We’ll have more on what a psycho Lierre Keith is soon but for now, here’s a bit of news from The Last Great Pool Party:
“Bound Together Books and PM Press continue to try to prop up and foist veg*n antagonist Lierre Keith onto the radical community in the Bay Area. Today, at the 15th Annual San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair, where she was scheduled to be a featured speaker, Keith was served her just desserts for her obnoxious attacks on veg*ns in The Vegetarian Myth. She was pied in the middle of her speech in the main auditorium at the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park.”
Assault is not the way to go, and yet I crack a tiny smile because in addition to being a veggie-hating loon, she’s also a trans-phobic loon affiliated with RadLesFes, which “is ‘unalterably opposed’ to 1) anyone, but specifically lesbians in the context of RadLesFes, who in the slightest endorse BDSM or pornography, and 2) trans people, specifically referring to all trans-related health interventions pejoratively as ‘mutilations’.”
Keith also claims to be an anarchist; when she was pied at the Anarchist Bookfair, though, she called the fucking cops.
Read the rest at IndyBay.
Note: veg*n is blogosphere shorthand for vegan/vegetarian.
What’s the best way to show fish have feelings? Dump them on national television! OR BETTER YET torture them!
Treehugger gives us a brief review of the new book, Do Fish Feel Pain? I didn’t read it because I’m busy watching CSI, but according to the site, author Victoria Braithwaite sets the record straight about fish and pain. As a fish-eater herself, she sees a double standard where birds and mammals are thought to be more sentient than our sea pals, but that’s not necessarily true. Sure, they aren’t super-cuddly like other animals but guess what, they don’t like being poisoned with bee venom—which she did.
They also discuss some tests being done to prove fish are smart and can learn. If you ever question that, simply head over to fish-school.com and watch fish PLAY SOCCER!
Treehugger ends on this note: “Sure, it may not come as too big of a surprise to learn that fish do have feelings after all, but now the evidence is definitive. So next time you’re out fishing, perhaps you should apologize before you let it go.”
For real! I feel like when you are young and first learn about fishing, it occurs to every single child that yeah, it MUST hurt when the hook goes into the fish’s lip! I just remember thinking about the fish they let go just have holes in their mouth and wondering if they heal or what. Every kid sees it because it just makes sense.
Even though I wish she didn’t eat fish, I’m kind of glad it’s a fish-eater exposing this truth. I’m so over meat-eaters lying to themselves to make them feel better about what they eat. Guess what, fish do feel pain and turkeys are smart. Deal with it.
I know new words are fun, but you can’t just go around inventing them willy-nilly! “Cybersex”: very important word development; “femivore”: SOME BULLSHIT.
The New York Times offers up this new concoction as a combination of locavorism and modern housewifery and/or feminism. The writer, Peggy Orenstein from our very own Berkeley, Calif., has a few friends who grow their own food and now are all buying chickens. Then BAM! Femivores! No, it’s actually not people who eat women. It’s women who are stay-at-home moms and make all their own stuff like clothes and now I guess eggs.
To be honest, I think I’m missing a few steps. You can read for yourself and see. Or maybe it’s just that the whole literary aesthetic is too distracting because it makes me want to vom. Who can say. Check it out:
“All of these gals—these chicks with chicks—are stay-at-home moms, highly educated women who left the work force to care for kith and kin. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: the omnivore’s dilemma has provided an unexpected out from the feminist predicament, a way for women to embrace homemaking without becoming Betty Draper. ‘Prior to this, I felt like my choices were either to break the glass ceiling or to accept the gilded cage,’ says Shannon Hayes, a grass-fed-livestock farmer in upstate New York.”
Glass ceiling or gilded cage? I know that’s a quote, but bleeeeeh! I need a shower! And what about men who grow their own food? Or women who grow their own food and have a job outside the home? Or what about words that already exist and aren’t ridiculous? I also doubt that this is anything new. Isn’t this just kind of a farmer? What makes them femivores? That they have chickens or that they are middle class?
Presenting another op-ed by one of our writers, Steve! His views do not necessarily represent those of Vegansaurus as a whole, but as one of our regular contributors, we’re happy to give him the space to express his opinions. If you would like to write an op-ed for Vegansaurus, please contact Laura.
Listen up, it’s time for some tough love. We need to face facts: the fur fight is over, and our side lost. At least for now. We were starting to worry after the furtastrophe at Fashion Week 2010, but for me, it didn’t really sink in until watching Blair swan around in that horrific hat on Gossip Girl last week. The fashion industry is going all-in on fur, and no one really seems to care. How did it get this way? The New York Times attempts to make sense of it all in a behind-the-scenes look at fur’s comeback.
Did the designers forget that wearing fur is fraught with controversy? Or did they simply stop caring? For the first time in more than two decades, more designers are using fur than not. Almost two thirds of those in New York are, based on a review of more than 130 collections that were shown on Style.com last month, which is a surprising development during a recession. And it didn’t just happen because of some idea that was floating around in the collective designer ether. Rather, fur became a trend because of a marketing campaign.
In other words, everything we know about the fashion industry is still true. Fashion isn’t democracy; fashion is fascism. It’s a top-down, command-and-control system driven by a handful of individuals and corporations who make it their business to dictate what the rest of us should desire. When something is “in fashion,” it’s not because everyone started wearing it spontaneously and captured the attention of fashion journalists; it’s because a decision was made in boardrooms to drive the entire public towards a particular look. This is unlike any other form of marketing, where companies respond to existing demand or compete for your attention. It is the pure manufacturing of consent.
While you were sleeping
The big furriers, like Saga Furs, have been on top of things for the last decade or so. Instead of trying to convince the public that fur isn’t cruel (thereby having the debate on our terms), they’ve been quietly working from the inside, pushing fur as just another material to love and admire for its own beauty. They get designers while they’re still in design school, they sponsor design contests, and they give free fur pelts to designers, both as students and at design houses, to use however they want. And with the fur fights of the ’80s and ’90s long faded from memory, fur has been stripped of its controversy among designers.
“We were seeing all of these new possibilities in which you can use fur in a very light way,” [designer Alexa] Adams said. “Fur gives a richness in texture. It’s like discovering something new that also has an interesting history.”
Several young designers echoed that sentiment, saying they were less interested in fur as a luxury statement or an act of defiance than as a novel design. [Designer Alexander] Wang said he had not intended to use fur in his collection but decided to after seeing so many plush fabrics that resembled fur. “The point was to create that rich, luscious feel while blending the lines between what was real and what was fake,” he said.
For designers, it’s no longer about the usefulness of fur, or about fur coats as a luxury statement, or even as a backlashy anti-statement. It’s about having one more texture on their palette to work with. Missoni’s fall 2010 collection shows this at its most gratuitous. What’s the fur doing in there?
It’s not keeping anyone warm; it’s just a design element like any other. The usual vegan response would be to point out how many great replacements there are. But unless a piece has been designed with faux fur in mind, like Karl Lagerfeld’s surprising fall 2010 collection for Chanel, designers will always want the widest possible range of materials available to them. And the more designers learn about how to work with fur, the more they like it. The furriers gambled on this theory, and it paid off.
Unfortunately, PETA’s anti-fur activism is part of the problem. Their campaigns and posturing come off as dated and tired, or irrelevant. “Watch out for PETA’s red paint, here’s what everyone is wearing this season” is a familiar lede among lazy journalists for a reason: there’s just nothing to fear out of PETA anymore. “I’d rather go naked” has gone from bold and shocking to yet another platform for self-promoting celebrities to self-promote, and in the process, turning fur into a proxy fight between celebrity fan bases.
“Fur is dead” is dead
Problem is, we’re having the argument on their terms. “Fur is dead,” “worst-dressed celebrities,” and boycott campaigns all have the same thing in common: they’re steeped in a free-market, fashion-centric mindset. What’s “in” right now will be “out” later, and what’s “out” right now will be rediscovered again. Today’s anti-fur activism has no hope but to live as a permanent cog in the fashion machine, with this season’s moral determination ready to be cycled out of style with a single “FUR IS BACK” headline. Would it surprise me to learn that Anna Wintour is loving all of this? It gives everyone in fashion an excuse to appear like they understand what people are thinking and feeling as they alternately take out and bring back fur.
The fashion industry is never going to care about animal rights in any lasting way. Hell, they barely care about human rights. Children and slaves work long hours at their factories in poor countries, while women and girls in rich countries starve themselves to look like walking clothes hangers.
So, fuck ‘em. Stop trying to convince fashion to care. They don’t care. Fur is a material to them, the masses will just keep buying what they’re told to buy, and we’ll never convince devoted fans that the stern moralizing of a red-paint-throwing activist is worth more than their imagined celebrity friendship.
As California goes, so goes the nation
Which is why we must outlaw fur, starting in California. Fashion is fascism, and the antidote to fascism is democracy. The solution is simple: use California’s ballot proposition system to outlaw the sale, production, and importation of fur. Exclude the fur in your closet and the fur in the secondhand store so no one will think jackbooted thugs are coming to raid your closet. Run ads on how kittens and puppies are grown for fur in China then falsely labeled, or make it about rich bankers in fur coats vs the middle class, or whatever. We have plenty of good arguments and snappy rhetoric. Pick the best and go with it.
If we win, fur will be off-limits to the biggest market in America. Designers will stop using it because it can’t sell, and in another 10 years, everyone will have forgotten fur exists as a material for fashion. Rich people will find refuge in places like Monte Carlo or Dubai to buy their illicit fur coats, but at least it will be gone from the department stores. And even if we lose, we still win. We’ll spend months putting forth the idea that animals aren’t ours to use for something entirely unnecessary, and at the end of those months, people will have to cast a vote and decide either way. Unlike a consumer decision like a boycott that can be put off indefinitely, people will have to search their souls and decide how they feel, on a deadline.
As gestation crate and battery cage bans were to animal welfare, fur is the perfect starter issue for animal rights. Fur is brutal and horrific, and the only arguments in favor of its use are aesthetic or symbolic. Medical research and even cosmetics testing can be justified in terms of human benefit, as specious as those justifications may be. Eating meat goes even deeper, evoking feelings of scarcity and survival. But fur? Who cares. Does anyone truly care about the creative latitude of fashion designers and fashion editors? Doubtful. So put it to a vote and find out.
Hey, let’s wish happy birthday to my parents’ dog, Oliver, who turns three big years old today! Oliver (at left, shown here with his older brother, Beauregard) works as a therapy dog, has a charmingly insouciant underbite, and wants to be your bestest friend. Happy birthday, little fellow!
Fun times vegan-style events!
The Out of Place art show at SPACE Gallery (1141 Polk St. at Hemlock Street) tonight, Friday Mar. 12, features your Vegansaur Jonas! It costs $3 and runs from 8 to midnight, and will be catered by Black Orchid Bakery. Is there enough culture in your life? Probably not, you philistine, so get over there and appreciate some damn art.
On Saturday, Mar. 13, you can attend “The Nutrition Prescription” lecture by Donald Forrester, M.D., presented by the San Francisco Vegetarian Society, at the Institute of Aging at 3600 Geary Blvd. (between Arguello Boulevard and Palm Avenue). The lecture begins at 8 p.m. and costs $10, or participate in the veg potluck at 6:30 p.m. and pay just $2. Contact the SFVS for further information.
Late update: The LGBT Army of Compassion will hold a demonstration against animal cruelty on Sunday, Mar. 14 from 8 to 9 a.m. in the northeast corner of the Heart of the City Farmers Market (UN Plaza) in San Francisco. Brochures (such as this pdf) and signs will be provided. For further information, contact the LGBT AC.
Washington, D.C., home of scrumptious vegan baked goods and now Hush Supperclub, a vegetarian Indian “underground restaurant” that sounds amazing.
Items of social and political import!
Phil Bronstein isn’t sure about the ethics of an animal abuse registry when animal abuse is condoned every day in our kitchens and laboratories.
The ethics of zoos come again under scrutiny as the three polar bears who live in San Francisco get older and become more difficult and expensive to “keep.”
Switzerland denies animals dedicated legal counsel. Apparently Swiss animal protection laws are ” among the strictest rules anywhere,” but proponents don’t think they’re enforced enough to matter. Keep trying, Switzerland.
Stop, video time! It’s JSF on Ellen’s Thursday, Mar. 11 show! [note: if you can’t see the video, please visit the link-o-rama at Vegansaurus.com!]
Oh, does someone think s/he invented the Elvis cupcake? Sorry, vegans have been doing it for four years, now.
OK Canada, for most of the items on this list of “10 foods of the future,” you’re cool again. Or at least acceptable (we don’t go in for that “non-traditional fish” or “new fabricated cuts of meat” nonsense).
Probably better that you eat Canadian meat, anyway (if you’re going to eat DEATH and all) as the U.S. is one of the top-five” least safe food producers in the world, along with China, Turkey, Iran, and Spain. I am SO PROUD.
Seriously, Walnuts? “Vote McCain, because BACON!” You nasty.
OK, Bob Barker has always been a total sleazy lecher, but his love for animals is pure and true: he just gave $2.5 million to renovate a building on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. for PETA—it’ll be called the Bob Barker Building, natch.
Beloved blog Sociological Images present maps that illustrate where animals for food and crops for food are grown in the U.S. Fruits, nuts and vegetables and chickens come from California!
That milk that makes you roll your eyes every time you open the fridge because ew is from California, too, right? Maybe not! Make your friends and relations find out where their dairy products originate at where is my milk from (also useful for soy milks).
Read the first article from The Awl’s vegetarian columnist, Jaime Green! It’s about visiting a Manhattan farmers market in the winter.
If little Oliver weren’t too stubborn/dumb(?) to play any version of “fetch” (because “fetch” does NOT mean “I throw the ball and you chase after it and hide it”), I would have definitely gotten him this for his birthday. [link and photo from Pawesome!]
Food & Wine magazine is shocked to find Berliners eating vegetarian food, as opposed to “Wiener Schnitzel and Currywurst.” Being very well traveled vegans, we are not.
Did you know that East Asian people eat CATS and DOGS? How SAVAGE!! The Chinese government is at present “considering legislation” to ban eating these particular animals, which is probably good considering how awful their living conditions are prior to slaughter. It of course does NOTHING for the rest of the animals raised for consumption in China, but as long as our precious puppies and kitties are protected, we can all sleep at night, right?
Holy Mary in a handbag, have you read this insanator email from an anti-The Cove wacko to Rich FourFour? It is the craziest best: “The humans being protecting wolfs(the whales / dolphins)is the devil! Devil! Devil! Devil! Destroy the devil for protect the human fish! The shark is a friend of the fish. The shark eats only the fish that dead / was damaged.”
Despite the horrors of whaling, Slate, however, wants you to know just what dead whale meat tastes like—and did you know that “many schools of Buddhism favor eating whales”? SEE, IT’S OK BECAUSE THOSE HIPPIE WEIRDOS SAY SO.
How about another photo? Party penguin has stripped off his dress whites and is ready to get down! [Photo via Andrew Evans of National Geographic]
Delightful Ruben Studdard went vegetarian 18 months ago, switched to a vegan diet six months ago, and lost 100 pounds! Man, when I went vegan for keeps I lost like zero pounds, WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME, AMERICA, WHY DO I STILL HAVE FLESH ON MY VEGAN BONES?? Seriously, we’re super-happy for you, Ruben, keep living your wonderful, cruelty-free life.
DYING OF AWESOME: this amazing retort to Abby’s “Vegan Boys Are the Worst” called “Vegan Boys Are the Best,” complete with KAZOO SOLO, by Brownbird Rudy Relic of SuperVegan!
There is still time for you to fit this into your social schedule: there is going to be a pretty awesome art show at SPACE gallery (that’s right next to the Hemlock, on Polk St.) tonight from 8 p.m. to midnight. Nine decently awesome artists are showing work—including me (but I’m indecently awesome)!
The door fee is a paltry $3, which for the first 25 people gets them a bag of goodies. There will also be vegan pastries from Black Orchid Bakery (which we’ve been dying to try for a while now!), some DJ, and a live art battle (not entirely sure how that’s going to go down, but I think it’ll be cool)!
Complete info at Paper Hat Productions and the Facebook event page.
Alternative Outfitters just got a bunch of new Shiraleah bags and I totally suggest checking them out!
Three percent of their profits from the handbags go toward helping disabled children in Hanoi, Vietnam: “Our goal is to purchase needed rehabilitation equipment and double each child’s daily food budget to provide a balanced, nutritious diet.” Shweet! They’re also environmentally friendly and all that good crap. I recently got this wallet from them and it’s super-dope. Well made and I’ve stopped losing my credit cards.
“Discover the glorious variety of life on earth and the spectacular and extraordinary tactics animals and plants have developed to stay alive.”
Yowza! Take it easy with the adjectives! But this does seem pretty exciting. The Discovery Channel has put together a cool-looking series called Life. It’s the second chapter of their popular series Planet Earth and focuses on all the amazing animals we got here on Earth. There’s 10 episodes, including Birds, Insects, and Creatures of the Deep. Yeah that’s cool but guess what number 10 is!: Primates
OMG I love me some primates! Especially the apes!* They’re all cool with their “I eerily resemble a human but not quite” shtick. Robots are like that too except apes are way cuter. Except for maybe Number 5.
The series airs Mar. 21 through April 18th.
*I know, I know, we’re technically apes too, but you know what I mean.
Unless you’ve been living in a fantasyland that involves subsisting on only defrosted leftovers from SF Vegan Bakesales (hey, I don’t judge!), you probably know we vegans can benefit greatly from supplementing our deep-fried vegan Twinkie intake with some raw greens now and then.
Whether or not you fall into the camp that refrains from cooking their food, if you enjoy yummies that taste amazing and are still healthful for you, I highly recommend checking out the excitingly awesome products from the brand-new raw vegan superfoods company Vivapura, located super-close to the Tree of Life raw vegan retreat center in Patagonia, Ariz., which is a tiny town (pop. 1,000) 20 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border where approximately one in 10 residents is a raw food vegan.
Since I live just up the road from Vivapura (I’m currently living and working at working at the Tree of Life), I recently had a chance to drop by the Vivapura warehouse factory and sample a bunch of their stuff. According to Vivapura’s website, superfoods are “plant-based foods that boast extraordinary energizing and healing properties due to their abundance and density of antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, proteins, and other vital nutrients.” From the stuff I tried, I have to say I can’t feel a noticeable change in my body, but either way, Vivapura’s stuff tastes amazing. Their superfood products range from raw regulars like cacao nibs, cocounut flakes, gogi berries etc. to more obscure items like wild-harvested spirulina crunchies (spirulina is a protein-packed algae that tastes way better than it should) and several proprietary blends of upscale, nutella-like coconut chocolate crème spread. All of their products are organically grown, ethically sourced and sold at really reasonable prices! (Note: Vivapura does sell a few bee-derived products, which I avoid of course, but everything else is animal-product-free.)
As of right now, Vivapura is only available to SF Bay Area folks through ordering directly from the company’s website or the Tree of Life Culture of Life Store. The good news is Director of Retail Sales Erika Rier assures me Vivapura has laid the groundwork to get their loveliness into Rainbow Grocery, and other local Bay Area independent organic stores really soon. If you want Vivapura products sooner rather than later (which, trust me, you do!) Rier says to request them from your independent local organic retailer.
This is the latest post by Vegansaurus raw correspondent Sarah E. Brown. Thanks, Sarah! [image from Vivapura]
![We already know the fools at Humphry Slocombe are a bunch of asses so it’s delightful to see them hated on so hard. I love a good internet joshing.
[Hat tip to myself over on Uptown Almanac! I don’t know, I can’t explain myself.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kz3t5dQlhi1qzq14lo1_500.png)
We already know the fools at Humphry Slocombe are a bunch of asses so it’s delightful to see them hated on so hard. I love a good internet joshing.
[Hat tip to myself over on Uptown Almanac! I don’t know, I can’t explain myself.]