Enewsletter
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Enewsletter • October 13, 2010 | ||||||||||||||
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Notes from Vegan Outreach
Activist Profile: Rick HersheyOur series of activist profiles continues with Rick Hershey. Since we started keeping track, Rick has handed booklets to over 130,000 individuals! Here’s an excerpt: What was your most positive leafleting experience? When I reached my 100,000th booklet last April. Other positive experiences include the many people I have reached out to who later tell me they have become vegetarian as a result of my influence, or even simply that they have reduced their meat consumption. As a Washington U freshman, I took an ethics course in the Philosophy department, “Present Moral Problems.” I wrote my paper on the ethics of vegetarianism. However, this was before Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, and the grader wrote that he thought the subject of my paper was a joke. When leafleting there recently, a vegetarian freshman told me he was taking that very same course, taught currently by the son of my professor, and now animal rights is a regular component of the course. That, too, was one of my better leafleting experiences!
From “Your Daily Dose of Vegan Outreach!” & Jack Norris RD Blogs
Product of the WeekRick: “Trader Joe’s Soy Creamy cherry chocolate chip ice cream; their mango vanilla runs a close second.” Please submit your product of the week via this page; previous entries here.
Notes from All OverLightning Round
Notes from Our Members
Thanks for your outreach program
about lessening meat consumption.
My sister is vegetarian, but I’ve never had
the guts to take the plunge, especially while
in college, and pretty much just eat whatever
I can get. Cassandra, Marguerite, and I reached
958 students at SUNY New Paltz today. As people
walked past me after receiving leaflets from
Cassandra or Marguerite, it was common for me
to hear them discussing the
leaflet. I overheard tons of conversations all
day, from “That’s going to make me vegetarian”
to “This is so sad – did you read
it?” It’s so great to get people talking
to each other about this!
Great leafleting at City College
of San Francisco with Jack (right)
today! Quite a few “Good for you!”
and “Thanks for handing this out!”
type comments. One young lady said her sister
went veg after receiving an Even If You
Like Meat booklet. I saw one guy walking
and reading Even If three different
times. The third time I asked him what he thought
about the material and he said he was really
shocked. He said one of his teachers had been
urging the class to boycott fast food because
of how badly animals are treated but he didn’t
realize the problem was so big. He accepted
a Guide and told me he would definitely
be working towards a more veg diet. I wasn’t really in
the mood for leafleting the University of Georgia
today, but talked myself into it. I’m sure glad
I did, as it turned out to be a great day! The
acceptance rate was around 90%. In addition
to leafleting, I had some good conversations,
met quite a few vegetarians, and also was able
to direct several interested students over to
our table to learn more.
A slow
but very worthwhile day at Miami-Dade
College Homestead campus today. A lot of the
students I interacted with seemed really open
minded; I saw many students reading their booklet
intently! After a conversation, one couple
said they would consider going veg. Another
great moment came when a Latino couple I’d given
a booklet to earlier came back. Although they
didn’t speak a word of English, they had looked
through the booklet closely and were now curious
to know more about it. We had a great conversation
and I was impressed that, with all the benefits
of a vegan diet I’d discussed with them, they
totally stayed focused on the main point –
that going veg is the only way to do the best
thing for the animals themselves! Weird to me,
but I almost seemed to be more convincing about
the merits of being vegan in Spanish than I
normally am in my own language! At the
University of New Hampshire, Durham,
one student who recently went veg after seeing
Food, Inc. was very grateful for a Guide to help with
her new way of eating. A young man was looking through a leaflet and
it prompted him to tell his friend about the Meatrix.
A student who said he couldn’t go vegan was
impressed with the idea of simply reducing animal-product consumption: “I
could do that.”
At Northeastern
Illinois University, one young
woman asked if it was hard knowing that a lot
of people won’t change. I told her that a good
many people do, in fact, change, and that even
if not everyone comes around to our side, the
change we create is very real to those we impact.
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