One of the many misconceptions we once had about going vegan was that we thought it would make the day-to-day of our lives more difficult. But this mentality has been countered going as far back as the third century A.D., when plant-based Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry urged "those who have arranged their life conformably to truth" to "liberate ourselves from many inconveniences by abandoning a fleshly diet." 

(Dude really isn't helping with the whole sanctimonious holier-than-thou rap vegans get, but you get the gist.)

Yes, for those with access and autonomy, the inconvenient truth about the need to change our diets is actually far more convenient than the vehemently vegan-resistant may imagine, and here are some of the many ways this is so today. They may surprise you!

1 - Grocery shopping is streamlined. 

With nothing off-limits, choosing groceries can get overwhelming. Unless you're shopping at Veganz (we wishz!), apart from the produce section, vegan items account for a smaller portion of a typical grocery store's inventory. (Although plenty of foods are "accidentally vegan" as well.) Sounds like a bummer, but research shows that the fewer options people have, the easier it is to make decisions and be happy with our choices. 

And although at first we were scouring labels, we quickly figured out what's vegan and what we like. Now we're in and outta there pretty quickly.

Plus, there's a certain satisfaction to be had in purposefully skipping over entire sections of the store - including whizzing by the deli line while people stand around waiting their turn. (Just don't breathe in, because that sh*t kinda stinks once you stop eating it long enough.)

As far as whether it's more expensive, it's been our experience that although some (but definitely not all!) vegan versions of foods may be pricier - partly because plant-based farming doesn't benefit from ginormous taxpayer subsidies like animal agriculture does, plus demand is currently lower (but growing rapidly) - the lack of meat expenses seems to even everything out, so the amount we spend on groceries is generally similar or cheaper. Many affordable global staple foods are plant-based, but any diet can be as expensive as you make it.

In fact, a recent Gallup poll found that Americans who make less than $30,000 a year are more likely to be vegetarian or vegan, while people who make more than $75,000 a year are less likely to self-identify with either diet. “The lower the income level, the greater the likelihood of reporting reduced meat consumption.” This makes sense, as the Washington Post notes in their coverage of the poll, because "meat adds expense to an already-tight grocery budget." St. Joseph Health System in Sonoma County, CA reports, “Vegetarian entrées cost about 50 percent less than meat entrées.” The hospital projects saving $5,000 a year by serving more meat-free meals. Think of what it can do for your annual grocery budget!

2 - Dining decisions are less agonizing

I don't know what was harder, trying to decide where to go out to eat before we went vegan, or deciding from the many hysterical memes about this conundrum for this blog post. 

We obviously have fewer options now, but in an over-saturated market, again, that's actually helpful. We know exactly which eateries are worth patronizing in our area, as well as those in the larger cities within reasonable brunch/dinner distance, and can decide fairly quickly. 

When traveling, we just use the Yelp or Happy Cow apps to find great options everywhere we go. Sometimes we even end up discovering interesting towns we never would have otherwise. (Hello vegan tikka masala curry pizza with curry fries at Pizza & Sub Stop in Lowell, MA, home to a national historical park – who knew?). More and more great options are popping up all the time all over the place.

Basically, rather than trying to make do with scraps in spaces that fundamentally don't understand or won't consider adjusting to accommodate the vegan ethical position, we prefer the new spaces that have been created by others who share it. We have access to these kinds of spaces, which are popping up all over the place. Plus, many global cuisines found everywhere have an inherent focus on plant foods, like falafel joints and Thai and Indian restaurants. (And as you can see, the vegan options at this famous falafel restaurant in New Haven we visited are considerably cheaper than the non-vegan options.)

Even dining at restaurants that aren't vegan-friendly can sometimes be surprisingly pleasant. Although Craig would rather die than call attention to himself or put anyone out for one second, I will veeeery politely ask if the chef could possibly whip up any plant-based plate of their choosing. This approach often gets great results. (Other times, the chef's efforts may be so laughably halfhearted they go viral. Then you can go hungry but be internet famous.)

Once, the chef himself personally served me a yummy concoction of rice and beans, plantains, roasted veggies, and salad to our table, beaming with pride, noting he relished the opportunity to go off-menu and get creative. Another time, the waitress at an old-school seafood joint (where I assumed they would think "vegan" was a type of alien) excitedly presented an artfully-plated herbaceous grain and root vegetable dish, confessing she made the chef promise to make the same for her meal break because she was f*cking sick of fish. 

3 - Getting ready is quicker.

Okay, this is the last one on the list with the fewer options = easier theme.

After deciding to give away my massive collection of vintage leather shoes, belts, jackets, and bags, wool sweaters, silk tops, etc., I no longer have to agonize (as much) over making sartorial decisions, given my streamlined wardrobe. My non-leather shoes even fit in one closet instead of basically needing their own storage shed.

Craig still chooses from the same goofy t-shirt collection he's had since college - although he's diversified to a "Tofu: The Other Other White Meat" option.

Similarly, as a vegan you get to know which toiletries are vegan and work for you, and without the constant temptation of every single cheap drugstore option, bathroom clutter is banished. (Mostly.)

4 - Safer, Easier Clean-up & No Cross-Contamination

When the nineteenth century feminist abolitionist Grimke sisters adopted a meat-free diet, they found it to be "an emancipation of women from the toil of the kitchen," while their biographer observed that it "simplified housekeeping." 

Okay, so Craig does most of the cooking, but I usually clean up after, and we agree that keeping a vegan kitchen is easier for several reasons.

To illustrate this, while recently visiting relatives who happen to be plant-based these days (woohoo!), my cousin's husband joked while grilling the marinated BBQ tofu if anyone minded if he used the same fork on the cooked piece he'd just used on the raw piece. Lolz.

Happily, careful hand-washing after handling meat and using separate knives and cutting boards to avoid germs are now distant memories. We typically use the same one throughout the entire day (and sometimes beyond – don’t judge). Was this knife used to make avocado or peanut butter toast this morning? Yum, PB. In the coconut butter it goes! That night, they'll get a halfhearted rinse before reusing them the next day. Or not. (Again, don't judge.)

If it's discovered upon waking that someone (someone!) forgot to put dinner leftovers in the fridge, oh well, it's not gonna kill us. Lunch it is.

And while baking - a process which in no way actually requires the ovulatory secretions of a fertile female bird – who knew? – without eggs in the picture we don't hesitate to scarf down raw batter or cookie dough.

Fun fact: Apparently the only reason kitchen water can't be reused as greywater is because of the bacteria in meat and animal products, so vegan kitchens are actually perfectly safe for this.

Plus, no more gross jars under the sink full of congealed bacon grease, no more bacon grease coating everything within a few feet of the stovetop, no dish sponges coated in... you guessed it, bacon grease. Today we enjoy the delectable umami of bacon without the grease or animal slaughter by roasting shitakes to a salty crisp. 

Oh, and in light of recent research showing how scarily germ-infested kitchen sponges can get, you'll go through those less often without all the meat grease everywhere.

On a related note, in the 1800s, fashions free of "animal matter" were called "humanitarian" and "hygienic."

Also, food-borne illnesses typically derive from human and animal waste (plants can also be contaminated, but they are not the direct source). Nearly all of the foods pregnant women should avoid are animal-based (excepting sprouts, which again would have been tainted by animal-derived contaminants). While pregnant, I still ate all these foods – just the vegan versions! Then there’s the fact that most contagious diseases originate from farming animals. Per Live Science, “About 60 percent of all human diseases and 75 percent of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, according to the researchers. Most human infections with zoonoses come from livestock, including pigs, chickens, cattle, goats, sheep and camels.”

To be completely frank, it's truly hard to believe we once saw no problem with storing, thawing, and cooking actual dead body pieces in our kitchen, or keeping the bodily fluids of lady animals in our fridge, let alone putting them in our mouths - and all the extra sanitizing efforts required to do this safely. Why? Can't even. Ok, moving on.

5 - Less Food Waste

Before going vegan we remember often not being able to finish a meal and frequently scraping the uneaten portions into the trash or disposal. As vegans, we typically clean our plates. I don't know if this is because of the fact that the portions aren't necessarily massive but have plenty of fiber to give more bulk, are typically less fatty and dense, or just because plant-based food is freaking delicious. But down our gullets it all goes, leaving us feeling satiated but not in a food coma. (Okay, sometimes a food coma.) Upon a fridge inspection, fruits and veggies on their way out get tossed into a smoothie, or into the freezer to do so later.

No guiltily scraping bits of some lovable individual's remains or soured or molded lacteal secretions into the garbage or down the sink. No bones or chunks of fat. No ungodly smell - or worse, maggots! - emerging from the trash, as I cringe to admit has happened more than once. Cannot. Even. 

But the FAR greater amount of food waste we are avoiding by being vegan is less palpable because it happens before animal foods ever reach us. Since most of the crops fed to animals are not converted into their flesh or secretions, the practice of farming animals for food accounts for 40% of all losses of harvested crops globally. (Take a minute to let that sink in.) This hidden form of food waste was recently coined by researchers as the “opportunity food loss” of animal farming. If, after all that built-in waste, you then actually toss what makes it onto your plate or into fridge, which isn't shocking since animal products are very filling and also highly perishable, it's even greater waste upon waste. Not to mention a waste of animals' lives.

And don't give us that marginal lands nonsense. We wouldn't need to convert "unarable land" ecosystems into pasture for pre-slaughter livestock if we didn't use so much arable land to grow livestock feed.

6 - Perfect Built-In Excuse

That massive extended family dinner you're dreading? That work lunch outing with annoying co-workers you'd rather skip? Just tell them you can't go because you're vegan. (Then silently count down to ten and wait for someone to say, "How do you know someone's vegan? They'll tell you!" Then humanely stab them.)

This doesn't work if the people in charge have actually made an effort to ensure vegan options will be available. (What kind of jerk is nice like that?) Yet this isn't totally safe either, since there's about a 50/50 chance they'll conflate vegan with gluten-free.

But of course, either way, we can typically figure something out, but they don't need to know that. Shhhh.

7 - Ideal Conversation Killer

Chatty seat neighbor on your flight? Religious solicitors at your door? Blind date gone bad? 

Maybe they'd like to hear about how animal exploitation is unnecessary and avoidable for those with access to other choices and autonomy over said choices, so it's a moral imperative for those in that position to take a clear ethical stance against it and simply make other choices, and also...

Didn't think so. 

Buh-bye.

8 - You Gain New Expertise

Because people constantly put you in a position where you have to defend veganism, especially online, you basically need to become somewhat of an expert on things like nutrition, history, philosophy, psychology, world religions, anthropology, animal "husbandry," veganic farming, ecology, linguistics, culinary arts, all the logical fallacies, Maslow's hierarchy of arguments, paranormal vs. physiological plant perception, and plenty more.

Okay, plenty of vegans don't do this, but we're nerdy like that. And we really like winning arguments with aplomb.

9 - Nothing Surprises You

Life after the paradigm shift that leads one to veganism is a bit like taking the red pill in that we become painfully aware of how we were previously conditioned to see animals as disposable commodities who are willful participants in their own exploitation. Otherwise intelligent, socially aware people will insist that plants have feelings too as a reason to exploit animals (while catering to their dog's every whim), or that vegans are destroying the planet with soybeans (which are used mostly for animal feed), etc. etc. etc. 

Other may talk about cage-free eggs while ignoring the fact that the cage-free hens' brothers were killed as day-old chicks at the hatchery (chick culling). They want free-range milk while ignoring the fact that each of the free-range cow's calves were removed from her within hours after birth (maternal deprivation). They want the "humane" killing of healthy young individuals in the early prime of their lives with a strong will to live who have done nothing wrong and can't defend themselves. Okay.

Then when something happens like, say, a hateful bratty belligerent man-child reality star becomes president of the United States, you're relatively unfazed. 

In other words, "alternative facts" are nothing new to you. 

10 - You may reverse/dodge some common health problems

We don't focus on this point because we understand that replacing animal foods with plant foods is not a magic bullet, and yes, even vegans die. However, plenty of credible research shows that this change often results in a decreased chance of many of the chronic diseases killing people in record rates and crippling our healthcare system. One study found adopting a vegan diet globally could avert 8.1 million deaths per year by 2050 and save $1 trillion per year on healthcare!

Purely anecdotally, after going vegan, my chronic tonsil issues and threat of having them removed went away. We both get far fewer colds. Plus we can now fly. Not really, just making sure you're still paying attention.

There's even an ad that keeps posting up on my Facebook claiming that vegans can get discounts on health insurance, but I don't know if that's really a thing. I'm just happy I still have my tonsils.

11 - Lighter psyche

As a vegan, all that time and energy previously used twisting oneself into a pretzel via the mental gymnastics required to try to defend needless animal use/killing can be used for something else. Maybe real gymnastics! Who knows, you could become the next Simone Biles. Or, speaking of Olympians, what about weightlifting, like vegan powerhouse Kendrick Farris? 

In all seriousness, there is a weight off your shoulders that comes with no longer clinging to old destructive ways. There are many, many things wrong in the world, and humanity's exploitation and farming of animals is actually tied to many of them. Although you can't single-handedly stop this damage, or animal exploitation, you sure as hell don't need to be another person normalizing it. 

And there really is something to the Kafka line: "I can now look at you in peace. I no longer eat you."

Now if only by we didn't have to deal with being the butt of predictable jokes, the target of passive aggressive quips, or provoke discomfort in others if not downright contempt. Many people seem to be triggered by a damn veggie burger (or more recently, a vegan sausage roll!). But that's another blog post for another time, folks. 

How else does being vegan actually make your life easier? Comment below!

A “livestock sustainability expert” (an oxymoron) is the person behind the Februdairy initiative (her "brainchild"), an unofficial pro-dairy response to Veganuary that's gained more popularity for the hashtag being hijacked by vegans. She goes by the handle @Bovidiva. She’s a Bovine Diva... get it?? 

On her blog, she describes herself as being dedicated to “giving farmers and food industry stakeholders the data and messages to explain why we do, what we do, every single day.” It goes without saying that this woman clearly has vested financial interests in animal exploitation.

But she doesn’t consider using and killing individuals for profit to be “exploitation.” Riiiiiight.

Here's her Tweet that began the initiative:

Let's make #Februdairy happen this year. 28 days, 28 positive #dairy posts. From cute calves and #cheese on crumpets, to belligerent bulls and juicy #beef #burgers - who's in?

Welcome to dystopia, in which newborn animals pictured being lovingly fed are innocently included in the same sentence as their juicy flesh.

Bait & switch

Word to the wise, friends: her Twitter account is essentially functioning as a sort of self-serving cybertrap for vegans. 

Under the guise of kindness and fairness and tolerance, she puts out one obtuse and intellectually dishonest Tweet after another in praise of dairy, mixed in with condescending microaggressions against veganism and vegans, sprinkled with praise for certain “fabulous vegans out there” that the others are giving a bad name (presumably the ones who don’t actually oppose animal exploitation, meaning they aren’t actually vegan). The focus is on how much dairy farmers care for their animals, but never are the routine aspects of dairying that are less palatable, like maternal deprivation or slaughter, ever boasted about.

Overall, the effect is pretty downright infuriating for the average vegan – and it seems that it is her intended effect. Although plenty of vegans calmly and clearly call her out on her lies of omission and refute her central points, some inevitably resort to responding to tone or worse, name-calling. (Welcome to the internet. This is certainly not a behavior exclusive to vegans by any means).

Then the trap is set. Bovidiva then uses those response as proof that vegans are cruel and rude, while typically ignoring or blocking the calmer ones (yours truly included). Tada! She is now the focus and the victim instead of the “dairy” cows, who are literally parasitized and killed, or their orphaned offspring. (See Reverse Victimization in Robert Grillo’s book Farm to Fable.)

Let’s take a look at some examples, as well as some of the other patterns of recurrent tactics she uses to try to mischaracterize vegans and delegitmize veganism, and to rationalize making a living from perpetuating the exploitation and slaughter of innocent individuals.

The goal here is not to draw more attention to this person or to wander into her trap and take her bait (please don’t), but to recognize and call out these tactics being used in general by her and by similar pro-dairy social media accounts, who are getting more and more desperate as dairy declines in popularity each year. In many of these spaces, blatant censorship is rampant, as any record of critical thought or dissent is swiftly eliminated from many of these posts, with only praise allowed to remain. 

Why she blocked me

First, I am not a big Twitter user, but her posts are so icky that I was inspired to comment on some of them over the past few days, until I was blocked. Here are all my comments to her Tweets, including responses to other comments on her post that she was therefore tagged in, that led to me being blocked. As you can see, I never called her names or made comparisons to humans or anything like that, I just stuck to the facts.

***

A vegan commented something about baby calves, and she replied something like “Why so emotive? Biology 101: cows have calves, humans have babies.”

(I believe she deleted that after she saw my reply, because that Tweet is now nowhere to be found.)

I replied (as @BrainOnHugs), quoting the emotive vegan propagandists who must have taken over vocabulary.com:

"Cattle are not the only animals whose BABIES are called calves. You can use the word to mean a BABY whale, baby elephant, camel, bison, elk, giraffe, gnu, hippopotamus, moose, ox, reindeer, rhinoceros, and yak." calf - Dictionary Definition: http://Vocabulary.com

(No response.)

***

In the responses to a Bovidiva Tweet, someone claimed “Cruelty is not inherent in animal production.”

Me:
If parasitizing someone and then having them killed once you can no longer profitably do so isn't "cruel," I don't know what is.

(No response.)

***

In the responses to one of Bovidiva’s Tweets, someone wrote, “If you all abandoned your animals tomorrow what would happen to them? A complete lack of acceptance of the cycle of nature.”

Me:
Are you suggesting that continuing the cycle of exploitation & slaughter of special breeds of animals not found outside of human confinement/control in perpetuity would be better? Are the only 2 options to continue to breed/exploit/kill (repeat) them forever, or "abandon" them?

(No response.)

***

@bluemorphovegan:
@Bovidiva would you be opposed to doing what we do to cows, to humans?

@Bovidiva:
Making sure that #cows are given shelter, comfortable bedding, balanced and targeted diets, excellent veterinary (medical) care, a good life... No, I think those are all things that most people would enjoy @bluemorphovegan. #Februdairy

Me:
I see you have omitted routine aspects of dairying like maternal deprivation and slaughter. I can’t imagine why.

(No response.)

***

@Bovida
Replying to @BennyMalone
Farmers care for their cows while they are alive, yes. Obviously dead animals do not have welfare issues.

(Note: Ick, ick, ick. She actually said this. The fact that an animal is killed for profit, even if just to keep costs down because she could not longer be profitably used, means that her welfare, a.k.a. well-being, was gravely disregarded, even if she had remained unviolated up to that point, which she wasn’t.)

@BennyMalone
Replying to @Bovidiva
Slaughtering is part of caring? #Februdairy #Desperate

Me:
Yes @Bovidiva, the "dead animals" the farmers killed. If you've deliberately killed someone in decent health, it's safe to say their "welfare" (state of being or doing well especially in relation to happiness, well-being, or success) was solely contingent on their profitability.

@BennyMalone
Animal agriculture slaughters animals as soon as possible. The younger the better isn’t it, as soon as it is profitable. Wouldn’t make much business sense to keep animals alive longer than necessary for their purposes. So you kill animals as young as possible.

Me replying to @BennyMalone @Bovidiva
Here's a typical example of how much dairy farmers "care" for their animals that I just came across on https://www.facebook.com/MyBeefCheckoff/videos/10156098915044717/ …
David Z: i shipped a dairy cow who wouldnt breed back 2 weeks ago beautiful cow nice and big and got .46 cents a pound.

(No response from Bovidiva)

***

Here's when I get blocked!

In the comments of one of Bovidiva’s Tweets:

@sweetgeorgiab_:
Farmers are not the opposite of vegans. As Paul said, we all need farmers three times a day no matter what diet we're sticking to. Massive thanks to @Southacrefarm #BackBritishFarming

Me:
@sweetgeorgiab_ @Bovidiva
You're conflating animal exploitation with farming. We need farming three times a day, but we don't need animal exploitation at all.

(It was here that @Bovidiva acknowledges me, for the first and last time. She “hearted” my Tweet, meaning apparently she’s pretending that using and killing animals for profit isn’t exploiting them? So she was confused and thought I was pro-dairy?)

@sweetgeorgiab_:
We definitely don't need animal exploitation, you're right 👍

(This person too apparently agreeing that using and killing animals isn’t exploiting them?)

Me:
Using and killing animals for human consumption and profit is exploitation.

...aaaand I'm blocked. As you can see, I did not resort to name-calling whatsoever. Guess the truth hurts.

Singling out hostile responses / vegan trap

So while she ignores and blocks people like me who calmly stick to refuting her points and don’t insult her, Bovidiva instead amplifies vegans calling her, for example, “vile” or a “monster” or a “psychopath” by retweeting them, telling them smugly and condescendingly to “be nice” and eat some cheese. Like clockwork, a chorus of her sympathizers, apparently mostly dairy farmers and fellow industry schills, quickly chime in, offering moral support and reassuring her that vegans do things like “create drama” and “don’t live in the real world.” The impression is that vegans are all mean and angry and clueless and sitting at home on the internet, without knowledge or jobs or lives, but dairy farmers are out there hard at work parasitizing cows and and busting myths. How DO they do it?

News flash: there are always going to be some people who don’t know how to follow “Graham’s Hierarchy of Arguments.” Making a big show out of pointing those people out out so you can become the victim is unnecessary, and simply a diversion from the real victims. But please don't give people like this ammo to work with.

One-sided mischaracterizations  

She Tweeted, “I have been amazed by the intolerance and hate shown by activists opposed to #dairy over the past two weeks. Civilisation is founded upon peaceful co-existence, yet the degree of intolerance towards omnivorous diets has been staggering. Celebrate #februdairy and diversity!”

(Speaking of diversity, 75% of the global population can't digest milk after weaning, which is part of how being a mammal is defined. To those who point this out, she says people who have developed the gene mutation to never ever wean themselves of mothers' milk are "lucky.")

She also retweeted someone claiming:
“I have been threatened exclusively by vegans. No other group. Just vegans.”

Really? Literally just hours earlier, someone had told me to “go eat some meat you c*nt.” Later, I had someone comment in an exchange that they want to kill and eat vegans. I’ve even heard radio hosts say without any repercussion that vegans should collectively be “rid of,” as in exterminated. EXTERMINATED.

Let’s not pretend that intolerance, hate, and threatening doesn’t happen “on both sides.” (Remember: one side is doing the exploiting and killing, and the other is speaking out for those being exploited and killed. Not quite a moral equivalency there.)

Might makes right, it’s ok to subjugate “the other”

When forced to rationalize the fact that farming animals means using and killing them for profit – dairy entails a constant stream of animals slaughtered after being deemed unusable or or used-up based on things like their gender, age, fertility, disabilities, etc., and to keep the herd a manageable and profitable size – she comes up with some real gems.

I can’t find this thread now, but someone had asked her why it’s okay to use and kill cows, and she said something like “Because they are animals, and we are humans.” This sentiment comes up with her again a few times. She retweeted on January 30, “Animals aren't the same as people.”

So because they are different from us, and we have power over them, might makes right. Gee, never seen that kind of mentality before to justify various attrocities throughout history.

She also retweeted someone claiming that animals “can’t reason.” (And she is an “animal scientist?") Of course animals can reason. But even if an individual really can't reason, isn't that even more reason to not take advantage of (and kill) the most vulnerable, who are completely at our mercy?

Hypocritical contradictions / Accusations of being "emotive" 

She mocks vegans for technical errors, retweeting when one posted what they thought was a photo of Bovidiva but wasn’t, as well as another’s malfunctioning gif. Yet she gives dairy supporters who make rampant grammatical errors a free pass.

She retweets that transportation of vegetables is harming the planet (yet research shows that transportation only accounts for 11% of the total emissions produced by a food while 83% are released during production), then later supportively retweets someone who boasts of buying cheese imported from the UK.

Additionally, “emotive” is one of her favorite words. As demonstrated above, to Bovidiva, simply using accurate descriptives like calling a calf a baby animal, is being “emotive.” Yes she omits or glosses over the highly unpalatable aspects of dairying, presumably because of the emotional response she is apparently so intent on suppressing.

Instead she talks constantly of the “care” the animals (who, remember, are all killed) get, doing the very thing she is accusing vegans of. Emoting. So it's okay to have positive emotions about dairy, but not negative ones. 

She even makes an astonishingly amateur, misinformed assumption based on a fundamental lack of the most basic understanding of what veganism is by asking: “surely breast-feeding is non-vegan?” Really? Doctor? Let’s hope she knows better and is just being intentionally obtuse to piss us off. She goes on:

“There’s not doubt that ‘breast is best’ but, for those Mothers unable to produce enough milk (in my case because of cancer treatment), the dairy cow really is the foster mother of the human race.”

Oh my. The foster mother of the human race???!!! Good lord. This is one of the most anthropomorphic, emotive, deeply offensive, and downright creepy rationales for animal use I’ve ever heard. And it’s incredibly hypocritical coming from someone who claims even just calling a calf a “baby” animal is “emotive.”

Projecting that cows are the foster mother of the human race is the epitome of true anthropomorphism, something vegans are often accused of using. Author and activist Karen Davis, PhD (the woman who inspired Ira Glass to stop eating animals) would call this kind of statement “the imposition of humanized traits and behaviors on other animals for purely selfish purposes, forcing them to behave in ways that are pathologic to the animals themselves.” Surely no mother cow would prefer to be a perpetual surrogate wet nurse for strangers of another species rather than nurse and raise her own babies.

I could go on, but I'm so over thinking about this. Her Twitter page actually makes me want to cry (emotively). I just ask my fellow vegans, please do not give her the ammunition she is looking for. Don't name call, just stick to the facts. You will get blocked, but at least you won't get snared in her trap. And please continue to hijack #Februdairy and #ShoutAboutDairy all month long. She is actually helping veganism, by saying things like, “If consumers don’t buy our products—milk, cream, butter, cheese, etc.—we will not have a dairy industry in five to 10 years."

Amen. Let's only hope it goes away sooner, as more former dairy producers like Elmhurst and Oatly suppliers shift to vegan business models. Oat farmer Adam Arnesson believes plant-based innovations can help transition farmers away from livestock and offer better opportunities, and his own experience proves that. In the words of Elmhurst's 82-year-old CEO, whose dairy-turned-nut-milk company is selling twice as many units per week than originally estimated, "It’s about transforming with the times."

Februdairy is scary. The future is vegan.

*Postscript added 2/4/18* - Classic distancing devices

Bovidiva is using all the classic "distancing devices" as described by James Serpell in his book In the Company of Animals: A Study of Human-Animal Relationships (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986) to a T: 

• Detachment

• Concealment

• Misrepresentation

• Shifting the blame

These devices are also described in Jim Mason's fascinating book An Unnatural Order. To briefly summarize, various gross betrayals of trust that are an inevitable aspect of animal production (like maternal deprivation and slaughter) will inevitably cause deep feelings of guilt and remorse for those responsible. So per Serpell, they "have learned to cope with this dilemma using a variety of essentially dishonest techniques." Plus, since many of their betrayals are outsourced and carried out by other business entities, such as the act of slaughter itself, individuals and firms can diffuse the feeling of being responsible for the gross reduction and elimination of another living being.

(It's especially easy for someone like Bovidiva to absolve herself of responsibility, as she is simply an industry shill and not even a dairy farmer. And it's equally convenient for the dairy farmers who are carrying out many of the betrayals directly to be able to defer to someone like Bovidiva as their spokesperson. It's a guilt-distributing match made in heaven!)

As has been long been practiced by herding cultures, Bovidiva and her army of dairy farmers and fellow shills are merely carrying on the grand tradition of perpetuating, in the words of Serpell, "a defensive screen of lies, myths distortions and evasions, the sole purpose of which has been to reconcile or nullify the conflict between economic self-interest, on the one hand, and sympathy and affection on the other." Such a smoke screen has no place in modern society, and it's time to critically question and evolve beyond this ages-old charade.

Further reading:
Tell It Like It Really Is (Response to Februdairy website Tell It Like It Is)
Dairy is scary. The public are waking up to the darkest part of farming (The Guardian)
Milk Hurts (Facebook page)
Mothers Against Dairy - A collection of stories from around the world about Mothers Against Dairy

Even though using animals for human food is the leading cause of many of our planet's most pressing problems – a fact so accepted that more than 15,000 scientists now agree a shift to mostly plant-based diets is an effective step to transition to sustainability – some people still feel the need to attempt to make the astoundingly absurd case that is it actually veganism that is destroying the planet.

The latest journalist to make this claim does so in a January 8th iNews Opinion piece that could easily be satire instead, "Sanctimonious vegans would do well to think about their diet's global impact." 

However ridiculous, lazy articles like this are effective bias confirmation that perpetuate the same defensive rationales slung at vegans time and time again. So let's dig in, shall we?

Sanctimonious Tho

The article sets the tone by starting out with typical do-gooder derogation against vegans and shooting the messengers, because presumably she doesn't like what their message says about her. 

Silly Little Lifestyle Tho

She then trivializes and depoliticizes veganism into a "lifestyle" when it is actually a clear ethical stance against animal exploitation that goes far beyond diet and is an exploding movement focused on justice and fairness.

A Fad Tho

She then mischaracterizes veganism as a "fad" even though the Vegan Society began during World War II not only to address animal rights but also global peace, justice, and food security.

Although there was no word for veganism before then, it was certainly practiced by some people including prominent figures like Amos Bronson Alcott and historically by members of the Rastafari religion. Per author Jim Mason, prominent Roman writers like Ovid, Seneca, Porphyry and Plutarch frequently denounced the killing of animals for food. People didn't like hearing about it then either though, so that aspect of their writing has been largely overlooked.

Clueless Tho

She then disparages all vegans – a massive and diverse group of people from all walks of life including politicians, doctors, scientists, theorists, artists, teachers, pastors, and more – as being collectively "clueless." 

Aggressive Tho

Next we are policed for being too "aggressive."

Death Threats Tho

She then defends a chef who bragged of adding bovine mammary secretions to a vegan's meal who has since resigned due to the backlash. Apart from potential health concerns, the chef's actions were deeply unethical and unfair. Yet the journalist positions the chef as the victim because of apparent death threats, but this too warrants further context.

People, vegan or not, make disingenuous "death threats" in comment threads all the time whenever animals like dogs are harmed. In fact, there is a PETA video in which non-vegans were fooled into thinking they were drinking dog milk, and many people who are presumably dairy drinkers commented that they would want to kill whomever gave them dog milk. Clearly, if people hadn't been indoctrinated into thinking human consumption of cows' milk is somehow normal, many would likely react the same exact way as some vegans do to the idea of being tricked into consuming cows' milk. To most vegans, the concept is no less disgusting and abhorrent. 

This isn't meant to defend vegans making death threats in any way (and please don't ever do that!) but it seems evident that a portion of humans, vegan or not, are inevitably going to do so when certain animals, whether dogs or cows, are mistreated, or when they themselves are hypothetically tricked into the unwanted consumption of their flesh or bodily fluids.

Scandals & Tragedies Tho

All this was before she even gets into the "scandals and tragedies" that "popular vegan crops" are allegedly imposing upon farmers and their families (always with the families) that she claims vegans don't care about. 

But vegans are the sanctimonious ones!

First, what are "vegan crops," and are they unique to vegans? No. Vegan crops are any crops that are grown from the Earth for direct human consumption (as opposed to animal feed). So all fruits, veggies, grains, beans, legumes, nuts, seeds, and fungi that are eaten by vegans and non-vegans alike.

Quinoa and avocados are not vegan dietary requirements, nor are they only consumed by vegans. And any large explosion in demand for any particularly crop cannot be logically attributed to vegans, since we still only compose a tiny minority of the general population.

And that's the difference between vegan food and non-vegan food; everyone can enjoy the former and only non-vegans can enjoy the latter. But only 20% of all agricultural land is used for anything outside of animal agriculture, per UN FAO. Meaning 80% of all ag land is used for either grazing animals or growing their feed crops. Per Our World in Data, the amount of land used for vegan crops (yes, including quinoa and avocados) supplies more calories and protein for the global population than the almost 4-times larger area used for livestock.

But vegan crops are the problem? Mmmkay.

Quinoa Tho

Here's where she trots out the debunked anti-quinoa meme, spawned by a 2013 Guardian article (which was the epitome of sanctimony, by the way, guilting anyone who ate quinoa, especially if they happened to be veg) and several other articles like it that came out that year.

As described in Slate using information from insider sources such as Emma Banks for the Andean Information Network, the anti-quinoa hysteria oversimplifies a very nuanced issue, and "discouraging demand for quinoa could end up hurting producers rather than helping them." Quinoa is also now being grown in many other areas globally, including the US. 

Soy Tho

She then makes the novice mistake of conflating primary consumption of soy with secondary consumption of soy (eating soy-based foods vs. eating soy-fed animals), thereby blaming vegans for the damage specifically caused by non-veganism. This overlooks the basic scientific law of energy transfer in the food chain.

There's nothing inherently environmentally damaging about farming any type of bean, including soybeans. The damage is caused by growing said bean to fatten up tens of billions of farmed animals, because then an unreasonable and unsustainable amount of beans must be grown. The fact is that 85% of the world's soybean crop is used as animal feed (Soyatech). The way to prevent soy over-farming is by eating it directly in the form of vegan soy foods rather than cycling it through animals before consumption, as has been pointed out by WWF and also by Guardian journalist & UN Global 500 Award winner for outstanding environmental achievement George Monbiot.

(There is a tacked-on mention that a "large proportion" of soy goes to farmed animals, but that's the understatement of the year.)

Deforestation Tho

Of course she mentions deforestation when talking about soybeans. Since animal agriculture uses the vast majority of all agricultural land (including for growing feed crops like soybeans), it's no surprise that animal ag is the top driver of deforestation. That's according to Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Union of Concerned Scientists, Florida International University researchers, Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project, and more. To imply that vegans are driving deforestation without mention of its actual top driver, which is the very thing veganism opposes and which is demanded by her own "lifestyle," is unbelievably obtuse.

You almost wonder if she is just writing this article to get people like me to waste their time refuting it. I guess it worked.

Avocados Tho

She then blames vegans for the environmental damage caused by avocados without:

• comparing it to the much greater damage caused by non-vegans due to animal agriculture;

• mentioning that most people who consume avocados are not vegan since vegans compose a small fraction of the population;

• mentioning that a Soil Association organic sticker means that an independent body has verified the practices of the farm that grew the avocado; or

• mentioning the enormous potential for more sustainable avocado farming to meet growing demand..
  
  To elaborate on the latter, according to Vogue,

In Peru, the World Bank identified areas in which the Hass avocado would grow well, and embarked on a long-term project to educate communities on sustainable avocado farming, while also offering them financial support to set up their farms. The Dominican Republic has a huge potential for increased avocado production, and the avocado (although not always the Hass variety) grows very easily in its high tropical fields. Spain’s avocado production is small, but the government is beginning to see the value of investing in it; while Israeli avocados are grown with exemplary practice.

While avocados can be grown sustainably, animal agriculture can never be sustainable due to its extravagantly high land requirements and material cost. It can also never be ethical to exploit and slaughter other sentient individuals when it can be avoided.

Farmers Toiling for the Rich Tho

She then laments the toils of farmers without mentioning:

• Most crops grown and harvested are actually fed to farmed animals.

• Vegan-run food justice organizations like Food Empowerment Project spotlight injustices like unfair working conditions for produce workers and the unavailability of healthy foods in communities of color and low-income areas, and are working to make a difference.

• Speaking of feeding the rich, per The Economist, "The desires of rich carnivores often trump the needs of poorer cereal consumers." Per a Chemical & Engineering News 2015 cover story: “A switch to plant proteins by those who can afford meat would go a long way to feeding the growing global population while using fewer of the planet’s resources.” 1999 research found that the majority of the global population eats a plant-based diet due to resource scarcity.

• Slaughterhouse workers (including not only the ones doing the killing but jobs like slaughterhouse sanitation workers) have the most physically dangerous factory job in the US and one of the most deeply psychologically damaging jobs in the world. In fact, the entire slaughter process is so disturbing it's masked from the public and is not considered a palatable topic for polite society.

Inconvenient Facts Tho

She then has the gall to end the piece by saying vegans are the ones who neglect to bring up "inconvenient facts," and goads us by asking us to refrain from making death threats to anti-vegans, and to love them too since humans are also animals.

The fact that this article was even published, let alone that it was written by someone who was awarded the Broadsheet Columnist of the Year at the 2017 Press Awards, is astounding. She is actually doing exactly what she is accusing vegans of: being sanctimonious and putting little if no thought into her own diet's global impact; a far greater impact, yet one she completely omits. 

Oh, and when she Tweeted out this article, she called vegans "thoughtless."

This article has earned the distinction of being the worst inflammatory anti-vegan article of 2018 so far, written by a person who seems very deeply uncomfortable with her own complicity in animal exploitation and the inherent unsustainability of the animal slaughter industry. To spread such damaging myths and lies at this time in history when a plant-based shift is so urgently needed is beyond thoughtless; it's downright unethical.

Although vegans love pointing out that animal consciousness and sentience are scientifically confirmed, most vegans remain unwilling to conflate physiological plant perception (the ability of plants to sense and adjust to their environment) with paranormal plant perception (the idea that plants are sentient and experience pain and fear). How convenient for them!

Non-vegans, however, are much more open-minded in this department. It is not uncommon – and in fact something would be remiss – if we didn’t see comments like these on pro-vegan social media posts:

• "Plants are live creatures and they are cruelly killed for vegans pleasure and consumption. :-p"

• “The fact remains the same for me, you, and anyone else to live something must die whether it's an animal or plant it all the same.”

• “That lettuce, it had a brother.”

• "Plants feel pain, vegans are monsters."

• “Plants have feelings too!”

Often infuriated by such statements, many vegans predictably reply that plant sentience is regarded as pseudoscience, or that animal agriculture actually dramatically increases the amount of plants “killed” for food. They may even imply that the concern is disingenuous, asking why it's only brought up in an anti-vegan context and not, say, in response to dog or wildlife rescue, or when firefighters save pets but leave behind houseplants.

Enough! 

It’s time for my fellow vegans to stop being so obtuse, open their eyes, and face the truth of their choices: there is really no difference between eating plants and animals.

Here's clear photographic proof that every vegan needs to see immediately. Vegans, I hope you will be brave and accept the truth (wink wink).

1 - Here is a potato manure lagoon where the potato poop and other potato bodily waste is kept before being sprayed over nearby fields, often wafting over low-income communities and causing horrible smells and health problems. 

Although this is a potato feedlot "factory farm," small local potatoes also produce unmanageable amounts of waste, often also disposed of in a questionable manner.

2 - Here is typical equipment used to restrain, stun, kill, and split bananas (humanely, of course).

3 - Here we have the lethal foam used to suffocate and kill masses of broccoli after yet another outbreak of broccoli flu.

4 - These are the macerators used to grind the newborn male baby peanuts alive shortly after hatching from their shells at the peanut hatchery, because sadly vegans have no use for male peanuts. This is called male peanut baby culling.

Although many vegans want to believe this practice is only done to supply peanut "factory farms," they're once again delusional. Nellie's Free Range Peanuts and even backyard peanut supplier My Pet Peanut confirms male peanut baby culling is an unfortunate but unavoidable aspect of peanut hatching, both referring to the unwanted male peanuts as "humanely euthanized." (How can you "euthanize" a perfectly healthy baby peanut just for being born the wrong gender! And vegans, how can you still enjoy your backyard free range peanut butter bagels for breakfast in peace knowing this?)

5 - Below are the hutches commonly used to keep the baby almonds away from their lactating mama almonds, who recently gave birth to them, so more of the mama almonds’ milk can be sold to selfish vegans.

Again, although vegans insist this is only done on factory farms, total maternal deprivation (or more rarely and at "best," severe restriction) of mama and baby almonds is an intractable, routine aspect of commercial almond milk farming (amongst other horrors) and is practiced widely throughout the Western hemisphere, so much so that ending it would mean no more almond milk farming. The USDA says that 90% of baby dairy almonds are removed from their mothers within 24 hours after birth (almond umbilical cord often still attached). Think about this next time you heartless hipsters buy your almond milk or almond ice cream, cheese or yogurt.

6 - Witness these thirsty Brussels sprouts packed in a truck en route to a Brussels sprouts slaughterhouse being given water by compassionate plants rights activists, despite often being screamed at and threatened and even sued by the heartless vegans surrounding them.

Toronto Brussels Sprouts Save gives H2O, love, & melons to suffering sprouts in transport trucks during July's heat wave. Brussels sprouts are denied food and water for several hours before slaughter, otherwise things "get messy."

7 - Many predator animals like wolves and bears are ruthlessly killed just because they pose a threat to garbanzo beans grown on public land. Terrified wild horses are rounded up into captivity, their families torn apart, because they compete for water with kale.

In fact, published scientific research is saying garbanzo bean and kale farming is "likely the number one cause of species extinction."

8 - The leading cause of rainforest destruction is apple ranching; specifically the clearing of trees to graze the apples and grow their feed crops.

In fact, researchers have found that the only way to guarantee enough food by 2050 without another tree being felled is if vegans give up eating apples. Guess veganism is not as good for humanity as people think!

Regarding deforestation for soybeans, the soybean industry itself says "Apple agriculture is a soybean farmer’s #1 customer." They state, "The apple industry is the the largest consumer of soy meal. In fact, 98 percent of U.S. soy meal goes to feed hungry apples and similar fruits like pears and peaches." So think of this next time a vegan tries to claim most soybeans are actually being used to feed livestock. We all know fruitstock needs to eat, too. 

9 - One-third of fish caught in the world's oceans is ground up to feed falafel wraps, a potential problem for marine ecosystems and a waste of a resource that could directly nourish humans, scientists claim.

Because of the vegans' insatiable appetite for falafel, salt water fish extinction by 2048 is being predicted by scientists. And because vegans will only eat falafel that will only eat certain types of fish, 40 to 60% of fish get discarded at sea after being caught.

10 - Eighty percent of antibiotics in the US are preventatively administered to pasta. The antibiotics used to promote growth and prevent disease in spaghetti, ziti, rotini and more are a major threat to biosecurity and called a "global health crises" by the World Health Organization. 

11 - There is no difference between the efficiency of farming plants and animals. The most cursory look at trophic levels should make this obvious. Whether you're a primary consumer or a secondary consumer of plants, it's all the same. Life feeds on life.

When it comes to eating plants or animals, rest assured there is also absolutely no difference between the climate impacts, exacerbation of world hunger, amount of freshwater consumption, or any other environmental ill related to our food choices. So stop being all sanctimonious and holier than thou while forcing your beliefs and get off your high horseradish.

12 - Despite the fact that carrots are considered the most intelligent of farmed vegetables, "thumping" is considered a "humane" way to kill sick or otherwise unusable baby carrots. This is when they are killed by being grabbed by their hind legs and slammed against the floor.

13 - Farmed seaweed is escaping into the ocean and mixing in with wild seaweed, creating fears that interbreeding will create some kind of mad mutant seaweed species. 

Speaking of farmed seaweed, they are vaccinated as a baby weed to survive the diseases that race through these seaweed feedlots, dosed with antibiotics to ward off infection or fed pesticides to shed a beard of bloodsucking sea lice. 

14 - If people stop eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, they will take over the world. Either that, or they'll go extinct. I'm not sure how both are possible, but they just are. Trust me on this one, vegans. 

15 - Lastly, here is a photo of a slaughterhouse floor after the soys are humanely killed. If this makes you feel sick, vegans, how can you cheerfully eat the results? 

Still thinking this is humane? If you can't even bear the aftermath, it's time to think long and hard about the choices you're making as a vegan or anyone for that matter who is eating helpless plants that have feelings. 

Some more food for thought from famous plants rights activists in history – please think long and hard, vegans!:

• "Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an plants rights activist. Plants and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it."
  ― Dick Gregory
  

• “Asparagus are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.”
  ― George Bernard Shaw
  

• “You can judge a man's true character by the way he treats his fellow cashews.” 
  ― Paul McCartney

• “A man can live and be healthy without killing cauliflower for food; therefore, if he eats it, he participates in taking cruciferous life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.”
  ― Leo Tolstoy
  

• "People don't think about how these vegan pizzas we call dinner have these same kinds of personalities [as our dogs and cats.]
  ― Emily Deschanel
  

• “Now I can look at a grain of rice in peace; I don't eat you any more.”
  ― Franz Kafka
  

• “People often say that humans have always eaten Portobello mushrooms, as if this is a justification for continuing the practice. According to this logic, we should not try to prevent people from murdering other people, since this has also been done since the earliest of times.”
  ― Isaac Bashevis Singer
  

• "Every day I have the choice to live a life of compassion that not only saves onions, but helps the environment."
  ― Kat Von D
  

• “You have just dined, and however scrupulously the vegan burrito slaughter is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”
  ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
  

• “You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the apple and plays with the rabbit, I'll buy you a new car.”
  ― Harvey Diamond
  

• 'As long as there are strawberry slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields.'
  ― Leo Tolstoy
  

• If you're violent to yourself by putting parsley in your body that violates its spirit, it will be difficult not to perpetuate that [violence] onto someone else."
  ― Dexter Scott King

Vegans, please swallow your pride and share the truth. And if you're ready to start being honest for once about the clear moral equivalency between eating plants and animals, please share your thoughts below.

Note: Thought it would go without saying but yes, this is SATIRE.

Further reading: Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us - No, Really.

Asheville, NC

Writer/activist Ashley Capps

Chicago, IL

Photo posted by Robert Grillo of Free From Harm

London

Nerys Auger

Fort Worth, TX

Griselda Div

Raleigh, NC

Chalking by Tracy Rene Curtis, Andrea Kiefer, and Kathy McManus Martin, photo by James DeAlto, all with Vegans for Peace

Raleigh, NC

Al-Nisa Berry with Vegans for Peace, photo by Mary Kay

Raleigh, NC

Andrea Kiefer, (co-founder), Tracy Rene Curtis, and Mary Kay with Vegans for Peace

Raleigh, NC

Vegans for Peace

Raleigh, NC

Tracy Rene Curtis with Vegans for Peace

Raleigh, NC

James DeAlto, co-founder of Vegans for Peace

Los Angeles, CA

Stephanie Gray Winnard and her son

San Diego, CA

Berenice Weber

San Diego, CA

Ellen Ericksen (second from left) and Berenice Weber (second from right)

Los Angeles, CA

Dani Rukin

Los Angeles, CA

Dani Rukin

Unknown

Uknown

Uknown

Seattle, WA

Shelby Reeves

Washington, DC

Posted on Reddit: "She's holding two signs: one with a photo of a pig in a gestation crate with the text "She spends her entire life pregnant and in a cage... We represent all abused women." The other sign that she's displaying next to it says "Ask me how you can be a better feminist."

Washington, DC

Chattavegan

Kona, HI

Willow Roback

Sacramento, CA

Heather Hanks

Hartford, CT

Photo by Phyllis Meredith

Cleveland, OH

Photo by Steph H.

Sarasota, FL

Photo posted by Meat Free Mafia

Helena, MT

Bonnie Goodman

Washington, DC

Sara Andrews & Johnna Williams

Portland, OR

Warren

Unknown

Vegan Feminist Network

The below are embedded directly from Instagram or Twitter:

Kelly couldn't stop chanting long enough for a photo. #AnimalRights #Veganuary @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/UPHaMcfkBV

— Jacy Reese (@jacyreese) January 21, 2017

These feminists make the connection. #theirMILKnotours #theirBABIESnotours #theirBODIESnotours #govegan #stoptheviolence #veganfeminist #feminism #womensmarch #womensmarchonwashington #notyourmomnotyourmilk #trump #president #washingtondc #activism #ashleyjudd #scarlettjohansson #madonna #loveallbeings

See this Instagram photo by @flying_kimmyb * 58 likes

What can I say about this women. She is brave, sassy, fun, intelligent, compassionate and a badass activist who NEVER STOPS fighting and campaigning for animal and women's rights. I had the honour of campaigning alongside her in Taiji, Japan as @coveguardians #Repost @simonereyes with @repostapp ・・・ #womensmarchonwashington #womensmarch #feminismisnotdead #veganfeminist #feminist #yesallwomen #fucktrump #girls #women #ladies #females #loveforall #equality #fuckthepatriarchy

See this Instagram photo by @geojpeg87 * 39 likes

#feminismosalvavidas #feministpunk #feminismorevolucionario #pinkcap #veganfeminist #womenrights

See this Instagram photo by @silvana_mello * 32 likes

#VegNews marched today for all women, including women of color, trans women, queer women, undocumented women, Muslim women, disabled women, and the like. And of course, it was great to see folks' intersectionality extend to the animals, too ✊️🚺🌱 #womensmarch #vegan #veganism #plantbased #vegansofinstagram #vegansofig

See this Instagram photo by @vegnews * 8,560 likes

DEMAND FREEDOM AND EQUALITY FOR ALL WOMEN HUMAN AND NONHUMAN. The issue of animal rights is a feminist issue. To fight for human women and ignore the atrocities of cow mothers, pig and chicken mothers who are raped, enslaved, torn from their babies and slaughtered is a disservice to feminism. Many have yet to make the connection, and many more are every day. I had some really lovely conversations with (mostly older) women of this small town and many were very interested to learn more. I had to remind them, "It may sound radical, but so did women's suffrage, civil rights, marriage equality. I'll be happy to sound radical until animal rights are mainstream. It is coming!" Mahalo to all the kind spirits of Pinedale for welcoming me, for lunch, and for new connections!!! #thisiswhyimarch #pinedale #standeithstandingrock #mniwiconi #waterislife #feminism #veganfeminist #intersectionality #cleanwater #womb #wombyn #wombynmagik #aquarian #waterbearer #womensmarch2017 #notmypresident #vegan

See this Instagram photo by @bigislandyogatherapy * 77 likes

For the march with @lisaorkingram and @apelila7 tomorrow 💪🏼✌🏼#womensmarch #womensrightsarehumanrights #veganfeminist #ifyousexistmeiwillfeministyou #befierce

See this Instagram photo by @jackyrita * 34 likes

Just created a poster for tomorrow's #WomensMarch ✌❤ time to end all oppression against women. ♀ There is too much hate in this world already. We must be the change, we must stand together and help each other! When the patriarchy tries to bring us down- we shall rise, together. May we continue to support, love and lift each other up. No matter our differences, gender, race, nationality, sexual preference, species, age, abilities, health, religion etc... no one is truly free until all are free 💞💞💞💞💞💞☄

See this Instagram photo by @veganmagick * 136 likes

My hope is that everyone marching today, as well as those who could not, or did not want to join, believe in their signs and chants and will keep fighting and making a difference. No one should feel like they did their civic duty because they joined one march and don't have to do more. There's a lot more work to do. (I also found the sign that I should have made).

See this Instagram photo by @emwiththehyphen * 197 likes

* "No one is truly free while others are oppressed." -unknown

See this Instagram video by @jocelyn.cole * 46 likes

The above is a video that can be viewed here (Jocelyn Cole at the Portland march)

And below are some memes that connect feminism and/or other forms of social justice to veganism.

Yesterday made me so proud on some levels, but so deeply frustrated and confused on others. "The entire animal industry is built on the exploitation of the female reproductive system." It exists "solely by doing to millions of defenseless females the worst thing anyone can do to a mother." This is not being melodramatic, this is literally how it works. How can we expect to be heard if we won't listen to their cries? <3 http://gentleworld.org/to-be-a-feminist-is-to-be-a-vegan/ #womensmarch #whyimarch #govegan

See this Instagram photo by @brainonhugs * 205 likes

#Repost @simonereyes with @repostapp ・・・ Make the connection #womensmarchonwashington #vegan #animalrights #animalrightsactivist #feminist #veganfeminist #feminism

See this Instagram photo by @samrose227 * 15 likes

If you're not making the connection, then you're contributing to the larger problem at hand- the belief that any sentient being is more worthy and some can be used and abused as someone's property. Being a #mother made it so much easier for me to make the switch to #veganism. Imagine all those babies being taken away from their crying mothers. As a multiple #rapesurvivor, I feel for those poor grieving mama cows who have not only had their baby taken away but are constantly raped and tortured until they are killed when they are deemed useless for #dairy. #maketheconnection #weareone #feminism #veganfeminist Every sentient being has the right to be free. #freedomforall 💃🏻🕉🐄 Repost @guidingvegan 🙌🏽💖✊🏽 ・・・ Animal agriculture only exists because the female species is exploited. The only reason there is cow milk, eggs, bacon, burgers, etc is because the female reproductive system is used. These animals are raped, tortured and eventually murdered so you can have a latte or eat some eggs with your toast. You cannot be a feminist and eat animals. You cannot be an environmentalist and eat animals. You cannot be for peace and eat animals. Pic #rg @onepeachyvegan ✌🏼❤🌱#vegan #feminist #environmentalist #animals #rights #animalrights #female #exploitation #wakeup #education #educateyourself #womensmarch #dosomething #bethechange #openyoureyes #makeadifference #animalliberation #knowbetterdobetter #notyourmomnotyourmilk

See this Instagram photo by @awakethetribe * 41 likes

Please ladies and also men and anyone in between if you honesty call yourself a feminist and believe in equal rights include those who don't have a voice, those who can't speak up for themselves. #veganfeminist #animalliberation

See this Instagram photo by @natalyk_ * 24 likes

Daaaaayummmmm. #shotsfired #vegan #veganfeminist

See this Instagram photo by @canna.yogi * 16 likes

I love you all for marching, for shining, for resisting and for simply being. Today and every day. Get fucking radical and embrace the full intersectionality of feminism. Animal rights is a feminist issue. Come on, I know you all can do it. You are the most amazing! ❤💫🌈#whyimarch #vegansofig #intersectionalfeminism #intersectionality #notyourmomnotyourmilk #feminist #veganfeminist #friendsnotfood

See this Instagram photo by @meaghananne * 22 likes

A spot of vegan feminist bedtime reading 📖 Goodnight! 😴 #vegan #vegangirl #reading #bedtime #bedtimereading #feminist #veganfeminist #sexualpolitics #openyourmind #knowledgeispower #educateyourself #goodnight #bethechange #openyoureyes #vegansofinstagram #vegansofig #bethechange #betheirvoice #sexism #upnorth #yorkshire #intersectionality

See this Instagram photo by @rehanajomeen * 68 likes

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, formerly known as the American Dietetic Association, are the largest organization of health and nutrition professionals in the world. Although many people don’t realize this, they have maintained since 2009 that vegan diets are healthful and appropriate for all.

Now, they have updated their position, and vegans might not like it very much…

They’ll love it!

In addition to the many previously noted health benefits, the organization has now updated their position to add the dramatic ecological benefits of a vegan diet, stating:

“Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage.”

Not just less environmental damage, much less. 

(Maybe in their next update, they’ll include the fact that vegan diets are also beneficial to the trillions of land and sea animals either bred or removed from their habitats annually and globally specifically to be exploited and slaughtered by humans - but, hey, we'll take this for now!)

The AND’s international counterparts actually have similar positions stating that vegan diets are appropriate for humanity. These groups include:

Dietitians of Canada
The British National Health Service
The British Nutrition Foundation
The Dietitians Association of Australia

Other organizations with similar positions that vegan diets are appropriate for human beings include:

The United States Department of Agriculture
The National Health and Medical Research Council
The Mayo Clinic
The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada
Harvard Medical School
Kaiser Permanente

(Those not hyperlinked above have all been painstakingly summarized and hyperlinked here.)

This professional consensus flies in the face of the antiquated belief that, regardless of access to other options, human diets must include the flesh and reproductive secretions of our finned, feathered, or furry friends in order to meet our nutritional needs and allow us to thrive.

In fact, with multiple professional athletes including Olympians having adopted plant-based diets with flying colors, the only people who still seem to claim vegan diets aren’t healthy enough are those with personal and/or vested interests in continuing the animal-based status quo, your Uncle Bill at the last family holiday, or your run of the mill internet troll.

So why continue to insist on animal exploitation and slaughter when there are readily available alternatives?

No, really, why?

The abstract of the AND’s updated position is below and also linked here, and the full paper is here. 

It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes. Plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable than diets rich in animal products because they use fewer natural resources and are associated with much less environmental damage. Vegetarians and vegans are at reduced risk of certain health conditions, including ischemic heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, certain types of cancer, and obesity. Low intake of saturated fat and high intakes of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, soy products, nuts, and seeds (all rich in fiber and phytochemicals) are characteristics of vegetarian and vegan diets that produce lower total and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels and better serum glucose control. These factors contribute to reduction of chronic disease. Vegans need reliable sources of vitamin B-12, such as fortified foods or supplements.

Inching closer to joining the vegan fold? Still don't understand how animals are harmed in egg and dairy production, or have other questions? Learn more at Why Veganism. <3

These days, most people have a vegan in their life, and chances are they have something to say about the typical main course on Thanksgiving Day.

It might go something like this: turkeys are someone, not something, and they want to live.

Despite being completely true, this might not move you one bit. But upon further investigation, I've discovered some freaky sh*t that should make even the most desensitized omnivore think twice. 

It turns out that even a free-range organic turkey purchased from a small local family farm typically fits the following description:

• is a 5-month old mutant baby who probably never met his or her mother or father

• was conceived by a mother and father who never touched each other

• is the product of a human physically ejaculating a restrained male turkey with the desired traits and then forcing the sperm into a restrained female turkey's genitals (not kidding)

• was intentionally orphaned, having hatched from a resulting egg that was removed and placed in an energy-intensive artificial incubator

• was then quickly fattened up with corn and soy, only half of which was converted to edible calories despite widespread global hunger, and the rest of the calories became pollutants

• was then slaughtered via methods that normal people don’t talk about, ask about, or watch – they just eat the results and give "thanks."

Before I get into those details, let's start with a story from earlier this year, shall we?

It's 2:30am on a hot July night and I can't sleep. Because 7,000 baby animals in my area just died, and the whole community is upset and offering condolences for this tragedy.

Worse yet, these babies were all denied a mother, from the moment their eyes opened to see their strange and confusing living conditions until they closed them while gasping for their last breath.

Add that to the fact they were intentionally brought into the world by humans specifically to die. As babies.

But the real rub is that this tragedy was entirely unnecessary and avoidable.

The above real-life scenario describes the following:

1. An accidental barn fire that took the lives of 7,000 turkey poults (babies).

2. Exactly what was scheduled to intentionally happen 5 months later anyway.

3. Both of the above.

If you selected both of the above, you're correct! These two scenarios as described had the same exact instigating factors – thousands of birds were artificially incubated into existence without mothers and were therefore huddled together in a barn for warmth and socialization – and the same exact ultimate outcome resulted - they all perished.

It’s just that they weren't supposed to perish until they were killed intentionally by people, all while still babies.

The community expresses condolences about the former scenario, yet collectively ignores the latter. One they "mourn," the other they celebrate. This doesn't actually make sense. And for that reason, "the trolls come out of the woodwork."

The trolls speak.

When I visited the Facebook page of this local turkey farm, I found out I empathize with many of those being called “internet trolls” and so much worse. It was even confirmed by a local newspaper article with the sub-headline, “The blaze devastated a Lancaster family farm, and now the internet trolls are coming.”

Why have they been classified in this way? Because they expressed the glaring contradiction described above, along with sympathy that these people are needlessly suffering after having lost part of their livelihood - while at the same time gently pointing out how they can now transition to an equally successful livelihood. Those who respectfully and calmly engaged other adults in important, relevant facts and questions they simply could not or would not answer were inevitably lumped in with those who made their point less thoughtfully.

People are very, very confused.

We love animals. Or at least we don't want to see them hurt.

But to eat them, we've gotta pay people to do stuff to them we wouldn't really want to do ourselves. Unless we specifically like to kill and dismantle them like a piece of IKEA furniture.

And yet... We don't have to eat them in the first place.

Which would remove the false sense of need to kill and dismantle them.

Being told of this, apparently, makes some people's brains explode with rage – not at themselves for having had them killed anyway this whole time, but at the person telling them this.

It's what some poet dude once called "shooting the messenger."

“The negative comments and cruelty [from vegans] are not welcomed and we are heartbroken that we even have to address things like this,” the turkey farm in question posted, as reported by CBS news. “These animals are not just how we pay the bills- they are our passion and to suggest anything else is just ignorant.”

Hang on a sec. To suggest that the birds you forcibly kill, behead, and shove into crates as 5-month-old plastic-wrapped carcasses are anything but your passion – and to dare ask why you're upset they accidentally died before you could intentionally kill them yourself – is ignorant and cruel? We should zip our lips unless we're unquestioningly shoving their lifeless baby bodies down our throats? Your heart is figuratively breaking so much as to have to address why you literally take a knife and intentionally stop their baby hearts from beating?

Legitimate questions, but CBS local felt uncompelled to explore such a perspective, stopping at that of the farmers'.

Many commenters said that these were cute babies and they felt bad they had died and were sorry for the farmers. I reminded one such person that it was July, and these babies were scheduled by the farmers who bred them to die in five months in November for Thanksgiving (and their natural lifespan would be up to twelve years), so the plan was always for them to die as babies. That is precisely why they were even bred into existence. Pretty airtight logic, right? I think I was told to f*ck off. 

The message of this particular post that summoned the vegan “trolls” was that it's wrong to critically discuss why 7,000 birds were in one barn in the first place – because they were in fact huddled together for warmth and socialization.

Ah. Well that explains it! Now I can eat turkeys without guilt and tell those vegans to shut up.

But as with all justifications made by farmers of so-called livestock, this explanation is only addressing the tip of the ethical iceberg. It sounds reassuring if you just leave it at that, but you have to play the "why" game – you know, when one clarifying question compounds after the next – to learn what's under the surface and outside of our collective awareness.

And the final answer is always the same.

Let's try it.

Why are a bunch of babies huddled together into a barn for warmth and socialization, like this?

Because they don't have mothers, and if they did they would be huddled under their mothers' wings instead, and she would teach them how to be a turkey. Like this:

Wait, why don't they have mothers?
Because they are selectively bred for the traits people want, and artificially incubated into existence. 

Weird. Why were they artificially incubated?
Because it's exponentially more convenient to breed turkeys and chickens this way when you want to breed a remotely profitable amount of turkeys or chickens. The natural way is more time consuming and unreliable, and often even physically impossible.

Er, so how did the parents procreate then?
Although some farmed turkeys physically mate if reared on an extremely small or backyard farms, it’s highly likely that the parents of the "all-natural" turkey on your table never touched each other. As this Discovery Channel narrator for the show "How Stuff Works" notes, the males “have gotten” so big with such big breasts and short legs (as if people had nothing to do with that) that they can’t physically mate. 

“Sperm wranglers harvest turkey semen manually!” the Discovery host says cheerfully. “The process is called “milking!” Listverse elaborates under their “engrossing” (more like f*cking gross) facts about turkeys that jerking off a tom takes the person tasked with such a thing no more than two minutes and “four strokes of the cloaca.” The hens are then “inseminated by automated injection,” which occurs “on a weekly basis” until it sticks. The semen from one “breeder” male is used to inseminate up to 60 hens.

This is not even an animal rights video, it's presented as educational. It clearly shows both males and females being restrained by both of their legs as they are violated by human beings. 

Oh, and then the resulting eggs are removed from mom and put in an incubator. Bye?

Who will teach them to be a turkey if they don’t have a mom?
No one, and people will call them "stupid" as a result.

But how will they take care of themselves?
The farmers will do what it takes to collectively get them all to five months or so. They'll just be in this barn and then, in this particular farm, they'll have access to outside for a few months in a confined area, and then they'll all be slaughtered.

Their wild counterparts are not subject to such bizarre treatment at human hands, and live much different, fuller lives. They have family units and strong bonds. Declares University of Florida Habitat Tracker, the females are very protective of their young. When there is danger, the baby turkeys will hide and freeze, expertly performing the mannequin challenge in the brush. Rather than abandoning her babies to save herself, the mother hen will often fake an injury to distract the potential predator, bravely risking it all to protect her precious young.

See it for yourself:

Wait. It's July [which is when the barn fire occurred and when I wrote much of this article], and Thanksgiving is in November. You're saying these adorable yellow fluffy babies are going to be killed in just 5 months? Won't they still be babies?
Yes. They will still basically be babies in age, but they won't look like babies because they'll have been fattened up on lots of grain, corn, and/or soy and were bred to grow unnaturally. They will be killed before they've even reached sexual maturity, as the females aren't capable of reproducing until about seven months. They're babies.

Here's the final answer to the why game that's always the same:

Why do any of this at all?
So we can kill them and eat their carcasses for pleasure when we could instead get sustenance from plants, including foods made from the very same plants we inefficiently feed these animals instead. 

Here’s where the cognitive dissonance in these conversations kicks in.

Ok. It's sad that they have to kill them, but not everyone can be vegan, so at least they're not factory farmers, right?
Although we've all been scared into believing otherwise, the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professional has the official position that vegan diets are healthful and appropriate for individuals in all stages of life. So barring any relevant health issues, anyone with full access to and autonomy over their food choices can make vegan choices as far as is practical and possible.

But not everyone wants to be vegan.
Well if you don't want to be vegan even though you could be, you have to specifically want animals to be needlessly violated and harmed on your behalf. It’s not really coherent to not want animals harmed but still have them harmed because you wanted to eat them, but you don't want to harm them…

Don't these farmers have no choice? They wouldn't be able to grow vegetables all year in New England and other areas.
We currently have the following available to us at a small local farmers’ market in the dead of winter in New England, with much more at other times of the year: Brussels sprouts, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celeriac, garlic, gourds, kale, leeks, onions, salad greens, shallots, turnips, and winter squash, plus sourdough bread from a local bakery. 

Turkey farmers are essentially converting grain, corn and/or soybeans (which may be grown and processed locally or shipped in from elsewhere) into turkey meat, but wasting half of it in the process. This is because turkeys have a feed conversion ratio (or FCR; the ratio of the amount of feed eaten to body weight gain) of about 2:1. So in terms of the yield of food that could have been produced, one pile of turkey meat is equivalent to a much larger pile of nutritious plant-based crops exactly twice its size. The waste is built in. Per Scientific American, the massive amount of corn fed to farmed animals suffers major losses of calories and protein along the way. “What this all means is that little of the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math.” (And then on top of that, in the process, massive amounts of waste and runoff are produced, a whole other topic.)

To further drive home this point, one blogger trying to justify consuming a turkey on Thanksgiving raised in the “best” of circumstances discovered that the small farm she was considering grow their own corn and soybeans and feed 1,800 tons of it to the turkeys weekly. She ponders: “Using farm land to grow only two types of crops for the sole purpose to feed animals. hmmm. That doesn’t sound like sustainable, responsible farming, does it?” 

But this is what the farmers know. It's a tradition.
Change is hard, but many former animal farmers have transitioned to a plant-based business model and are doing great! One example is Soledad Goats, former award-winning goat cheese makers who changed the farm over to a vegan sanctuary where the animals live out their natural lifespan instead of being exploited and then sent to slaughter, and now the owners make and sell a successful line of delicious vegan cheese made with all natural, non-GMO, and plant-based ingredients.

And many other people have gone from farming animals to saving them. It's never too late to start a new, even better tradition that doesn't involve, I don't know, say, slaughtering innocent baby mutants. There's lots of support and incentive to diversify to plant-based foods, as even investors who manage over a trillion dollars have formally asked food companies to do, and the plant-based market is exploding so the customer base is there.

This is how animal farming works. You may be against eating meat or farming animals, but not everyone is.
If you're against things like selectively breeding animals, denying them a mother, and/or killing them as babies, you're against farming birds and other animals for their meat.

(And if you're against killing male babies because they won't lay eggs and then killing the females once their bodies give out, then you're also against farming birds for their eggs. And if you are against separating newborn babies from mothers or severely restricting their nursing before killing them as babies, adolescents, or exhausted mothers still a fraction into their natural lifespan, you’re against farming cows for their milk).

Yes, the process will vary slightly on some farms, for example, "heritage" breed turkeys may physically mate and may be fattened up for several additional weeks before being slaughtered. Yet the outcome is always the same. 

If you reframe it as being "how farming works" and insist you're not against farming animals, yet you admit you're against the actual process of farming them, you're performing some pretty hardcore mental gymnastics in order to make your actions appear to match your values when they don't.

These are not just vegan values, they're apparently yours too. The only difference is that vegans are acting on them.

What if every year when these turkeys were slaughtered, it made the news? What if people asked how they were slaughtered? How old they were? Where their mothers were? What if people asked if the turkey they were eating was a male or female? What her morning and evening routine was? Where she slept at night? Whether she dreamed? Whether she had a best friend? 

The problem is not this particular farm or farmers (although they allegedly resisted regulations to install sprinklers and weren't insured.) The problem is the violent paradigm we've all been conditioned to believe is “just the way things are” or must be.

We are mostly nice and compassionate people. But we believe a paradoxical absurdity: That we must manipulate and repurpose the very existence of certain other complex, sensitive individuals because our acquired tastes, habits and traditions (which can all easily be changed with a bit of gumption) trump all else. Including the very lives of other sentient beings – the ones we instinctively feel so bad for when they die before we can them first.

Kill them to "give thanks." Or hell, just for a sandwich on a regular day.

These farmers are being lionized and held up as pillars of the community who are currently rallying around them, and a GoFundMe has been started which I have no doubt will be funded. They will rebuild their barn and next year, 7,000 more confused motherless babies will be fattened up and slaughtered five months later. (See update at end of the article.)

And the same will happen the next year, and the next, until these beloved farmers retire.

It's truly dumbfounding to see so many people express sympathy and compassion for dead birds they were going to pay to have killed, and then channel their disdain toward vegans reacting to this. They are saying that killing healthy young animals is showing them kindness, love, and care, while merely suggesting not killing them is hateful and negative. Is this the Twilight Zone?

"We spend day in and day out feeding, watering, nurturing and growing these animals [specifically in order to kill them] and to say we are jolted by the loss of so many lives is not enough," a turkey farmer told a journalist. The posted on their GoFundMe, “we grieve all of the lives that were lost in this tragedy.” Another article mentions they are "mourning the loss of their animals."

What's truly jolting is the astounding level of cognitive dissonance required for them to say this, to omit their true slaughterous intention maybe even to themselves, and for those around them to go along with the charade. Why don't they also "mourn" and "grieve" the loss of the lives they kill themselves? Anyone daring to challenge this illogical disconnect is dismissed or even straight-up censored. Yep, they blocked and deleted me. 

These animals trust us, and we betray them. And we can’t admit this, because it goes against our very humanity. 

A sign.

As I drove to an appointment that morning, to my amazement, from my vantage point on the highway in a large nearby field I spotted two wild turkeys. A female appeared to be grazing while a male stood proudly and protectively by her, or maybe just courting her, feathers out in an amazingly beautiful and downright magical display. 

Yes. These creatures are majestic. They had mothers that taught them how to be badass turkeys under a wide open sky. They are living under their own terms a hopefully long and full life, although likely difficult and cruel at times but also blissful at others. In a world full of people hell bent on ensuring their death – along with natural predators who try to do so for survival rather than gluttony – they are wildly, boldly, brazenly free. Isn't that what we all want?

At that moment, I decided this here internet troll owed it to them and everyone else covered in feathers, fur or fins to write this article. Turkeys, 45 million of whom are slaughtered at human hands every Thanksgiving, deserve this effort at the very least.

People deserve the respect to learn the truth, however hard it is to hear and however deeply it is suppressed. An informed choice requires all the available information, not overly simplified half-truths and marketing green washing – and fairy tales we were told at children and never looked past, because we suspected the truth might force us to make an unfamiliar change.

This is not about good versus bad people or judging anyone. This not about someone else's morals. The basic golden rule is to do unto others as we would have done to ourselves. We have compassion for all creation. These are human values, not vegan values. But we are taught to suppress them, and it's all we know. Rather than clinging to our defenses, it's time to open our hearts and minds to positive change. 

Let's be truly thankful for the wonderful opportunity to inform ourselves and evolve – together – beyond the gross and unnecessary animal slaughter industry by embracing veganism.

Five months later...

I wrote this article in July, and now that November has rolled around I confirmed that the money was raised for the farm to rebuild. There were surprisingly few comments on the GoFundMe given the frenzied Facebook thread, but the most “hearted” comment is by a woman who writes without a trace of irony, “Just wanted to let all the vegans know that ummm plants are alive too. And you kill them at an even higher rate. Think of all the industrial farming of corn and soy with all that round up.” WGBH had previously done a profile of this turkey farm and reported their turkeys are... wait for it... “fed a balanced grain diet that consists mostly of corn and soy.”

As explained above, one of course “kills” astronomically more corn and soy when they are funneled through animals first.

I also learned that at this turkey farm, as their website states, “We breed, raise, and slaughter all of our own turkeys.” They make sure to not show or tell us how the latter is done though. Photos of turkeys are either living turkeys or headless carcasses, with all that occurs in between those stages omitted.

Because otherwise, we maybe might not actually want to eat them after all. 

As was reported two years before the fire, “the team” at this farm “will start slaughtering and processing the birds on Nov. 12 and work straight through Thanksgiving Day.” As the  piece’s only vague reference to the inherent repugnancy of killing a healthy animal who doesn’t want to die, the journalist follows this with a brief quote from one of the farmers: “We grew up around it, so it doesn’t faze us.” Read: they were desensitized to animal killing from an early age, but if you weren’t, it will faze you and then some, so let's not talk about that. 

The journalist even includes specific details about what happens right after slaughter (the now deceased birds are “cleaned” [of things like blood, feathers, feces] and then “packed in chill tanks with ice and kept at a very low temperature). And in case you were wondering, according to the owners, “the flavor and texture are better if the turkey has been dead at least two to three days.” 

Despite omitting such a major detail of the process as the slaughter itself from the feature,  the journalist does feel it's necessary to talk smack about the living turkeys, asserting, “Much like wild turkeys, domesticated turkeys can be unfortunately be aggressive and mean to each other” (sounds like a typical morning commute for humans, no?), without mentioning any of their positive traits described in part above.

Of course, this is a rash generalization used to justify the ultimate human aggression: needless killing. Fictionalizing animal identities, which is what we do by blaming the victims themselves, allows us to rationalize that they deserve what's coming to them. In reality, “What we tend to find is, just like people, there are some birds that are more aggressive or less concerned about the world around them,” Marion Larson of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife has said.  Even one backyard turkey farmer admits of the turkeys he raises for slaughter, “They are just a very gentle bird.” And one well-known historical figure once called the turkey a little "vain and silly" but still “a respectable bird” and “a bird of courage.”

At this turkey farm, some families apparently take pictures when they pick out their bird. Wonder why no one is asking to photograph the slaughter of their bird? Or even asking how their bird is slaughtered? (Or asking themselves why they are eating a bird carcass to celebrate human genocide? I digress.)

The Thanksgiving/Thanksliving article I wrote last year includes more info and a video of a turkey being slaughtered in the most "humane" of conditions, and even that is terribly upsetting for sensitized people to see.

In conclusion, to stop vegan trolls from ruining your Thanksgiving, go ahead and pretend you didn't just read this article and ignore all others like it. Just remember that obscene abuses described (and I just touched on a fraction of them) from which we instinctively want to recoil are part of animal agriculture across the board and under the best of conditions. Animal products are unnecessary when we have other options.

If, on the other hand, you're ready to begin moving on from the disturbing things you've been unwittingly paying people to do to baby birds and other awesome individuals on your behalf, welcome to the fold! You're in excellent company:

Learn more at Why Veganism

If you've read our "about" section, you know we met on... Tinder. This cracks most people up because we're not at all typical Tinder people, but somehow it happened – and here we are, all married and sh*t! Our first date was on February 2014, we moved in together that August, we bought a house and moved to Massachusetts a year later, and about a year after that we got married on July 27, 2016.

We had an intimate ceremony at a beautiful lake house (okay, technically a "pond house" but that just sounds weird) that we rented through VRBO on Walker Pond in Sturbridge, MA with just my two best friends (an Amy from each coast!), my mom, and my sister's family (her husband and my nephews). Although my dad passed away in 2008, he was there in spirit and I quoted him in my vows. Craig's parents and his sister's family were unable to join us in person, but they attended virtually from Minnesota via Skype!

We wanted to keep it very low key and inexpensive, but still wanted it to feel special, and honestly it ended up being totally magical and just the best day ever.

And in a cool twist of fate, I ended up finding several 100% vegan vendors in some cases on accident. Here's more pictures, a video, and info about the vendors:

Photographer: Joseph Gonzalez-Dufresne

I contacted photographer Joseph Gonzalez-Dufresne, whom I saw had been voted #1 in Worcester by Worcester Magazine, because I loved his artful style – and it turns out he had photographed my New England FestVest Presentation several months earlier and has been vegan for something like 20 years! Talk about serendipitous. We also have mutual friends from the local hardcore music scene I was into when I was a teenager. We got to know him better before the wedding over a meal at Chickpea vegan restaurant in Worcester. You can see more of the photos here. We love the photos and are going to treasure them forever!

The Flowers: Priscilla Chambers

I didn't want to pay people to ship flowers to us from across the world, but I was clueless. Craig said he saw on Facebook that our friend Priscilla Chambers, whom we had met at a vegan potluck held by Maple Farm Sanctuary, arranges flowers, and she was thrilled to be contacted for this as she works at a major flower retailer but wants to do more stuff on her own. More serendipity! She also was really into my request to use mostly local, in-season flowers. In addition to the bouquet and table arrangement, she made Craig's boutonniere and my hair garland (obsessed!) with fresh flowers. If you want to contact her about doing your flowers, email us. 

Hair & Makeup: Green Hair Company

I've been going to Green Hair Company in Worcester since we moved back here because not only is it 100% organic, it's actually 100% vegan. This was impossible to find even in San Diego, a much more populated city. When I get my hair cut by Mimi, we chat the whole time about all things vegan and more. (She went vegan when she moved to a small town with a dairy farm at the end of her road and saw firsthand how each little calf is separated from mama so farmers can take her milk instead. Yep, that's how dairy works.) I was really, really happy with how my hair and makeup came out and refused to take my hair down for two days... okay, three. 

The Food: Belmont Vegetarian & The Bean Counter

Belmont Vegetarian seemed like a no-brainer, since it's easily transportable and everyone, vegan or not, loves it. Actually, almost everyone at our wedding was vegan or vegetarian anyway, and the two who aren't eat a lot of veg food, so we weren't worried about that. It's a small, very affordable Jamaican/American vegan restaurant that plays reggae music and posts lots of vegan stickers and articles on the walls, and you can get a selection from everything they've made fresh that day (or you can get it all) crammed into a small or large container. If you want to drool, check out their Instagram. The cake was from the Bean Counter also in Worcester, who have vegan options. It was a really delicious vanilla cake with fresh strawberry filling. The dark blue frosting ended up looking a little goth, but hey, we're goth. Okay, we're not.

Graphic design

My West Coast bestie Amy of Wonder Creative, is also a reiki master and vegan nutritionist, made our awesome sign! We just wanted to have something to post on the Eat Plants / Drink Beer Facebook, but we didn't want to make a big deal of out if it. This message was based on something I heard a vegan UFC fighter say when interviewed after he won his match, which I saw because someone had posted something about it, and I just thought it was fitting. 

My East Coast bestie, also named Amy (who has been a vegetarian since she extracted a large vein from a hamburger she was eating as a kid - ew) served as our JP, and got ordained from the Universal Life Church just for the event. She is a Boston roller derby veteran and a nurse, basically the sweetest, kindest badass you'll ever meet.

What's that you say? You want to see more? Well, I made this photo/video montage of our wedding and NYC vegan food tour honeymoon. You will not believe all the delicious food we feasted on. Perhaps the best part of this video, though, is around 4:30 when my nephew Roman loudly says, twice, "Can I get married, too?" right when Amy is announcing us husband and wife. :)

So, there you have it. We tied the knot, vegan-style. I'm so happy to spend the rest of my life with my handsome vegan beer-brewing scientist!

One more thing. I think it's important to mention that we're both divorcées (feels so French and sophisticated to say it that way), because at one point we each felt like we would never be able to pick up the pieces and I'm sure a lot of other people out there feel the same. It also can feel like being vegan makes finding a relationship a lot harder, or maybe there's something else making you feel that way. I hope this gives someone out there some hope that their person is really out there... and that sleazy dating apps can actually lead to a legit relationship and marriage, ha!

The German government has warned that in some circumstances a vegan diet can be harmful to a farmed animal’s health, as the non-meat, non-dairy lifestyle of the farmed animals whose flesh and secretions people eat remains steady in Berlin and worldwide.

 “A purely plant-based diet makes it more difficult to give the body some of the important nutrients it needs,” the government statement from last week reads. Vitamin B12 is a particularly important nutrient that is almost exclusively present in meat, the statement adds, explaining that the only way vegan farmed animals can consume it is by being given supplements or eating fortified feed.

Since farmed animals like chickens and cows are vegan (other than when farmers give them, say, cow blood plasma as calves because humans took their mothers’ milk, or when pigs are given scraps), they are given B12 supplements or B12 fortified feed. That's a coincidence, because most vegan humans do the same! It's almost as though non-vegan humans could just skip the middle animal, too... but that would just be weird. Right?

It is unclear why the German government feels that farmed animals need to eat other farmed animals to get their B12, because those animals would also be given B12 supplements, too. And then it would go on and on for all eternity. Very meta.

A diet that does not have sufficient levels of vitamin B12 can over the long-term result in neurological damage and has been linked to depression and psychosis. Other symptoms of a vitamin B12 deficiency can be poor muscle function and difficulties with movement. Sounds scary. Like we said, we already discussed the solution is to this problem, but it’s fun to scare the crap out of everyone, anyway. Cows seem like they get spooked easily, right?

Other nutrients of which the vegan diet may deprive a farmed animal are vitamin D, calcium, iron and zinc. Before it is marketed to humans, cows’ milk is fortified with vitamin D, which is normally obtained from fortified cereals and beverages and the sun, and cows don’t drink their own milk fortified with vitamin D or even any of their own milk at all even as calves if they are born to dairy farms, as we mentioned above. In other words, many calves born to dairy farms have something in common with vegan humans – both are holier-than-thou and drink dairy alternatives with plant proteins.

We know that the vast majority of the world’s soybeans are fed to farmed animals (but do keep blaming vegan humans for the environmental destruction caused by growing them for tens of billions of animals, it's fun!) – probably because soybeans are super nutritious and have calcium and iron, plus protein, folate, vitamin K, magnesium and, of course, fiber, the latter of which is only found in vegan foods. But since there was a very successful soy smear campaign (spearheaded by a multimillion dollar operation named after a late Cleveland dentist that lobbies for raw milk and grass-fed beef) against people eating soybeans and it actually fooled many otherwise intelligent people – despite the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals trying to rationally explain that beans don’t give you boobs or cancer despite what a bunch of bloggers and alternative health people say – perhaps a similar smear campaign should be prepared to scare the bejesus out of farmers giving farmed animals all those soybeans. Then we can let one of the world’s most nutritious crops go extinct and be rid of this pox on our planet for good.

Let's think about this. We know that vegan (and many non-vegan) humans get their calcium from exotic, expensive foods like oranges – and also those darn poisonous bean foods again like soy milk, tofu, and edamame.

And since the countries that consume the most dairy have the highest rate of osteoporosis, it seems that the calcium in the lactation of a 1-ton mother cow, which she secretes for her 70-pound newborn calf, might not be right for a human. Maybe human, pig, or zebra milk would give cows osteoporosis, too? Just thinking out loud here.

For the other nutrients in which farmed animals may be deficient due to their vegan diets, here are some ideas for Bessie and her pretentious hipster vegan friends on the farm who judgmentally eschew slaughter products from up on their high horses: 

As you can see, it seems like everyone has plenty of plant foods to choose from for these specific nutrients the German government warns vegan farmed animals about, but they must know something we don’t. So, to be safe, I would probably continue to trust those who falsely position plants as necessary for normal development while at the same time invalidating plants as sources of those same nutrients, since everyone makes a lot more money when we cycle plants through other animals first before eating the plants – and those with vested interests probably aren't threatened by the rapidly growing movement showing this is unnecessary and harmful, or anything like that. Better eat other supplemented animals that eat plants.

The government also advises pregnant farmed animals or those breastfeeding against maintaining a vegan diet. Oh wait, since the vast majority of cows bred for the cow breastmilk industry aren’t actually allowed to nurse their own babies for more than 24-48 hours at most or are severely restricted from doing so before their babies are forcibly weaned much earlier than they would be in nature – so their milk can be taken and fortified with vitamin D and then sold to and consumed by another grown-ass species, remember? – they probably are in the clear.

The official warning also says that children and teenage farmed animals should not be vegan. That’s weird, because all farmed animals are killed as children or teenagers – except for used-up mama dairy cows, who are killed around 4-7 years into their 20-year lifespans and ground into hamburgers, and again, they’re all pretty much vegan again since that whole mad cow debacle when we tried to feed them to each other.

And we already determined that grown-up dairy cows don’t have to worry about this because they are not allowed to breastfeed their babies very much or at all, so perhaps a vegan diet is safe for them after all?

So yeah. We thought this was all a little weird too, but we care about your safety. The wholesome and nutritious vegan farmed animals people eat for the nutrients the animals get from plants can't say they haven't been warned!

Oh, and hot on the heels of an Italian Parliament member saying vegan parents should go to jail, the German government also warn of the dangers of a vegan diet for humans, despite the consensus of international dietetic associations. If you're someone choosing from the tens of thousands of plants species on planet Earth including fruits, vegetables, beans, legumes, grains, nuts, and seeds and possibly taking supplements like many non-vegans do as well, you may want to switch to eating vegan animals who are eating plants and taking supplements themselves instead. 

Spread the word! ;)

Something has become glaringly clear lately even to people who haven't thought much about this topic in the past. On one hand, we have a dominant culture that continues to use animals as resources without a second thought, including eating from their bodies and feeding them to their children pretty much every time they sit down to eat.

On the other hand, we have a growing body of scientific evidence showing that doing so is actually quite bad for everyone and everything including our planet itself, along with a consensus from dietetic associations that it's definitely unnecessary and perhaps even harmful. We have more efficient plant-based alternatives rapidly increasing in tastiness, availability, and affordably, along with information at our fingertips to help us understand how using animals as resources is wildly exploitative and wasteful even under the best of farming conditions. And we have vegans emerging in every segment of society along with options for social support to make the transition.

It seems that for many people, the more clear it becomes that a vegan shift seems to be gaining traction, the stronger their desperation to confirm their existing bias and maintain the status quo of animal use grows.

One of the recent news stories illustrating this societal dissonance was that – brace yourself – an Italian politician has proposed a bill that would actually imprison parents who raise their children on a vegan diet.

Apparently, the act of providing a child with such a diet would land parents up to one year in jail. Should the child become sick “because of the diet,” the sentence rises to four years and to six if the child dies.

The Italian Parliament member’s disturbing proposal apparently came about because four of the presumably hundreds of her country's children who were hospitalized in recent months for malnutrition ate a vegan diet. 

At face value, that may sound extremely alarming to any parent, as it should. But let’s pause for a moment and think about this critically. What do we actually know about these children? Did a vegan diet really cause their medial issues? 

Let’s take a look at one example for which we know details.

Veganism, or Something More Sinister?

In short, when we examine the anecdotes blaming veganism for a health issue, we always find much more beneath the surface.

As reported in the Washington Post, this baby had dangerously low calcium levels.

As not reported in the Washington Post, calcium is prevalent in plant foods like greens, broccoli, oranges, figs, white beans, almonds, soy beans and all the awesome stuff that can be made out of them without cycling them through animals first, and more.

Despite the sensationalist headline screaming, “An Italian baby raised on a vegan diet is hospitalized for severe malnutrition and removed from parents,” we learn that the baby, sadly, also had a congenital heart condition, which was aggravated by said low calcium levels, resulting in an emergency operation.

The director of pediatrics at the hospital “was careful not to take sides on the issue of what constitutes an optimal diet for a baby” but recommended that this particular baby, who again had a dangerous and entirely separate health issue, “should have had support in this case with calcium and iron.”

The pediatrics director did not specify that those nutrients needed to be obtained from the animal kingdom versus the plant kingdom, or if the child's precarious condition meant he needed a level of support and/or supplementation that a typical child, regardless of whether they are vegan, would not.

Speaking of iron, as with calcium, vegan foods high in iron are abundant, including the Italian culinary staple of tomato sauce. It's recommended that eating iron-rich plant foods with vitamin C powerhouses like lemons or oranges (again, also high in calcium) boosts iron absorption, which is manageable enough. 

Given the abundant and common foods high in calcium and iron that grow from trees or the ground and don’t solely derive from an animal’s flesh or bodily secretions – animals who themselves eat said plants – how is the logical takeaway here that the lack of an animal’s flesh or bodily secretions caused this baby’s deficiency, which then exacerbated his congenital heart defect?

Don't Fear the Vegan

It’s not, of course, a logical takeaway. Society is simply not often operating on all four cylinders when it comes to this issue. As vegan sociologist Dr. Richard Twine gingerly puts it, "when approaching veganism we are confronted, still, with something of a chasm of unintelligibility." 

Due to perceptions that are deeply entrenched and socially conditioned, the dominant culture generally won’t consider choosing alternatives to animal use even where practical and possible to do so. The desire to soothe one’s cognitive dissonance when presented with factual information that contradicts one’s bias and acquired tastes, habits, and traditions often results in absurdities that defy basic logic yet make it past (or are even encouraged by) editors and authority figures everywhere.

The consumption of any other animal’s flesh or a female animal’s reproductive secretions including her lactation (milk) or ovum (eggs) does not in and of itself cure or prevent any disease or deficiency in humans, whether in children or adults. 

If that were the case, surely the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association) would specify this, no? Given the fact that one of their major sponsors is actually the National Dairy Council, they are presumably under immense pressure to falsely position so-called animal products as necessary for normal human development while at the same time invalidating plants as sources of those same nutrients.

Instead, their official position is that vegan diets are healthful and appropriate for individuals in all stages of life – going so far as to specify this is "including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes” – and their international counterparts have similar positions, including:

Dietitians of Canada
The British National Health Service
The British Nutrition Foundation
The Dietitians Association of Australia

Other organizations with similar positions that vegan diets are appropriate for human beings include:

The United States Department of Agriculture
The National Health and Medical Research Council
The Mayo Clinic
The Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada
Harvard Medical School
Kaiser Permanente

(Those not hyperlinked above have all been painstakingly summarized and hyperlinked here.)

Guess how many medical associations/government agencies take the opposing position?

Zero.

Yet whether a vegan diet is appropriate for people and especially babies and young children is portrayed as “a hotly debated subject” when in fact the consensus is in and has been for years. Most people just aren’t aware of or won’t acknowledge it.

And it should be noted that just like omnivorous diets, vegan diets vary wildly in composition from one person to the next and don't necessarily have to be very healthy. The only thing uniting the latter is that they don't include the bodily flesh or fluids of our furry, fuzzy, feathered, or finned friends. It couldn't possibly be determined by law that any deficiency is caused by that exclusion and not from the addition of one or more of the 10,000+ edible plant foods that could have remedied the situation just as effectively.

In other words, if someone is eating a nutritionally deficient vegan diet, it's not the lack of animal products in and of itself that is to blame. Not only do deficiencies in non-vegans also exist, but in fact most people with nutritional deficiencies are not vegan. Why does correlation apparently imply causation in one case but not the other?

Might vegan parents want to do a little research and experimentation when everyone around them is eating other stuff? Yes. All parents should take efforts to ensure their kids are getting all the nutrients they need and not too much of the things they don't. And yes, vegans do need B12 supplements, since they are not getting it from B12-supplemented animals like other people do. By the way, the USDA reports that nearly two-fifths of the U.S. population may be flirting with marginal vitamin B12 status because the vitamin isn't getting absorbed, regardless of intake.

Note: Similar digging is necessary when it comes to the media's misleading anti-vegan interpretations of environmental studies that fly in the face of basic laws of trophic levels, including the latest half-baked study making the rounds ranking vegan diets only 5 out of 10 for land use efficiency, prompting headlines like "Selfish Vegans Are Ruining the Environment" and lines such as "If you’ve ever suspected nothing is more annoying than prissy, sanctimonious vegans, it turns out you have company: Nature wants to punch them in the face, too." No mention of the study that came out in April showing not only does a vegan diet use land most efficiently, but a vegan shift is the only way to produce enough food to feed a growing population by 2050 without another tree being felled. Funny enough, that study didn't result in any cruel headlines implicating those eating the SAD (Standard American Diet) for destroying the planet, nor journalists stating that nature wants to punch them in the face, despite both studies showing they are doing the most damage by far.

Are We Being Punked?

A lot of these anti-vegan articles could pass for being in the Onion, except they're not intended as a joke. It’s important to take a brief look at the almost satirical language used by the journalists reporting on the proposed Italian bill to understand how insidious these articles are.

Vegan diets are described by these journalists as being “imposed” on children by parents who “force” or “restrict” them. 

Let’s see, when we give the dismembered flesh or repurposed reproductive secretions of another species to a child before they are agents of free will and for no vital reason – and worse yet, we don’t explain how these products are obtained from the lovable creatures they cherish so very much and would never hurt in their wildest dreams – and we even lie about it should they catch wind of what’s going on and ask you for clarity – we honestly believe that is not also imposing anything on them? 

Really now.

The Washington Post predictably describes veganism by listing everything that a vegan diet omits (sounds so restrictive!) without mentioning that vegans simply choose from the abundant plant-based alternatives to all these foods – which, may I add, are freaking delicious, often serve to diversify rather than restrict diets, and go straight to the source of the nutrients that are otherwise being inefficiently funneled through animals. 

(They also position veganism as a diet when in fact it’s a rapidly growing movement expanding far beyond dietary choices and one being embraced by renowned doctors, scientists, athletes, and political leaders who want to leave the world a better place than they found it.)

And the language used by the Italian politician is even worse. 

Unbelievably, she is so brazen to flat-out admit that her proposal actually aims to “stigmatize” the “spreading belief” of veganism, which she calls “reckless and dangerous.” She spouts off the nutrients that vegetarian and vegan diets are “devoid of” and “deficient” in, despite any mentioned qualification to do so and in direct contradiction to the aforementioned consensus of actual international dietetic and medical associations.

Funny, I’m vegan and I don’t have those deficiencies.  And we're sitting here watching vegan athletes rock the Olympics.

Essentially, this Italian lawmaker is the world’s worst misinformed, biased, anti-vegan troll I’ve ever encountered – and trust me, I’ve encountered plenty and admittedly spend way too much time sparring with them. 

Btw, this Radiohead video totally has a subversive pro-vegan moment around 1:40.

Along with many people's aversion to choosing alternatives to animal use, causing many to blame veganism for anything bad that happens to a vegan (like, say, when the media smugly trumpets the fact that a vegan tragically died climbing Mount Everest while omitting altogether the fact that another vegan successfully climbed it the day before), another unfortunate and far more prevalent reality is being blurred by this case.

Many parents willfully feed their children plant-deficient diets that may help lead to them being pre-diabetic with high cholesterol and blood pressure, setting them on the path of almost inevitable and debilitating if not mortal diabetes and/or heart disease, the number one cause of death. In fact, some do fear the bill could unintentionally be interpreted to also penalize non-vegan parents of children hospitalized for dietary reasons. 

As a vegan contemplating having or adopting children with zero intentions of including slaughter products in their diet, the media and public’s uncritical response to this garbage scares the sh*t out of me. (And yes, milk and eggs are slaughter products as well since any form of profitable milk and egg production including small or local farms requires routine slaughter due to the nonstop need for only fertile females.)

Despite the fact that I’m going to assume this absurd proposal could not possibly come to fruition (and I some have pointed out that as a female politician of childbearing age it may be that she is simply being used as a pawn by those with vested interests in animal agriculture), such viral fear-mongering sparked by these articles can further perpetuate the half-baked anecdotes and myths that exacerbate society’s profound aversion to moving beyond animal exploitation. It can hinder the progress of the vegan movement, which our planet so urgently needs from us in the face of increasing water scarcity, climate change, deforestation, species extinction, ocean depletion and dead zones, world hunger and more while we breed, feed, water, and slaughter trillions of land and sea animals each year – each trapped in this system imposed and forced upon us all (and which is wildly disproportionately subsidized). “Livestock” systems cover 45% of our dying planet, mostly the fault of Westerners, but now developing nations are following our lead.

Either that, or it will completely backfire, the way that Hellman's ridiculous attempt to sue Hampton Creek for their eggless Just Mayo resulted in the exposure of the government's attempted suppression of vegan alternatives – and ended with Hellman's giving in and creating their own vegan mayo! 

I found this great video after I wrote my article. We make a lot of the same points, but they make additional ones I didn't even think of!

Vegans and non-vegans alike may have noticed a sharp increase in widespread anti-vegan sentiment online lately, including two new popular videos going around that, shall we say, poke fun at vegans.

Vegans are intolerable hippies who make impossible, confusing, and downright absurd requests at restaurants and of their friends while wearing funny headbands. They tell you in a vapid, breathy voice that they’re vegan before they even tell you their name. They are overall just "the most annoying group of people known to mankind" and "think they’re better at life."

Oh, and if they choke or are stranded at sea, kill them/let them die.

Just as a few lil' examples.

One look at the comments sections of these videos shows that those being ridiculed have defended themselves, corrected misinformation, and some even reacted aggressively or used defamatory language – so it's then pointed out that all vegans are, in fact, mean and angry.

But wait – in the videos vegans were portrayed as illogical and daft, but at least they were peace-loving hippies. Now in the comments section they are all called a bunch of aggressive a-holes.

Which is it?

In truth, it doesn’t really matter which they are, the point is that there has to be something majorly wrong with vegans, and it must be funny to make fun of them... right? These are, after all, the minority of people who voluntarily don’t eat the meat, milk, and eggs of animals, wear their skin, or otherwise use them like normal people do. 

Weird. Yeah, vegans are annoying. And they should get a sense of humor.

Here's the thing.

Veganism has absolutely exploded into the mainstream this year, which anyone not living under a rock has likely noticed. Therefore, the inevitable cognitive dissonance-induced vegan backlash that has always been brewing under the surface is now apparently occurring in full force. And since vegans are very much in the minority, it's like David and Goliath. It seems all you need to get more traction for your content is to find the anti-vegan angle in there – somewhere, anywhere. 

(For example, if some people tragically die while climbing Mt. Everest and one is vegan, the headline is "Why Being Vegan Is a Bad Idea." Even TIME Magazine gets in on the viral fun. Yet another vegan successfully climbed Everest one freaking day before, which the media completely omitted.)

To quote Dr. Casey Taft of Vegan Publishers, who is also a renowned domestic violence psychologist: “People try to mock vegans because they don't like to be reminded of the harm they do to animals.” It’s really that simple. As he points out, it's the same strategy that's been used to counter every social justice movement – propagating negative stereotypes in an attempt to try to silence people.

So maybe vegans could take a joke if non-vegans could take the truth. These videos and articles sensationalize or make a joke out of vegans, but they never coherently address veganism or animal use.

Because most people refuse to agree to become informed about animal use  – or they fixate on selected, seemingly pleasant aspects they may have witnessed or grown up with while ignoring the many other inherently dreadful aspects – and they like it that way. They won’t look into the issue beyond a surface level or push past the typical stale justifications. They just simply flat-out refuse. I once did it, too. It is the very epitome of putting one's head in the sand and fingers is the ears while singing la-la-la-la.   

Many of these very same people, however, are all too happy to do things like share anti-vegan content, tease vegans, brush off or trivialize them, and have an opinion about why veganism isn't an option for them and/or humanity and list a multitude of absurd justifications for this. (They are also the first to be vocal when a member of a comparably privileged species such as dogs is abused.)

Yet once we open the door to discovering how animal use is connected to so many of the urgent problems we face today, it's astounding – and it's freaking scary.

As one example of many, our Earth is currently in the middle of its sixth mass extinction, and scientific research shows that meat production is "likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions."

Most recently, findings published in PNAS by researchers from University of Oxford showed that if the world went vegan, food-related emissions would be slashed by 70%, trillions of dollars in healthcare saved, and 8.1 million human deaths avoided by 2050 (along with trillions more animals, of course).

Oh, and Newsweek specifies meat consumption as a leading factor driving the global water crisis that has already destabilized the Middle East, sparked civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and is now spreading to the US, which "could spark unrest across the world, and dire consequences." (They also discuss a leaked 2009 Nestle report warning the US government that our meat habit is draining the planet dry and will cause catastrophic consequences if nothing changes. This isn't PETA, this is a giant corporation which itself sells animal products.)

Worth talking about? Or "Dear vegans, shut up?" 

When we actually allow ourselves to peel back the layers that normalize animal agriculture – which, in all its forms, requires doing mean, gross, and unnatural sh*t to animals at which still-sensitized people would instinctively recoil – we see it's not really what we thought it was. It's not a matter of some annoying person's extreme and personal "belief.” It's a matter of facts we either deny or accept. 

Breeding, feeding, watering, and slaughtering tens of billions of animals each year and removing trillions of them from the oceans in a seemingly endless yet totally unsustainable, nightmarish cycle is counterproductive to our own interest in keeping the planet inhabitable – and also counterintuitive to our basic desire to love and protect animals. Having “dominion” over someone doesn’t involve systemically destroying them.

We are being made part of something we would never agree to – and deep down, we know it. Animal agriculture is an ethical, environmental, and human health catastrophe of epic proportions. 

"Dear vegans, shut up" really means, "Dear veganism, go away. I preferred when you were an obscure fringe movement rarely mentioned by the mainstream. I don't want to change. I'm scared to change. You can't make me learn about this if I don't want to know."

Yet, no matter how strongly we try to convince ourselves we’re cool with it because "mmm, bacon," or how vehemently we try to absolve ourselves of responsibility, we continue to use embarrassing amounts of the planet’s increasingly scarce natural resources, much of which are turned into waste and pollution, to feed selectively-bred animals – each of whom enters a slaughterhouse as a very young, complex, sensitive creature and comes out chopped into bits. 

I know, la-la-la-la-la. Please push through this with me!

Veganism is a real and rapidly-growing social justice solution for people, planet, and animals. In reality, vegans are an extremely diverse group of people of various ages, races, professions, and temperaments, including well-known social justice figures, a US senator and congressman, musicians, physicians, scientists, record-breaking athletes and many more.

It’s a lot easier to trivialize and dismiss the movement as something for vapid, shallow, ill-informed people than to admit that vegans are actually on to something huge. 

Yet, while these silly videos and articles circulate, right now in France for example, a huge national discussion is actually taking place, exposing the "chilling" systemic cruelty that occurs in slaughterhouses in order for people to eat the meat, dairy and eggs of animals and use the resulting byproducts. According to a French acquaintance, “Almost every week there are now talk shows on national TV or on the radio and articles in major publications about animal cruelty in slaughterhouses, speciesism, and veganism. Recently, it was the cover story and a 6-page article in one of the top 3 newspapers in France, Liberation. The tittle is: 'Slaughterhouses: we are all accomplices of this atrocity.'” 

As one mainstream story after next comes out, it really is unprecedented, and it’s a huge shake-up to the status quo – and some people really don’t like that.

Ridicule is actually a great sign, as a famous German philosopher once pointed out – he said all truth passes through the stage of being ridiculed before becoming self-evident. (Next is violent opposition, so not really looking forward to that one either.) Gandhi echoed this when he said, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

The truth is that non-veganism is what's actually been dishonestly forced down our throats since childhood, because it requires the most resources and therefore results in the most profit. Tens of billions of animals who each and every year are bred, fattened up, slaughtered, processed, butchered, and packaged – and transported and refrigerated at multiple points along the way – obviously balloon agriculture to a size much larger than it would otherwise be. We could instead eat plants and make yummy stuff out of them instead of eating the animals that eat the plants, thus removing the totally inefficient “middleman” – someone who also happens to have interests and desires that don’t include being some anonymous, doomed human resource.

We've been told deceitful fairy tales, and then as we get older we suspend our disbelief along with everyone else in order to maintain our acquired tastes and to avoid sticking out from the group. So we don’t even realize that, for example, dairy is the lactation of continuously impregnated cows whose precious calves are removed from them shortly after each birth, with the mamas themselves killed after birthing 4-10 babies they never raise. Dairy cheese on average requires ten times the milk, ten times the suffering. And most also don't know that eggs come from grown chicks who weren’t born to the highly maternal mother chickens we imagine, but in energy-intensive artificial incubators, with roughly half killed shortly after hatching just for being male regardless of how pastoral the future setting for the remaining females, who will also either die prematurely and painfully due to the bodily consequences of her selective breeding or via slaughter at human hands when no longer profitable. 

And when we hear “humane slaughter” we don’t ask what that entails. Normal people don't Google this, right? Well, it mostly consists of just stunning the animal before slaughter. This usually means either firing a steel bolt into animal’s skull, which may or may not destroy part of the brain (and the first shot is ineffective about 5% of the time in best case scenarios) or CO2 gassing, which results in a burning and then drowning-like sensation and can cause around 15-30 seconds of very severe suffering prior to the animals losing consciousness. Again, that includes animals raised for meat as well as milk and eggs once they’re “spent.”

We've been scared into believing it's somehow necessary for humans to consume animal slaughter products regardless of their circumstances, when the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals and its international counterparts declare a vegan diet is healthful and appropriate for all stages of life.   

Veganism is simply realizing there's a better, more logical way, on all counts, despite how badly society at large wants everyone to maintain the harmful status quo. And this transition, while generally seen as a sacrifice, actually opens our lives up in ways we never previously imagined. Believe it or not – and I know at one time I could not believe this could be true – it’s actually a very positive, enjoyable, and rewarding experience (when we’re not being heckled)!

Before I wrap this up, I’ve got to address one more popular meme going around: what about all the land cleared to grow crops vegans (and non-vegans) eat, and crop farmers who kill animals that endanger their crops?

The logical answer is that, of course, far more crop farming is needed to support animal agriculture due to low feed conversion ratios (FCR), so non-veganism is responsible for far more of the dilemma described. This explains why research just published in Nature Communications says if the whole world becomes vegan, the global population in 2050 could eat enough without further deforestation – meaning without another tree being cut down for food. Right now, per UN FAO LEAD, 2/3 of all agricultural land is used for "livestock." That's downright shameful. Humans are grossly outnumbered by the farmed animals constantly bred into very brief existences. Globally, this is what that looks like:

Alas, the anti-vegan content will likely just keep coming, and trying to respond to it all would be impossible, bringing to mind the hopelessly frustrating arcade game "whack-a-mole" in which you're set up to fail (in retrospect, decidedly not a very vegan game!)

But if people can create, like or share anti-vegan videos, memes, and articles, or even just trivialize or dismiss the idea offhandedly – all while expecting vegans to laugh with them – they should be able to coherently answer questions like the following:

• Which innocent and vulnerable animals should we protect and which should we intentionally and avoidably harm against their will?

• What is the right method to kill a day-old fluffy yellow chick who was born the wrong gender so won't lay eggs?

• How should hens and cows who have had their female reproductive systems aggressively manipulated for their lactations, resulting in prematurely exhausted bodies, be killed?

• When should a newborn calf or baby goat, often with umbilical cord still attached, be separated from his or her highly maternal mama so people can take her milk for themselves?

• Why should a healthy animal forced into the world by humans, and who is barely in the prime of his or her life, then be forced against their will by humans to leave this world?

• How should the people tasked with killing hundreds of animals an hour deal with the trauma of constantly doing so day in and day out?

Remember, the above is done to accommodate a socially-accepted human vice, not a vital human need. Do the research for yourself. Push beyond the first answers you get. Push yourself to learn about things you really don't want to. Read a book, watch a documentary, read articles about this. Fact-check everything. 

You may find you're instinctively making a joke of vegans and veganism because deep down you knew the truth would hurt too much. Because it's likely you would never pay someone to deliberately hurt an innocent animal unnecessarily if you really thought about it, let alone do so yourself. Well, you don't have to. There are plenty of delicious and fashionable alternatives available, so if you can reasonably access them there’s no reason to keep supporting the animal slaughter industry. Insisting on doing so anyway means you specifically prefer animals to be unnecessarily killed. Think about it.

Yes, I can take a joke. But when people refuse to acknowledge glaring truths and to become informed about a horrific atrocity and instead make a joke of something they don’t understand – it’s not really funny. It’s just sad and incredibly frustrating.

So perhaps it’s not that vegans can’t take a joke. Perhaps it’s that non-vegans can’t take the truth, so instead they make a joke. About vegans. They mock vegans without talking about veganism or animal agriculture and other animal use.

In truth, to paraphrase the activist and intersectional educator Christopher-Sebastian McJetters, if you really believed in the inherent wrongness of totally unnecessary and avoidable systemic exploitation and killing, then you would go vegan too. 

Shut up, vegan! No one asked you! 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 

To see what kind of food vegans really eat, see the popular #whatveganseat and #veganfoodshare hashtags on Instagram.
 

Let me just address one thing quickly: one of my least favorite sites on Facebook is “I Fucking Love Science,” which may seem odd as I have a PhD in molecular biology and am a scientist by trade. I personally can’t stand the page because it has almost nothing to do with science; I just went and perused their page and most of what it shares are cool pictures of space and nature with a random sprinkling of articles with headlines that sound cool because they're overselling the science in the articles because the authors don’t really understand the work they're discussing. The page has almost nothing to do with how science works or what it entails and I blocked it from showing up in my feed because so many people like and share stuff from it all the time.

But I’m not here to rag on a Facebook site, I’m here to talk about the idea that so many people seem to think they “fucking love science” yet, when push comes to shove, they’ll do their damnedest to ignore science that has implications they don’t like – which is about the most anti-scientific thing you can ever do.

I imagine most people reading this believe that human activity plays a role in climate change. “Of course it does,” you say, “the science is undeniable!” And I agree with you, the science is pretty undeniable, as there is a very large scientific consensus that says human activity is a contributing factor to climate change and major environmental organizations trumpet this fact and use it to encourage behavior change. They ask us to decrease our carbon footprint and cut down on things that emit greenhouse gases by doing things like using more fuel efficient cars, and they want us to turn towards alternative sources of energy that don’t rely on the burning of fossil fuels. We need to do this to save the planet, and we need to do this now! Greenhouse gases are so destructive, and everyone knows this, after all, everyone “fucking loves science!” So why would you want to argue with it?

Yet how many people know that globally animal agriculture causes more greenhouse gas emissions than the combined exhaust from all modes of transportation? That, depending on reports, animal agriculture is responsible for 18-51% of all greenhouse gases released into the environment?

The lower number, a number that is still higher than all transportation vehicles combined, is from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, an institution that I would say doesn’t have a vegan bias. The FAO recently revised their numbers down to 14.5%, though they do state that the two numbers can't be compared "as reference periods and sources differ."

The 51% number is from a study conducted by the Worldwatch Institute in which they took into account CO2, nitrous oxide, and methane from the respiration and waste coming out of the tens of billions of animals who are continually bred and slaughtered specifically for food, since without animal agriculture, they wouldn’t exist in the numbers they do (meaning the greenhouse gases  from these animals would clearly not exist if animal agriculture weren’t around). The FAO chooses to ignore animal respiration from their numbers, suggesting that the 10+ billion animals that are only on this planet due to human intervention would be replaced by wild animals if we stopped breeding them into existence, which is a highly preposterous notion. The Worldwatch Institute may have a bias towards veganism, but only in that they are for sustainable living and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a study saying animal agriculture in its current form (a form required to meet our unchecked demand) is sustainable.

There’s also another recent article that mentions 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions coming from animal agriculture. I’ll concede that all three numbers vary, but this has more to do with the methodology used to generate the numbers being different than anything else (which the FAO themselves admit in looking at numbers just a few years apart). And even with this discrepancy, the emissions attributed to animal agriculture are equal to or greater than all the emissions that come from the global transport sector (cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships, etc) combined, which routinely vary from 12%-15% depending on the report.

Now, if you agree that human activity is a driver of climate change and facts point to animal agriculture being responsible for a large portion of the greenhouse gasses released into the environment, why are you waiting for something that can take decades to implement (alternative energy sources) instead of doing something that will have an immediate impact on the day you start (going vegan)?

Going vegan can cut an individuals carbon footprint in half! And all you have to do is simply eat delicious and healthy vegan food. That's it, there's no modifying your house or buying an expensive new car, all you have to do is eat good food. A lot of people like to tout they’re cutting back on their meat consumption (only to replace meat with cheese- and egg-based dishes, greatly negating the effort), and people love Meatless Mondays because they can talk about how they’re making a difference one day a week, so there's obviously an awareness out there of environmental impact of animal agriculture. But if we lived in a world where all our energy could be generated from wind, solar, and waves, how would you feel if almost everyone decided they were going to run a gas-guzzling generator anyway – but only six days a week – to power their house while you used the emissions-free energy sources all seven days?

Wouldn’t you be mad at them, since there is so much more they could be doing? What would you say to them to get them to switch? Maybe they don’t want to switch because they’re so used to gas/coal power or maybe they feel that wind power doesn’t give them the same amperage as fossil fuel power. How quickly would you show them the facts; that there’s no difference between the wind/solar energy and the energy generated from coal?

Do you not change because you feel the “science isn’t settled?" Because if you feel that way, you’re coming across just like a climate change denier who doesn’t feel like the science on human-induced climate change is settled. Do you say that because every report on climate change and animal agriculture comes up with different numbers? There's no denying they do, but when differing methods all come to the same conclusions, it's further proof that those hypotheses are true, not false!

What research have you read or done to convince yourself that animal agriculture isn’t a major driver of greenhouse gas emissions? I guess those articles written by farmers and large animal agriculture conglomerates proclaiming #NotAllMeat really have you convinced. I’m sure those people, unlike the big oil companies saying they don't cause climate change, are writing those article because they care so much about getting the science right, not because they have a financial stake in keeping people unaware of the damage they're doing to the earth every time the sit down to a meal with animal products on their plate. How much data do you need to be convinced that animal agriculture is bad for the environment from a greenhouse gas emissions standpoint? If you need more data, you can wait for the inevitable to happen and get more data on the issue, or you can make the switch to veganism and start helping the environment now. The best part is, we have no nutritional requirement for any animal-derived food at all!

If you could switch your house over to all solar/wind generated power at zero net cost to you, how quickly would you switch? If suddenly electric cars got 400 miles per charge and cost the same as a gas powered car, how quickly would you be at the car dealership making a trade in?

If you would do both those things today, have I got a deal for you! Veganism costs you nothing and has the wonderful benefit of greatly decreasing your carbon (and water!) footprint immediately. A single person going vegan makes a huge impact on the amount of greenhouse gases that go into the environment, so even if you’re one of those “what good can one person do” people, you can actually do a lot! Your change can be an inspiration for others to change too, creating a ripple effect and making the collective contribution of you going vegan that much greater!

Additionally, animal agriculture has been shown to be the top cause of species extinction, Amazon deforestation, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, the spread of disease, and a pervasive driving force between many other devastating social and environmental ills including world hunger.

So if you really “fucking love science” and believe in human-induced climate change, you’ll start your vegan journey as soon as you can.

Written by Craig

"COWSPIRACY: The Sustainability Secret" is a groundbreaking feature-length environmental documentary following an intrepid filmmaker as he uncovers the most destructive industry facing the planet today, and investigates why the world's leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it. A cut co-produced by Leonardo DiCaprio is now streaming on Netflix. See more at: www.cowspiracy.com.

Sue Coe grew up in postwar England with a slaughterhouse nearby and a small pig farm with sheds behind their house. “My mother and I watched a pig escape from a slaughterhouse. My whole childhood was listening to the pigs scream.”

So she asked her parents two questions: why didn’t we stop the death camps in Europe? "Because we didn’t know," they said. But we know about the slaughterhouse next door, she asked, so why aren’t we stopping it?

Their maddening answer: “Why don't you grow up?”

Shockingly, she wanted to go into a slaughterhouse, and at age 10, she was allowed inside to draw. Upon entering, the thing that immediately struck her was that, as a witness, you have no power or control. You are totally vulnerable and defenseless – just like the animals.

“I was so glad I looked into the slaughterhouse,” she said, “because it became my life mission to stop it. My work destroys the meat industry, in my small way.”

50 years later, Sue has continued talking her way into slaughterhouses, armed with paper and pencil – but no camera – to bear witness to the plight of farmed animals. Along with slaughterhouses, her work also explores subjects including apartheid, sweat shops, prisons, AIDS, and war, and her illustrations have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Newsweek and more.

At a presentation of hers I saw, during which she showed her illustrations while describing what each particular slaughterhouse setting or moment was like, at times it felt like getting punched in the stomach. My eyes watered, chills of shame came in waves. And I kept thinking – how can I tell people about this in the normal day-to-day social context of my life? There's no way the people I love would want to be part of this. And yet we don't want to know, so we keep participating and transferring the guilt.

“I’m asking you to look through my eyes,” she told us. “Not to look at my eyes but through my eyes.” Here are some of the moments that especially stuck with me.

It's a Picnic

“This is what goes on, on the other side of the wall.  Why don’t we want to look on the other side of the wall?” she implored us. “That we can be so happy, and yet only feet away, this is happening.” (And it's happening on a scale of unfathomably epic proportions, to an estimated 70 billion sentient individuals each year despite the fact we have no nutritional requirement for the results.) She also drew a parallel to our for-profit prison system.

Factory Pharm

“This is insanity,” she told us. “This is the meat industrial complex. Madness is a complex they are selling. The insanity that they force on the animals…”

She drifted off and said softly, “In some sense, when they get to be slaughtered, their suffering is over.”

Standing Pig

Did you know a large factory farm is built near the site of the Lety Concentration Camp in Czechoslavakia? Once a World War II internment camp, today it's a never-ending hell on earth of a different kind.

“The meat industry,” she said, “knows no irony.”

"Gassing Hogs, 6 at a Time, Instead of One at a Time, More Profitable for the Industry

In the US, she shared, most slaughterhouses are still the old-fashioned single line system, but globally they are becoming more and more automated to decrease labor costs, complete with muzak playing in the background.

Decompression chambers, or controlled atmospheric stunning, are the latest slaughter method, and she says it feels comparable to a human with the bends. It’s now a very common method for killing "spent" hens past their egg-laying prime. Birds have very sensitive eardrums, which burst as they are being decompressed.

In the gas/CO2 chambers, it takes pigs up to 90 seconds to die. “They have done many tests on this.” To try to get away, she described, “They climb vertically up the ceiling. They climb up walls.”

Meat Fly

“This is a Slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania. She [a "dairy" cow] has a broken back or broken leg and they leave her for lunch break. And she’s tapping, it’s like Morse code with her hoof. All her herd are there waiting with her. And they [the workers] come back and she keeps calling and she’s not being milked because they don’t care – she is going to be slaughtered at age 3 or 4. A cow lives for like 32 years. At age 3 or 4 she’s ‘milked out.’"

She adds, "Her milk went with her blood down the drain.”

Select

We were all inside a large enclosed room for her presentation, and now she paused before continuing. “This is as though I said to you, ‘I’m going to slaughter all of you now. All of you. And I could.

Because you are the batch. You are the average number that goes through in a few hours.

And you would go to the farthest end of that room to get away from me. You would try to become invisible. You would start climbing up the walls to get away from me – but you can’t, because I would get you, one by one.’” 

I'll never forget how I felt at that moment. 

In a recent LAIKA Magazine interview, she said that almost every animal she has seen slaughtered firsthand – and there have been many – has looked into her eyes right before it happened if she was close enough, and just like anyone would want to know, the question in their eyes is always: Why? They are searching your eyes for a motive right up until the last moment. 

Amongst the other unbearably heartbreaking incidents Sue described:

• The debeaking of poultry: “Their tongues come out sometimes. People come up to me and want to know – people don’t know this. Regular people don’t know."
  

• Foie gras geese being force fed: A rare example of only male animals being used, as only females can be used to produce milk and eggs.
  

• Sheep transported (by boat 3.5 weeks from Perth Australia to the Gulf): “The sheep on the bottom are blinded by the urine that comes down.”
  

• Fish market: “In San Francisco, where the fish are chosen alive – they could be swimming in the Galapagos a few hours before, with their scales of multicolors! And they’re taken, and they end up here. And they flip off the board sometimes and are still moving around on the ground, amongst cigarette butts. They go grey. You actually see them go grey, all their beautiful rainbow colors going.”
  

• Separation of dairy cows and their calves: “All around me in upstate New York are dairy farms," she said. "This is a young calf stolen from the mother... These cows cry for three days and three nights. It’s constant. And then they are hot-wired away from these plastic kennels where the young cows are chained. These are replacement heifers, not veal calves. They stand in freezing cold. They stand in their own shit and piss, frozen to the ground, barely alive."
  

• Male calves tied to a tractor: “They aren’t even worth the price of a bullet.”
  

• The cutting of the vaginal folds of sheep used for wool: “Many are so young they’re still basically lambs, trembling so much they can hardly stand.”
  

• Transport to the slaughterhouse (the average farmed animal today travels 350 miles to slaughterhouse): “I’ve seen pigs get electrocuted in the eye and anus to get them to move when their whole skin is frozen to sides of trucks.”
  

• Abandoned animals due to a slaughterhouse health code violation (without food or water for a week): There were pyramids of dead animals’ bodies and some survivors. “I held this goose, and she was as thin as paper. Her heart beat against my heart. Under her wings was a tiny chicken she had been with for a week." She added that they were rescued and stayed together for the rest of their lives.
  

• Millions of pigs buried alive in plastic pits (due to hoof and mouth disease, which is not fatal to pigs but reduces the market value of their flesh): “Bulldozers bulldozed over them, still screaming."
  

• Dogs being boiled alive in Asia: “In their last moments they are trying to get out of the boiling water. And what’s difference between this and throwing pigs in a scalding bath? None. Don’t be xenophobic and focus on this. There’s no such thing as humane slaughter.”
  

• A single black sheep outside of a slaughterhouse: “I’ll always remember her. I drew her. One out of billions. One out of trillions. And I couldn’t save her.”
  

• The de-finning of hammerhead sharks: Thrown back and left to drown.
  

• Long line fishing: “Every animal gets caught in long lines. This is an obscenity.”
  

• Young turkeys pecking another turkey to death (because of a tiny spot of blood): Turkeys habitually peck at dirt and food, but “there’s no dirt or food, they’re in a cage, so they just peck each other to death.”
  

• Newborn chicks ground up alive (because male chicks born at hatcheries for the egg industry – for both factory farms and backyard farmers – have no value): When Sue’s activist friend called the police to report this barbaric yet standard practice, she was arrested.
  

• Sheep drinking the blood of the animals that had just been slaughtered before them (because they’ve been in a truck for three days without food or water): “They fell to their knees and started to drink.”
  

• Visible antibiotics in a calf's open carcass: At an organic veal butcher in Montreal for NYC restaurants, the butcher lifted up the calf’s skin, and underneath was all the medication still in its plastic caps. She added that the butcher lost fingers because he makes 1,500 cuts an hour.
  

• Sheep bleeding out: “This I watched as the sheep and goats just went very small as they bled out. They just seemed to get smaller and smaller.”
  

• Exploited meatpackers at a slaughterhouse in Pennsylvania: Waiting for a late truck of a animals, greatly concerned they won't get paid that day if it doesn't arrive, as as the average lifespan of a meatpackers before getting injured is just six months. Meatpacking is the most dangerous job in the United States.

Sue said when she goes into a slaughterhouse, she asks the workers, “Can you imagine a vegan world?” They think about it, and they say yes. She then asks them what’s preventing a vegan world in their opinion.

And they think, and they say: “culture.”

Has this article gotten you thinking? Share your comments below.
Watch Sue's full presentation:

Sue Coe at the 2015 World Vegan Summit and Expo - The Art of Compassion

“What would cause an entire society of people to leave their thinking caps at the door – and not even realize they’re doing so?” Harvard-educated UMass Boston psychology and sociology professor Melanie Joy, Ph.D., Ed.M. explores this question in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. 

 This book could have been called “The Meatrix.” By reading it, you’ve taken the figurative red pill and you may never be the same.

 Although published in 2010, I read this at just the right time. Is the decision to reject needless animal use wherever possible and practical (veganism) just a “personal preference?” Is it an idealistic, arrogant, hypocritical, misguided, cult-like imposition on others?  What continues to stop so many people from ditching animal flesh and fluids in the age of information? To me, this book is like solving an unsolvable mystery, using real psychology, to explain the unexplainable.

I've highlighted some of the themes she delves into below. Whether or not you have the slightest interest in veganism, I encourage you to challenge your existing mindset and read on.

Joy's subsequent TED Talk based on her book, above, is amongst the top 1% viewed of all TED talks.

Mental Gymnastics

 The book begins by asking the viewer to imagine enjoying a roast at a dinner party, which you learn mid-bite is actually golden retriever. Even just reading this, you probably immediately feel disgusted and also are imagining the living dog, right?

“Even stranger, though,” writes Joy, “is the way we don’t react to the idea of eating cows” and the other species we perceive as edible. Most never picture the cow or feel repulsed when eating “beef.” Why is this? As she demonstrates, the answer is complex, yet far from abstract.

Humans are naturally averse to blood and killing unless we've been desensitized. Since we care about animals and don’t want them to suffer, a good amount of mental gymnastics are necessary in order to feel perfectly comfortable consuming them – or more specifically, consuming the tiny handful of species we have designated as edible.

To alleviate this inconsistency between our own deeply held values and our behaviors, Joy describes our three options:

1. We can change our values to match our behaviors

2. We can change our behaviors to match our values

3. We can change our perception of our behaviors so they appear to match our values (hence the mental gymnastics)

It's the latter dominant unexamined, socially conditioned, misinformed, and/or uninformed default mode – which is anything but neutral and benign despite appearing so – which Joy defines as “carnism.” (This includes vegetarianism, which includes exploiting and killing animals for human use).

If you just automatically rolled your eyes at this new term, you are exactly the person whose mind will be most blown by Joy’s concepts. I promise. Previously, this dominant ideology had been invisible and unnamed, enabling our continued psychic numbing, denial, and avoidance of our own participation in violence against innocents on a positively epic scale.

“We send one species to the butcher and give our love and kindness to another apparently for no other reason than that it’s the way things are. When our attitudes and behaviors toward animals are so inconsistent, and this inconsistency is so unexamined, we can safely say we’ve been fed absurdities.”

Regardless of how absurd they are, the deeply entrenched beliefs and behaviors of the majority are seen as normal; a given rather than a choice. This is even the case for violent ideologies like the one Joy calls carnism. How can something that doesn’t even have a name be questioned, and when even calling it by a name is met with knee-jerk resistance and likely mockery?

To take it a step further, the carnist system actively keeps itself hidden due to the fact that its inner workings are so horrifying that most are altogether unwilling to witness them. (Witnessing includes taking the time to read, watch, or otherwise learn about standard animal farming and slaughter practices.) It's why we so often hear people say of the experience of the animals on their plates, "I don't want to know." That's understandable, because knowing might force us to do the following:

• Acknowledge the painful reality of our own participation in suffering of such devastating magnitude

• Feel powerless to change it

• Challenge our identity as a human/perceived superiority over other animals

The paradox of the above is that we either agree or refuse to witness the suffering of these innocents for the same exact reason: because we care.

When people assert it’s possible to love animals yet eat them, they’re looking through the lens Joy describes. When we can’t bring ourselves to face the horrible truth about something we continue to justify and willingly enable, we can’t smell our own bullshit. 

The Horror

A large portion of the book goes into detail about the horrors inflicted on animals raised for their flesh and fluids (including dairy and eggs), which I won’t get into but which you could witness here in 12 minutes (Farm to Fridge, narrated by Oscar-nominee James Cromwell). If these practices and cost-cutting measures weren’t so inherently horrific, the meat industry wouldn’t go to such lengths to keep them hidden and people wouldn’t be so averse to witnessing or even discussing them.

But of course, even just the act of slaughtering the most “humanely raised” of animals (which routinely occurs for meat as well as dairy and egg production) is also horrifying to those who haven’t been desensitized, and therefore it’s also suppressed. 

To sum up this section, most animals used for food including fishes, dairy cows, and layer hens are put through hell we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemies, let alone perfectly innocent and vulnerable creatures. As this becomes more common knowledge, humane-washing grows in popularity. Yes regardless of the true quality of their always-brief lives, almost all of these animals end up at the same slaughterhouses at a point nowhere near even the middle of their natural lifespans (that is, if they weren't culled shorty after birth) for no vital reason, subject to a bloody ending and subsequent dismemberment (which sometimes begins while they are still alive), which they did absolutely nothing to deserve and is not in any way necessary nor justifiable in non-survival situations.

Something from this section that stood out to me was the fact that there is a standard piece of equipment called a “head splitter,” used for removing their brains – and that’s just one of many such tools in the meatpacking arsenal.

“Most people, whether they eat meat or not, share the same attitude towards the slaughtering of animals: they see the process as disgusting and offensive.” That’s because it is disgusting and offensive. Think about it: our lust for the products of slaughter means a portion of our population is employed turning living creatures into bloody stubs; to commit acts that would leave us quivering in the fetal position if we were in the room for five minutes – the sights, the sounds, the stench, all of it.

This leads us to the fact that humans are also unwitting victims of this violent system. Regulation is poor, contamination is the norm rather than the exception, and meatpacking is the single most dangerous factory job in the US. The workers often become so desensitized that many exhibit extreme and irrational violence against the animals beyond that which is already required of them, and this often seeps to their lives outside of work as well. This is because the system is violent, extreme and irrational to begin with. What do we honestly expect?

The Meatocracy

The rabbit hole deepens when we realize not only is animal agribusiness inherently corrupt due to its inherent violence under the best of circumstances, but it’s a $125 billion industry controlled by a handful of operations, and so the power is concentrated and the consumer protections are flimsy.

Massive political funding and lobbying efforts have led to blurred government boundaries to the point that not only are animal agribusinesses above the law, they help shape it. Taxpayer money goes to enabling the unsustainable resource depletion of these multibillion-dollar corporations and cleaning up the inevitable ecological messes they make. (Often, the "small family farms" are contracted by huge corporations, who take on none of the debt or risk but reap most of the profits, and the contracted farmers are unwilling to speak out and risk retaliation.) 

Speaking of the environment, a growing body of scientific evidence shows that mass meat production is causing a serious breakdown of the ecosystem that cannot possibly be sustained. (Please make the fascinating documentary Cowspiracy your next Netflix session.)

Additionally, it is now a crime punishable by law to cause any “animal enterprise” any loss in revenue, to film inside of one in many states, or to publicly criticize any food produced by one without “reasonable” scientific evidence. Welcome to the “meatocracy.”

Joy briefly goes into the many documented health risks of meat and what it would look like if Surgeon General’s Warnings were on animal products as they are on cigarettes. One of my favorites: “There is shit in your meat.”

She then moves on the mythology of meat, which is the defensive backup system that kicks in to help one recover when the disturbing reality of a system left entirely unaccountable for its actions (and our own unaccountability for our participation) is temporarily exposed. A Voltaire quote sums this up: “When we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”

The Three N’s

She refers to the “Three N’s of Justification”: that meat is natural, normal, and necessary. From childhood, we are taught these widely-accepted myths that discourage critical thinking. It’s not until a violent ideology collapses that these myths are seen for what they are – ludicrous – but as it stands, we’re still knee-deep in it this particular pile of BS.

Carnism is so entrenched that it’s supported by every major institution in society, as all violent ideologies must be. An example is the fact that veterinarians take a pledge to alleviate animal suffering, but most of them eat animal flesh and fluids themselves in non-survival situations, an obvious source of animal suffering and death. 

Many people, including professionals, pathologize or otherwise thwart those who don’t support this dominant ideology (vegans are called extremists, unhealthy, crazy, cult-like, etc). 

Competing ideologies are viewed as illegitimate, which is why vegans can’t press charges against businesses confining and slaughtering perfectly innocent creatures. In another example of this concept, CBS once turned down a $2 million-dollar PETA anti-meat Superbowl ad claiming they don’t air “advocacy advertisements,” but during the same program ran an anti-smoking ad as well as many commercials promoting meat consumption.

As seen above, the mainstream media generally enforces carnism via their omission. The unprecedented number of victims – who suffer every minute of every day for human pleasure – are rarely discussed. When an outrageous aspect of meat production does occasionally get media attention, it’s presented as an exception rather than the norm, and public outrage is directed at a company or individual rather than the inherently violent system itself, which remains unchallenged.

A little more about each of the three N’s:

• Normal: Social norms both describe and dictate how we behave. When something is seen as a custom or tradition, it easily escapes scrutiny. We often don’t realize our values, preferences, and behaviors have been defined for us. We are led to actually believe that our acquired taste preferences supersede other species’ preference to not be killed. This means vegans are the ones that have to explain, apologize for, and often vehemently defend their choice to minimize harm, while no one has to explain why they choose to maximize harm when they could so easily avoid doing so.
  

• Natural: “As with other acts of violence… we must differentiate between natural and justifiable.” Just as things become normalized by us, they also can become naturalized. The tenants, seen as being irrefutable and in accordance with nature depending on one’s belief system, are constructed by those who put themselves at the top of the “natural hierarchy” of the way things are “meant to be.” (Of course, this has also been done to various groups of humans.) Additionally, despite all this talk of a food chain, a chain doesn’t have a top – and if it did, it would be inhabited by carnivores, not discretionary omnivore/herbivores. (Scientists have actually found that humans are actually at the trophic level of anchovies. Take that, ego.)
  

• Necessary: Most people behave as though meat products are necessary for human survival regardless of circumstances despite the tangible existence of millions of happy, healthy vegans (and the official position of the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, formerly the American Dietetic Association, that vegan diets are healthful and appropriate for individuals in all stages of life – and its international counterparts have similar positions, with not a single medical or dietetic association claiming otherwise.) “The Protein Myth” is the most pervasive of these myths, which is thoroughly debunked by reputable sources found via a quick Google search and some basic math.

Like similarly self-serving historical mindsets, many seem to believe that breeding and exploiting animals is somehow helping them and is necessary for all. It’s a common assertion that if we stopped eating animals, they would either go extinct or take over. Even though we would obviously stop breeding these animals, it’s as though the “killing must continue in order to justify all the killing already done.” How nice of us to justify the number one killer of sentient individuals, one generation after the next, for all eternity.

(To go off the book for a minute, of course, no one is ever going to release a bunch of cows and other farmed animals into the wild. Gradually-lowered demand for products of the slaughter industry would lower the supply, so fewer and fewer animals would be bred in the first place. And using the sentimental idea that farmed animals will go extinct to justify non-veganism is perhaps the ultimate irony. We are talking about animals who don't exist in the natural world and are pale shadows of their original wild forms. They are artificially bred into existence, selectively engineered for human use, and essentially imprisoned in their own genetically-impaired bodies – and we kill them all. Meanwhile, scientists have found that livestock production’s impact on land use is “likely the leading cause of modern species extinctions.”)

Another common “necessary” assertion of many is that the economy would suffer if we stopped eating animals. In reality, the concentrated corporations would suffer the bulk of financial consequences (if they weren’t already smart enough to have shifted to plant-based food production, as many are already doing) while the majority of workers and citizens would be unaffected – yes, the same workers and citizens who have moved on from many other now-obsolete products and industries without causing economic collapse.

The Cocoon

Next she discusses the myth of free will. Most Americans wouldn’t intentionally harm an animal – yet we must believe we are informed consumers acting on free will – so constant coercion is in order. While no one is exactly forcing adults to eat meat, our thoughts, behavior patterns, and acquired tastes are established long before we are able to act as free agents.

When we do experience brief gaps or interruptions in consciousness – such as when we’re children first realizing “chicken” is actually a chicken, or we encounter a vegan who makes compelling points – we are immediately discouraged from further exploring this gap and our numbing is quickly restored by society, including authority figures, with any or all of the Three N’s. And if we see, for example, a video of an animal being slaughtered that makes us say we never want to eat meat again, it’s usually not long before we are swiftly pulled back in to the defensive structure and comforting cocoon of carnism.

“It is impossible to exercise free will as long as we are operating from within the system,” which Joy says we must fully extract ourselves from to recover our lost empathy and truth.

She then geeks out a bit on Matrix comparisons before moving on to a description of the Cognitive Trio, which prevents us from identifying or empathizing with the animals we eat (since doing so would cause us to feel disgusted by the idea of eating them):

• Objectification: “By viewing animals as objects, we can treat their bodies accordingly, without the moral discomfort we might otherwise feel.” This is why farmed or hunted animals are an “it,” but our pets are a “he” or “she.”
  

• Deindividualizion: “Recognizing the individuality of others interrupts the process of deindividualizion, making it more difficult to maintain the psychological and emotional distance necessary to harm them.” (“If I look at the mass,” Mother Teresa said, “I will never act.”)
  

• Dichotomization: “The two main categories we have for animals are edible and inedible… whether the categories into which we place animals are accurate is less important than whether we believe they’re accurate.”

The Cognitive Trio is enabled by technology, which has given us the surreal ability to kill more animals than ever before humanly possible while at the same time removing most of us from the process entirely.

Joy then summarizes several amusing interviews she conducted during her doctorate research with people including butchers and meat consumers that clearly reveal the strangely unexamined confusion regarding why we actually kill/eat the animals we do, or that we kill/eat animals at all in non-survival situations. “It is striking how an entire society of rational people can maintain such irrational patterns of thought,” summarizes Joy, “without catching on to the gaping holes in the logic.”

Again, we understand this irrationality is due to the fact that they are seeing the world through the psychologically manipulative lens of carnism, as most vegans once did as well. They are struggling to close this “gap in consciousness” Joy’s questions have created; topics they have probably never been asked to think about before or were actively discouraged or brushed off. The only possible answers are decidedly absurd.

She touches again on the issue of inherent disgust and the “contaminating effect of disgust,” regarding the expectation for vegans to pick the animal meat or cheese out of a dish – a non-vegan Westerner would never be expected to pick out the dog meat or dog cheese. Most people won’t even finish their soup after a fly has landed in it, yet chunks of deceased chicken or cow are perfectly acceptable?

The Meatrix

We then dive yet further into the rabbit hole, discovering there is a “matrix within the matrix.” Yep. While carnism is a social matrix, the carnistic schema is a psychological matrix that further entrenches this violent system. Since schemas filter information, we tend to notice or remember only what confirms our existing bias. The carnistic schema embraces any confirmation bias (butter is good for us after all!), but distorts our perception of information that threatens our bias (dairy and egg production butchers adorable “surplus” baby calves/chicks and “spent” mamas). This greatly impacts what we notice, how we interpret it, and whether we remember it.

For example, the word "nurse" usually brings to mind a woman in an old-fashioned uniform and hat even though we know perfectly well they are often male, and they wear modern scrubs. Schemas are stubborn that way. When we learn that pigs actually are one of the most intelligent animals on the planet and they keep themselves very clean, or we see a disturbing video of one being slaughtered (often done via horrific gas chambers), the sight or info typically wears off shortly after due to this schema of happy, dumb, filthy pigs rolling in mud on farms who are "meant" to become human food. It “twists information so that nonsense seems to make perfect sense,” and also “explains why we fail to see the absurdities of the system.”

The ultimate absurdity may be placing our acquired taste and fashion preferences over the lives and deaths of billions of innocents.

 Clearly, the carnistic system is riddle with:

• Absurdities

• Inconsistencies

• Paradox

It is fortified by a complex network of defenses that make it possible for us to:

• Believe without questioning

• Know without thinking

• Act without feeling

So why all the mental gymnastics? “The answer is simple. Because we care about animals, and we care about the truth. And the system depends on our not caring, and the system is built on deception.”

When we tolerate living a lie, we become the very fortress holding up this house of cards. But we can stop blocking the truth. Joy can show us the door, but we have to walk through it. Here's how.

Bearing Witness

The final section of the book discusses how the entire animal exploitation system is organized around blocking its single greatest threat: collective witnessing.

If the masses catch on, it would lead to an informed public. It would lead to disgust. It would lead to empathy. It would show us the truth.

“Virtually every atrocity in the history of humankind was enabled by a populace that turned away from a reality that seemed too painful to face, while virtually every revolution for peace and justice has been made possible by a group of people who choose to bear witness and demand that others bear witness as well,” writes Joy.

Instead of witnessing the heart-wrenching plight of animals, most have disassociated from it. This mass disassociation is the central mechanism that allows our psychic numbing. Most have dissociated not enough to kill others, but enough to support killing done on our behalf, and to render us powerless to make morally consistent choices.

We all pay the price. While the ultimate goal of human development is integration (the synthesis of various aspects into a harmonious whole), our disassociation prevents this. It’s simply impossible to have an integrated, peaceful society when we care about animals while both supporting and turning a blind eye to their suffering and the pervasive, complex web of deceit that supports it.

Witnessing hurts and takes courage, so we resist and deny. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. But rather than conforming to this violent ideology, we can liberate ourselves to live a more authentic, integrated life. When we pull back the curtain, we leave behind our own personal contribution to this system based entirely on the domination and subjugation of other sentient individuals. 

But as Joy reminds us, you’ll have to keep actively working to maintain your awareness and resist your old cocoon of psychic numbing. As someone who, before finally going vegan, once reverted back to eating animal meat after several years of (albeit somewhat uninformed) vegetarianism for a substantial period of time because it was "socially easier," I can personally attest to this.

Following vegan Facebook pages such as Vegan Publishers can help one to stay informed and aware daily. Also, joining vegan Facebook groups and vegan Meetup groups gives social context to stay connected to others, vent, and ask questions.

As James O’Dea (formerly of Amnesty International) puts it, we realize we are never truly outside observers, as we are all “inside the wound” together.

When we agree to be a witness, we call forth our highest qualities, including:

• Conviction

• Integrity

• Empathy

• Compassion

We end our:

• Apathy

• Complacency

• Self-interest

• “Blissful” ignorance

We only participate in this dominant system because we have agreed to remain uninformed. (I once did it, too, and trust me, I get it.) But as Joy reminds us, in the face of this mass violence, we are either a victim or perpetrator. We must take a side. All bystanders are either marked by their action or inaction. Being silent or neutral only helps the oppressor. 

So I encourage you to walk through the door Joy has busted wide open. Step out of The Meatrix; speak out for the animals, people, and planet it lays to waste; and never, ever allow anyone to shame you or shut you up. Veganism is an urgent social justice solution whose time has come. Please don’t wait another day to get on the right side of history. <3

Did this article make you rethink your animal use? Share your comments below.

A brilliant animated video by Melanie Joy

2015 was an absolute whirlwind of one incredible vegan-related story after another. Here are my personal top 10 surprising and inspiring vegan stories of 2015!

#10 - Professional Cheese Taster Raves About Vegan Cheese

Elizabeth Nerud, a Certified Cheese Professional in the American Cheese Society who manages a bustling cheese department in downtown Minneapolis, sums up her tasting of 10 different Miyoko’s Kitchen cultured nut product varieties:

“It’s like cheese created the shapes and flavors but it inspired a whole new thing. You want for nothing, you don’t feel like you are sacrificing a thing.”

#9 - Winning Chili Cookoff Entry is (Secretly) Vegan

Chef Mama T’s homemade vegan chili took first place at a chili cook-off in Honolulu, but no one even knew it was vegan until after the winners were announced! (I so wish I could have seen the looks on their faces.) The second place winner was “grass-fed brisket chili” and the third was “local pork and white bean chili.” Mama T’s secret ingredient was pureed, roasted eggplant. Tastes great, less killing!

#8 - GQ’s Best Burger of 2015 is Vegan

The taste and texture of the burger at NYC chef Brooks Headley’s restaurant Superiority Burger has earned it the honor of being named GQ’s best burger of the year. The clincher? It contains no animal flesh or fluids. Apparently it’s made from a nutty patty with a “roasted umami-bomb tomato” and all kinds of snappy, crunchy, chewy, yummy stuff going on.

This reminds me of the 2104 story of Vedge (a 100% vegan eatery) being named Philadelphia’s best restaurant in a Zagat survey of over five thousand people. 

#7 - Britian’s New Farming Minister is an Outspoken Vegan

Kerry McCarthy says: "I really believe that meat should be treated in exactly the same way as tobacco, with public campaigns to stop people eating it. Progress on animal welfare is being made at EU level... but in the end it comes down to not eating meat or dairy. The constant challenging of the environmental impact of livestock farming is making me more and more militant." I don't know how the hell she got this position seeing as we live in the Meatrix, but I like it!

#6 - Mr. Universe Goes Vegan (and other Vegan Athletes Kick Ass & Break Records)

The reigning Mr. Universe Barny Du Plessis went vegan, joining the 1977 winner Jim Morris (who is a 78-year-old powerhouse). Scott Jurek became the fastest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. Serena Williams (who is "plant-based" but not vegan ethically) won Wimbledon (her fourth straight major) and was named Sports Illustrated’s 2015 Sportsperson of the Year. Football player David Carter, “The 300-Pound Vegan,” was signed by the Chicago Bears. Strongman Patrik Baboumian officially beat his own Guinness world record for heaviest yoke walk.

But where do they get their protein? ;)

#5 - The Onion Mocks the Paradoxical Idea of “Humane Meat”

The Onion cleverly mocked the nonsensical yet ubiquitous “humane meat” myth with their “free-range slaughterhouse” spoof. “When you bite into a steak, you can tell whether or not it was given the chance to amble around near its own disemboweled calf.”

This may even top their classic 2013 piece, “We Raise All Our Beef Humanely On Open Pasture And Then We Hang Them Upside Down And Slash Their Throats.”

#4 - Vegan Mayo Lawsuit Triumph Shows Desperation of Declining Industry 

Lobbyists for Big Egg tried and failed to ruin Josh Tetrick's vegan food company Hampton Creek and their “Just Mayo.”  Officials at the American Egg Board — a marketing organization funded by the egg industry but overseen by the Department of Agriculture — tried to coordinate a public relations effort to bring down Hampton Creek. It backfired miserably. 

And while the Washington Post article linked above says the environmental benefits of replacing eggs with plant-based alternatives are “debatable,” the ecologically damaging impacts of chicken farming are well documented. 

#3 - “Going Vegan” Wins Best Water Idea at World Water Week 2015

World Water Week in Stockholm, organized by Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), is the annual focal point for the globe’s water issues. In 2015, over 3,000 individuals and close to 300 convening organizations from 130 countries participated. "Going vegan" won their "Best Water Ideas" campaign with 58% of the votes. Going vegan is literally the only way to save massive amounts of water. All other solutions pale in comparison.

Oh, and the media decided not to report on this story at all. 

#2 - Cowspiracy Cut Co-Produced by Leonardo Dicaprio Released on Netflix!

In 2014, I interviewed the director of documentary film Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. This year a new cut was produced by Leonardo DiCaprio, released on Netflix, and screened for the European Parliament and the Italian Parliament. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you. Just watch it already!

Forks Over Knives
Cowspiracy
Earthlings

Of course, there were many other shocking stories that proved we are truly living in the Meatrix. Here is a summary of stories like that from September alone (I made this for my page Brain on Hugs):

In case you need another reason, the top story of the year in this regard was of course the World Health Organization classifying processed meat as a carcinogen (something that causes cancer). Read the WHO's Q&A on that.

#1 - EPDB goes viral!

The year's top story for Craig and I was the fact that our blog article Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us – No, Really went unexpectedly viral! It now has over a million views, and we've gotten tons of people telling us it has inspired them to go vegan! Woohoo!

Thank you for reading. If you are inspired to make the switch, it's the perfect time, as Veganuary is about to kick off. May you take a cup of kindness yet in 2016 by going and/or continuing to be vegan. <3 

Other best-of vegan 2015 lists:

VegNews
Portland Press Herald

As Jesse Eisenberg recently explained to Conan O’Brien, many are calling their vegan Thanksgiving celebration “Thanksliving.” But is it really possible to give thanks for the blessing of the harvest without consuming a dead turkey with dried bread stuffed into his or her anal cavity? Let’s find out.

A Corny Tradition

Corn, a main player in the harvest we’re ostensibly giving thanks for, was a cherished staple crop for many native tribes and subsequently for the Pilgrims. What do farmed turkeys mostly eat? Corn. If this seems like an appropriate celebratory use of the stuff, read on.

Per Scientific American (we like science), the massive amount of corn fed to farmed animals suffers major losses of calories and protein along the way. “What this all means is that little of the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math.” Good thing we're donating food to hungry people when we're not wastefully shoving it down the gullets of animals.

For every 200 calories of corn the average modern domestic turkey eats, only 100 calories become edible portions of his or her flesh. The feed conversion ratio (FCR) of turkeys raised in more pastoral settings is often worse, and that of larger animals like pigs and cows is even more atrocious.

So what are the impacts of growing such epic amounts of corn? It’s not pretty. The below picture from National Geographic’s “The Future of Food” shows a section of Amazon rainforest cleared to grow corn. In total, 91% of deforested Amazon is cleared for grazing animals and growing their feed crops like corn, soy, and grain – all while 21,000 human being starve to death EACH DAY.

In the US, the corn system uses more land (and irrigation water) than any other crop, equivalent to the size of the state of California. The National Corn Grower’s Association says 80% is fed to livestock worldwide. They’re happy about this because it means they can grow and sell unreasonably large amounts of corn. Like, say, enough to fatten up tens of billions of entirely discretionary animals like giant turkeys and 1-ton bovines while human beings starve to death.

In a nutshell, an 18-pound turkey is actually a 36-pound pile of corn, minus the fiber, micronutrients, and energy-giving carbs that were present in the corn.

Our well-intentioned tradition of feeding the hungry while simultaneously creating demand for tens of billions of crop-inhaling animals – none of whom go remotely hungry – is counterproductive, illogical, and harmful.

Turkeys Would Say Thanks, But No Thanks

Despite the fact that the origins of the Thanksgiving tradition have nothing to do with turkeys, the charming gobbles of 37 million baby galliformes are silenced around this time of year. (Yes, they are babies. They average 16-18 weeks, or 5 months, of age when they are butchered.)

As psychologist Melanie Joy explains, violent ideologies are the product of an invisible system. Although enabled by well-meaning friends and family, the institutionalized bloodshed of tens of millions of individual toms and hens to “give thanks” is an undeniably violent, counterintuitive ideology. It stays entrenched by remaining invisible, unnamed, and unquestioned.

Despite the onslaught of images of happy living turkeys, including those aimed at children, most people are totally sheltered from what it takes to turn living turkeys into headless, legless, internal organ-less carcasses. This is because most couldn’t stomach or tolerate it. The only footage we see of animal factories are illegally obtained by activists, which are then discredited as being altered or portraying an isolated incident.

So why, pray tell, don’t they just show us their own footage of how turkeys are intensively confined before being beheaded?

As Craig and I once did, you may make an effort to purchase meat with humane labels and acknowledge your own disappointing hypocrisy in continuing to either frequently or infrequently consume the products of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) because they are so pervasive and much more affordable.

But please think about it. Would you recoil any less at the idea of slitting a turkey’s throat just because of the conditions he or she was briefly raised in during life? You owe it to yourself and the turkeys to find out. Take a moment to watch how they are killed under the most “humane” of circumstances. As Khaiti Kahleck of LTD Farm explains, “The muscles as they move as they die are very strong. And it’s almost startling to feel that energy as a life force leaving.” Even more startling is the idea of such a needless betrayal of our feathered friends.

Killing for nourishment when it's not for survival is actually killing for pleasure. It's unnecessary. Although humane-washing has successfully distracted us from this, these small farmers, whether struggling or not, receive a paycheck from the act of forcefully and violently ending someone’s brief existence on this Earth – someone brought into existence just for that purpose. Those with access to and autonomy over our food choices can forego this process by choosing plant-based foods that use resources far more efficiently.

What to Do?

“There’s some strange thing about when a person meets a turkey and realizes just how sweet they are,” explains Susie Coston, who takes care of animals rescued from the slaughter industry at a vegan farm sanctuary. As she explains, the turkeys have deep bonds with other specific birds. They vocalize with their besties back and forth when they can’t see each other. She describes most of them as curious but shy. Hildy the turkey loved to sit with Susie for hours and hours being pet.

One woman, Kathryn King, even explains how she ended up inadvertently becoming a turkey’s surrogate mom when one of the poults (baby turkey) she bought was weak and needed extra nurturing. Even once grown, Peeper would follow her around, fly up onto her lap to cuddle when she watched TV, and would lay his face by her face for her to pet and stroke him for hours. Much like any other pet, he had favorite toys, daily routines, and would come when called by name. When he passed away, the mourning process was no different than had he been the cherished family dog.

Nothing about Hildy or Peeper is different from the turkeys people eat without ever considering the unique individual on their plate. Animals are not anonymous production units, even if we pretend they are. The animals don’t have to change for us to live vegan, but we do need to change our own perspective.

I have come to understand that the questions I am asked at holidays are, in a way, questions people are asking themselves. For example:

Don’t you miss having the turkey at Thanksgiving?
Would I miss having the turkey at Thanksgiving?

What’s Thanksgiving without the turkey?
Could I celebrate Thanksgiving without the turkey?

What do you eat instead?
What would I eat instead?

It can be impossible not to sound defensive. Colleen Patrick Goudreau has a helpful suggestion: just ask an open question back instead. “Well, do you think you would miss having the turkey at Thanksgiving?” I find people usually say it’s not their favorite part of the Thanksgiving spread but they eat it because it’s there.

On holidays, we all want to be surrounded by friends and family, eat delicious food, and collapse into a satisfied haze afterward. Animal flesh or fluid is in no way required for any of this. Trust me.

Here are several approaches for celebrating a vegan Thanksgiving:

• Have your own enjoyable, delicious ThanksLiving. (And no, this doesn’t need to involve a lecture about the evils of factory farming or a turkey-shaped alternative, the latter of which apparently enrages Conan O’Brien more than the actual killing of 37 billion US turkeys each year.) This can also involve going to a farm sanctuary to experience the joys of living turkeys firsthand. The real thrill, as they say, is not to kill.
  

• Opt out of any Thanksgiving celebration in which turkey is on the menu, as is the idea behind this year’s #LiberationPledge. The idea, modeled after how past social injustices have been overcome, is that we are born into a violent status quo that takes courage to remove ourselves from, so we need support if we are going to take a minority stand – but to create social change we need to put traditionalists on the defense by creating zones of nonviolence and asking others to do the same.
  

• Attend a party that will have a turkey carcass as the guest of dishonor and bring delicious vegan options to share, helping others understand that they do have a choice to opt out of needless violence and resource waste.

So yes, I think we’ve proven it’s not only possible to give thanks without chopping off someone’s head, but that doing so is actually a far more appropriate and effective use of the very harvest we’re giving thanks for. Here’s to a wonderful ThanksLiving!

Vegan Thanksgiving recipe ideas:

Eat Plants / Drink Beer (us): Roasted Seitan with Root Vegetables
Serious Eats: Vegetables Wellington (The Ultimate Vegan Plant-Based Holiday Roast)
Huffington Post: 42 Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes That'll Steal The Turkey's Show
Buzzfeed: 41 Delicious Vegan Thanksgiving Recipes

Craig here. How do you follow up Lorelei’s brilliant viral post Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us – No Really? Before that article, we were getting a few hundred people to read our posts (at the most), because we just started this site and hadn’t built an audience yet. But even then, I was excited to know that some people saw my beer and food recipes. Yet, as of this writing, we’ve had over a half million people access the article; more than 1,000 people have left comments (in addition to the many comments we’re seeing on Facebook shares). Some of those comments are really nice and supportive (from vegans and non-vegans alike) and some of the comments are – how can I put this delicately – not quite as nice. This letter is directed at the latter group. (And to the many people who let us know they are now going or considering veganism after reading the piece – that thrills us to no end!)

One of the main criticisms that seemed to pop up over and over was that we won’t change omnivores’ minds about adopting a vegan lifestyle by being so blunt in our language about what is required in order to get meat and animal products on people’s plates. Actually, the top comment was probably that we wasted people’s time because they read an article they thought was going to give them ammunition against a vegan diet – and all they got were many reasons and links to support it and a happy ending, delivered via a Dad joke. Whoops! 

We were also told over and over again that calling someone by a scientifically accurate descriptor of their diet makes some people feel bad. Saying omnivores or omnis is apparently some sort of pejorative when coming from a vegan’s mouth rather than an easy way to delineate between people that eat meat (omnivores) and people that don’t eat any animal products (vegans). Here’s a fun experiment: think of the last time you heard the term “vegan” in your everyday life – did you associate it with a lifestyle that tries to minimize animal suffering, is friendlier to the environment, saves a lot of water, and is quite healthy when done right? I’m betting your initial reaction was a lot more negative than positive. While you read our article, consider that maybe you felt like a vegan does every time a new person learns our dirty little secret that we seek to cause less harm.

Many like to say that vegans shouldn’t tell others how animals are forcibly impregnated, taken from their mothers, killed incredibly early into their lifespan, often slaughtered while often still conscious, etc. Why? This is literally what happens. Vegans aren’t the ones lying about how they’re bred, raised, and killed – unlike the meat industry, which needs to perpetuate the myth of the small-scale, idyllic family farm where cows and pigs hold hands while skipping through the pasture (skipping that whole messy slaughterhouse part altogether) so people will continue to do something that’s completely unnecessary no matter how it’s done.

Pointing out that animal agriculture is the top clearer of rainforests, user/polluter of waterways and oceans, user of antibiotics, as well as a top greenhouse gas emitter and contributing factor to world hunger, is also frowned upon because so many people recycle and do as much as they can for the environment – but not the one thing that’d have the biggest affect – and then they get offended because they feel like vegans are saying their contribution doesn’t matter. Their contribution does matter, but who wouldn’t want to do more every day of your life, multiple times a day, when it’s so easy to do? And apparently letting people know that meat and animal products are also unhealthier than plant-based options is another thing that vegans can’t mention because diets are a “personal choice” (that we all pay for through inflated healthcare costs and widespread environmental consequences).

So I ask you, person-who-knows-what-can-change-your-own-mind, what should we, as vegans, say to you to convince you that a vegan lifestyle is something you should adopt?

I only ask because when you assert that vegans won’t change people’s minds with their current tactics of “in your face” veganism (a.k.a. letting people know what’s happening in the world), it suggests that there is something that vegans can say to change your mind. Or more interestingly, that we’ll change people’s minds by never saying anything about it at all. Being quiet about something isn’t how you raise awareness; just living our lives and letting our example speak for ourselves won’t sway people because there is so much false information out there about veganism along with the deep cognitive dissonance that comes with being an animal lover who eats animals. Should vegans say it “nicer” to you? If so, how do you want to be informed that around 100 billion animals a year are killed strictly for hedonistic reasons? And yes, consumption and use of animal products is hedonistic, because people don’t need their flesh to eat or their skins to wear in order to survive; they do it because it tastes good and it looks good.

We live in a world of cars and computers, where the entirety of human knowledge is in a device we put in our pockets. We’ve got man-made textiles that are vastly superior to leather, down, and fur. We have agricultural, scientific, and dietary knowledge to grow, produce, and harvest all the great-tasting food that humanity needs from the Earth itself, so continuing to exploit animals is archaic. (When Guinness recently announced they’ll discontinue using fish bladders to filter their beer, Lorelei jokingly asked if they finally phased out using whale oil in their lamps too. I mean, what year is it?) And yet people want to glorify the act of intentionally breeding billions and billions of animals to be raised mostly in inhumane conditions and then slaughtered by horrific means because it’s “natural for people to eat meat” and “our ancestors did it.” Take a look around you; what’s natural about your current living situation or reminiscent of how our ancestors lived? And in what other ways do cavemen and women serve as your moral compass?

There’s much more to say, but let me finish with this: are you telling vegans to stop speaking out, or to somehow say it differently, because it makes you uncomfortable to know your lifestyle directly contributes to what we’re being frank about? If that’s the reason, vegans going silent may make you feel better, but it isn’t going to stop the actual events that are making you uncomfortable. If you’re actually upset by what we told you rather than being upset about how we told it, consider thinking about making a change in your diet and lifestyle to help dramatically reduce the amount of damage your current habits are doing to yourself, to animals, and to the planet. Because it won’t kill you. No, really.

Our Vegan Diet Almost Killed Us – No, Really

Okay, vegans. I know what you’re thinking. There have been many articles with similar titles circulating around the internet for years, and after you read the article you realize the person, although technically vegan, also had a serious eating disorder like anorexia or even the lesser-known "orthorexia," or was on a restricted calorie cleanse consisting of lettuce water, or they were homicidal parents feeding their baby one carrot a day - or something like that. Somehow, people like this even manage to wind up on the Today show with book deals, as we saw earlier this week. 

Well, this is not one of those stories. For me and my fiancé, our regular vegan diet actually almost killed us. If you’re thinking about veganism, you’ll want to read this – and vegans, please hear us out.

The Best of Intentions

I believe people are vegan for really, really good reasons. In a nutshell, they’ve learned that we make the choice every day to either pay people to breed and intentionally kill vulnerable animals for our pleasure – or to just not do that. After all, these animals value their lives as much as our pets do and are just as worthy of love.

Then they learn that dairy and eggs are as bad as animal meat, because newborn males are an unfortunate byproduct of egg and dairy production and are typically killed – while their sisters and mothers are forced into production before being butchered once “spent” a mere fraction into their lifetime. And they learn that this is part of the typical process even if the farms are "humane," small, local, organic, pastured, cage-free, or free-range.

They learn about the many scientific and academic sources showing that vegan diets represent perhaps the most significant environmental effort one can make, requiring about half the water and emissions to produce compared to typical Western diets. This is starting to become more mainstream information, especially since Cowspiracy hit Netflix.

Oh – and this is not a small point – vegans learn that plant-based diets feed far more human beings. As a recent Chemical and Engineering News cover story explains, producing meat and animal products "requires a lot of animals raised on huge, unsustainable amounts of plant protein," adding, “A switch to plant proteins by those who can afford meat would go a long way to feeding the growing global population while using fewer of the planet’s resources.”

So how could we just sit by and continue to opt in to this human-created nightmare called animal agriculture when we could just make a very simple, doable lifestyle change to create less harm?

With that background, hopefully you can understand why we chose to go vegan. Our hearts were in the right places. I’d been totally vegan for about 3 years after dabbling in varying degrees of vegetarianism throughout my life. My now-fiancé Craig made the shift after we’d been together for a few months, which you can read about here.

What We Ate

Unlike the typical negative stories of vegans eating very restrictive diets, we basically ate everything under the sun other than animal products, of course. Craig’s an amazing cook and I’m not so bad myself. Since there are 20,000+ edible plant species on planet Earth to choose from and tons of ways to enjoy fresh, frozen, and prepared fruits, vegetables, herbs, spices, mushrooms, beans, legumes, nuts, and seeds, it wasn’t hard. We made rich cheeses, sausages, ice creams, gravies and more, all without animals. It’s not like we were stranded on a desert island without a plentiful supply of food. And when we got lazy, there were plenty of yummy pre-made vegan meats and cheeses to choose from at the store, even after we moved from an urban to a rural area.

We stuffed our faces full of delicious, nutritious food basically every day with few exceptions – say, that time on a business trip I was stuck with omnivores who looked pityingly at my wilted salad and plain baked potato at the restrictive omni restaurant they took me to. (I snuck out after for a real meal at Native Foods.) But generally everywhere we went, we could get satisfying vegan meals, even from popular chains like Subway to Taco Bell to Chipotle.

Whenever I used an app to see if I was getting enough protein, I’d usually had more than enough even just by lunch! I’d always tried to take a daily multi-vitamin even when I was omni, and that didn’t change, but I now took a vegan-friendly version when I remembered to (and I admit I often forgot). Like my old supplement – and like those given to livestock themselves – it included vitamin B12. Salt is iodized, folic acid is added to many packaged goods, and vitamin D is added to cows’ milk, so we didn’t find it weird to be getting a nutrient obtained from bacteria in isolation rather than from the flesh and fluids of animals.

So What Went Wrong?

We were getting all our nutrients like everyone else and were totally healthy. I hadn't wasted away, my hair wasn't falling out, etc. When I gave blood at a blood drive, the nurse commented on my high iron levels. At my annual physical checkups, my physician never mentioned anything was remotely amiss. And despite working in offices where colds and flus regularly made the rounds, neither of us had gotten the flu since going vegan, or even much of the sniffles.

Yes, sometimes it was hard socially, like when my uncle asked me why vegans don't care more about people. I told him we don't kill and eat people, either. That shut him up. (I could direct those with further objections here or give them the handy  anti-vegan bullsh*t mix n' match for fun.) And that time when the waiter accidentally put dairy milk in my oatmeal, instead of throwing a tantrum, I politely requested another bowl. The struggle is... real?

I should add that Craig is a molecular biologist and I have an MBA in environmental management, so we know better than to intentionally harm ourselves to avoid harming others – or so we thought. After all, despite lots of anecdotal confirmation bias-affirming claims to the contrary, the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals (the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, formerly called the American Dietetic Association) and its international counterparts declare a vegan diet is healthful and appropriate for all stages of life, with not one medical or dietetic association claiming otherwise or that the flesh or fluid of any animal is somehow necessary to cure, treat, or prevent any deficiency, disease, or twinge of discomfort. Not only that, but a growing body of evidence shows that animal products don't do a body good after all.

So how did our vegan diet almost kill us? Well, it was a couple of months ago when we ran out of cashew milk (one of many tasty non-animal milks) and bananas. I really, really like to make shakes every day around midafternoon – peanut butter, dates, vanilla, chocolate, berries, whatever ­– with a frozen banana for a creamy base. I swear it tastes like soft serve ice cream, but healthy. You can add hemp, chia, and/or flax seeds and a few Brazil nuts for an extra boost of sustenance too, if you’re into that sort of thing. 

So we ended up going to the grocery store to get more milk and bananas, and as we were crossing the street to the store after parking... wait for it... a car totally came out of nowhere and almost hit us! It was seriously a really close call. We could have been killed. We almost died!

If we hadn’t been vegan, we wouldn’t have run out of cashew milk, and we probably wouldn’t have been drinking a midafternoon shake because we probably would have still been in a food coma from eating severed birds’ wings or someone’s ribcage with mammary secretion dip or whatever the hell it is omnis eat these days. Am I right?

The Aftermath

Ever since that fateful day, even though our vegan diet almost killed us, we’re actually both… still vegan. You heard me right.

We decided that we’d still rather not pay people to do things like fire bolts into sweet animals’ brains and slit their throats, grind up newborn male chicks in macerators, place “spent” hens in gassing chamber units, force females to lactate by impregnating them and then removing and either killing their babies or forcing them into the same servitude based on their gender, turn “spent” mothers into hamburger meat, remove fishes from the rapidly depleting oceans to become “seafood” no one needs (or feed for filthy fish farms for more manufactured seafood no one needs), or heck, even to steal honey we also don't need that bees produce for their own personal use and whom we have to sedate in order to take. That would be like, I don’t know, aliens breeding humans for our ear wax.

In fact, seeing as the global population is now seven billion humans and SEVENTY billion farmed animals, we’d rather not pay people to artificially inseminate animals at all! And if we want to talk about our diets almost killing us, perhaps the focus should be on the many pervasive lifestyle diseases either directly caused or greatly exacerbated by animal-derived foods, many of which actually kill people. In fact, heart disease, which vegans rarely get, is the number one thing that actually kills people!

So yes, even after our frightening ordeal, Craig and I are still eating delicious, nutritious food every day, even though we almost died from doing so. That’s how dedicated we are.

After all, we have somehow managed to peel back multiple, complicated layers of confusion and cognitive dissonance we’d picked up from a lifetime of sensationalist articles like the one you thought you were about to read. Like you, we had constant exposure to the same repeated myths and misinformation about where nutrients must come from, had been told the same fairy tales about farming animals for their flesh and fluids, and we also operated in a social context that reduced our natural wisdom and empathy for animals; animals whose individuality and cuteness we would have otherwise gone gaga over – or whom we would have at least respected enough to just leave the hell alone and eaten or worn something else.

We didn’t come this far to turn back now, careless drivers and annoying lifestyle bloggers be damned.

If you're interesting in going vegan, visit vegankit.com or google "how to go vegan."

Article by Lorelei Plotczyk

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Postscript:
This post has gone kinda viral. Holy sh*t. This article was long enough as is (as many have pointed out!), but there's obviously a lot to say about this issue, as many have done far more eloquently than me, and I've barely scratched the surface. Yes, my article was a satirical response to the press surrounding the "Breaking Vegan" gal, which propelled my newfound sense of urgency to come up with a creative attempt to get people to read urgent information the media is overlooking. Although I would address every comment if I had that kind of time, here's probably the most important thing to add:

 Veganism isn't about making a random personal choice, and it's not about elitism, judgments, superiority, etc. It's about being a conscientious objector to mind-boggling social injustice that is the product of the exploitative mindset we are born into and accept as normal (as I did for most of my life and as many of those dear to me still do), and there are many, many hurdles to overcome making a vegan diet not practical and/or possible for everyone to adopt today. Yet compassion always makes sense.

There are many angry comments below, and some very kind ones as well. But I've gotta speak the truth without being attached to how that truth will affect another person or how we will be perceived. This is needless violence and ecocide on the most epic scale imaginable. These practices and their consequences, when made visible, are so horrifying most have to look away. But as long as farm animals are considered generic farm production units, people will continue to deny those traits suppressed by farming practices that we share and relate to, that endear them to us, that make us want to help and not hurt them, and that clearly make animals our friends, not our food. When you treat an animal as an individual and show him or her your instinctive compassion and love rather than anonymous exploitation and death, nothing about the animal has actually changed. It's you that has changed.

The more "livestock" products we eat, the more crops must be be grown and sold – which is why livestock products are pushed on us and subsidized so heavily – yet the fewer people can actually be fed. That's so wrong. Why use meat eating for survival – and cherry-pick behaviors from our ancestors and Indigenous cultures – to justify modern-day meat-eating for gluttony and preference? As noted in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the majority of the planet actually lives on a plant-based diet out of necessity due to resource scarcity, with only 2 billion eating a meat-based diet. 91% of the world's resource consumption is done by the top 1/3 of humanity (per the UN Human Development Report), the majority of whom eat a resource-intensive meat-based diet. 

I'm not perfect by any means. But I can embrace compassion, health, and resource abundance. I can reject bloodshed, lifestyle diseases, and resource scarcity. That's my "positive no." A million thanks for taking the time to read this long-ass article... and postscript. ;)

I have one question. You’re a nice person. So why the shell are you still eating eggs?

You may be shocked at the things that need to happen for people to eat chickens’ eggs, regardless of how kindly the still-fertile hens are farmed or how pastoral the setting. The sunny side is definitely up, while the dark side is hidden from view. Heck, even vegetarians eat them! How bad can they be?

The truth is that we are collectively adulterated into believing fairy tales surrounding animal products that defy common sense, and we operate in a social context that has robbed us of empathy for “food animals” – whom we are encouraged to see as anonymous production units rather than sentient individuals with personality to burn. Even chickens, typically thought of as simple creatures, have an intelligence level called “startling” by Scientific American.

When we try to break this spell, people are instinctively uncomfortable, defensive, and/or dismissive. If you’re feeling that way now, please read on.

Collectively, our society has now managed to peel back some of the ugly layers of egg production, resulting in more people seeking out cage-free or even pastured eggs. However, such farming conditions only address the tip of the ethical iceberg. Can you handle the rotten truth?

Humane Hurdle #1: This Bird You Can Change

While birds’ eggs are certainly edible – which I can only imagine was first discovered in a moment of desperation, if you really think about it – chickens found in nature only lay 10-15 of them a year, and they only do so during breeding season. Anyone’s eggs, after all, exist for reproductive purposes, not for others to eat.

Logical? Yes. Convenient? No.

Rather than adjusting ourselves to nature by, say, eating something else, we decided to rearrange nature to suit our desires.

Our first troubling solution was to selectively breed chickens for either their flesh or eggs. To turn each man-created “layer hen” into egg-laying factories, we essentially rigged their reproductive systems to lay hundreds of eggs a year, disregarding the fact that this greatly taxes their bodies and strips them of vital nutrients like calcium.

This article explains the highly labor-intensive process behind every single egg and includes a disturbing yet important 4-second video demonstrating our next topic.

Humane Hurdle #2: Sorry, Dudes

But then we faced another inconvenient hurdle of biology: half of all chicks are born male. Why is this a problem? Well, due to modern selective breeding, egg-laying strains differ from meat production strains. Male birds of the former do not actually lay eggs, being boys and all, yet also won’t grow large enough to justify their food and lodging. So what do we do?

Brace yourself for this particularly shameful solution: chick culling. Typical methods include cervical dislocation, asphyxiation, and maceration in a high-speed grinder. For real. Billions of newly hatched, adorable, fluffy yellow chicks – the ultimate symbol of vulnerable innocence – are routinely disposed of in this unthinkable, bloody, violent manner.

(And on Easter, we celebrate the symbol of chicks while decorating eggs. Please stop and think for a second about how utterly f*cked up this is.)

I understand most people would never condone this and it’s hard to accept – this can’t be real, because people wouldn’t stand for this… right? Yet the fact is most people have not the foggiest clue this is even going on, including myself for most of my life, despite it being standard practice and not denied whatsoever (but not exactly advertised) by the egg industry.

United Egg Producers spokesman Mitch Head has said, "There is, unfortunately, no way to breed eggs that only produce female hens. If someone has a need for 200 million male chicks, we're happy to provide them to anyone who wants them. But we can find no market, no need." Using a grinder, Head said, "is the most instantaneous way to euthanize chicks."

After getting over the initial shock, you may hope this doesn’t happen on small farms. Yet chick culling is standard practice – it happens at the hatcheries, before the chicks even get to the farm or homeowner's backyard. Even My Pet Chicken, who "lead the way in urban chicken space" and pride themselves on being "humane," admits to doing it (which they deceptively frame as "euthanizing".) This is because, again, half of all chicks are born male, regardless of how “free” their sisters may temporarily be. It’s biology and math. And consumers just don't want male chicks of this breed. There is a socially-ingrained expectation that even pet chickens will lay eggs. Yet we don't require this of other pets like dogs and cats – to be fertile females who provide human-manipulated edible secretions. 

Although small farms raising animals for food have become lionized, they are not manned by magicians, and they also exist solely to profit from animals’ flesh and fluids – none of which humans actually have any need to consume. 

Yet our desire and false sense of need to eat the unfertilized eggs of female birds requires male chicks to be continuously hatched and immediately killed in an endless cycle behind the scenes.

Even Comedian Aziz Ansari has said, if more people actually knew about this, “We’d all check ‘no’ on that box. But the problem is this kind of information, this kind of footage, it just hasn’t been seen in the right context to elicit… mass outrage.” View this surprising moment in his performance at the end of this article.

Humane Hurdle #3: It’s a Gas

As if this weren’t enough to turn your stomach, especially if you’ve just had hopefully your last non-vegan omelet, there is a third major inconvenience of egg production: lady parts are only fertile for a fraction of one’s lifetime (as child-free thirty-somethings like myself are often reminded – thanks, Mom).

Again, this is totally logical, but majorly inconvenient under our egg-eating scenario. It’s not profitable, sustainable, or even safe given agriculture-induced bird diseases to collectively allow the tens of billions of hens we continuously breed into existence for their eggs to actually live out their natural lifespan of eight years or more, or anywhere even close to it.

Also, remember how I mentioned it taxes hens’ bodies to lay hundred of eggs a year? They would likely eventually die prematurely anyway from painful diseases related to excessive egg-laying.

Although decades ago, the meat of "spent" hens was used for stews, tastes have since changed and they are no longer considered edible at all. USA Today calls them “tough” and “stringy,” noting the USDA tried to use them for school lunches, but administrators admitted, “The taste just didn’t go over." The "spent" hen meat market has collapsed so dramatically that the cost of slaughtering and processing menopausal poultry wouldn’t be recouped. 

Rotten solution 3: Around one to two years of age, when their production wanes, "spent" hens are typically placed in a sealed area filled with carbon monoxide, and then their bodies are layered into a mound of sawdust. Again, I’m serious. In about a month, they turn into compost, which smells like death and attracts vultures. In the Press Democrat, Jim Stauffer of Petaluma described seeing chickens crawling out of a mound of compost like the living dead. "We called them zombie chickens. Some of them crawled right up out of the ground. They'd get out and stagger around."

However, the sickening fate of these hens, when considered at all, has been spun to seem as though something people can actually feel good about, because they are “recycling” the exhausted chickens. Plus, while the slaughter costs of spent hens wouldn’t be recouped, this Applied Poultry Science piece states, “The efficiency of the [gassing] unit should make it possible to recover the cost of the CO2 used to kill the hens.”

I invite you to read that last sentence one more time, and to reflect on exactly when we turned into such monsters.

Natural - existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.

Humane - having or showing compassion or benevolence.

We are told eggs are “natural” and that they can be “humane,” and it’s easy to believe when we see hens roaming happily in a field (which again, is the rare and un-scalable exception to factory farming). Yet you are only seeing a small part of the story, from which eggs cannot be coherently separated. They are only produced by selectively bred females – allowed to live at all because they weren't born male – and only for a fraction of their natural lifespan.

You might still be searching for the rare exception. A backyard hen owner who was given a hen whom they’ve vowed will be kept as a pet once spent? That hen wouldn’t have been bred and wouldn’t be laying more than a dozen or so eggs a year without the supporting system of selectively breeding, sexing, and slaughtering chickens, which we condone and help normalize by eating eggs. Here’s an excellent piece that goes into further detail on this topic.

The information here only represents a very tiny fraction of why one would choose to go vegan. It takes serious bravery to defy social norms, and that’s the hardest part about it for many. But the only regret I have about becoming vegan, and one I hear often from others, is that I only wish I did it sooner. Seriously.

Voltaire said some version of the following: “If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.” We have been sold the lie that eating the eggs of chickens is natural and humane and therefore we commit atrocities (by proxy) to purchase and consume them. So next time you are tempted to eat eggs, ask yourself if you would press the “on” switch on a chick grinder or hen gassing unit. If not (and let’s hope not), try making one of these instead or experiment with your own ideas. Baking without eggs is particularly easy. And just wait until you play with aquafaba!

Comedic relief from Asiz Ansari that also makes a great point.

Postscript:

Are You My Mother?

As if we needed another reason to stop eating birds' eggs, a whole other messed-up aspect of all this is that almost all farmed chickens today are hatched under artificially incubators, for our convenience. The fragile day-old chicks are even shipped in the mail. So hens, naturally some of the most maternal creatures on the planet, are altogether denied of any motherhood experience, while chicks are denied a mother. No one to teach them how to be a chicken. Because we don’t care about chickens, we just care about "chicken" and eggs. Essentially, we deny them both a mother and motherhood while exploiting their reproductive systems to a breaking point for a substance we don't need. Then we kill and replace them. Yet these are sentient individuals with personality to burn and lives that matter to them. Please watch the below informative and entertaining presentation Who Chickens Really Are by my friend Robert Grillo of Free From Harm, who has rescued and nurtured many chickens (and posts some of the most touching and adorable chicken moments on his Facebook page).  <3

Thanks for reading and opening your mind. Stay tuned for my upcoming piece on why dairy is scary. [Edit - someone beat me to this title, so check out her informative 5-minute video!]

The abbreviated story about how I became vegan is in our “about us” section, but I wanted to flesh out the story. I think there are a lot of people out there who were like me, so of course I hope this story makes people think about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and if they’re really exactly who they like to think they are.

Two years ago I roasted a whole pig at my house; little did I know that 9 months later I would be eating my last animal carcass. So what changed in those 9 months? Did I learn something new about where my food came from? Nope, I (like pretty much everyone else) always knew where it came from and I (like pretty much everyone else) always knew it wasn’t always a good place. Did I become a new age hippie and suddenly want to become one with the world? Nope, I was still a craft beer brewing and drinking hipster who played video games with his friends until 3am and listened to weird music. Did I do it for health? Nope, I already ate quite well; my cholesterol was low, my blood pressure was solid, and I worked out pretty regularly. Did I meet someone who asked me a simple question that changed the way I lived my life for the better? Yes, yes I did.

Lorelei and I met on Tinder the February after that pig roast; we’re not normal Tinder folk, which is probably why we worked out. On our second date I found out she was vegan while I was enjoying a Bloody Mary with shrimp and bacon in it. Well, that was awkward. I believe I said it was a personal choice for people to eat meat and she responded gently yet assuredly that it wasn’t a choice for the animals being eaten. I didn’t want to have a fight on our second date with someone I had a great connection with, so I changed the subject. For the first few months of our relationship, I was vegan around her to respect her beliefs and because I enjoyed making new foods (before Lorelei, when I cooked at home for just myself, a lot of my meals ended up vegetarian or vegan because I could have an entire meal ready by the time my chicken breast was thawed to cook, so I didn’t mind), most of the time I was vegetarian around my friends, and occasionally I was an omnivore by myself. I never hid the fact that I ate meat when she wasn’t around (and she did ask!).

As our relationship progressed, the elephant in the room never left. As an ethical, environmentalist vegan, it was sometimes hard for her to resist tossing in little facts and numbers about the benefits of veganism. As a molecular biologist otherwise accustomed to thinking on a cellular level who fancied himself a localvore who ate “humanely” raised and “humanely” slaughtered animals (are they “humanely” dead, too?), I thought that I, too, was doing a great thing. I told myself that the animals I ate had great, albeit short lives, and were loved by the farmers who raised them. But the longer I was with Lorelei, the more I realized that who I thought I was and what I actually was were quite different. All those cheap late night burritos and cheesesteaks from greasy hole in the wall restaurants that I was eating? I don’t think those restaurants were getting grass fed beef from a small family run farm. The eggs in my breakfast burritos? I’m sure those chickens weren’t running around a pasture in an idyllic countryside. But I had convinced myself that I ate from local farms and truly cared about the animals who ended up on my plate. I’m sure everyone likes to think that. Upon hearing about terrible conditions of factory farms and slaughterhouses, it’s easy to convince yourself that that’s an isolated incident and that there are laws to help protect those animals. But it’s a lot harder to realize the truth that what you actually hear about is only the tip of the iceberg and that while there are laws to protect animals, farm animals are rarely included in those laws. And even the exceptions who are treated well in life are killed a fraction into their lifespans, while I bended over backwards to give my pets long healthy lives.

As time when on, I found myself grabbing carne asada a lot less frequently. I was getting meatless options at restaurants with my friends and having them hold the cheese. But I still wasn’t ready to call myself vegetarian or vegan. I had my last pieces of meat on a trip back to Minnesota for my birthday in May 2014. I ordered a pork sandwich on the first day of the trip – and it tasted terrible. I mean, I’m sure it was fine and 90% of the country would have enjoyed it, but to me it tasted of death and decay. The rest of the trip I stayed vegetarian until my last day. I had a fried fish sandwich from a local diner because I made up my mind that I couldn’t eat anymore land animals after that pork sandwich, but fish was probably still cool. Again, the sandwich was awful (though I think this time almost everyone would have agreed with me on that one). I don’t even know why I finished it, but I did. That awful fish sandwich was the last bit of animal flesh that I put into my body. I don’t know if it was the knowledge I now couldn’t ignore, a change to my taste buds, or a combination. Six weeks later I willingly consumed my last bit of animal product, as they also necessitate slaughter and other practices I never wanted to partake in again. It was cheese pizza during a beerfest and the next day I told myself that that was it. (Check out http://humanefacts.org/ for more info on the problem with animal products like dairy and eggs and the "humane" label.) From that point forward I was officially vegan (though I still had trouble telling people I was… I didn’t want that to become my identity). After some early skepticism, my friends have happily ordered the vegan pizza when I was around, have raved about the food I’ve made, and one has even since gone meatless.

Why don’t you live within the moral boundaries you already have set up for yourself?

That was the basic question that changed my life for the better. Before I went vegan, I would tell you I loved animals (all animals!). I had a cat and a dog that I doted over way too much (and still do). I loved going out in nature and seeing all the animals enjoying their domain. Hell, I even loved seeing cows and chickens in pastures just living their lives. That question, though, kept creeping back into my thoughts. Before I was vegan, I’d get upset when I heard about restaurants serving dog, if a cow or pig escaped from a slaughterhouse I cheered for it to make it to freedom, and I felt that animal sanctuaries were a great thing (taking in neglected animals from factory farms so they can live the rest of their lives in peace – what’s not to love about that!). But beef and pork and chicken still made it onto my plate. The animals I saw in the pasture, the ones escaping the slaughterhouse, or the ones being rescued and brought to the animal sanctuary… those weren’t the animals on my plate. The animals on my plate were a number, a nameless creature that was simply “livestock.” It was just a product that was kept alive for as short a time as possible. It wasn’t my dog, my cat, the chickens I saw in people’s yards, the cows in a pasture on someone’s hobby farm. That’s what I told myself. I think that’s what everyone tells themselves.

Tens of billions of animals are slaughtered every year. There’s no way our brains can truly grasp that number; it’s too big, it’s just a concept, we can’t care about 50-75 billion individual animals because we simply can’t visualize 50-75 billion individual anythings. So we sit back and do nothing while 50-75 billion creatures are put to death simply because we want them on our plate more than we want something else. We convince ourselves that by caring about the handful of cows we see in a field, the four chickens in our neighbor’s backyard, and the hundreds of animals that were just brought to a farm sanctuary that we do care about all animals. It’s easy to convince ourselves of that because those are manageable numbers. Those animals mean something. We can see them, we can interact with them, and we can feel their love and affection so we can care about them. What do the billions upon billions of animals that we don’t personally interact with become? They’re afterthoughts if they’re thought of at all. They’re cheeseburgers, chicken salads, pulled pork sandwiches, fishsticks, etc. But they’re no different than the animal that you just said you cared about, that you do care about, the ones you’d be sad to see killed because you have a relationship with them.

I’ll stop here because I really want you to think about the question that changed my life:

Why don’t you live within the moral boundaries you already have set up for yourself?