vegansaurus!

It’s the first giveaway from Vegansaurus Giveaway Week! This one is just for women-type people who will be in the L.A. area this weekend. But we’ll have plenty more prizes this week for everybody!

Hey ladies! Remember when Chef Ayinde Howell’s vegan pop-up Wildflower was in S.F.? Now it’s coming to L.A.! This Saturday, Sept. 22, Chef Ayinde will be cooking a five-course meal, JUST for ladies. And Vegansaurus is giving away two free tickets! To enter to win, leave a comment on this post explaining why L.A. is a vegan food wonderland.

More details:

Wildflower, the one-of-a-kind crowd-funded vegan pop-up phenomenon that debuted last year to sold-out crowds of New York foodies, will be bringing its artisanal plant-based creations to Los Angeles on Saturday, Sept. 22. Chef Ayinde Howell will be curating the first of the brand’s “Good Living” sessions—a festive dinner party, with cocktails and a chef demo. This is a ladies-only event, and guests will receive special gift bags filled with goodies.

Why woman-only? Women are the last minority in America to rise, and their power years are just in their infancy. Managing stress, work, success, family and a healthy diet can be hard to balance. Chef Ayinde is here to show you how it can be done.

Wildfllower Good Living will be a night of good food, fun and education. Just like the short-lived beauty of blossoming annuals in the field, Wildflower is here today and gone tomorrow. But this experience is designed to keep on giving. Complementing the ever-growing trend of food trucks and pop-up restaurants, Wildflower is a culinary experience with a purpose. Tickets can be purchased here.

Menu:
Amuse: Scalloped Mushrooms with Sea-Sciutto
Mac & Yease
Cesar Howell Salad
Ayinde’s Jambalaya
Gran Marnier Bananas Foster

Who’s ready? Ladies, let me hear you say “yeah!” I’m SO jealous. I went to the pop-up in NYC and it was SO good. SO SO SO good. For all you L.A. people, now’s your chance! I will pick a winner on Thursday morning—leave your comment before then!

You can also skip the contest and buy tickets online. Up to you! Or buy tickets online and then win two more and then have a big party! It’s ladies’ night! The feeling’s right!

Here ye, here ye! Every day this week, we will host a different giveaway for an awesome prize! Rules are the same as usual, just leave a comment on the giveaway post answering whatever genius question we’ve presented.* We will read the comments, pick winners and then email them when the giveaway closes. You could be a winner! Well, you’re all winners to us. But now you could be a winner with some dope free shit!

Spoiler alert: prizes include yummy fake meats, lovely vegan skincare products, and we’ve lined up something extra special for the rescue pooch in your life! So make sure you come back and enter every day. I’ll be posting today’s giveaway shortly. I’m so excited! Happy Giveaway Week!

*Update: sorry if this is unclear, this post is not giving anything away, it’s announcing there will be giveaways all week! When a giveaway post goes up, it will detail how to enter. But they will all be the same as usual—leave a comment answering the question in that specific post.

It’s Animal News You Can Use from Paul Shapiro! Yay, Paul! Yay, Animals!

Huge news this week: Big agribusiness lost another round in its continued assault on Prop 2, the ballot measure we waged four years ago in California to ban various factory farming practices. A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in HSUS’s favor and threw out a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law.

Also big news is that meat consumption is in significant decline in the US. Here’s a new piece from me looking at the trend and the reasons behind it. And here’s a nice segment from the ABC San Francisco TV affiliate about HSUS helping a local school district implement Meatless Monday.

Speaking of big, my friend Big Bruce Friedrich has a good new essay about how the pork industry’s leadership is both anti-science and anti-animal.

P.S. Video of the week: Man apologizes to cat by building him an amazing gift.

We love the SF SPCA and we love adopted animals,* which makes this weekend’s Homecoming Adoptathon an ideal even for those of us—you, me, everyone else—without a companion animal to find one, already, and fill that hole our hearts we are currently stuffing artisan vegan cheese into with a furry creature who really will love us back. Fuck a human friend, what you want is an animal. Dogs don’t think you drink too much! Cats maybe are a little concerned with your “professional” wardrobe but they would never say so. And bunnies are never too tired to greet after another endless workday with a full minute of I-love-you hops.

The SF SPCA is ready to help you remedy that forever alone situation this weekend, with two days of adoptathon fun. On Friday, Sept. 14, get down with free booze and free adoptions, plus food from Voodoo Van, which appears to have one vegan option (though you’ll be in the Mission, legit snacks won’t be far off); adoptions are on from 1 to 8 p.m., reception from 5 to 9 p.m. Then on Saturday, Sept. 15, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., continue wooing the animal companion of your dreams with free adoptions, plus a foster care bake sale, and Q&A with a trainer. You know you have to train your dog if you adopt one, right? An untrained dog is an unhappy dog! Plus you can’t take it to the park to play with the other dogs if s/he never learned to socialize. The adoptathon continues on Sunday, Sept. 16, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with more free adoptions and more bake sale.

Are you ready for a furry best friend of your very own? Maybe a dog small enough to put in a large bag, who loves to catch (soft!) frisbees and curl up behind your knees for an afternoon nap? Or someone with big paws and jaws to wrestle with? Someone to call your “four-legged child” because you and your partner aren’t into human kids? The SF SPCA wants to make those dreams come true this weekend. So get over there and make yourself and a lonely animal happy.

For more information, visit the SF SPCA online.

*Yes, Vegansaurus is built on relentless, hyperbolic enthusiasm, but we really do love you.

Hello, Turn Down Chukka QT

The New York Times’ International Herald Tribune did a little feature on Unstitched Utilities, a vegan shoe company that uses Tyvek to make sustainable, theoretically recyclable shoes. And they are kinda hot, you guys.

The totally vegan Hang Up Slip On, in a sunshiny yellow

What I particularly love is that not only are Unstitched Utilities shoes totally vegan and eco-friendly, they are waterproof. This means you can pop out of the house in your cheery yellow slip-ons, get caught in a freak rainstorm, and still have happy, dry feet! Because as much as I love a rainboot, I don’t always want to commit to full-on wellingtons. These are casual and charming and just weird-looking enough. And the men’s shoes are absolutely great, vegan dudes.

Read more about Unstitched Utilities at their site. Wearing stylish, eco-friendly vegan shoes increases your sexual attractiveness by 20 percent, guaranteed.

East Bay Ethiopian 5EVER. Will this be on the menu? Buy a ticket to find out, we have no idea.

Dishcrawl, the eating event for people who mean Serious Business about their food intake, is doing an all-vegan event in Berkeley next week! They’re keeping the restaurants secret, but tickets are $39, there are eight left, and do you have a better way to spend a weeknight than with a bunch of hungry East Bay vegans? Don’t even act like you’re popular; what you want to do is attend this Dishcrawl and make some friends on your side of the bay!

This Berkeley vegan Dishcrawl starts at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 18. Contact the organizer, Sarah, with questions, and get ready to get down. Will it be all Ethiopian and Flacos and spicy legumes? Or maybe it’ll be a pizza-and-cinnamon-roll extravaganza! You know we love Berkeley and its many vegan options; the only question is how you will get home after devouring the neighborhood. Is there a special taxi for vegans too full of food to walk? Probably there should be.

[photo by selena hoy via Flickr]

Sumatran rhino, Sabah, Sarawak and Peninsular Malaysia, Kalimantan and Sumatra, Indonesia: 250 mature individuals left

The Guardian, a top newspaper for people with brains, has a gallery of the 100 most endangered species, as listed by the IUCN and Zoological Society of London. It’s depressing! Even more depressing, it’s part of a series called The Sixth Extinction: How humans are driving animals and plants to extinction, which includes articles on how endangered wildlife is being (illegally) traded on the internet, and on Ecuador’s Yasuni Park, “the most biodiverse region on Earth,” where people want to drill for oil because what else do you do with all that wildlife?

Spoon-billed sandpiper, Russia, Bangladesh and Myanmar: 100 breeding pairs left

I had this conversation the other day about how, as a disgruntled, in-it-for-the-ethics vegan, it’s hard not to wonder if the world would be better off if whatever apocalyptic event happens and wipes out humanity; you know, end humanity, end humanity’s nonstop abuse of animals (among a million other things). Counterpoint: Hoping for the apocalypse is just another way of expressing depression; it’s our responsibility to not be jerks—not contributing to the exploitation of people/animals/the environment, being kind to other people, living well and appreciating how good we have it, and trying to help everyone have it better. Read all the books about the post-societal gangs of rapist cannibal murderers, while striving for utopia.

Coral tree, Namatimbili-Ngarama Forest, Tanzania: 50 individuals left

These 100 species are considered the most endangered not only because there are so terribly few of them left, but because “they have no obvious benefits for humans.” So cool! What do we even do about this? What does it matter if we cause the death of the greater bamboo lemur, or the Amsterdam albatross? They’re not curing our cancer or assembling our shoes or inventing personal electronic devices; fuck ‘em. We won the evolutionary race, we get to decide who lives and dies from now on. Right?

[photos, from top: ZSL/IUCN; Baz Scampion/ZSL/IUCN; ZSL/IUCN all via the Guardian]

[link via The Editors’ Desk]

Look for this ad on your BART car!

Remember back in April when we asked you to vote for some worthy causes to win ad space on BART, via BART Blue Sky? Duh of course you do, you hang on our every word. Well, if you voted for our pals at the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition (formerly the Coalition to Fight Factory Farming), get ready to pat yourself on the back for a couple of clicks well-placed, because they won second place! And good old Earthjustice came in third! Hooray!

Our pal, FFAC President and founder Katie Cantrell, sent us previews of their onboard and station ads. They’re pretty friendly, right? Just, hey, it sucks to be an animal on a factory farm; ensure fewer of them suffer by observing Meatless Monday. Money quote from the FFAC press release:

We know BART riders are concerned about the environment, yet many people don’t realize that animal agribusiness is responsible for 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transportation sector. … If we really want to spare the air, we should all eat more plant-based meals. We can start by participating in Meatless Monday.

See this ad in BART stations! 

These ads will run throughout September, so maybe look up from reading that thoroughly engrossing novel/Dlisted on your phone (I SEE YOU) (me) and check out the ads you voted for! Your eyeballs deserve to look at something besides that dour girl in a severe haircut and native California plants.

You heard it! Blossom is coming out with a vegan cookbook. As she said last week on her blog:

My next book will be a plant-based (vegan!) family cookbook. Yay! It’s meant for vegan and non-vegan alike! I intend to include all of the Jewish recipes I’ve veganized as well as all of our family’s standard beloved recipes.

I’m into this! I like Jewish food and Blossom was my jam. Remember her boyfriend? What was his name, Vinny? He was the hotness. And Six was so great in those Lifetime movies later in her career. 

So, is there vegan matzo brei in my future?!

Here’s a sweet story. This couple, Melanie and Eddie, had their dream wedding all set to go when they found out their adopted pit bull Koda was sick. He had a liver shunt and needed expensive surgery to save his life. The couple, having been turned down by their pet insurance and with no other money draw from, spent their wedding fund to save Koda’s life. Here’s the best part:

Upon hearing what Melanie and Eddie did for Koda, the Halifax Humane Society felt they had to help. They approached local vendors and soon had a catering company provide food and a lovely receiption facility for the couple and their guests. Other vendors soon joined in to help, arranging for flowers, music and all of the other necessary arrangements to throw the couple their dream wedding on Saturday, September 8, 2012. 

OMG don’t cry! How great is that? There’s got to be a screenplay in here, right? Or at least a series finale. Also: hello, nurses! I wonder if this couple is into threesomes. And how adorable is Koda? Ridic.

Via Ecorazzi

I don’t know what really happened but the awesome animal sanctuary my lover Somerhalder is planning was in danger! Luckily for us, Ecorazzi has been following the story via Twitter. The land Somerhalder wanted for his sanctuary was possibly going to be “turned into a business park and transfer station.” Whatever the eff that means. But it looks like my super-hot future husband* was able to reach a deal and can now move forward with his super-awesome sanctuary. This is good news! Let’s save the animals and the kiddies!

*JK, marriage is for suckers! Born alone, die alone—that’s what I always say.

Hella Vegan pop-up dinner at Dear Mom on 16th and Harrison in San Francisco! Tonight from 4pm to question mark! Because, who can say!

It’s Animal News You Can Use from Paul Shapiro! Yay, Paul! Yay, Animals!

The Wall Street Journal had an important article about the progress we’re making against the inhumane practice of tail-docking in the dairy industry. And as far as progress is concerned, hot dog giant Wienerschnitzel and Jack in the Box are the latest major pork buyers to announce its plans to phase out gestation crates.

The Toledo Blade had a piece entitled “More black Americans are giving up meat and dairy,” and the San Jose Mercury News ran a good story about HSUS’s work with the Pleasanton school district to implement Meatless Mondays.

Finally, author James McWilliams has an interesting piece about HSUS today on Slate.

Have a great weekend! Hope to survive mine, as I’m part of the depraved Team HSUS crew taking on the Tough Mudder challenge in Maryland tomorrow…

Video of the week: Can’t decide if you like cats or dogs more? This video gives you both. (And bonus photo of the week!)

On Saturday (that’s tomorrow!), Nativas Naturals is launching the Back-to-Basics Smoothment—a smoothie movement! From what I gather on social media, a bunch of you hippies are into this kind of “healthy milkshake” thing. You’re in luck—Nativas has got your back. Just head on over to the website, and sign on up! It’s all free of charge, and you’ll gain access to instructional videos, receive free recipes and even get discounts on featured raw, organic products. Just the incentive you needed to plug in that blender, isn’t it?

When it comes to smoothies, I like to think of my friend Caroline as the professional between the two of us. I prefer my blended drinks at a tiki bar, but Caroline actually drinks smoothies for breakfast. I thought that’s what coffee was for? Silly me, I have so much to learn! For all of our sakes (mine especially), I recruited Caroline as Vegansaurus’ own Miss Smoothment! Armed with products and a blessing sent to us from Navitas, Caroline agreed to share a couple of her own recipes with us, to kick off the occasion. Take it away, girlfriend!

“Anyone who follows me on Instagram is well aware that I’ve been obsessed with smoothies lately (I mean, why eat your food, when you can drink it?), so I wasn’t totally surprised when Jenny asked me to help review some of the Navitas superfood products.

You may have seen the colorful Navitas packaging in your local health food stores—I’ve definitely used some of them before (namely the chia seeds and cacao powder—great for raw desserts). Needless to say, I was STOKED when I had a whole box of their goodies to play with.

I usually start my day with a protein smoothie of some sort (using a vegan protein mix and my kitchen staple, the immersion blender), so I did what any excessive American girl would do — I mixed all the powders together for the mother of all breakfast smoothies. I wanted to see how this stood up to my “rigorous” morning workout (hello, I’ve got to be at my best when working out beside the retirees in the San Francisco Presidio Y). I also wanted to see how it compared to the more “performance”-oriented mixtures that I’ve been using. The verdict? I felt totally energized (as much as I can at 8 a.m.), and wasn’t hungry afterward. Not to mention, it was super delicious! (Bonus that all their products are organic—I’m not a fan of drinking chemicals and pesticides in my smoothies—raw, and gluten-free.)

Here’s what my typical morning smoothie looks like:
Serves 1 (6-foot girl)
2 Tbsp raw Hemp Protein powder
1 Tbsp sprouted Flax Seed powder
1 Tbsp Freeze-Dried Acai powder
1 tsp raw Maca powder
1 Tbsp raw Cacao powder
12 oz almond milk (or a mixture of half-almond, half-rice)
1 banana
Handful of blueberries
Handful of ice

Lately I’ve been having a smoothie for lunch—again, why go through the hassle of chewing your food? Below is the recipe for one of my favorite combinations. I added a few of the Navitas superfoods to the mix, and felt extra pumped. (My boss has a Vitamix, which I try to put to use as much as possible.)

Lunchtime smoothie, serves 2:
3 Tbsp raw Hemp Protein Powder
2 tsp raw Maca Powder
12 oz almond milk
Handful of baby spinach (kale is good, too)
1/2 of an avocado
Handful of raspberries
Handful of strawberries
3 Tbsp organic peanut butter
Handful of ice

I shared this with a friend of my boss and she said it was the best thing she had ever tasted. Not bad for a testimonial, eh? I totally agree—why else would I drink this almost every day?

Since I’m already armed with so many of Nativas amazing products, I have no choice but to participate in their Smoothment. I also can’t stand not joining things (only child syndrome). Perhaps you’ll give it a whirl, too (Get it? Bad smoothie puns!).”

As usual, please share your personal recipes with us!  Don’t forget to follow my girl Caroline on Twitter and Instagram (@wakeupcaroline)—I can’t wait to see all the smoothie talk that will ensue, while wondering if rum is also a suitable ingredient in your icy beverages.

It’s always a big deal when someone famous comes out of the vegan closet. Us normal, everyday vegans celebrate it, and our omnivorous friends think, “Hey, maybe they aren’t so weird after all.” Maybe that last part isn’t always true but we all know we’re the LESS weird ones. And our count just went up by one, as Usher Raymond IV announced he is maintaining a vegan diet. My first thoughts? “Yeah!” [Ed. note: That’s the jam].

I have a sneaking suspicion that he and his 18-pack abs will still be gyrating under unzipped leather coats for the foreseeable future, but a small victory is a small victory. Usher saying he eats vegan has led to speculation that he’s getting his main man Justin Bieber to also gravitate to a plant-based diet, so he’ll have more energy fighting off 12-year-old girls in international airports. The Biebs going vegan will be huge for P.R. in the pro-vegan community, especially when accounting for the 8-to-14-year-old girl demographic. If I see a flock of Bielibers running toward a chrome Fisker in the parking lot of Native Foods Cafe, you bet your animal-loving ass I’m going to ask for a high five. I just better not have to wait any longer for my reuben.

There is more than handful of famous vegans. It’s tough to say who is in it for moral reasons and who just claims it as they get out of a Prius on the red carpet. Natalie Portman for example, isn’t all vegan all the time. But we beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. If veganism gets a little shine here and there from a celebrity trying to better their lives, who am I to complain? We got Billy Clinton to look as good as ever since his vegan transition. I was contemplating buying women’s underwear Wednesday night just so I could throw some at the TV. Lucky for the rest of us dudes, Usher can’t get any prettier. Right?

Let’s hope that Ursher’s selling skills are as good as his sit-up skills and we can mark down more artists in the famous-V column. He reportedly feels great and “loves” eating out at fancy New York city restaurants. Not the best-ringing endorsement to potential or on-the-fence vegans, since people of all diets can eat out in fancy New York restaurants. But we’ll take it! Hopefully Usher will make a Billboard chart-topping single where he serenades an unsuspecting woman on where he gets his protein. I’ll buy that record.

Andrew E. Irons is a blogger from Long Beach, Calif. He co-created and contributes to Rhode Island-based hip-hop website The Echo Chamber Blog under the pseudonym Verbal Spacey. You can track his daily diatribes by following him on Twitter.