qualification for their consideration. It doesn’t matter how valuable they are to humans. They don’t need our patronizing crumbs of compassion based upon a misinterpreted action, picture or physical cuteness. It’s enough that we all find ourselves stranded upon this watery rock in space and we should learn to just get along. Justice doesn’t require a special love for animals and when the animal love orgy starts, I always find myself particularly left out.
If we are to continue to look at internet videos and pictures as examples of animal greatness then we mustn’t ignore the less favorable ones. I’m not talking just about when you see a lion take down a gazelle or an orca chowin down a bowlful of penguins. I’m talking about those unusual examples like when we see a “monkey saving a puppy”. For instance (ALERT: shocking video ahead) :
Holy WTFF! Chimps are all bastards and we should lock em all up in testing facilities and pour bleach in their eyes. Goddamn!
Humans are so civilized and morally upstanding compared to these dispicable brutes.
Of course, that’s not true now though, right? Stereotyping works both ways and neither makes a good argument for or against a species as a whole.
Ok, so for real, I admit that I have had some meaningful relationships with nonhuman animals and loved them to bits. I do think every creature on this Earth is amazing and regardless of what they mean to me they should be recognized as having interests. Pandering to our own selfish preferences doesn’t seem very “animal loving” to me. If that’s your deal though, wouldn’t it better serve the animal’s interest by not making your preference an exclusionary requirement for fair treatment?
Perhaps somebody likes animals and perhaps they can’t stand them. In either case there is a good case for fairness. Shouldn’t that be the focus?
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:
Being a proper vegan means eschewing all forms of animal products. Those of us old-skool vegans remember studying our 
Gosh, it was nearly a year ago now that I wrote a post on agriculture technology utilizing genetic modification referred to as “GMO”. The post 
Recent Comments