Enewsletter

Notes from Vegan Outreach

Join Jon's Jaunt

Next Monday, February 4, Jon Camp will embark on a 10-week college leafleting tour. He'll be leafleting in VA, TN, KY (WKU only), AR, TX, OK, NM, AZ, CO, WY, KS, MO, IL, IA, WI, and WV. He'd love for you to experience this powerful outreach firsthand. If you'd like to join him for some leafleting, or if you'd like for him to meet with your local group, please email jon (at) veganoutreach (dot) org. Thanks!

Aashish Bhimani leaflets at George Mason; photo by Jon Camp.

Product of the Week

Deborah: Donna Klein's cookbooks: Vegan Italiano and The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen have provided me with wonderful authentic meals. Even my Italian, meat-eating husband (who is only eating vegetarian meals at home to humor his wife) is happy with the dishes found in Klein's books.

Notes from All Over

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

From The New York Times:

Once, these animals were raised locally (even many New Yorkers remember the pigs of Secaucus), reducing transportation costs and allowing their manure to be spread on nearby fields. Now hog production facilities that resemble prisons more than farms are hundreds of miles from major population centers, and their manure “lagoons” pollute streams and groundwater. (In Iowa alone, hog factories and farms produce more than 50 million tons of excrement annually.)

Animal welfare may not yet be a major concern, but as the horrors of raising meat in confinement become known, more animal lovers may start to react. And would the world not be a better place were some of the grain we use to grow meat directed instead to feed our fellow human beings? Full story; see also "Eating as if the Climate Mattered."

 

Vegan Health in USA Today

[E]ating a healthy vegan diet "is not difficult once you get used to it," says Jack Norris, a vegan and registered dietitian who offers tips at VeganHealth.org. Full story.

 

Learning to Eat, and Like, His Veggies

From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Vegan, vegetarian, vegetable love (in fact, that's the title of a 2005 Barbara Kafka tome), meatless, and less-meat cookbooks poured off the presses last year. More encouragingly, vegetarian cuisine has been sprung from its health-food ghetto; slipped out of oily, mock-meat Chinese prison. If plant-based cookery was about morality once (and there is a profoundly moral case to be made for it), its resurgent popularity adds pleasure to the brief.

It's not just to choke down anymore. It's to savor and celebrate. It's hip, not hair-shirt. No members-only card required. No consignment to lifeless brown rice, peanuts and broccoli. No suffocating, lemme-outta-here absolutism. Say hello to the new veganism -- culinary sophistication, patient craft, lovingly nuanced flavor. Full story.

 

The Freedom to Be Poisoned

How the CCF works, from Newsweek:

I consider myself an open-minded person. So just because a group attacks drunk-driving laws and anti-smoking regulations, just because it opposes replacing the junk food in school cafeterias and vending machines with healthy snacks, just because it opposed reducing the blood-alcohol level that constitutes the legal definition of drunk, and just because it calls concerns about obesity "hype," do I dismiss its defense of mercury in tuna fish? Of course not. Full story.

 

NFL Star Works towards Veganism

From The Wall Street Journal, record-setting tight-end Tony Gonzalez pursues veganism, with sidebars on vegans Salim Stoudamire of the NBA and Ultimate Fighter Mac Danzig. Full story.

Note that, because of their lower fat content, vegetarian meats like Gimme Lean, Boca Burgers, Tofurky slices, and Morningstar Meal Starters can provide a higher percentage of calories from protein than animal products.

Notes from Our Members

While leafleting today, one person told me his story of why he went vegetarian: He worked in a pig slaughterhouse in Louisville, KY for 7 years, assisting in and/or slaughtering upwards of 2,000 pigs per day. He woke up one morning and couldn't take it anymore, and felt great remorse for killing all of those animals over the years. He and his wife are now vegetarian, and he said he's never looking back. He shared many graphic details of working on the kill floor, and how things got so sloppy with fast moving lines. Regarding the brochure, he said that our information was totally accurate to what he experienced while working in the slaughterhouse, and that much of the stuff he saw was even worse than we depict.
     Another example of the power of one booklet: last fall, on the first day of class at the National Gourmet Institute, a classmate said: "One day in high school, almost 10 years ago, someone handed me a Why Vegan and I was horrified, shocked, and went vegan for several years, took a break, now I'm trying to be vegan again, and I want to focus on vegan baking." This past week, I gave her a few of the new Vegan Outreach brochures and she took a quick look at them and thanked me for them, and said she is going to definitely be vegan again! She told some others in the class, "I love Vegan Outreach -- their info made me go vegan back in high school!" A few non-vegan classmates asked for copies.
-Eileen Botti, 1/18/08

Vegan Outreach is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the suffering of farmed animals by promoting informed, ethical eating. All donations are tax-deductible. Vegan Outreach POB 30865, Tucson, AZ 85751-0865