Four Food Groups from the PCRM

It’s also available on their site as a full color handout and poster.

Ads by Google, in Google Reader

I’m reading feeds in a site-specific browser using Fluid, which means in essence I’m reading them in a browser using Google Reader.

The ads are clearly powered by Google Ad Sense, but look at the tags of the blog post to which this one was linked: business, collaboration, journalism, Media, news. Which one of those suggests I’d be interested in something called “Herd Management Software”?

I remembered that once upon a time, I checked out Google’s Ads Preferences Manager and opted out of targeted advertising. Revisting the site now, it looks like that only applies to the browser in which you did it, not all browsers.

Thus it looks like my SSB (which I use to visit Google Reader) still doesn’t have its opt-out cookie set, and is getting served targeted ads. Ok, that much I get.

But why does Google think Herd Management will be a good category for me?

Visiting the Google Ad Preferences Manager in the browser I actually use to view Google Reader, I find the following listed as my interests:

Computers & Electronics – Hardware – Peripherals – Printers
Computers & Electronics – Software – Operating Systems
Industries – Agriculture & Forestry – Food Production
Industries – Agriculture & Forestry – Livestock

Well there it is. Certainly I can see how reading lots of vegan blogs might suggest I’m interested in what the industry euphamistically calls “Food Production” (ie, the breeding, captivity, and slaughter of non-human animals).

But isn’t Google smart enough to recognize that a vegan’s interest in these things is different than a cattle rancher’s?

The fix is to opt-out in that browser as well, by the way.

The first is brought to you by the good doctors at Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine (PMRC). It’s a 21 day “kickstart” program starting January 1st, 2010.

The new 21-day kickstart program from PMRC

The Kickstart program includes daily messages, breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, webcasts, coupons, celebrity tips and inspirational messages, etc. Should make it easier and help folks who might otherwise be going it alone as they try to transition to a vegan diet.

The second is brought to you by the folks at Mercy for Animals and Compassionate Action for Animals. It’s a launch of a new version of VegGuide, an extensive and user-sourced guide to vegan, vegetarian, and vegetarian-friendly restaurants around the world:

VegGuide.org

What we eat – what we choose to consider food – is the product of ideology when we aren’t forced by necessity to eat whatever we can get.

And this:

Our goal isn’t to simply get people to stop eating meat, dairy and eggs, but to abolish the system that is carnism, one burgeoning vegan advocate at a time. In doing so, we must remember that when we ask a person to stop eating meat, we’re not simply requesting a change in diet. We are requesting a shift in deep-seated ideology, one that is intimately connected with family, community, spirituality, and politics. Making a change in lifestyle, the roots of which lie deep and strong, is no small task. When we realize this, we are able to approach our advocacy from a place of love and compassion, not anger and judgment. I really believe that when we advocate from this loving place, the world is possible.

Which is to say what we choose to consider food for most of us in North America and Europe is ideologically determined, and that overcoming ideology is what makes it difficult, but possible. (Ideologies can be changed through defamilarization and exposure to different modes of thinking).

Made me think of this recent pairing of images:

Little Orphan Angelo at Farm Sanctuary:

And this shirt, now available at Food Fight! in Portland and likely elsewhere:

The answer, of course, is one like me – before beginning the process of unlearning ideology and investigating the realities of “animal agriculture” that led me to becoming vegan . . .

It’s a great opportunity to remind people of the link between animal-based agriculture and climate change.

Related links:

• Livestock’s Long Shadow – the UN report from the Food and Agriculture Organization which concluded that “livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions” – more than that of transportaiton.
• Price of Meat: Cut some meat, cut global warming – a blog which focuses on these connections, and has lots of good links to more info
• Vegan Video from A Life Connected

99.44% pure. Photo by Stewf, cc-by-nc-sa license, click through for details. (And yes, it is ironic that Ivory soap is not vegan - contains animal fats)

Lots of (well-intentioned I’m sure) vegan and omnivore friends over the last month have sent me links to Quarrygirl’s investigative report on animal product ingredients in food purchased from self-declared vegan restaurants around LA (Operation Pancake).

While I certainly share a desire to get what I order, and to have both menu descriptions and waitstaff knowledge accurate as to what food does and doesn’t contain eggs, dairy, or other animal products, something about the whole report (and the excitement/energy/enthusiasm around it) just seemed fundamentally wrong.

Certainly part of the feeling was the irony that my omnivore friends were “alerting” me to potential trace ingredients in otherwise vegan food – while they continued to deliberately and explicitly order food with those same ingredients in quantities orders of magnitude higher. Of course, given that I’ve self-identified as vegan, one could argue they’re simply alerting me to issues they would expect me to be interested in. Still, given the prominence of E.coli, Salmonella, Bovine Growth Hormone, fecal matter, antibiotics in large quantities, and other contaminants in the Standard American Diet, the irony of alerting the vegan community about food contamination seems quite rich.

Kudos to Eric Erik at Vegan.com for explaining so clearly the real reason why I felt this energy was misplaced (Nonvegan Vegan Restaurants).

First, it’s important to recognize the difference between a contaminant and an ingredient: an ingredient is there on purpose, a contaminant is there by accident or lack of safeguards.

In most cases where a vegan meal tested positive for animal products, the amount present was truly miniscule. And it appears the contamination comes, not from the restaurant, but from the factory that produces the mock meats or processed food ingredients.

This doesn’t mean that contamination isn’t important, and worth watching. But it’s a question of priorities. How much energy in the collective vegan / animal rights movement went into this rather than focusing on more productive activities?

Eric put it better:

The amount of animal products involved in this story is so minimal that just twenty minutes devoted to leafletting outweighs the effects of a lifetime of eating at questionably vegan restaurants. So let’s focus on what’s important: keeping as many animals from harm and working toward the day when animal agribusiness no longer exists.

Yes, it’s annoying that some vegan restaurants (or more accurately some vegan faux-meat suppliers) aren’t 100% pure. They should be, and it’s good to monitor them and keep them honest.

But we shouldn’t let the goal of personal purity (eliminating 100.0000% of potential animal contaminants from our diet and lifestyle) overwhelm or take importance over the goal of activism: speaking truth to power, making clear to people the impact of the choices they make everytime they order or make a meal.

VeganSoapbox makes the same point, quoting Martin Luther King Jr on the four steps of nonviolent action:

“In any nonviolent campaign, there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustice exists; negotiations; self-purification; and direct action.”

We’ve got to avoid getting stuck at step 3. Let’s keep vegan suppliers honest, of course, but it’s far more important to get people asking for vegan food than it is to spend our time increasing the purity of that food from 99% to 99.9%.

Turns out they’re in more difficult financial straights than I’d imagined. They’re running a voluntary donations campaign. As they wrote in a letter to readers:

As a completely independent company, Paste has struggled for the past nine months as advertisers have decided to wait out the recession. As most of you realize, magazines are heavily subsidized by advertising. Industry experts estimate that an average subscription for a monthly publication would cost $60-$80 per year without advertising support. But last month was brutal. Cash received unexpectedly reached an all-time low, and turned a tough situation into a short-term crisis.

Long-term, Paste will emerge in good shape. Even with the fall-off at the end of the year, 2008 was our best year yet—print subscribers, print ads, online readers and online advertising were all at record levels. Readers (print and online) remain strong. And new advertisers have come on board even in the recession, with more ready when their advertising budgets come back.

Regardless of what you donate, you get access to a vault of 70+ songs, many of them rare or unreleased tracks, from a broad variety of the kind of artists you’d expect to be friends of Paste.

I hope this does generate enough cash to support Paste through to long-term recovery.

Erik Marcus of Vegan.com

First, Erik Marcus, who you likely know as the person behind Vegan.com, as well as the author of Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, Meat Market: Animals, Ethic, and Money, and The Ultimate Vegan Guide: Compassionate Living Without Sacrifice.

His new blog is An Activists Life. It’s a tumblr-based blog, so it is likely to be more microblog style, more conversational, and more focused on the personal than vegan.com. As Erik put it:

I’ve decided to start something new. I’m going to blog about my personal efforts for animals, and all the things in my life that I try to put in place to be as effective as I can be.

I could take the tried-and-true way out and do this as a book, and not publish a word until it’s fully baked. But that’s not what I want this time. I want to show you the process, the fear, the uncertainty, that comes with writing a shitload of words in real time.

There is no business model. There is no ultimate form I expect this work to take. Just the feeling that if I can give you some insight into the way I’ve structured my life, and the things I do day after day, some people might either be inspired to take action, or be able to act more effectively for animals.

So take a look. Everything’s in flux; everything’s not ready for prime time; this is my activist life. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Given that on some days I think this blog could become nothing but a giant pointer to the RSS feed at vegan.com, I look forward to riding along with Erik over at An Activists Life.

Karen Dawn and Paula

Second, Karen Dawn, who you like know from Thanking the Monkey and Dawnwatch.

Karen’s started blogging at Thanking the Monkey and will focus, one assumes, on many of the same topics and Thanking the Monkey and Dawnwatch, but with more personality. (It is really possible I just put “Karen Dawn” and “more personality” in the same sentence?). Here’s how she described it in an email to Dawnwatch subscribers:

While my blogs, like DawnWatch, will include animal news, they will be lighter and more personal. They will generally have embedded video, sometimes of what the animal friendly celebs are up to. In honor of the release of a new little flick called Star Trek, the first one includes an interview we did with Bruce Greenwood who plays the captain, Captain Pike, in the new movie. (The movie is a prequel so Kirk is not yet the captain.) Greenwood has some lovely comments on animal cruelty, and the state of the oceans. My first blog also includes a wonderful Onion news piece on Star Trek, just for laughs. We need those. I hope you will check out my new blog and forward the link to all of your Trekkie friends. They might figure that if Captain Pike cares about the animals, maybe they should too.

Glad to hear and see more from both of these voices.

Molly (Photo from NY Times - click through for original)

It never ceases to amaze me how, when one cow (or goat, or pig, or chicken, or turkey) escapes from the slaughterhouse, the public at large want to save him/her, but then don’t recognize how their own eating habits put said animal in that position in the first place.

This week, Molly (so named by the workers at the Brooklyn shelter to which she was transferred) escaped from a slaugherhouse in Queens, running for her life, according to the NY Times:

After decamping from the slaughterhouse, the heifer made a mad dash along 94th Avenue, turned at 150th Street, and again at Liberty Avenue, witnesses said. She passed other slaughterhouses — for goats, lambs, chickens and turkeys.

Luckily for Molly, she’ll likely (the story suggested, but was inconclusive) be headed to Farm Sanctuary in Watkins Glen, where she’ll receive excellent thoughtful care for the rest of her natural life.

What do we learn from this? Here’s what the NY Times article concludes:

Adam Khan, 47, a truck driver who lives in a house near where the calf was captured, said the episode “tells you something.”

The heifer, he said, “didn’t want to get killed.”

You know what? None of them do. If more people would eliminate animal products from their diet, we wouldn’t need any more “rescue” stories. I love a good rescue too (and hope to meet Molly on our next visit to Farm Sanctuary) but we have to remember that for every rescue billions of other animals arrive “successfully” at slaughter.

The choice you make with every meal is whether you are on Molly’s side or you are subsidizing her slaughter. It’s that simple.

In it, he describes the efforts of Louise Slaughter (we’ll ignore the irony of her name) to pass legislation in congress to “ban the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.” The issue? Feeding antibiotics to healthy animals – as U.S. livestock companies do on an alarmingly consistent basis – increases the odds of developing antiobiotic resistant viruses:

Seventy percent of the antibiotics used in the U.S. are fed to healthy animals — well, animals that would be healthy if they weren’t overcrowded and improperly fed. These antibiotics are used on animals that are not sick in order to prevent disease from erupting in these facilities. Such massive prophylactic use of antibiotics encourages bacteria to develop resistant strains, and now medicine is on the verge of running out of drugs that haven’t been rendered useless for human health by being misused to allow animal abuse.

The Infectious Disease Society of America calls it a public health crisis; the president of the American Farm Bureau says there’s no public health threat. Which are you going to believe – the guy whose job it is to protect profits by “pork producers,” or the doctors whose job it is to keep epidemics controlled?

Pope adds:

Why do doctors and agribusiness disagree so vehemently? Well, if you read what the Farm Bureau says carefully, they argue that the superbugs in pigs don’t survive cooking your pork chop — which is technically true but fatally flawed. First, the bugs in uncooked meat end up on cooking surfaces and inadequately washed hands and can contaminate consumers indirectly in a host of ways. But more importantly, the issue is not whether we are exposed to superbugs through eating meat — it’s where we breed them. Because once these bacteria take hold down on the farm, they spread on their own, not just through the meat counter.

Which, of course, is exactly the point of the current H151 aka Factory Farming Flu. At least its not (yet) antibiotic-resistant.

Go express your support of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.

Related:

• Pew Campaign on Health and Industrial Farming