Vegan Food:

• Chili and cornbread muffins
• Apple Pie Muffins
• Vegan vichyssoise
• Danish braid with German Chocolate Filling
• Jicama Con Limon Y Chile
• Cumin-Grilled Tofu with Papaya Salsa

Vegan News:

• “[C]ommercially raised meats and dairy products carry antibiotic-resistant bacteria” (more)
• “Cosmo’s [vegan shoppe] will pay half (!) of the shipping charges on any order with standard USPS Priority or UPS Ground shipping.” if you order before July 31st. (link)
• Gary Francione and friends made an animal rights pamphlet. I like the idea, but the end result is… a little… text-heavy. It’s a little more theory and a little less pamphlet, which can be good or bad depending on the audience.  Check it out yourself >>
• “ANIMAL-RIGHTS groups are angry the Queensland Government is spending up to $50,000 to promote an event they say is “blatantly cruel”.” (link)
• “Beltex Corporation, doing business as Frontier Meats, a Fort Worth, Texas, establishment, is recalling approximately 2,850 pounds of fresh cattle heads which may contain specified risk materials (SRMs), the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced today. SRMs are tissues that are known to contain the infective agent in cattle infected with BSE” For those of you who don’t know, BSE is Mad Cow Disease. (link)
• “Members of the Fashion District BID hope the episode will spotlight the rampant pet sales. The weekend of June 20, LAPD officers working with the BID’s Clean and Safe Team confiscated 37 turtles, eight birds, six rabbits and two reptiles. [...] L.A. is such a clearinghouse and hub for illegally imported and transported wildlife.” Sadly, these things only seem to get media attention when drama and violence is involved. In this case, there was violence. A group of women attacked some of the animal vendors in what police say is a “battery.” (link) I assume some legal action will be taken against the women, however, The Vegan Ideal makes a good point: “In a society built on white supremacy and capitalism, people of color, especially those who work on the street, make easy targets. Molyneux notes that if the [women] had harassed a rich white man, say one who owns a meat packing plant that exploits both workers and nonhuman animals, the [women] might end up in jail. However, by targeting people of color working on the street the same [women have] all the support of the institutional racism and classism, including the LAPD.” (via Vegans of Color). (I think there are even more interesting layers to this puzzle of oppression and violence given that the violence is coming from women, not rich, white, hetero men.)

Vegan Theory/ Pro-Veganism:

• From CounterPunch: “A pro-animal agenda will improve human health and safety, increase property values, and balance and protect an ecosystem that is meant to protect us from floods, hurricanes and other natural disasters. [...] We need a president who understands that when we invest in sustainable and compassionate animal policies we all live healthier and more secure lives. [...] let’s demonstrate that the United States really is the most compassionate nation on earth. [...] By treating vulnerable animals with reverence and mercy we will not only save their lives, but also many of our own.”
• Mary Martin writes, “When people use the I-wouldn’t-even-do-that-to-an-animal line, it scares me. It tells me that they draw some kind of line in the sand between torture that’s okay and torture that’s so terrible that even animals don’t deserve it. But what is it about sentient nonhumans that makes them somehow inherently deserving of at least some level of mistreatment? Nothing.”
• Gregory Dicum wrote:
  

  “After I became a vegan, a suite of changes came over me: I became lighter, finding a new stable weight, I felt better, my bodily systems worked more smoothly, and this: Simply because I had stopped being complicit in their slaughter, I came to see animals in a different way. I no longer had a need to rationalize at every meal, and I gradually came to see the essential truths of the ethical arguments for veganism: of course animals feel pain. How could they not? Of course they want to live, and to enjoy life. Anyone who’s lived with a pet knows as much. But there’s a difference between knowing and feeling, and no longer having to defend my psyche against my actions meant that I came to feel the reality of the animal experience.”

  I’ve noticed this transformation happen to other people as well. They go vegan for health reasons, environmental, or to lose weight, but once they’re vegan they develop animal rights sensibilities. They allow themselves to adopt the ethical perspective because they are no longer in denial. This is one reason why veganism ought to be “the moral baseline” or “the starting point” for true animals rights theory. Dicum’s article encourages veganism from various perspectives and concludes with:

  “choosing veg is wildly optimistic: it is making ourselves into who we want to be, and proclaiming that conscious change on a global scale is something we humans just might be able to pull off. And that would be nothing less than an act of intentional evolution.
  Think it can be done? It starts the next time you sit down at the dinner table.”

  Read his article here >>

Anti-Vegan & Anti-Animal Propaganda:

• A Big Food front group called Center for Consumer Freedom attacked PETA and the HSUS. Basically, they argue that animal advocacy isn’t worthwhile (particularly when it hits Big Food’s bottom line) and they think PETA and the HSUS should be rescuing more animals, but only pets, not farm animals. Big Food knows that attacks on PETA are generalized by the public and become attacks on the entire animal rights movement and all vegans. Here’s why Big Food is interested in making a public stink about PETA and the HSUS: humane farming laws. Big Food doesn’t want pro-animal groups to have the kind of cash Big Food has because then they’ll lobby for significant legal change on behalf of farm animals. I think of PETA and the HSUS sort of like my family. If anyone’s going to say nasty things about them, it’s going to be me. (link)

Sections: Vegan Food, Vegan News
Topics: Food, links, news, veg, Vegan