Veganacious

Posts Tagged ‘Veganism’

We share an estimated 98.7% of the DNA with our brethren, the chimps and bonobos.  These highly intelligent, sensitive social animals are our closest cousins in the tree of life.  But what a difference that 1.3% makes in respect and viability.  So many chimps end up as inappropriate pets, in the entertainment industry, or in the medical labs. If they are lucky, they might have a few years in a sanctuary, but that is still a confined life and not the one they were designed to live.  Even those who live in the wild have dismal odds of surviving for long without capture or murder. They face diminishing habitat, callous disrespect, and an uncertain future. Because of our choices as humans, so do we.

The Animals Are More Like Us Than We Knew

Declining numbers and habitat are both taking their toll. What is it about that 1.3% of DNA that allows humans the hubris of thinking we are so divine? It is certainly not our capacity for compassion or sensitivity – no sensitive, compassionate creature could wreak the havoc we wreak on one another and on the animals each and every day. Unable to appreciate diversity, we begin to challenge and destroy everything that doesn’t look like us, act like us, or respond like us. In the end, there is nothing left because of our short-sightedness and fear of The Other. Genocide, war, deforestation, animal agriculture, racism, sexism, are all part of this legacy of uniformity. It is deadly.

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My four year old grandson told me, “I am a vegan boy.” He understands a little bit about veganism; I bought him Ruby Roth’s book, That’s Why We Don’t Eat Animals, and I read it to him when asks me to read it.  He told me yesterday that, “my parents eat animal projects.”  I knew he meant products; his mum told him that “the animals feed us.”  (Not willingly, though.) He is trying to make sense of the difference in how I eat and how the rest of his family eats.  Sometimes, he is peeved with me, for not buying him the cheese he wants.  Other times, he is peeved with his parents, because he senses their choices are harming animals. He happily eats vegan food and loves the animals he has come to know, but he eats what is put before him at preschool and at home. I do not proselytize, but I do answer his questions as honestly and briefly as I am able.  I think most children would be appalled at what is done to animals if they knew. He only knows a little but it does have him thinking. It has me thinking, too.

Trying to be an ethical vegan grandmother is not an easy task.  He calls me Bubba, and recently decided that only Bubbas are vegan.  That seemed to settle it, for a while at least. I have told him that when he is older, he can decide how to eat for himself, but for now, he needs to eat what his parents provide for him.  Luckily his father requested a vegan cookbook for Christmas and he is on soymilk, not cow’s milk. His father tries some of my vegan recipes; he is one of my tasters and is eating more vegan meals than omnivore meals.  His father has been an animal lover most of his life and used to volunteer at the animal shelter. Like many Americans, he is unable to connect his consumer choices with his view of caring for animals. My grandson, though, is already questioning some of the hypocrisy in the adults around him, including me.  Young children often see so clearly what the rest of us just accept.

His older brother is nine and does not spend as much time with me. His culinary tastes are distinctly more limited, and he balks at vegan fare, except banana bread, strawberry ice cream, and a few other acceptable items like spaghetti and noodles. He is unwilling to try new foods, something his parents are working on at the moment to increase his culinary parameters. His little brother recently said to him, “You are not a vegan boy,” to which the elder said, “Neither are you.”  I can only hope that being an out and proud vegan will continue when he can make those choices for himself.  And I hope that the vegan world is there for him to appreciate, too.

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While listening to one of my favorite podcasts, NZ Vegan Podcast, I was amazed at the solid, logical sound of a very young man, 13 years old at the time, who was on fire for animal rights and veganism.  Not only was he intelligent and well-spoken, he was doing something about the injustice he was witnessing.  Sam Tucker is that young man, now 14, and he is already an enterpreneur (having owned a tee-shirt business), a radio host (Food for Thought), a public speaker (at Animal Rights assemblies and on podcasts), and a successful animal rights advocate.  He is also a snowboarder and a musician.  Sam, as you can tell, does not let any moss grow under his feet.  He is part of a growing number of young people who are making enormous contributions to changing the way people think about animals, about food, and about the earth.  Below is a recent interview done with Sam:

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I describe myself as an imperfect vegan because I have not yet reached the level of theoretical knowledge where I feel assured  my every move is the right one. I support the abolitionist movement and believe that animals deserve personhood, that a major paradigm shift needs to happen to move people away from the exploitation of animals and earth towards justice, and because non-violence is an important component of doing so. I hope to see a day where humans can respect the natural world and see themselves as part of it, not in charge of it.

As a therapist, there was a tale about a man who was walking on the beach that was told to us as interns.  The man found millions of starfish, dying, having washed up on shore. A man stood there, throwing one after another in the water.  Another man walked up and told him, “What are you doing? You cannot save them all!”  to which our man replied, “No, but I can save this one,” as he saved another life. The story was to help us avoid being overwhelmed by the need and suffering we were soon to encounter. It was also to remind us that, although we could not “save” every single client, each one was worth the effort. We would do the best we could.

I make mistakes and hopefully learn from them. I do not invest time in urging for larger cages for chickens but rather to free chickens from being commodified. I support vegan education. I also support some groups that are also imperfect but are working tirelessly to save animal habitat, increase education about the lives of animals, improve respect for animals, and educate people about veganism; some would disagree with that. No two advocates offer the same combination of perspective, energy, experience or education; that is what makes us a community. We need all of us to pull together to get this done.

Here are some of the ideas I have been learning about activism as well as the activists that keep me sane.

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Podcasts are a unique medium that can be tremendously beneficial, are available at no cost, and cover a wide array of topics.  After moving to Texas and working from home, the isolation and intellectual void became mind-numbing. Podcasts helped me to go vegan (Colleen Patrick-Goudreaux, Vegan Radio, Vegan Freaks), to learn about what was going on with animals (Animal Voices, Elizabeth Collins, Jordan Wyatt), learn about abolitionism (Gary Francione, Roger Yates, Vincent Guihan).  Bloggers are also a saving grace; I am a fan of too many to mention here, but Animal Emancipation and the We Other Animals podcasts are high on my list of must-read, must-hear.  Vincent is so multi-faceted, it is hard to get it all in a brief article.  He is a published poet, a pirate, a playwright and a podcaster.  He is an academic, an abolitionist, and animal activist.  He creates beautiful AR posters. He kayaks. He works on his dissertation. He has eight cats all with unique histories, all of whom he treats with great respect. He cooks, and is a cookbook author, with his New American Vegan book recently published by Tofu Hound Press. He is innovative and is not content to veganize traditional fare, but to explore an entire new vista of tastes, textures, and something called “flavor theory.”

Here is the interview with Vincent in its entirety:

You have been a vegan for ten years.  How did that happen?

Like a lot of people, I wasn’t entirely sure why I went vegan.  I knew that my lifestyle was harming nonhuman animals. I didn’t have all of the details worked out.  But I wanted to stop harming nonhuman animals and I knew that veganism was the simplest, most meaningful way for me to do that.  It wasn’t until a bit later that I learned about abolition, understood that provided a simple and effective way for me to think about my moral intuitions and organize my work.

About the pirate and poet? (on your blog)

The piracy is just an internet meme joke.  But I’m also a published poet.  Mostly small stuff.  One of my one act plays was also performed when I was in college as an undergraduate many, many years ago now.  Some pirates also represent some of the earlier forms of democratically organized labor.  That and I enjoy the sea (and water in general) and saying ARRR!

How did you get into blogging and podcasting? You mentioned starting with food blogging; is there another blog out there?

I started with my first blog a handful of years ago now, VeganImprov.  The blog is mostly about improvisational vegan cooking (cooking without a strict recipe) – mostly about getting in the kitchen and trying out complementary flavors, colors and textures and seeing what happens.  When I read Francione’s books, particularly Rain Without Thunder, they made a huge impression on me.  And one of the perceived impediments to adopting veganism is knowing what to cook and how to cook it.  So, I thought, this is a small contribution I could make.  Why shouldn’t I? If it helps just one person make the transition to abolitionist veganism, then it’s worth it.

I started my second blog, We Other Animals, in part to blog my dissertation, but I decided that wasn’t necessarily all that useful.  So, I turned it into a general commentary blog.  Mostly, I blog about what interests me: nonhuman animals and their ethology, the political economy of animal slavery, the rights of animals not to be used as property and our responsibility to go vegan in light of those rights, and so on.  The podcast stems largely from the blog, trying to make the message of the blog even more accessible, but also to expand on some topics for which a blog article is just too long.

But again, I thought, well, I have a $15 headset with a mic, and a little netbook with a mic-in port, why not give it a try? It will probably be an ungodly distaster, but why not?

Loved your open letter to Gary Francione; background?

Gary and I haven’t seen eye to eye on everything always. We’re both passionate and committed advocates who take animals very seriously.  It’s only normal in a movement like abolition where there is no absolute party line, where advocates are encouraged to think critically, where there’s no propaganda machine, and so on, that disagreements occur.  All I can say is that I was wrong here and there (not always politely), but that he was always magnanimous about it.  I issued the letter because he’s often a target of harassment especially from the larger animal advocacy community, and I find that very disappointing.  I find it disappointing because it’s both wrong and intellectually problematic, and because it’s often very, very boring.  Most of the criticisms I’ve seen directed at Francione and his work have been little more than cut and paste, underinformed personal attacks, and it’s very unfortunate that this passes for ‘critical thinking’ among some animal advocates.

The doctoral is in what area? How is the dissertation coming along?

The area is called Cultural Mediations, but it’s largely a cultural studies degree.  My research focuses on the contemporary Canadian novel, its focus on representation of nonhuman animals and the politics that follow out of those representations.  So, for example, Timothy Findley has a whole novel, Not Wanted on the Voyage, about Noak’s Ark and one calico cat’s attempts to stay alive during the flood aboard the Ark.  Barbara Gowdy has a novel about talking nomadic elephants, the White Bone, who are looking for sanctuary in Africa.  Yann Martell has a novel, the Life of Pi, about an East Indian boy (Pi) who ends up on a lifeboat with a number of nonhuman animals from his family’s zoo, including a Bengal Tiger name Richard Parker.  The novel is all about Pi reexamining his relationship with Richard Parker.  All of these novels ask very serious questions about what we owe nonhuman animals and tend to pose nonhumans as agents of change to whom we owe moral duties.  It’s a curious post-WWII tendency and my work asks: “what exactly does this mean and how does it suggest the way we perceive the human/nonhuman animal relationship to be changing?”

I rarely talk about my academic work on my blog and podcast, but it still tends to make its way into my more practical work there.  My work with (mostly) sociorealist literature and moral realism go hand in hand. When advocates are faced with a complicated moral problem, for example, I think there’s often a tendency to do a bit of hand-waving and oversimplification and then to rationalize a decision based on their inclinations. My work with (mostly) sociorealist literature  and moral realism go hand in hand. The strong support for welfare reform in the animal advocacy community is a good example; it privileges what makes activists feel good, but it neglects to take into account all the realities of what nonhuman animals face in slavery today and how the property status of nonhuman animals and speciesism makes welfare reform morally problematic as well as strategically and tactically unhelpful to nonhuman animals.  In contrast, I prefer to look at the reality of a given moral situation in depth and suss out what it means in terms of its complexities. Abolition, in contrast to welfare reform, works from empirical data and soundly reason in that suggests that welfare reform has correlated with a rise in use historically. So, even if there were no moral problems to promoting reforms, I would never advocate welfare reforms because they don’t work in reality. Furthermore, abolition works from a soundly reasoned view that if we want people to stop using animals, we should tell them to stop using animals, go vegan and educate others about veganism and abolition. And although I am not a philosopher, that makes good sense to me!

What keeps you going when the work is so discouraging at times?

I’m never discouraged. There’s probably some sort of  personality disorder for that, but my sense of solidarity with the oppressed is enough to keep me going. I never have doubts about veganism or the rights of animals. I believe in the prospect of social transformation. Reform and violence are not shortcuts; they are steps backwards. In the meantime, every new abolitionist vegan who demands a different future is one brick removed from the foundation of slavery in the present. Every domesticated nonhuman animal who is adopted and whose personhood is restored by love and care is another. In some respects, I don’t feel like I have the option to be discouraged when I see change already happening all around me.  But even if that weren’t the case, there only has to be one abolitionist vegan in the world and the system of animal slavery will always have to answer to someone’s criticism, someone’s demand for change, someone’s insistence on an end to that slavery.  The system’s collapse is inevitable so long as we keep working and building a movement that turns our opponents into our colleagues, and that’s a powerful thing.

What do you do to keep in balance, for fun, to make sure you have time for your family?

I like to run, cycle, swim, kayak, camp, cook, listen to music, read, play Scrabble, bake, dance, chat, talk about ideas and other things. I also make AR posters and outreach/education materials with my partner and we run a discussion forum (animalemancipation.com), which is mostly fun. Pretty standard stuff.  My life is pretty quiet and average, but I find it enjoyable and that’s what really counts.

Background on the cats, how they found you, their personalities, etc.

This  would be a very long story, since I live with eight cats. They’re all very unique.  Azrael, Thor and Jasmine were all rescued by my partner when she lived in Montreal from a cat colony there.  Jasmine and Thor are brother and sister, both white long-hairs.  They both like to bite my toes, Jasmine especially when I’m recording a podcast. Azrael is a small, long haired Maine coon mix. Fred was adopted from a friend. He lost the tips of his ears when someone thought it was a good idea to let him out in a Montreal winter and he was lost.  Julius and Harriet were adopted from our local shelter.  Julius is a remarkably friendly, but also remarkably sneezy, blue cat.  Harriet is a very surly tortie who growls at everyone. Wade and Seymour were both adopted from a no-kill shelter not far from us.  The two were very close after a four year stint together in the shelter.  Wade only has one eye, and both of them were a little skittish, but now they’re both very well-adjusted and very happy.  I want to thank everyone who saves the lives of nonhuman animals daily with shelter and rescue work.  I know there’s not a lot of thanks and glory in it, but each life is precious.

Lots of info on the cookbook? Do you cook? Did you before becoming vegan?

I do! I was vegetarian for a decade before becoming vegan and I cooked almost that entire time as well. Of course, I’ve gotten a lot better with practice, and veganism is a great way to learn how to cook.  You really get to know the proper flavors of a very wide range of foods cooking plant-based meals.

The cookbook, New American Vegan, focuses primarily on common ingredients, techniques and recipes from the Americas, less on Asian or fusion styles of cuisine. It’s coming out this spring from Tofu Hound Press.  There will be 150 recipes, give or take, and they’ll range from very simple sauces (e.g., kiwi and jalapeno coulis) to much more complicated dishes (e.g., acorn squash stuffed with lentils, wild rice and greens with both a white and a red sauce).  The purpose of the book is to help vegan cooks get comfortable with flavor theory, understand common building blocks, and how to really understand what makes a plate flavorful, inviting to the eye and so on.

The cookbook, I find that many vegan cookbooks focus on imitating meat-based cuisine or on fusion.  I find the former fairly boring and although I like the latter, I think it’s been overdone. I like kitschy imitations sometimes myself, but serious innovation tends to interest me more.  I also think there is no strong sense yet of what vegan food should really taste like, how a primarily plant-based cuisine will express itself visually and in terms of its flavor or how the vegan palate should be properly cultivated.  My book is an attempt to advance that dialogue into a more public discussion.

Part of the world where you are?

I live in Ottawa, Canada’s capital city.

Hope for the future?

Yes, today, I hope everyone who reads this article and is not yet vegan will take the rights of animals not to be used as property seriously and go vegan, help to educate others and work to end the property status of nonhuman animals and cultural speciesism as quickly as possible. Tomorrow, I hope we can fix all of the other problems of the world.  Whether we will be successful, it’s the right thing to do, and we will certainly be unsuccessful if we give up before we start.

Here are links to some of Vincent’s work:

VeganImprov

We Other Animals

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What is it about missing the party that is so unpleasant? I was recently invited to my grandson’s birthday party, which would include a boat ride on the lake near my home; I was looking forward to seeing him enjoy being out on the lake. The day before the party, it was suggested that I come by afterwards to watch him open his gifts, because there would be fishing.  It is true, I am not someone you want on a fishing trip–I tend to plead for the fish; I do not think using animals for fun is a good way to spend the day.  But the boys don’t fish, nor does my son.  If there is only one holiday I could attend, my choice would have been the birthday of my grandson. But I realize it is only one small price to pay, compared to the suffering of all the fish and other earthlings, so I missed the party.

I later learned it was a conjoint birthday party, including the birthday of the fishing grandpa.  The boat ride lasted an exceptionally long time, and the returning mariners ended up needing to have dinner about 7 pm.  There was nothing for me, so it was suggested I come over when they were done, about 8:30 pm.  By then, having been up since about 4:30 am, and not feeling terribly welcome, I decided to wait until the next day to give my grandson his gifts. It had been a long day and I did not yet know that it was a conjoint gathering. Had I known, I would have come by to pay my respects to the adults who were celebrating, but I did not yet know. And fourth birthdays have special significance in our family, so at the time, it was a disappointment.

The next day the little one came over with his brother and his father and opened up his gifts.  I had a treasure map to find the pirate ship I purchased for him; he had to search through clues in a half dozen different places to find his gifts.  He and his older brother had a great time.  He said something to me about fishing; I didn’t realize his grandfather would be bringing a little fishing pole for him.  He mentioned that the fish had something red in his mouth.  I asked if it was blood; he said it was a tongue or something, he wasn’t sure, but he made a face.  He didn’t like fishing; he asked me if I liked fishies. I said yes, I like them alive and swimming around and being free. End of conversation and on to playing with his new gifts.

My grandson will have to decide for himself how he feels about bugs and fish and other creatures.  He shows great empathy around me but is adaptable to his circumstances.  I asked my son to please have a birthday for him that did not include harming any animals, but I did not sense much support; at times I think my beliefs about compassion offend the entire world.  I know that missing family gatherings because of vegan values is a common occurrence, but it is painful nonetheless. I think it is indicative of how frequently animals pay the price for human desires, because I know how frequently I am not included in things in life. I try to find ways to participate, to not leave my son in an awkward position because of my beliefs, without compromising my own values. I can only hope there will be more vegans by the time my little grandson grows up – he loves anything vegan, even me. I hope there will be a world left for him to grow into, a kinder world, where other people, other animals are respected and treated with kindness.  Meanwhile, I will miss the party if it includes harming other individuals, be they finned, feathered, or furred. It is a small price to pay to respect my fellow inhabitants.

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