vegansaurus!

SF Green Festival, meatball awards, the miracle of birth, delicious local tofu, Czech dumplings, urban gardening and more in this week’s link-o-rama!GE  »

Green Fest is in San Francisco this weekend; let Vegansaurus guide you through it.

Win a copy of 500 Vegan Recipes! Hurry up and do it by Tuesday, Nov. 17!

The clever fuckers at the California Milk Advisory Board will be filming their latest “Happy Cows come from California” commercials in New Zealand. Torture the local cows, but don’t let the state benefit from production fees: such lovely people they are.

Local chefs discover that tofu is not an abomination against haute cuisine. Color us shocked. And hungry for samples!

Another poor review of Eating Animals, from another Gawker associate. Shut up, Joshua David Stein, you are much too pleased with yourself and your criticism.

For the strong-stomached, the birth of an elephant. Miracles: kinda gross! This goes for every human who records the births of their own young as well.

And in New Zealand, a shark gave birth to four live sharklets, thanks to the intervention of another shark? Freaky, gross, amazing.

Oh delicious: a recipe for Czech fruit dumplings! Yes PLEASE.

Filling closets with clothes for yourself is acceptable human behavior; filling a closet with matching clothes for your cat is NOT. I recognize we’re all guilty of anthropomorphism to some degree, but this not OK.

Watch out, sickies: you can pass on the swine flu to your companion animals.

Remember Nicolette Hahn Niman’s ridiculous op-ed renouncing her ranch’s responsibility for carbon emissions? Peter Singer gives her brief, precise what-for.

King of Jerkoffs A. Bourdain says humans are allowed to eat animals because they are “smaller and stupider” than us. Ari Solomon says, intelligence is as intelligence does, bright boy. (Although we should note, Mr. Solomon, that “stupider” is an inflected comparative and most certainly a word.) (Grammarsaurus!)

More meat and more dairy makes Jack an angrier, more hostile and depressed boy; more carbs and less meat and dairy makes him happier and peaceful.

Friend-of-Vegansaurus Graciela has a new blog in which she explores urban gardening in L.A. We are so envious of all her lovely greens!

Check it out, another E. coli outbreak in ground beef!

Kind of pretty, kind of disgusting: your internal organs rendered in produce.

Genetically engineered apples that stay crispy without refrigeration!

Congratulations Ike’s, winner of Peta’s best vegetarian meatballs! Enjoy them in a (vegan) Meatless Mike or a Not-So-Sloppy Ike.

An interview with our hero Deborah Madison, vegetarian chef and cookbook author extraordinaire!

Last year’s fascinating story “Morality bites,” by the Chicago Tribune’s Monica Eng, is included in Best Food Writing 2009.

Publisher’s Weekly selects this year’s best food books; titles include the bizarro Almost Meatless (“almost”? come the hell on), the revolting Lobel’s Meat Bible, and two books Vegansaurus wouldn’t mind unwrapping this holiday season: Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking, and Salt to Taste: The Key to Confident, Delicious Cooking. Neither is vegan, but both seem extremely useful.

Revolting, slightly terrifying tale of a food writer’s giving in to a murderous impulse and shooting a baboon, and the global fallout.

Ours friends at Veg-Table are looking for writers for their city guides. GET ON IT, YOU WRITERLY PERSON.

JSF mania, regal vegan dining, tons of recipes, horrible tragedy and more in this week’s (bipolar) link-o-rama!  »

TODAY! That’s Friday, Nov. 6: Jonathan Safran Foer is having a book signing at UC Berkeley at 7 p.m. in the Multicultural Center! Woo!!

On Sunday, Nov. 8 at noon King of Ughs David Chang and Ubuntu’s vegetarian betrayer Jeremy Fox will appear in conversation with each other at Omnivore Books (3885 Cesar Chavez St. at Church Street). New York Times columnist (and co-author of His Majesty of Shut Up, David Chang’s new book) Peter Meehan will moderate.

JSF makes a modern Modest Proposal to omnivores: how about some delicious dog? One of your Vegansaurs’ first solid foods was dog soup. This was not a major factor in his/her decision to go vegan (GUESS WHOSE), as it only happened once, during toddlerhood; the point is, duh, all meat is equally reprehensible.

This one time, in August, Emperor David Chang of Saying Idiotic Things made a vegetarian meal, at the behest of the James Beard Foundation. Color Vegansaurus unimpressed; we’ve had at least as fancy at Brassica.

Miss Vegan Drinks? Of course you do! Thank goodness for the East Bay, who’ve been doing their thing on non-holiday Tuesdays and want to see you at their next meeting! Mix and mingle on Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 6:30 p.m. at the Kona Club, at 4401 Piedmont Ave. at Pleasant Valley Avenue in Oakland! Details here.

Hey, Science: “Because such monkey torture will not lead to improved human health, you don’t need to be an animal rights advocate to wonder if an ethical cost-benefit analysis might conclude that the ends don’t justify the means.”

Nicolette Hahn Niman doesn’t want you to blame her ranch for the environmental problems caused by raising animals for food; after all, she says, “Singling out meat is misleading and unhelpful, especially since few people are likely to entirely abandon animal-based foods.” And anyway, ”avoiding soy from deforested croplands may be more difficult…. Brazilian soy is common (and unlabeled) in tofu and soymilk sold in American supermarkets,” so shut up and eat your Bill-Niman-de-and-renounced “happy” beef, already. JESUS LADY.

Adult Dungeness crabs are few and far between for the second consecutive year, but that won’t stop most fishermen from going out to catch as many as they (legally) can. Fishing in a “down” season makes perfect sense, hooray people.

CHOW honors local hero Bryant Terry and Queen of Vegetables Deborah Madison in its first annual awards, the CHOW 13. Too bad they have to tell us how much they looooove Ryan “literally all of the pig” Farr as well, boo.

Congratulations to friend-of-Vegansaurus Celine of Have Cake, Will Travel: her very first cookbook is out today!

For reasons as yet unknown, all the female spectacled bears in the Leipzig (Germany) Zoo have lost nearly all of their hair. They look incredibly pathetic without their usual “fluffy dark brown” fur coats.

Oh delicious, sumptuous, vegan cuisine literally good enough for the Queen: a luncheon at Windsor Castle, part of a “Celebration of Faiths and the Environment,” satisfied all the participants’ dietary requirements by eliminating all animal products from the menu! An “autumnal roasted pear salad” with “deeply savory…toasted [Kentish] cobnuts”? Yes, please!

Yobie Benjamin analyzes the most recent reviews of and data on San Francisco’s public school lunches, and determines that, duh, it can be done better, for cheaper. The notable part here is that he includes veg options in his price breakdowns. It’s not more expensive to eat vegan! OK?!!

How revolting: a guy in Cleveland had very poorly hidden the bodies of six women—who had been raped and murdered—“in and around” his house, which is next door to a sausage factory, which some people blamed for the stench. Rotting carcasses stink, be they human or other animal.

In fucked-up and depressing animal news, there’s still one organization associated with the veal calf slaughterhouse exposé that apparently supports the obscene treatment of those baby cows. Unregulated free markets always arrive at the best solutions, right?

The SF Bay Guardian makes a giant effort and reviews Greens. Revelation: it still makes good food. Your omnivorous friends will not complain (too much) about being denied their meat for one meal. Like we were saying, a new restaurant critic with some imagination re: veg food, please.

Our pals at CSA Delivery blog have been killing it with their vegan recipes lately: dolmas with caramelized leek hummus; chard and chickpea burgers with quick pickled veggies; vegetable curry; soft chili tofu. UGH SO HUNGRY.

On Saturday, Nov. 21, friends-of-Vegansaurus Farm Sanctuary are hosting a Celebration for the Turkeys dinner, “designed” by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau! Tickets cost $75 for adults and $35 for children, and are on sale now. Unless you are also a famous vegan cookbook author, this is guaranteed to be a lot tastier than your Thanksgiving dinner, so you might as well go. Plus it supports farm animals, instead of crazy relatives who drink too much/not enough; a pig will never ask you when you’re going to give it grandchildren or if you’ve put on weight.