With the world fighting a vicious new pandemic, Ian asks a front-line physician, an epidemiologist, a public health expert and activists about how new diseases spill over from other animals, and how factory farming and the wildlife trade raise our vulnerability.

Play or download (42MB MP3 30min) (via iTunes)

Contributors:

• Dr Aysha Akhtar (@DrAyshaAkhtar)
• Dr Laura-Jane Smith (King’s College Hospital) (@DrLauraJane)
• Prof Jonna Mazet (University of California Davis)(@JonnaMazet)
• Peter Kemple Hardy (World Animal Protection)

Zoonoses and Vegan Activism

You’ve probably heard animal activists linking the Covid-19 pandemic to human treatment of animals well before you listened to my show – part of the reason for doing this show was to give people the information to talk about the link without drifting into hyperbole.

For example, “Earthling” Ed Winters famously got a roasting in the UK’s tabloid press for a viral Facebook post in which he blamed half a dozen new diseases on meat-eating. From what I’ve learnt doing the show, it was his categorical certainty that’s wrong rather than his general point (and, arguably, tone). I thought his later video on the subject was more nuanced.

Has it Been Three Years?

It took me almost a year to close VegHist after transmitting the final episode, and then I got distracted by UK politics. (Which, in fairness, is very distracting.)

My next goal for The Vegan Option is to do some short videos based on the history series. Of course, as someone who set out to make a series of 10 x 15 minutes but made a ten hour epic instead, I’m not very good at “short”. (I feel a personal sense of triumph that I didn’t have to edit this episode down to the half-hour broadcast slot.)

Bibliography

Credits

Theme by Robb Masters. The featured image is CC-BY-SA Scientific Animations, as it is based on their SARS-Cov-2 virus image, combined with a circle of animal kingdom icons for which I’d be happy to credit the original author, if I knew who they were.

The post Spillover Diseases: Covid-19 & Zoonoses, with Jonna Mazet and Aysha Akhtar first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 15: Liberation

This final episode recounts the growth of veganism, vegetarianism, and the modern animal advocacy movement.

Ian treads in the footsteps of the handful of pioneers who set up the vegan movement in the 1940s, and meets a life vegan born in 1951.

He investigates the sixties counterculture that combined the philosophy of ethics, activism, and new ways of living and working, visiting one of Britain’s first vegetarian wholefood co-operatives.

And as vegetarian and vegan movements increasingly link up around the world, he looks at developments in China and India. In New Delhi, he meets the vegan politician who is also the most prominent animal advocate in the world’s largest democracy.

Play or download (70MB MP3 49min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Dr Samantha Calvert (@SamCalvert)
• Edwin Cluer, Wimbledon
• Prof Julia Twigg (University of Kent, Canterbury)
• Reg Taylor, founder of the precursor of Suma Wholefoods
• David Jarvis, Les, George, and others, Arjuna Wholefoods Cambridge
• Dr Vincent Goossaert (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités), Paris
• Dr James Staples (University of Brunel, London)
• Maneka Gandhi (Parliament of India) (People for Animals) (Wikipedia)
• Members of Bengaluru Vegans (Vegan Bangalore on Facebook)

Archive

• Donald Watson archive interview with George Rodger by kind permission of The Vegan Society (transcript of full interview [PDF]).
• Jay Dinshah at Vegan Society of South Jersey, Health Expo. Moorestown, NJ, USA, Nov 10 1990, courtesy of The American Vegan Society
• Richard Ryder, talking in 2001’s “Animal Rights”, courtesy of Vegetarian Guides.
• Francis Moore Lappé, talking in Diet for a Small Planet, 1974, courtesy of Bulldog Films.
• The Vegeburger Rap, courtesy of Gregory Sams
• Open Door, 1976, by the BBC and The Vegan Society

Readings

• Various (Alice Bonus, Dugald Semple, Florence Sexton inter alia) “The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review”, 1909-12, referenced in Leneman (see below)
• A Guthrie Badenoch, Letter, British Medical Journal, 1952
• Cyril Pink, 1952, see below
• Ruth Harrison, the start of “Animal Machines”, 1964

Production Notes

There was a gap of months between the broadcast edit and the podcast of this episode.

This is partially because the episode had quite a different script for broadcast and podcast. Many of you who listen to the podcast are also part of the movement this episode is about; it’s not like previous episodes, where I can talk about long gone vegetarian groups in the third person on the certain basis that no listeners are part of them.

I also wanted to give the podcast edit more of a global scope. It’s okay for a radio show broadcast in London to centre on London. In this episode, I talk more about what’s going on in the rest of the world.

And I think that trimming the episode to the broadcast slot took a lot of stuff out; the podcast edit is two thirds longer.

The conclusion at the end is completely different – and if you’re interested you can listen to the broadcast edit of Episode 15 on the Resonance FM Mixcloud.

The End and the Beginning

Kickstarter backers and Resonance FM listeners might notice I changed the title. From the start of the project, the final episode title(s) were going to be “The End and the Beginning”, referring to Donald Watson’s comment that “vegan” was the beginning and end of “vegetarianism”.

There were a couple of problems with this. Firstly, I never explained the reference in the show.

In fact, as I learnt from Samantha Calvert during production, Donald Watson originally had a very different background for the word vegan. (Via the Hendersons suggesting “Allvega”, probably inspired by the “Vega” restaurant.)

Plus, coy references for episode titles don’t cut much ice with search engines. So I went for “Liberation”, as a nod to Peter Singer’s “Animal Liberation”, and a word that became very important to the movement in the late twentieth century.

Birth of the Vegan Society

As veganism becomes more influential, there are more active debates about its beginnings. My comments on that will be a blog post of their own, but let me confess to leaving a couple of things out of the show.

Dr Samantha Calvert credits Elsie Shrigley as a co-founder of the Vegan Society, because of her role bringing people together. I missed that out because I don’t think it’s that unambiguous, and there wasn’t time to delve into it.

One interesting thing that got cut for time was how the vegan movement got some national attention in its first ten years. I didn’t have time to mention them all in the show:

• Dec 1946 – Vegan meal in House of Commons, Westminster
• Mar 1951 – The Daily Mirror publishes a sympathetic article about the Vegan Society with the headline “600 people who’ll only kick a vegetarian football.”
• Mar 1951 – BBC broadcasts two vegan episodes of its “Vegetarian Dishes” TV cookery show

The Cluers

You can read Mabel Cluer’s “family notes” in the Spring 1959 edition of The Vegan. The Vegan Society published a feature interview with Mabel Cluer on their 70th anniversary. Alan Cluer’s reminiscences of running a health food shop in Wimbledon were printed in the Wimbledon Society Newsletter February 1989 (PDF).

For full disclosure, the Cluers ate honey. No-one in organised veganism seemed to challenge the Cluers’ status as vegans, either then or now, so I haven’t either. (Even though many contemporaries clearly thought honey wasn’t vegan; I suspect people were less likely to jump from “I think that isn’t vegan” to “So you’re not a vegan” back then.)

How many vegetarians and vegans?

I tried to trace changes in the numbers of vegetarians, but the number of people who describe themselves as vegetarian varies enormously according to how you ask the question. And most of these surveys haven’t publicly revealed their questions.

The number of vegetarians can be three times higher if you ask “are you vegetarian?” instead of breaking it down into “Do you eat (a) red meat (b) poultry (c) fish? Please tick where applicable.” And the margin of error is often higher than the percentage of vegetarians or vegans.

One ill-constructed British survey in 2003 put 2% of the population as vegetarian, 7% as “vegetarian who eats fish” and 3% as “vegan or other”. This led to much vegan rejoicing, until folk realised that the 3% included confused omnivores.

So the numbers jump up and down. Maurer 2002 p16 put the number of vegetarians in the USA at 1%-2.5%.

In Britain, there was a jump in the numbers identifying as vegetarian in the 1980s – from 2.1% in 1984 to 5.4% in 1997. One person who was across the surveys speculated this represented a real growth in vegetarianism in the midst of the UK’s Bovine Spongioform Encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) scare, and that some people returned partially to meat-eating whilst still thinking of themselves as vegetarian.

The Vegan Society commissioned a very thorough survey from MORI in 2016, suggesting 3.25% of the British population is vegetarian, including 1.05% vegan. That suggests a slow (if any) rise in the number of vegetarians, but a very dramatic increase in the proportion who are vegan.

Of course, the western vegetarians and vegans are a blip compared to south and east Asia. In India, 40% of the population is vegetarian, including 31% who follow the traditional Indian definition and also exclude eggs.

In Memoriam

I’d like to take a moment to remember the people who passed away during the time I was working on the series. (These are also people I never interviewed before it was too late.)

Folk interested in vegetarian history might have followed the prolific work of Rynn Berry, who died at the start of 2014.

Mabel Cluer herself died in 2015. Mary Bryniak, a founder member of the Vegan Society and part of a pioneer veganic gardening family, died later that year. Joan Court was a veteran Animal Rights campaigner who met Gandhi whilst working in India in the 1940s.

And finally, I’d like to mention a place. London’s last vegetarian vestige of the hippy era – Food for Thought – was a victim of rising rents. It was open from 1971 to 2015. Roann Ghosh’s short film about it portrays it perfectly.

Credits

The theme music is by Robb Masters. Variations for the Healing of Arinushka by Arvo Pärt is performed CC-BY Markus Staab. Les Sylvains, Op. 60 by Cécile Chaminade is performed CC-BY Takashi Sato, and the clip of “Summer of Love” is CC-BY Saul Rouda. With the voices of Amy Saul, Jeremy Hancock, Brian Roberts, Robert MacDougall, Julie Cummings, Akshay Dave, and Sally Beaumont.

Episode 15 is generously sponsored by Kickstarter backer Jaysee Costa.

The cover picture is of the 2017 Animal Rights march, in London, by “Animal Rights Photography”, used with permission.

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 15: Liberation. Veganism, hippies, and the animal rights movement first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 14: Diet Reform

As animal agriculture industrialises and meat consumption rises, the ways that food reformers respond are familiar to people today – the plant-based meat, the celebrity athletes, and the reformers who worship nature, sunshine, and fresh air.

Ian goes to the shops to discover just how many vegetarian staples he owes to pioneers like John Harvey Kellogg. In Sabarmati, northwest India, he visits the Ashram of Mahatma Mohandas K Gandhi.

Play or download (62MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

Contributors:

• Dr Adam Shprintzen, (Marywood University, Scranton PA) (@VegHistory)
• Dr Julia Twigg (University of Kent)
• Megha Todi (on Instagram) (Sabarmati Ashram Archives)
• Ramachandra Guha (ramachandraguha.in) (@Ram_Guha) (on Wikipedia)

Readings

• Ellen White, vision, from “A Brief History of Seventh-Day Adventists”, by George R Knight, 2004 (PDF), p69
• Protose & Nuttose advertisement from “Battle Creek Foods for Health”, 1920, cited in Shprintzen p133
• Letter from a suffragette, “Vegetarian Messenger” vol 10, no. 12, 1907, cited in Shprintzen p180
• Bernarr Macfadden, “Eating for Health and Strength”, 1921
• Harry Hedden, “Youthful at 82” from Physical Culture magazine, 1910 (Vol 23 p107)
• Maroons Chant, from Shprintzen p201
• Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step”, 1883
• Dugald Semple,
  • “worship the divine” remark from letter in “The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review”, 1912
  • from “Joy in Living”, 1957 (“Food Economy Lectures”) p47 onwards.
• Mikkel Hindhede, “The Effect of Food Restriction During War on Mortality in Copenhagen”, JAMA. 1920;74(6):381-382. doi:10.1001/jama.1920.02620060015005
• Mohandas K Gandhi
  • Vows of Sabarmati Ashram
  • From “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”, 1927
  • From “A Speech to the London Vegetarian Society”, 1931
• Louis Rimbault on friction in communes in “Libération économique”, Le Néo-Naturien, n° 16, Feb 1924 cited by LaRotative.info
• George Butaud, from “Les conséquences pratiques du végétalisme intégral sur l’évolution individuelle et sociale“, 1922, cited by LiberationAnimale.com
• Sophie Zaikowska, “Végétalisme”, from “l’Encyclopédie anarchiste”, 1934
• Postcard, from Frieder Kiel, Eden, 1934 (see pic above)
• Hans Georg Müller, in “Leib und Leben”, 1936, cited by Fritzen p77

See also the Henry Salt Archive:

John Edmundson runs the Henry Salt Archive and the Ernest Bell Library, and blogs a lots about early organised vegetarianism for Happy Cow, including:

• Dugald & Cathy Semple – Vegan Pionneers
• Dugald Semple’s book “Joys of the Simple Life”
• 1893 Chicago World’s Fair
• Basconnaise (French anarchist) Salad Recipe
• Les Végétaliens
• Vegetarian pins and badges from the late 19th & early 20th centuries.

Production Diary

Nuttolene

The peanut loaf that Kellogg sold as “Nuttolene” (and Granovita sell as “Nut luncheon”) is opened like old-fashioned tinned meat. You open both ends, loosen it with a knife, push it out, and slice it. Here’s what I was eating.

Lebensreform

This is one episode where I wanted to find a bit more “colour”, particularly about Lebensreform. But for once, I couldn’t get past the language barrier – I don’t speak German, and was unlucky in terms of finding someone to talk in English, particularly when I avoid recording over the Internet.

The orchard settlement Eden still exists near Berlin (link in German) and has open days. (I regret that I didn’t manage to arrange a visit.)

Nevertheless, I hope the combination of interviews, background music, and readings tells the story engagingly.

It’s hard not to be moved by the vegetarian leaders who seem to be trying to gauge how much they can get away with before they fall foul of the regime. I’m indebted to the German speakers who helped me understand some of the sources. If you want to delve and can read German, Frizten looks fascinating.

With respect to Hitler, I’ve read Rynn Berry’s “Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover”, and checked his sources, which are more robust about the 1930s. But when it comes to the 1940s, there is substantial eyewitness evidence. I think the best answer to folk who consider that Hitler’s diet, alone amongst murderous dictators, somehow relevant to animal ethics today is comedian Jamie Kilstein’s hilarious rant on the subject (YouTube).

Végétalisme

I had to skip over just how long the French have had a word for a vegan diet.

All the English-language sources I’ve read take at face value Fred Rothwell, who credited the word to the physician Jules Lefèvre in his introduction to his 1920 translation of Lefèvre’s extensive essay (c. 1904) on the vegetarian diet. But Rothwell seems to be wrong.

Lefèvre was one of the “rationalist” vegetarians, who thought that meat was toxic, a gateway drug to worse things like alcohol and tobacco, and even likely to inflame disorderly conduct like going on strike (for these rationalist vegetarians tended to be conservatives).

The word “Végétalisme”, however, was reportedly in the 1890 edition of the venerable French dictionary Larousse. There, it was defined the way Lefèvre used it (and the way it’s used today) – purely as a question of diet.

But I haven’t been able to check Larousse 1890 directly, so I don’t know if it began as purely a dietary term (as it is now), or if it always had the political ascetic flavour associated with the anarchists.

Credits

Background advice came from Judith Baumgartner, Renate Brucker, and James Gregory, as well as some archive material from the Ernest Bell Archive.

French translations were by Elisabeth Lyman; German by Annelie S & Anami N. I recorded the health food shop scenes in The Grocery, London.

The theme music is by Robb Masters; “Nature Boy” is written by Eden Ahbe and performed CC-BY Jennifer Orna. The incidental music was John Philip Sousa’s Gladiator March performed by the US Air Force band, Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag performed CC-BY Stefano Ligoratti, “Russian Easter Festival Overture” by Rimsky-Korsakov performed by the Musopen symphony orchestra, and Wagner’s Siegfried performed by the US Marine Band.

The actors were Brian Roberts, Ian Russell, Guillaume Blanchard, Orna Klement, and – as Mohandas K Gandhi – Harish Bhimani.

The cover picture is a public domain photograph of Mohandas K Gandhi.

This episode was originally broadcast on Resonance FM May 2nd 2017.

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 14: Diet Reform. Consumerism, Lebensreform, and Gandhi first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 13: The Vegetarians

After their foundation in 1847 and 1850, the vegetarian societies in Britain and America rose swiftly faced new challenges.

Dr Adam Shprintzen, author of the history of US vegetarianism “Vegetarian Crusade, tells Ian how the American Vegetarian Society poured its energies into an anti-slavery vegetarian settlement in the Wild West. And how its founder, Englishman Henry Clubb, ultimately took a bullet for the union in the Civil War.

Under British rule, Hindu vegetarianism faced a mix of threat and opportunity. In India, Ian meets historians DN Jha, Burton Cleetus, and Bhaskar Chakraborty, who explain how, faced with rule by distant Christians, vegetarianism became more important as a marker of caste and identity.

Ian also sets off on a cycle tour of vegetarian Victorian London, and talks to the first modern academic to study vegetarian history – Dr Julia Twigg.

Play or download (58MB MP3 41min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

Contributors:

• Dr Adam Shprintzen, (Marywood University, Scranton PA) (@VegHistory)
• Prof Dwijendra Narayan Jha (Wikipedia)
• Prof Bhaskar Chakraborty (Department of History, University of Calcutta)
• Dr Burton Cleetus (Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
• Dr Vincent Goossaert (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités), Paris
• Dr Julia Twigg (University of Kent)
• Dr Samantha Calvert (@SamCalvert)

Readings

• Mary Gove Nichols
  • “On the Education of Women”, in “The Herald of Health” 1881
  • “A Woman’s Work in Water Cure and Sanitary Education”, 1874
  • Bill of Fare, The “Alpha”, 1889
• The Liberator, announcing the American Vegetarian Society annual meeting, Aug 5 1853
• “Not wanted in Kansas”, Chicago Daily Tribune, Feb 12 1856 p2
• Henry Clubb
  • Excerpt from his unfinished history of vegetarianism, printed in the “Hygenic Review”, possibly 1893
  • Letter in the “Kansas Herald of Freedom Newspaper”, May 3 1856
  • Letter to his wife, from Shprintzen p89
• “The Truth Tester”, 1856, via Cubesville*
• Meat-eating Doggerel
  • by poet Narmad, recorded by Mohandas
• Hindu Tract Society, after 1887, from Barua, citing GA Oddie
• Account of a Christian convert by Howard Taylor, in “The Story of the China Inland Mission” by Geraldine Guinness, 1894
• Anna Kingsford
  • quoted on why she pursues medicine in Edward Maitland’s “Anna Kingsford, her life, letters, diary, and work” 3rd ed 1913
  • “A lecture on food”, 1882, in “Addresses and Essays on Vegetarianism”, by Kingsford & Maitland, 1912.
• Mohandas K Gandhi, “The Story of My Experiments with Truth, 1927
• Henry Salt’s poem “The Sufficient Reason” in Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review, 1927
• Annie Besant from “Vegetarianism in the Light of Theosophy”, 1912

*I couldn’t track down issues of the Truth Tester published that late, so I do wonder if it’s possible that Richard Cubeville made a mistake over the name of the magazine; but he’s been delving into the Vegetarian Society archives and I haven’t. The 1840s and 1850s yielded a confusing array of vegetarian periodicals with the same few overlapping writers and even overlapping titles (“The Truth Tester, Temperance Advocate, and Healthian Journal” being three journals merged together, for example) which doesn’t make citation easier.

Production Diary

This is the rig I used for the cycle tour around London. If the white object poking out of the basket looks a lot like a cat scratching post, that’s because it is – it’s the only appropriately sized object in the flat with a thread that fitted my microphone mount. Mazzy has multiple scratching posts, so she wasn’t deprived.

From left to right, the microphones are:

• covered by a grey fuzz windshield, the portable audio recorder. This was to pick up ambient noise, and was held in place by string and elastic to hopefully not be shake too much. (This only partially worked: I couldn’t use most tape of me cycling because of the noise).
• a lapel mic, so that you can hear what I say whilst cycling
• an SM58 mic, so that I can talk to others and get better sound quality myself when stationary

Credits

The theme music is by Robb Masters. Actuality of West Ham United Supporters CC-BY Hooger WS; and Civil War songs sung by the US Army Band (and hence public domain).

The cover picture is a picture of a set of vegetarian magazines from around the world taken from “Fifty Years of Food Reform”.

Featuring Harish Bhimani as Mohandas K Gandhi.

Other parts were played by Chetan Pathak, Matthew Arenson, Ian Russell, Amy Saul, and Orna Klement.

The montage of international vegetarian society foundings also included Jordi Casamitjana, Yuna Sparkle, and Adam Cardilini of VeganSci podcast.

This episode was originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4FM on April 4th. Because I had a hoarse voice at the time, I have re-recorded my narration. This is also a fixed re-post, after it was originally posted with a link to episode 9 (HT Russ Wesp).

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 13: The Vegetarians. Abolitionism, colonialism, and Victorian reformers; with Julia Twigg and Bhaskar Chakraborty. In London first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 12: Radicals & Romantics

In the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, the sects and philosophies that embrace a “vegetable diet” multiply – from ecstatic cult to puritan crusades, to utopian community to public-spirited congregation. No longer are they isolated groups – they connect with each other in books, magazines, and letters. Until a single word catches on – “vegetarianism”.

In the United States of America, Ian discovers the the vegetarian sword and shoes of a 1790s “free love” vegetarian sect in a local Massachusetts museum, and visits the failed vegan commune where Louisa May “Little Women” Alcott lived as a child.

And in Salford, NW England, he walks in the footsteps of a nineteenth century vegetarian church, with local historian Derek Antrobus and the vegetarian history specialist Dr Samantha Calvert.

It’s a story that also takes in the French bohemian “cult of the bearded men”, the man who invented the modern idea of Robin Hood, the woman who invented Frankenstein and his creature, Sylvester Graham, and, finally, the creation of modern vegetarianism.

Play or download (65MB MP3 47min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

Contributors:

• Timothy Neumann (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association & its Memorial Hall with 1790s veggie shoes), Massachusetts USA
• Pierre Serna (French Revolution Institute at Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris) (Modern & Contemporary History Institute, ENS)
• Dr Samantha Calvert (@SamCalvert)
• Cllr Derek Antrobus (Salford Council [local government]) (@CllrAntrobus)
  • See his Radical Manchester interview, History Today article & book A Guiltless Feast, all on Salford’s role in vegetarian history
• Dr Mike Volmar (Fruitlands, Massachusetts USA) (@Fruitlands)
• Dr Adam Shprintzen, (Marywood University, Scranton PA) (@VegHistory)

Readings

• Charles Nodier, on Les Bardus, letter to Charles Weiss,
• Alphonse Lamartine, on Jean-Antoine Gleizes, in 1846
• Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty, 1802
• Dr John Lambe, Water and Vegetable Diet in Consumption, Scrofula, Cancer, Asthma, and Other Chronic Diseases, 1815
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, 1818
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818
  • further discussion of Mary Shelley’s work
• Anon (but probably Shelley’s friend Peacock), The Medical Advisor, and Guide to Health and Long Life, “Dinner by the Amateurs of Vegetable Diet“, 1824
• Emmanuel Swedenborg, Divine Love and Wisdom, 1763 (with tweaked translation)
• Sylvester Graham, Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally, and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera, delivered 1832-3, published 1838
• Asenith Nicholson
  • Advert in Graham Journal of Health and Longevity, 1838
  • Boarding House Rules in Nature’s Own Book, 1835 (1st edn 1832)
• Prof William Tyler (Amherst College), on his stay in a Grahamite boarding house, 1833
• William Alcott, Boston Surgical & Medical Journal (now the New England Journal of Medicine), 1836
• Martha Brotherton, advert for Bible Christian cookbook “Vegetable Cookery”, in The Manchester Guardian, 1821
• Joseph Brotherton
  • introduction to “Vegetable Cookery”, 1833 edition
  • speech on Corn Laws, 1842 (transposed by me from Hansard back into the first person)
  • speech recorded in Vegetarian Messenger, 1847 (transposed by me back into the first person)
• Louisa May Alcott, diary, 1843 published as part of “Louisa May Alcott, her Life, Letters, and Journals” 1898

Geek Reference of the Month

The debates amongst a medical profession stumbling towards usefulness are a big part of this episode, and although the Victorian Dr William Lambe (and other “water cure” fans) were wrong to think distilled water can heal, the converse is true. Polluted water can be very harmful indeed.

Dr John Snow is widely known as the man who identified sewage-contaminated water as the cause of the 1854 London cholera epidemic, and removed the handle of the water pump to halt it; and as the father of epidemiology who mapped cholera cases to show this. But he was also a follower of Dr William Lambe and spent many years of his life on a vegan diet.

It would have taken too long to describe all that in the show. But I wonder (and it should be possible to check) what part his belief in the importance of pure distilled water played in forming the idea that polluted water could transmit epidemic disease.

Production Diary

Back when this series was just an idea, the Messy Vegetarian Cook, Kip Dorrell, mentioned to me at London Vegan Meetup that she had a distant relative who ran some kind of American vegetarian sect long ago. Little did I know I’d end up photographing his shoes next to mine.

It was a stroke of luck that my life took me to New England in 2015 – I hadn’t originally planned to visit anywhere in America for the series. We did try to find the hill where the Dorrelites once lived, and though we ran out of road, we ran into a woman who lived there and knew that it had once held some kind of vegetarian cult. The locals really do still tell stories about William Dorrell.

We also spent half an hour looking for the grave in what’s meant to be his cemetery, but didn’t find it. It’s said to be marked “Soldier of the Revolution” – artfully eliding which side he fought on!

As you can tell from the recording, it was very rainy in Salford; my next fundraising goal might include a mic with a proper windshield.

Credits

The curators of the two American sites we visited this episode, Timothy Neumann and Mike Volmar, gave me enormous help with the primary sources on these characters. Photographs of them are by Heidi White, who also drove me up and down Vermont and Massachusetts on the trail of vegetarian history.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Guillaume Blanchard, Amy Saul, Matthew Arenson, Orna Klement, and Ian Russell.

The Romantic period music was by Ludvig van Beethoven – for the Bracknell Circle, his “Pastoral” Sonata No. 15 performed by Paul Pitman (PD), and for Shelley’s circle, his Piano Concerto no. 3 performed by Stefano Ligoratti (CC-BY).

The Bible Christian vegetarian hymns were very kindly performed by The Choir of St. Mary’s Nottingham, directed by John Keys.

The cover picture is from Asenath Nicholson’s “Nature’s Own Book”, 1848 edition.

Originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM March 7th 2017, with a very hoarse narration. I re-recorded once my voice had recovered.

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 12: Radicals & Romantics. Bible Christians, Grahamites, and Transcendentalists first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 11: Enlightenment

Ian traces a winding path of vegetarian inspiration from the personal diary of an Indian vegetarian working for the French, to the darkest corner of British imperial propaganda, to the Enlightenment’s favourite Paris café, to a rural retreat that inspired a social revolution, and to the squares where citizens plotted a real one.

Play or download (61MB MP3 43min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

There are many vegetarians in eighteenth century southern India, but only one, Ananda Ranga Pillai, who kept a diary of his daily life – whilst serving as a senior aide to the French governor. Ian meets historian Prof B. Krishnamoorthy in a temple Pillai had built in the French capital.

Meanwhile, the British produced a governor of Calcutta – John Zephaniah Holwell – whose fascination for Indian culture crosses into Hindu vegetarianism. Ian meets Prof Partha Chatterjee, an expert in the incident – the Black Hole of Calcutta – that made Holwell famous.

Paris was the heart of the enlightenment, where the Lumières condemn organised religion and discuss the nature of humanity over coffee.

Holwell and other writers out of India inspire the leading figure of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire, to criticise Christian attitudes to eating animals, and Ian meets vegan Voltaire expert Renan La Rue in the Lumières’ favourite haunt, Café Procope.

Then Ian and Renan visit the hillside home of Voltaire’s sentimental rival Rousseau, who suggested that children should be raised without the corruption of meat-eating, along with Prof Christophe Martin of the Sorbonne.

The ideas are revolutionary; but it takes the radicals of the revolution to put them into practice. Ian visits Prof Pierre Serna at the Sorbonne, and travels to the heart of the French Revolution with Matthieu Ferradou to discover the vegetarian Scotsman who led the French revolutionaries in battle, and the Pythagorean aristocrat who dressed like an ancient Greek and was rumoured to have made possible the storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the revolution.

It’s a chain that links the conservative vegetarianism of southern India to the heart of European radical politics.

Contributors:

• Partha Chatterjee (Columbia University New York)
• B. Krishnamurthy (Pondicherry University)
• Tristram Stuart (tristramstuart.co.uk) (on Wikipedia) (@TristramStuart on Twitter)
• Renan Larue (UC Santa Barbara)
  • (Regardez il parlent sur l’histoire végétarien en Français)
• Christophe Martin (Paris Sorbonne)
• Pauline Prévot (of Musée Jean Jacques Rousseau Montmorency)
• Pierre Serna (French Revolution Institute at Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris) (Modern & Contemporary History Institute, ENS)
• Matthieu Ferradou (Modern & Contemporary History Institute, ENS)

Readings

• Ananda Ranga Pillai, Diary
  • vol V p334-5
  • vol VI p265 (Nov 16 1749)
  • vol VIII p296 (Apr 4 1753)
• Voltaire, “Essays on the Encylopedia: Meat”, 1770-4
• Rousseau
  • Emile, 1762
  • Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men, 1754
• Bernardin St. Pierre
  • Paul et Virginie, 1788
  • Letter to Brissot, see Stuart p 317
• John Oswald
  • The Cry of Nature, 1794
  • Review of the Constitution of Great Britain, 1792 (see Stuart p 301)
• Marquis de Valadi
  • Letter to Thomas Taylor, about Piggot, 1788
  • Letter to Samuel Breck, on the revolution, 1788
  • Letter to aunt, 1794, taken from Stuart p. 330

Geek Reference of the Month

The “Black Hole of Calcutta” we visit this episode is almost certainly the namesake of the cosmological phenomenon.

Credits

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

With the voices of Guillaume Blanchard, Brian Roberts, and Selva Rasalingham.

My thanks to Vincent Migeotte, who acted as my volunteer fixer in Paris – in particular setting up location interviews at Café Procope and the Musée Rousseau; and to Elisabeth Lyman for translation and swapping flats.

The featured image is “Banyan tree with Hindu temples at Agori, Bihar” by Thomas Daniell, 1796, CC-BY Wellcome Trust – an early colonial vision of Indian religion to match the information about Indian religion that sets the episode in progress.

This episode is kindly sponsored by Kickstarter backer Martin Taylor Costumes, which specialises in vegan costumes, particularly ones for the eighteenth century, the period of this episode.

Bibliography

See Also

If you’re interested in hearing more of John Oswald, the vegetarian pikeman of the French revolution, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau recorded a podcast episode in which she read excerpts from his books (also on SoundCloud).

And I came across history blogger Rodama reviewing Renan LaRue’s work on the treatment of vegetarianism by Voltaire, which is interesting further reading.

The post VegHist Ep 11: Enlightenment. Colonial India, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Les Bardus first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 10: Revolution

In England, the 1600s are a century of revolution. The artisans and yeomanry are picking up books – and the New Model Army is picking up pikes and muskets to turn the world upside down.

Ian meets Dr Ariel Hessayon, a lecturer in the radicals of the English Civil War at a Thameside pub that was there during the 1600s, to discover tabloid scares and firebrand sermons about people who ate only bread, and water and fruit.

In Ahmedabad, India, he visits the kind of animal hospital that astounded European travellers. And he hears from author Tristram Stuart about the impact stories of India had on Europeans, and how they shook Christendom’s moral certainty.

Dr Anita Guerrini researches the first vegetarian diet gurus, whose books about food and medicine interpreted the intellectuals of the Republic of Letters for everyone else. And she tells Ian about the secret religion of Sir Isaac Newton.

Play or download (62MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript

Contributors:

• Sherwin Everett and Giraben Shah (Jivdaya Charitable Trust, within Panjrapole Ahmedabad)
• Ariel Hessayon, Goldsmiths, University of London (@ArielHessayon1 on Twitter)
• Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University (@NickyTheProf on Twitter)
• Tristram Stuart (tristramstuart.co.uk) (on Wikipedia) (@TristramStuart on Twitter)

Readings

• Traveller Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, “Voyage .. to the East Indies”, 1595, translation by Burnell 1598
• Thomas Bushell on his diet, quoted in Stuart p 8
• Richard Baxter, “The Poor Husbandman’s Advocate to Rich Racking Landlords”, 1691 (published as “The Last Treatise of Rev Richard Baxter” in 1926 [PDF])
• Thomas Edwards, “Gangraeana”, 1646
• John Reeve, “A Transcendental Spiritual Treatise”, 1711 (1st ed 1652)
• Lodowick Muggleton, “The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit”, 1699
• Anon & Roger Crab, “The English Hermit”, 1655
• John Evelyn, “Acetaria”, 1699
• Thomas Tryon
  • “A dialogue between an East-Indian brackmanny or heathen-philosopher, and a French gentleman concerning the present affairs of Europe”, 1683
  • “Transcript of several letters from Averroes – also several letters from Pythagoras to the King of India”, 1695
• Anonymous, “Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy”, Vol 4 & 7, 1691-4 (following Giovanni Paolo Marana tr William Bradshaw, “Letters Writ By a Turkish Spy”, Vol 1 1687)
• Isaac Newton, “Irenicum”, some point within 1711-1727
• Bernard de Mandeville, “Fable of the Bees”, 1723
• Alexander Pope, “The Essay on Man”, 1733/4
• George Cheyne
  • “The Case of the Author” in “The English Malady”, 1733
  • “An Essay on Regimen”, 1740
• John Wesley
  • letter to Bishop of London, 1747
  • Sermon 60, as published in 1872

Production Notes

This is really where the story breaks open in the west and a “Pythagorean” diet re-enters the popular consciousness for the first time since antiquity. Frustratingly, I had to leave out a lot, such as how Thomas Tryon follows the mystic Jakob Boehme (quite a lot of early vegetarians are mystics) .

In particular, George Cheyne has a very specific theory of how the nervous system works, based on the physical laws of Newton. But I can’t go into detail on all the theories that have fallen and risen as “natural history” stumbles towards a useful understanding of the body.

The monument to Roger Crab is still in St. Dunstan’s, Stepney, London, though unfortunately I haven’t been able to locate it. As I live near there, it would be nice to pay our vegan predecessor some respects.

The broadcast of this episode was on 6 Dec 2016. The podcast release was severely delayed. Rather than date this page with the broadcast date (as usual) I’m dating it to the January broadcast slot that was superseded by Resonance FM’s holiday schedules. Content (whether books, journal articles, or programmes) tends to be identified by its publication year, and so I thought it particularly important that that stays accurate.

Credits

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

The period music was Greensleeves performed by Paul Arden-Taylor and Carol Holt (PD); slow reels (dances) “Long Acre” and “Kerry Fling” performed by the “Peak Fiddler”; Papalin’s performance on recorders of Henry Purcell’s Sonata in D Major (CC-BY) to again evoke turn-of-the-century London, and Telemann’s performance of Händel’s recorder Sonata.

With the voices of Jeremy Hancock, Ian Russell, and Brian Roberts.

Nimi Hirani gave me enormous help and assistance in Ahmedabad, and in India in general.

The cover picture (by me) is some of the books in the readings: “Acetaria” (Evelyn) , “The English Hermit” (Crab), a pamphlet attacking Crab, and “Guide to Health, Long Life and Happiness” by George Cheyne.

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 10: Revolution. English civil war, diet gurus, and the poetry of Sensibility first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 9: Renaissance

Old medieval certainties are cracking under the combined assault of new sciences and rediscovered classics. It’s an age when “natural philosophers” combine scientific discovery with philosophical treatises, and when their Republic of Letters transcends political boundaries in the name of free thought.

It’s the age of Descartes, whose mechanical philosophy dismisses animals as “automatons”. But rivals like Gassendi suggest that animals have more in common with humans than he thinks. Ian traces the trail from Paris to the Mughal Court and back to the medical schools of the Enlightenment. He discovers the forgotten story of how Christian mythology, early anatomy, classical thinkers, and Indian medicine came together in respected medical schools that taught students to prescribe a vegetable diet.

Play or download (61MB MP3 44min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Justin Begley, University of Oxford (academia.edu)
• Jean-Charles Darmon (Université de Versailles) (on Wikipedia)
• Deepak Kumar (Jawaharlal Nehru University)
• Tristram Stuart (tristramstuart.co.uk) (on Wikipedia)

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Readings

• Lucretius, “On the Nature of Things”, 56 BCE (see translations by Hugh Munro 1910 & Cyril Bailey 1900)
• Montaige, “Apology [in the old sense of “propounding”] for Raymond Sebond”, 1580 (see translation by Charles Cotton)
• Gassendi, Letter to Van Helmont, 1629
• Descartes, Letter to Henry More, 1649
• Descartes & Gassendi, Appendix to Meditations, 1642
• Bernier, appendix to “Concerning Happiness”, 1674 (see translation)
• Bernier, “Travels in the Mogul Empire”, 1670 (see translation by Constable 1891 & Smith 1916)
• Philip Hecquet, “Traité des dispenses du Carême” (translation for by Elisabeth Lyman)
• John Wallis & Edward Tyson, 1700 (see below)
• Alexander Munro, “An Essay on Comparative Anatomy”, 1744
• Herman Boerhaave & William Cullen taken from Stuart (see below)

Descartes’ readings represent the course of his philosophy, but aren’t in chronological order in the show. Descartes first propounded his mechanistic ideas about animal “automatons” in his 1638 “Discourse on Method”, but articulated it more clearly for us in a letter from 1649. He didn’t touch on it in his First Meditations (1641), but Gassendi did raise it in his response.

Geek Reference of the Month

Just Lady Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. And all the characters in the show who are leading scientists.

Credits

Background advice came from Renan LaRue and Antonia Lolo. Location photographs are by Vincent Migeotte, my production assistant in Paris.

The theme music is by Robb Masters.

The period music was Anna Simboli’s performance of ‘Signor, quell’infelice’ from L’Orfeo by Montiverdi (CC-BY); and, to evoke 1700 London, Papalin’s performance on recorders of Henry Purcell’s Sonata in C Major (CC-BY), which is dedicated to Lady Rhodia Cavendish.

Archive monastery bells recorded by Robin Whittaker, Gregorian chant CC-BY Ramagochi, fast ticking recorded CC-BY Patrick Liberkind, and clockwork toy recorded CC-BY Steven Brown.

The cover picture is The Garden of Eden, by Jan Brueghel.

I’m very grateful to the actors of historical drama group Joot Theatre Company, at the University of Dundee – Connor Ogg (Monro), Iain Brodie (Cullen) and Vachel Novesha. Dr Jo George is their director of Joot Theatre Company, and was extremely helpful in helping set this up, and Brian Hoyle was their studio producer. Other parts were played by Sally Beaumont (Margaret Cavendish) and Guillaume Blanchard.

Bibliography

The post VegHist Ep 9: Renaissance. Descartes, Montaigne, Gassendi, and the “sparing diet” first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 8: Contacts

Ian discovers the ecstatic dancing and singing shared by Sufis and Hindus – including westerners singing Hare Krishna in London’s main shopping street. In Delhi, he finds out about the inquisition that started with European antisemitism and ended with Indians being forced to eat beef.

And in the royal city of Agra, he visits a shrine built to commemorate a conversation about religion and vegetarianism between a Jain saint and the Mughal emperor Akbar. He uncovers the fascinating story of this heretic emperor who advocated vegetarianism.

At the halfway point of this 15-part history of vegetarianism, the traditions of East and West come together. From hereon, it’s all one story.

Play or download (52MB MP3 37min) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Pius Malekandathil (Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi)
• Sushil Jain and Ashoka Jain, Agra
• Sanjukta Gupta (University of Oxford)
• Dr Peter Flügel, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
• ISKON (“Hare Krishnas”):
  • Devotees of Radha Krishna Temple, Soho, London
  • Prasad distributed by Food For All
  • Ter Kadamba das (askamonk.org)

Readings

• Andrea Corsali, Letter to Giuliano de Medici 1515
• Emperor Jahangir, Memoirs (Translated by Alexander Rogers, 1914)
• Kabir, in the Guru Granth, translation assisted by Manvir Singh.
• Abu Fazl Allami’s Akbarnama, on the sayings of Akbar (see translation by Gladwin 1800) and on the Hall of Worship (from Rezavi and Blochman)
• Palatina Inscription
• Akbar’s Farmans (from Malcom’s Memoir of Central India 1832, Jhaveri, and the Bhanuchandra Gani courtesy of the Digital Library of India)
• Letter of Father Pinheiro, from Vincent Smith’s “Akbar the Great Mogul” 1917
• Matteo Ricci, from “The Truth Meaning of the Lordof Heaven”.
• Francis Bacon, “The Partitions of Science”, discussing Proverbs Ch XII v10 (“A right-minded person cares for his beast”).

The Italian and Portuguese sources used the word “gentoo” (related to “gentile”, but from the perspective of Christians). Here I variously translated it as “Hindu” or “Infidel”, but I’m wishing I’d translated it as “pagan”.

Special Bonus for Australian Listeners

Andrea Corsali’s letter is famous for more than casually implying that Leonardo da Vinci was vegetarian. He was the first person to draw the constellation of the Southern Cross, which is part of the Australian flag. There is a copy of the letter (ironically on animal skin) in the State Library of New South Wales.

Untranslated Vegetarian History

I tried to find readings from some of the Sufis mentioned early in the show. But their words do not seem to be published in the vernacular, let alone in translation.

So again, I’ll leave these footnotes here in the hope that scholarly specialists will one day come across them!

Hamid ud-Din Nagori’s commitment to animals is mentioned on p221 of Sururu’s Sudur, which is in the Habibganj collection at Aligarh University.

Nuru’d-Din’s admission that he considered meat-eating cruelty despite it being allowed under Shari’a is in the Asraru’l-Abrar (“The Secrets of the Pious”) by Dawud Mishkati (ff. 236a-b), published 1654. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.

Kabir, Sikhs, and Vegetarianism

There’s a well-worn debate about vegetarianism amongst Sikhs, including a seventeenth century account that the early Gurus (in the early sixteenth century) were vegetarian. There are arguments over whether particular verses condemn meat-eating, or just the ritual killings of Muslims and Hindus.

Some of the strongest lines against eating animals seem to come from the poet Kabir. (He may have inspired the first Sikh guru, and the Sikh scriptures include his poetry.)

But even Kabir’s rhetoric is open to interpretation; much of it seems directed at particular kinds of slaughter. It seems reasonable to assume he was vegetarian, but it’s not absolutely explicit (either in the poetry, or in my script). For example, there is one line of the Bījak quoted in Religious Vegetarianism from Hesiod to the Dalai Llama that seems to advocate vegetarianism, but I had no reasons to choose their translation of “You should not eat fishes or flesh over what grows in the fields” over the very different “You eat animals and fish as if they grew in the fields“. I’m grateful to Brianne Donaldson and Susan Brill for that discussion.

The original Hindi text is online, should anyone wish to discuss the translation in the comments.

The non-vegetarian interpretation of the Kabir lines in the show would be to claim that throat-cutting was about Islamic ritual slaughter, rather than killing in general. But Kabir obviously isn’t suggesting a different way of killing; he’s suggesting kichri.

(“Kichri” is the name of the dish of rice and beans. Its seasoning of salt was described as “amrit”, literally “un-death”, which after talking to a helpful Sikh vegan I rendered as “bloodless salt”.)

With time, I could have delved into Sikh vegetarianism more. As it happens, the oldest marathon runner in the world is a Sikh vegetarian who (like me) lives in East London. I didn’t go into detail in part because I couldn’t find a consistent strand that goes back to the sixteenth century; the movements towards vegetarianism within Sikhism are informed by its own sense of self-discipline, the conversation with the other religious traditions of India, and the basic principle of compassion.

Emperor Jahangir

Jahangir is Akbar’s son and successor. He kept lurking at the fringe of the story, barely doing enough to be properly featured.

Most interestingly, there’s his complex relationship with Akbar.

He ordered the murder of Akbar’s vizier (who described the Hall of Worship in this episode). His guilt over this might be a driver of his own dalliance with vegetarianism (see Findly). Which might be why he wrote so admiringly of the Rishis (also in the episode).

He also ordered the death of the Sikh leader Guru Arjan, which pushed the Sikhs into becoming the martial religion we know today.

Geek Reference of the Month

“Ferengi” / “Farang” is the word for foreigner throughout Asia – not just in Hindi (and Tamil, which is what the Jesuit Roberto de Nobilis spoke with locals) – but in Persian and Thai and Chinese as well. It derives from “Franks”, which became the Arab name for Western Europeans back when Charlemagne’s Frankish empire was its main power.

For most westerners, though, it was familiar for another reason. Writers chose the Asian word as the name of an acquisitive species in Star Trek who would rival the East India Companies for greed.

Credits

Archive Qawaali and Sikh Temple audio CC-BY Vintage Sense and Casa Asia, respectively.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Selva Rasalingham, and Jeremy Hancock.

This episode is sponsored by Kickstarter backer Jaysee Costa.

Bibliography

A bar over a vowel (“ā”) lengthens it.

I particularly recommend the chapter of Rizvi that deals with the interactions with Bakhtis – it’s on the Internet Archive.

The post VegHist Ep 8: Contacts. Indian Sufism, Bhakti, Akbar, Portuguese Christianity, and Gaudiya Vaishnavism first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 7: Heresies

A string of religious groups across medieval Eurasia shared one common belief: that this world was a terrible place; and to escape its cycle of rebirth and redeath you needed to be ordained into a pure life, abstaining from violence. They all have some level of abstention from flesh, up to and including a vegan diet. But they all face suspicion.

Discover why the “good men” of the Cathars and Bogomils eschewed sinful flesh, why the men and women of the Manichaean Elect followed a vegan diet, and how the monks and nuns of Buddhism were shamed by their layfolk. And how a vegetarian culture spread throughout east Asia.

Ian joins a Chinese Buddhist congregation in London for its full moon service. He discovers how Buddhism not only spread across China, but made vegetarianism part of Chinese culture. He discovers a war against pescetarian heretics in Europe, the medieval Chinese horror stories that encouraged kindness to animals, and visits his local Tofu maker.

Play or download (67MB MP3 48min) (via iTunes)

Contributors:

• Chueh Yun, Fo Guang Shan Temple (Wikipedia) (@LondonFGS on twitter), London
• Prof John Arnold (Birkbeck, University of London)
• Dr Vincent Goossaert (Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités), Paris
• Jason BeDuhn (Wikipedia) (Northern Arizona University), Flagstaff
• Prof Richard Gombrich (Wikipedia) (University of Oxford)
• Dr Deepak Anand (blogger.com) (Buddhist University of Nalanda)
• Neil McLennan (Clean Bean Tofu), London

Readings

• Miracle Tale of Zhizong, from MS Fayuan zhulin 64.722b (see Camapany, 2012)
• Liang of Wu, pronouncement around 522 CE (see De Rauw & Heirman, 2011)
• Khan Bügü’s pronouncement (see Papaconstantinou, 2015)
• The Story of ‘Amir ibn ‘Abd Qays (see Tạbarī, 1990)
• The case of the animals versus man before the King of the Jinn, from The Epistles of the Brethren of Purity (see translation by McGregor and Goodman, 2012)
• Frs Cosmas & Zigabenus on the Bogomils (see Hamilton and Hamilton, 1998)
• Anselms’ letter on the over-zealous persecution (see Wakefield & Evans, 1991)
• The report of the Cathar women from the Le registre d’inquisition (see Fournier 1978)
• And for the report of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, see (of course) Baṭṭūṭa 1953

Hear previous shows about a medieval Syrian vegan poet and Chinese mock meat

This episode returns to themes that previous shows have explored in depth.

Rebel Poet: Benjamin Zephaniah discusses the life of Abul ʿala Al-Maʿarri (أبو العلاء المعري), the medieval Arab vegan philosopher poet

Unanswered Questions

There were some questions I did not manage to get to the bottom of. I leave them here, in the hope that scholarly specialists will one day come across them!

Middle East: Were any Qarmatians Vegetarian?

The Qarmatians were a religious and political rival to Islam in the ninth and tenth centuries. They controlled eastern Arabia, the gulf archipelago of Bahrain, and (at points) southern Iraq. At one point, they scandalised the Islamic world by stealing the meteoric black stone that lies at the spiritual heart of Mecca. The first sources I read painted them as communist vegetarian bandits, who followed a breakaway religion that owed as much to Manichaeanism as Islam. (Cyril Glassé’s New Encylopedia of Islam suggests they were mainly vegetarian. I do not trust his independent un-referenced work; not least because he calls the ethical vegan Al-Ma’arri a “crypto-Manichaean”. I found no evidence of this when doing a show about Al-Ma’arri in 2012.)

Less romantic sources, such as the Encyclopedia Iranica, position them simply as radical Shia Muslims.

The people nicknamed “al-Baqliyyah” (UK: “Greengrocers” US: “Produce sellers”) in southern Iraq were Qarmatians. My final script is based on M G S Hodgson’s entry in the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam, with some information from Wilferd Madelung.

I also found multiple versions of the etymology of al-Baqliyyah; some of which had nothing to do with vegetarianism.

But I really think someone who can read the primary sources (in classical Arabic) would be able to dig deeper than the brief outlines from Hodgson and Madelung. Cyril Glassé was of the opinion that orthodox Qarmatians put pressure on the rest to be vegetarian, and I don’t know where that idea came from. Farhad Daftary (author of the Encyclopedia Iranica article) tells me that “we cannot consider them as vegetarians”.

I’d be happy to share my detailed notes with anyone who wants to take this further.

Balkans: Did any Bogomils follow a Vegan Diet?

One academic told me that there was a source that suggested the Bogomil clergy followed a vegan diet. This would not be a surprise – it would be a logical extension of existing orthodox fasts. and if the Manichaeans did, why not the Bogomils? (The Bogomils presumably never met any Manichaeans, but they were part of scholarly common knowledge in Christendom.)

I asked every relevant academic I could find, and didn’t find anyone who had heard of a direct reference. We know a lot about the Cathars because of the papacy conducted a detailed inquisition and kept the records. On the other hand, the Byzantine empire didn’t gather as much information about the Bogomils, and much of has been lost over the past few hundred years.

China: What’s in Emperor Wu of Liang’s essay about meat-eating?

Wu of Liang wrote an essay about why we should be vegetarian. It’s on Wikisource. It’s just never been translated into English. It’s as important to the history of vegetarianism as the writings of ancient Greek or Indian vegetarians, which have been available in English translation in some cases for centuries.

So if you happen to be able to read T’ang dynasty Chinese and can translate it into English please consider having a read of “Of meat and wine” (at least, I think that’s what 断酒肉文 means) by Emperor Wu of Liang. There’d probably be quite a few English speakers interested in reading it too.

The Links to Broader History

When it came to Buddhist vegetarianism, I was fortunate that John Kieschnick had already written an excellent overview.

But the rest of the continent required me to dive deep into research into Bogomils, Cathars, and Islam. Even letting the show run to 46 minutes – the longest yet – I had to leave a lot of stuff out. And in the process of research, I came across a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with vegetarianism, but it pained me to leave out anyway.

That time the Chinese emperor tried to please Buddhists by sacrificing an animal to the Buddha

At first, Buddhism was slotted into traditional Chinese religion, perhaps as additions to the Daoist pantheon. And these additions sometimes ran ahead of the monks and nuns who actually understood the Buddhist dharma.

In 166 CE, the emperor was reported as having sacrificed animals jointly to the Buddha and (the legendary founder of Daoism) Lao-tse. Opposition to animal sacrifices has been a defining feature of Buddhism since the beginning, so he rather missed the point.

All the Challenges to the Medieval Roman Church

When I look into a cultural movement whether it’s the mystery religions of ancient Greece or the anti-clericals of medieval France, I pick out the vegetarian threads, but wish I could have included the whole movement. And I wish I could have included more of the interview with Dr John Arnold – but I need to put a limit on episode length!

The Cathars were just one aspect of the challenge to the church. Other groups also eschewed the trappings of the establishment to rework Christianity.

A similar semi-heretical movement, the Waldensians, had even produced a translation of the New Testament in the local language Franco-Provençal. Even the Bishop who was forced to disavow heresies in the tenth century plays his part – he was credited with introducing the abacus from neighbouring Arab Iberia.

The Waldensians aren’t the only group that survived. The early Cistercians were also living monastic abstemious lives that reminded people of Jesus’ apostles. And they’re still an active order of Roman Catholic monks.

The European events of this episode also accidentally created France. The Albigensian crusade was an excuse for King of France (based in the north) to annex the Mediterranean lands.

This episode has a blink-and-miss-it cameo appearance by one of the most important figures in Muslim history

In the show, I recount the first mention of vegetarianism in the context of Islam – when the preacher ‘Amir ibn ‘Abd Qays is questioned on behalf of the Caliph about ‘Amir’s (overblown) reputation for vegetarianism.

The person who quizzed ‘Amir (Mu‘Āwiyah) goes on to become Caliph, and fight the war that sunders Sunni from Shia. This is the central divide in Islam.

Pun of the Month

Is in the episode itself, and shouted by our troupe. The Chinese word for “Demon” (“Mo”) is also how the Chinese pronounce “Mani”. Many academics suspect that the shout of “Vegetarian Demon Worshippers” is a play on words that references Manichaeans.

Credits

I had to rely on even more academic advice than usual for this episode. I’d like to thank Claire Taylor, Yuri Stoyanov, John Kieschnick, Renan LaRue, Erica Hunter, and Andrew Chittick.

The ambience in the fable of Zhi Zhong is CC-BY Klank Beeld; the recording of a Niger village muezzin call was contributed to the public domain by Felix Blume; and the monastic chanting by singer Jayme Amatnecks. The Uyghur folk song “Mira Jihan” was sung by the London Uyghur Ensemble, and featured by their kind permission.

The theme music is by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, Selva Rasalingham, Jeremey Hancock, Guillaume Blanchard, and Yasser Sha’aban, with additional laughter by Orna Klement.

Bibliography

A bar over a vowel (“ā”) lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 7: Heresies. On Chinese Buddhists, Cathars, Bogomils, Islam, and Manichaeans first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 6: Hinduism

How did vegetarianism permeate Indian society? Ian tracks the changes in India’s religious life during the first millennium, following the vegetarian strands of the tapestry that we now call Hinduism.

Ian travels to a temple to Vishnu in eastern India to understand the importance of vegetarianism to his worshippers. He talks to theologians and historians in Oxford and Delhi about the factors that caused the change. He uncovers heated arguments about vegetarianism and animal advocacy in the leaves of India’s sacred texts. And he explores the medieval Buddhist monastic university of Nalanda, in the company of a lecturer from its modern namesake.

Play or download (42MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Ranjan Garuva, Ananta Vasudeva Temple (Wikipedia), Bhubaneswar
• Prof KTS Saroa, University of Delhi
• Prof GC Tripathi
• Prof Richard Gombrich (Wikipedia) (University of Oxford)
• Sanjukta Gupta (University of Oxford)
• Dr Deepak Anand (blogger.com) (Buddhist University of Nalanda)

Readings

• Rules for student Brahmins, from the Gautama Dharmasūtra. Translation by Muller.
• Extracts from Laws of Manu on vegetarianism (V26/7, V39, V48). Translation by Bühler
• Defence of the cow to be sacrificed by Brahmins from Manimekalai.
• The argument about the sacrifice of a goat, from The Anugita Parva of the Mahābhārata, based on the translation by Ganguli in consultation with John Smith.
• The half-golden Mongoose, from the Mahābhārata
• Extracts from Nīlakēci’s argument with Buddhist nun Kuṇṭalakēci, in the Tamil Jain epic Nīlakēci’s, translation by Katherine Ulrich
• Shaivite condemnation of Jains by Campantar and Appar, taken from the Teveram, translation by Katherine Ulrich
• The Lankavatara Sutra, translation by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki

Half-Golden Mongoose

You might be wondering what the deal with the half-golden Mongoose in the Mahabharata was. He was looking for a perfect sacrifice to remove his curse (of being a half-golden Mongoose), and had hoped that the immense horse sacrifice at the end of this truly epic war might be it. But he learns that whatever makes an offering perfect, victory in war and animal sacrifice isn’t it.

Pun of the Month

One reading I didn’t get a time to include was from the Laws of Manu, about how meat-eaters will be consumed in return:

“He whose meat in this world do I eat will in the other world me eat.“ Wise men say this is why meat is called meat.

This is just because of the heroic act of punning that renders the Sanskrit folk etymology (“mamsa” = meat, “mam” = me, “sa” = he) into English in a way that still makes sense. (Alas, I’ve lost the name of the first translator to do this. )

Credits

I’d like to thank Sanjeeb Kumar (YouTube) of the artistic Kanti Centre for practical help in Bhubaneswar. Katherine Ulrich and John Smith helped enormously with historical advice and translations.

Music by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, and Selva Rasalingam.

Bibliography

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 6: Hinduism. On Indian Vegetarianism, Vaishnavism, Satvik, and Mahayana Buddhism first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Vegan MP on EU Referendum

In this special short extra edition of the Vegan Option, Ian catches up with longstanding vegan MP, and main official opposition spokeswoman on farming and the environment, Kerry McCarthy. How does she think animals would vote? (And, for that matter, how will Ian?)

Play or download (17MB MP3) (via iTunes)

I compiled the thoughts of ten EU immigrant vegans for a post on my friend Sean’s blog, Fat Gay Vegan.

I also mentioned the UK Government’s recent proposal (now withdrawn) to make the poultry industry self-regulating.

Party Spokeswomen and man on Brexit:

• “A Vote for the EU is a vote for Animals” by Kerry McCarthy MP, Labour shadow secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs
• “If Animals Could Vote, they Would Vote to Remain” by Keith Taylor MEP, Green party spokesman on animals
• “Leave or Remain? AWP’s position …” by Vanessa Hudson, leader of the Animal Welfare Party

Podcaster and YouTuber VeganTrix (SoundCloud) filmed Kerry McCarthy’s full talk to VegFestUK [since deleted from YouTube]. It’s an hour long and very interesting, with a bit of gossip about life as a vegan MP. Plus, I’m in it. An audio-only version will be up soon.

Other articles:

• A video explainer for non-Brits from the Guardian
• “In or Out, that is the Question” by Jasmijn de Boo (quoted in the show)
• “Brexit would be Disastrous for Britain’s Farmed Animals” by Sam Barker in The Guardian
• “Will EU Exit put a Stop to Live Animal Exports?” from Kent News
• “What would Brexit mean for Animals?” by Maria Chiorando in Vegan Life magazine
• “Greener In – Obviously!” by Jonathon Porritt (not about animal issues, but is about the tension between ethical regulation and other political priorities)

Credits

Music by Robb Masters. Interview recorded at VegFestUK Bristol.

The post Kerry McCarthy MP on Brexit first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the eastern Roman Empire, several faiths and philosophies agree on one thing; that you need to eschew flesh to live a life of the spirit.

Episode 5: Flesh & Spirit

Not all Romans celebrated pagan sacrifices or the bloodthirsty arena. Some Romans followed the semi-mythical vegetarian Pythagoras, or neoplatonist philosophers who preached a vegetarian contemplative life.

In the melting pot of Jewish mythology, Greek philosophy, and the worship of Jesus many forms of Christianity emerge. Some of them advocate vegetarianism. The lost world religion of Manichaeanism took ideas from India and was led by a plant based priesthood that would last a thousand years.

Alexandria in Egypt is the epicentre of many of these contemplative movements. Ian visits a valley in Yorkshire that still echoes with the traditions of the ancient Egyptian desert – the Coptic Christian monastery of St. Athanasius. He discovers why the monks pursue that life, what it means to them, and how they maintain some of the original vegetarian traditions of the Egyptian desert fathers.

Play or download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Fr. Abouna Yostas St. Athanasius (St. Athanasius’ Monastery)
• Dr David Grummet (University of Edinburgh, davidgrumett.com)
• Dr Michael Beer (@Sutekh69)
• Dr Nicholas Baker-Brian (Cardiff University)

Readings

• Seneca the Younger, “Epistles“, 1st Century CE.
• Philo (attributed), “The Contemplative Life”, 1st Century CE. Translation by Charles Duke Yonge
• Paul of Tarsus, “Letter to the Romans”, 1st Century CE. Romans 14:2-3.
• Gospel of the Ebionites, 1st or 2nd Century CE (as quoted in fragments by a later Christian heresiologist). Translation by Montague Rhode James 1924
• Jerome (attributed), “The History of the Monks (Fr Theon)”, traditionally 5th century.
• Plutarch, “On the Eating of Flesh”, 1st Century CE. Translation by PD Loeb
• Clement of Alexandria, “Miscellanies”, turn of 3rd Century CE. Translation by William Wilson 1885
• Porphyry, “On the Abstention from Flesh”, 3rd Century CE, Translation by Thomas Taylor
• Council of Ancyra, 314 CE. Translation by Henry Percival 1900
• Augustine of Hippo, “Against the Manichaeans”, 388 CE. Translation by Richard Stothert 1887

Production Diary

Now the story has reached characters whose writing survives to the present in volumes, I’m spending less time talking about historical sources and more time quoting people. And it’s hard to leave things out. There are so many things that Plutarch said in the first century that people like Vegan Sidekick have had to repeat in the twenty-first.

This was also the hardest episode for which to arrange a location visit; the story unfolded a long way from where I live, there’s not enough reason to travel, and precious few ethical vegetarians. It took me a while to find the monastery of St. Athanasius.

The tattoo of a Coptic cross on Fr. Yostas’ wrist is what modern Copts (Egypt’s Christian minority) show on entry into a church.

Credits

Music by Robb Masters, and Michael Levy. The actors were Jeremy Hancock and Yasser Sha’aban.

The music was:

• Theme by Robb Masters
• Sacred Flame of Vesta, by Michael Levy
• Avinu Malcheinu, Jewish traditional, arranged and performed by Michael Levy
• Hurrian Hymn, anonymous ancient Mesopotamian, arranged by Michael Levy based on translation of Ugarit tablet by Richard Dumbrill

The show also included part of a service at the monastery of St. Athanasius, and (at the end) an Ethiopian Orthodox Service at St. Mary of Tserha Sion in Hackney, East London.

The icon of St. Nofer the hermit is taken with permission from this Russian-language tourist website.

Special thanks to the Coptic Monastery of St. Athanasius, and Marian and Kevin McDonald (my parents) for driving me there.

Bibliography

Geek recommendation: some of the Christian theologians in this episode also appear in the excellent (and uncharacteristically monster-free) Doctor Who audio drama Council of Nicea.

The post VegHist Ep 5: Flesh and Spirit. On Egyptian monasticism, Early Christianity, Plutarch, Neoplatonism, and Manicheansim first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 4: Ashoka

In the fourth century BCE, the śramaṇa movement (anti-violence anti-ritual ascetics) has produced three religions: the vegetarian Jains, the freegan(ish) Buddhists, and the mysterious (and now vanished) Ājīvikas. The Mauryan Empire is absorbing almost all of the subcontinent, from present-day Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal.

At its height in the middle of the third century BCE, the king – Ashoka – has edicts carved in stones and columns across the realm. Alongside the rulings and propaganda you might expect, his edicts oppose the slaughter and abuse of animals.

Ian travels to the Indian Museum in Calcutta to speak with historian Dr Suchandra Ghosh. And he visits a hillside that looks down on the battlefield that – King Ashoka says – turned him way from violence forever, and where Ashoka erected an edict that still stands today.

Play or download (44MB MP3) (via iTunes)

Contributors:

• Dr Suchandra Ghosh (Calcutta University) (Academia.edu)
• Dr Bharati Pal (Odisha State Museum)
• Dr U.C. Dwivedi (Patna Museum)

Locations:

• Dhauli, Odisha, India
  • Travelog by Rangan Datta
• Patna Museum, Bihar, India
• The Indian Museum, Calcutta/Kolkata

These are the artefacts of the Ashoka and his dynasty we talk about during the show.

Readings

The translations of the edicts of Ashoka Maurya are based on those of Hultsch 1925, Ven. S Dhammika 1993, and Romila Thapar 1999. I had a look at the original work of Prinsep and Wilson (PDF) who decoded the Brahmi characters in the nineteenth century.

The Indian diplomat is Megasthene. He was based in Pataliputra, at King Chandragupta’s court, and his work Indika (PDF) (various fragments and translations) remained the major Greek source on India for centuries.

Translating “dāsa” – slave or servant?

When Ashoka defines dharma, he starts with a list of who should be treated properly, beginning with “bonded servant”. This is how I translated “dāsa” – a word scholars variously translated as “servant”, “slave”, or simply left untranslated. (It has other meanings, too, like “religious devotee”, but not here.)

So what is a dāsa? We know from a contemporary orally transmitted book of governance that they couldn’t change master unless they bought their freedom, but they also had legal protections against abuse, demeaning tasks, property theft, or being sold on to someone else. Ancient Greek commentators say there’s no slavery in India, implying they don’t recognise dāsas as slaves.

My original script used the translation “slave”, explained that in more detail, and added:

Ashoka usurps the spiritual monopoly of Brahmins, spreads a casteless religion, and his attempt to change a continent’s values is astounding; but it’s still a stratified society. He does not seem to change that.

I changed it because that would have been a distraction from the story.

But accepting that dāsas are quite different to Greco-Roman slaves, they’re still forced labourers in any modern sense. And the Mauryan empire has a Greek corner in which Greek-style slavery presumably did exist. (In one text, the Buddha says that the Greeks have only two castes – slaves and free.)

We look back at Ashoka from the perspective of a society that finds all forms of human slavery abhorrent but generally takes it for granted that other animals exist for humans. We’re used to assuming that the first injustice is challenged before the second, but that’s not always the case.

Of course, the word “slavery” today principally conjures up the racist “peculiar institution” of the southern United States and Caribbean, and the transatlantic slave trade. When the movement to abolish those horrors gets going, campaigners against the abuse of animals will be part of the alliance. But that’s seven episodes (and almost 2000 years) away.

Diary

The interviews were recorded in early 2014, before the the lion capital was seriously damaged in a museum accident.

Recording these interviews was a little hectic. In order to make a different interview in Calcutta on the Saturday after interviewing Dr Ghosh, I took an overnight train to Bhubaneswar on for Friday morning, gave myself a day to set up the Dhauli interview, head back overnight to Calcutta for another interview; and then back to Bhubaneswar in the hope of gathering material on Sunday. (Which you’ll hear in episode six.)

The following Monday was Holi, the Indian spring festival of colours. Folk in the west have embraced it as a chance to throw brightly coloured powder at each other.

I alighted in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. I’d given myself a day to setup and a day to interview. My solution in India when I hadn’t managed to set anything up with phones and emails beforehand was to turn up on people’s doorsteps – and the local Archaeological Survey of India office can be relied upon to know everyone. They very kindly sent me to Dr Pal at the museum.

This is probably where I should mention that Holi is a much bigger deal in Orissa. There’s a major procession with religious idols, and two linked festival days. So I’d turned up on the Friday before a bank/public holiday weekend. And at the end of the working day, just before starting her holiday, Dr Pal very graciously got into a motor-rickshaw for the Dhauli hillside.

That schedule meant I completely missed Holi on the following Monday, apart from sharing the carriage with young folk whose clothing was still tinged with coloured powder.

Credits

The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Sandeep Garcha and Vinay Varma as King Ashoka Maurya (Wikipedia)

The series has included some brilliant actors in a range of roles, but this is the first episode where a single actor carries the show in a single role. Vinay is an accomplished Hyderabad-based actor who has appeared in a range of Hindi and Telugu films, TV series, and theatre.

The music is by Robb Masters, and Michael Levy.

The clip played under discussion of Greek India is the “Epitaph of Seikilos”, taken from a Greek gravestone, performed by Michael Levy on his album “The Ancient Greek Lyre”.

The composite image (of the Dhauli elephant with text of the edict) is available for re-use under a CC-BY-SA license; attribution should link back to this page (or list veghist.org in physical media) and name either the “The Vegan Option” or “Vegetarianism: The Story So Far”. The original photograph is by Michael Gunther.

Special thanks to the Archaeological Survey of India, and to Nimi Hirani of The Philosophy Club Ahmedabad (FB) for advice and interpretation throughout my time in India.

This episode was sponsored by Kickstarter backers Menka and Ajay Sanghvi, to whom I’m very grateful.

Bibliography

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “Ashoka” for “Aśoka”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 4: Ashoka first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 3: Pythagoreans

The Greek philosophers knew about vegetarians. But they were part of cults associated with the mythical figure of Orpheus, and the guru of harmony and number – Pythagoras. The people who introduced the concept of reincarnation into Greece.

In the British Museum, Ian talks to Hugh Bowden, the head of the classics department of King’s College London and mystery religion specialist. There, Prof Bowden examines what its artefacts of Greek life and death tell us about attitudes to animals. Including – some suspect – an Orphic pocket guide to Hades.

Play, download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript

Contributors:

• Prof Hugh Bowden (@HughBowden) (King’s College, University of London)
• Prof Armand D’Angour (@ArmandDAngour) (Wikipedia) (www) (University of Oxford)
• Dr Michael Beer (@Sutekh69)
• Prof John Wilkins (University of Exeter)

Readings

The translations used in the show aren’t necessarily the ones linked to here; for example, I used “animate” as a consistent translation of “ἔμψυχος” (empsychos), to help communicate that they all used the same phrase to mean abstaining from flesh.

• Hesiod’s “Works and Days”, 8th century BCE. Translation by HG Evelyn-White 1914
• Genesis 2:13
• The accusation of Theseus from Euripides’ “Hippolytus” 428BCE. Translation by EP Coleridge 1910
• Discussion of customs around meat in Plato’s “Laws”, Book 6, §782c, early 4th century BCE. Translation by RG Bury
• Mention of Orpheotelestai in Plato’s “Republic”, early 4th century BCE. Translation by Jowett 1892
• Empedocles in Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”, Book 1 §13, 4th century BCE. Translation by JH Freese 1926
• Polybius’ “Histories”, Book 2, 2nd century BCE. Translation by ES Shuckburgh 1889
• Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, Book 15, 8 CE. Translation by AS Kline 2000

Recreating Ancient Greek Music

It was extremely tempting to go on a long tangent about efforts to record ancient Greek music. There are two extant compositions – the Delphic Hymn (which far from being Pythagorean relates to an animal sacrifice), and the haunting Epitaph of Seikilos.

Historians go to great length to try to recreate lost instruments.

Academics like Armand d’Angour endeavour to infer melodies based on the rhythm and accents. His current project to recreate ancient Greek music will bear fruit in the shape of a CD and radio broadcast later this year.

Meanwhile, dedicated amateurs like Michael Levy simulate a range of ancient music.

Credits

Music by Robb Masters, Michael Levy, and Stefan Hagel. The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Sandeep Garcha, Orna Klement and Vinay Varma as Ashoka Maurya. Additional sound engineering by Mathieu Gillon.

The track played under discussion of musical harmony is the “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo”, performed by Michael Levy on his album “The Ancient Greek Lyre”. The track played under the Orphic totenpass is “The Epitaph of Seikilos”, performed by Stefan Hagel.

Special thanks to the British Museum, and to Elizabeth Alexandra Fisher for assistance and photography.

Bibliography

Nerdy language coincidence of the month: the Pythagoreans’ adversary at Croton was called Cylon (although pronounced with a hard “c”). Someone should make a TV series about their years on the run from a Cylon attack. It could have lots of references to Greek deities and mysticism.

The post VegHist Ep 3: Pythagoreans first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 2: The Middle Path

Of the many monks of the ancient Indian kingdom of Magadha, only one has become a global household name. Buddhism will spread ahimsa to the ends of the earth, and inspires many millions of vegetarians today.

And yet the oldest Buddhist texts seem to portray the Buddha eating meat. Hear commentary from theologians from both vegetarian and meat-eating interpretations of Buddhism, the insights of world-leading historians, and a dramatisation of the moment in early texts where vegetarian Jain activists clash with Buddhist meat-eating.

Play or download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Rev Dr Varasambodhi Thera, International Meditation Centre, Bodhgaya
• Prof KTS Saroa, University of Delhi
• Dr Peter Flügel, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)
• Prof Richard Gombrich (Wikipedia) (University of Oxford)
• Prof Dwijendra Narayan Jha (Wikipedia)
• Prof Uma Shankar Vyas (Buddhist University of Nalanda)

Rev Dr Varasambodhi by the enclosure housing the trunk of the Mahabodhi tree and the Buddha’s throne.

Readings

• The story of General Siha of Vaiśālī, and the rule of Seen/Heard/Suspect is in the Vinaya Pitaka (“The basket of discipline”) VI.31. Translation by I B Horner 1951
• The story of Siddharta Gautama’s search for enlightenment is from the Jātaka Sutra of the Sutta Pitaka. Translation by Henry Clarke Warren 1896
• Gautama Siddharta’s proclamation upon enlightenment is from the Mahāvastu (“great story”) 286. This is the only reading from a text that’s not part of the Pali canon followed by Theravada Buddhists, but from another early Buddhist collection that developed alongside it. Translation by J J Jones 1952
• The “middle path” speech is from sermon in the Deer Park (at Sarnath, where the Buddha preached for the first time). Translation by Piyadassi Thera 1999

Notes on the Ājīvikas

I was fascinated to find out there was a whole other religion, at the time as important as the Buddhists and the Jains, that’s now almost forgotten, called the Ājīvika. But the evidence we have is fragmented and contradictory – so it was an area where one spends much time but grows only in uncertainty.

Even the small picture I give in the episode only hints at the patchwork of information we have about them.

The very word “Ājīvika” for example, is often used in Buddhist texts in a similar sense to “heretic” – capturing every śramaṇa other than Buddhists and Jains. (US Vyas used the word in the heretical sense in the full interview; but I only used his references to the movement of Makkhali Gosal, which is consistent with the later use. It would have been too confusing to introduce different meanings.)

The “educated guess” I mention is that of Arthur Llewellyn Basham, the twentieth century Welsh Indologist. His book “The Wonder that was India” was the leading popular history of the subcontinent. He did his PhD thesis on the Ājīvikas in the 1940s, and 65 years after publication (Basham, 1951) it is still the standard reference work.

Another view I didn’t have time to include was Johannes Bronkhorst, who quite radically reinterpreted the mentions of Ājīvikas at the turn of the century (Bronkhorst, 2000). He argues that the early Buddhist texts named rival groups not according to doctrine but according to appearance. Most academics assume “Niganthā” in Buddhist texts means the Jains. (The word “Jain” didn’t emerge for many centuries.) So in his view, the words “Ājīvika” and “Niganthā” in Buddhist texts describe (respectively) naked rival orders and clothed rival orders; with the former term including not just the “true” Ājīvikas, but the Jain followers of Mahavir (who would have been naked) and the latter including the Jain followers of the teachings of Parshwa, the preceding tirthankara (Jain inspired teacher, literally “ford-maker”) who had lived centuries before.

(We don’t know if the Jains cohered as a single tradition during Mahavir’s lifetime.)

So, as interesting as this all is, all this tells us is how little we know about this period.

(We can be confident that the Niganthās in the argument at Vaiśālī that our actors portray are Jains because Mahavir is mentioned earlier in the story. Just in case you were wondering.)

Though I did manage to learn that the Ājīvika leader is, once you translate both names into their meaning, basically called Gandalf. (Those years poring over Tolkein’s fictional etymology finally pay off.)

Credits

Music by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, and Selva Rasalingam.

Bibliography

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 2: The Middle Path first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Episode 1: Ahimsa

Ian visits the intellectual hub of iron age India – the Kingdom of Magadha. He discovers a subculture of vagabond philosophers that developed two world religions; and the vegetarian order of monks and nuns who became the torchbearers of ahimsa.

Play or download (41MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Contributors:

• Sadhvi Yasājhe Maharaj
  • Interpreter: Dr. Smita Bagrecha
• James Serpell (University of Pennsylvania)
  • “One Man’s Meat: On The Evolution of Animal Food Taboos” (blog post)
• Prof Richard Gombrich (Wikipedia) (University of Oxford)
• Prof Dwijendra Narayan Jha (Wikipedia)
• Prof GC Tripathi
• Dr Priyadarshana Jain (University of Madras)
• Dr Peter Flügel, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London)

Locations:

• Veeryatan, Bihar
• BL Institute, Delhi

Recording diary

I’d only been told about Rajgir the day before arriving. I was staying at the refounded University of Nalanda for a couple of nights, where I interviewed two people who lived in the block in which I was staying. Institutions like that are fantastic for my research. But one interviewee – Deepak Anand – told me the real place I needed to go to was Rajgir. My desk research had led me to places like Vaisali – which will turn up via Buddhist texts in episode two – but at Rajgir, modern Jains celebrated and could talk about what happened there two and a half thousand years ago.

Finding guests with good English is obviously helpful. So it was gratifying to learn that the Veerayatan Institution at Rajgir was led by Jain sadhvis (nuns) who were very used to communicating with foreign and English-speaking audiences, because of their outreach overseas.

When I got there, I discovered all the English-speaking sadhvis were overseas doing outreach. So I had very little time to find both a learned sadhvi, and a way of interviewing her. An English-speaking physician, a glaucoma consultant from the hospital on the other side of the site, helped me out and acted as interpreter; and I’m very grateful to her indeed. Dubbing a non-English speaking guest is a lot more work (Yasājhe’s words were retranslated carefully and then read by actress Sandeep Garcha) but I’m glad now that the first words you hear from a guest in the series are in Hindi.

This left me not much time to get to the station for the train back to Patna – later Magadha capital and current Bihar state capital.

The background noise at the start of the show was from two different journeys: a crowded auto-rickshaw in Mahabodhi, and that train I took back to Patna. Both were travelling the kinds of routes Śramaṇas would have taken within ancient Magadha.

Credits

Particular thanks to Dr. Smita Bagrecha for interpreting Yasājhe at short notice. The featured pic is public domain painting of Mahavira, Rajasthan, circa 1900.

Bibliography

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Episode 1: Ahimsa first appeared on The Vegan Option.

As the internet transforms the media landscape, how can vegan organisations and businesses survive and thrive? In the midst of the crowdfunding campaign for Vegetarianism: The Story So Far, Ian McDonald interviews Stephanie Redcross of Vegan Mainstream.

Play or download (23MB MP3) (via iTunes)

This show is an update to Digital Vegans, in which we spoke with Eric Brent of Happy Cow, Kerry McCarthy and others at venerable group London Vegans, and reviewed vegan smartphone apps. The interview will form part of the Resonance 104.4FM broadcast radio edit of Digital Vegans.

Stephanie Redcross

Stephanie Redcross is the managing director of Vegan Mainstream – a San Diego-based marketing company that specialises in vegan and vegetarian businesses.

• @VeganMainstream on Twitter

Thanks

Digital media artist Robb Masters wrote our theme. Also, thank you to everyone who has backed the Kickstarter for a radio history of vegetarianism.

The post Digital Vegans: Picking up the Tab, with Stephanie Redcross of Vegan Mainstream first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Palm oil is everywhere – from cooking oil to soap to vegan margarine. Equatorial rainforest and peatland are cleared and replaced with serried ranks of oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis).  The biodiversity of Borneo and Sumatra, including  the iconic Orang Utan, is threatened by habitat loss.

Some vegan activists say no product that causes so much destruction can be considered vegan. But is palm oil really worse than the alternatives? And can poor countries like Malaysia and Indonesia develop without it?

Environmentalist Catherine Laurence helps me disentangle the thicket of issues.

Hear academic experts Eric Lambin and Robert Greenland; vegan baker Ms Cupcake; primatologist Georgina Ash; vegan MP Kerry McCarthy; the boss of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; and vegan Indonesian palm oil activist and Miskin Porno lead singer Daniek Hendarto.

 Play or download (38.3MB MP3) (via iTunes)

Catherine Laurence

There is more about Catherine in her blog post, “Being part of the solution“.

• Follow @calaurence on Twitter

Guests

Georgina Ash

Georgina Ash is a primatologist who has worked and volunteered with Orangutans. She is now the picture editor for the World Society for the Protection of Animals in London, UK, where I spoke with her.

Daniek Hendarto

Daniek (pronounced “Danny”) works for Indonesian NGO the Centre for Orangutan Protection: he helps advise Zoos on care, resettling Orangutans from threatened areas, and campaigning against the impact of palm oil. Daniek is vegan, and also the lead singer of punk rock band “Miskin Porno”, which (content warning) sings sweary rants against palm oil:

• Listen to Miskin Porno at ReverbNation.com

Prof Eric Lambin

Dr Lambin is a Professor of Geography at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium and at Stanford University, California. He specialises in land use change. Because of his work, he has received the Prix Franqui, and been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a meat reducer, for environmental reasons.

• Eric Lambin at Standford University, California USA
• Eric Lambin at Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, California USA
• Eric Lambin’s research activities, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium (PDF)

Dr Robert Goodland

Dr Goodland is a tropical ecologist. He went from an academic career to being an environmental advisor at the World Bank, and from there to being an environmental campaigner, consultant, and writer. He is vegan. Dr Goodland blogged at WorldBank.org about the research he did with Dr Anhang that concluded that livestock are responsible for 51% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. He also wrote a column for The Guardian criticising the World Bank’s environmental impact in 2007. He received the Coolidge Memorial Medial from the International Union for Nature Conservation in 2008.

• Robert Goodland’s site

Darrel Webber

Darrel Webber left a career in business to join the World Wildlife Fund, where he liaised with palm oil companies to build wildlife corridors into their plans. He is omnivorous – his interest in conservation is led partially by his fishing. He joined the RSPO from WWF. As Director General of the RSPO, he has taken part in:

• A Google hangout with other palm oil activists and stakeholders (1 hr)
• Business podcast “The Breakfast Grill” (“The Green Side of Palm Oil”)

Melissa Morgan (“Ms Cupcake”)

Ms Cupcake is a vegan baker and media personality, the author of “The Naughtiest Vegan Cakes in Town” cookbook, and winner of the British Baker 2011 “Rising Star” award. Her bakery is in the gentrifying south London suburb of Brixton.

• @MsCupcakeUK on Twitter

Kerry McCarthy MP

You hear the Member of the UK Parliament for Bristol East and her two parliamentary colleagues in the shows about vegan politicians.  There is more about her on the page for the first politics show.

Oil Palm

You can read reports from US-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (2005, PDF), the United Nations Environment Programme (2011, pdf), and campaigns from the Rainforest Action Network and  the UK magazine Ethical Consumer. But you should definitely read Catherine’s blog post about what she thinks the solutions are, now the episode is done. As a commodity, we used statistics from the US Department of Agriculture.

The Three Oil Palm Fruit Products

The Oil Palm yields fruit; the fruit has both flesh and kernel; and both of those produce meal as well as oil. In the show, we talked mainly about the fruit oil (which is four-fifths of the economic value). Here is my working for how the economic yield breaks down (showing that it’s mostly the fruit oil). According to the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, each hectare produces:

• Oil: 4t at $750/t = $3000 = 80%
• Kernel oil: 500kg at $840/t = $420 = 16%
• Kernel cake/meal: 600kg at $250/t = $150 = 4%
• Total = $3750

The oils are used mainly for food, but are also used in biofuel and other non-food products. The kernel meal is mainly used as animal feed, but is sometimes also used locally as biofuel.

The Oil as an Ingredient

The saturated fat molecules in palm oil have a kink that makes it easy for the molecules to stack into a solid. For this reason, palm oil is a source of fats that are solid at room temperature, making “ambient products” possible. This is an issue for anyone avoiding fat, as well as for bakers.

Orangutans and Habitat Loss

The Orangutans (Indonesian: forest man) are the only species of great ape restricted to Asia. The Sumatran Orangutan is critically endangered; the Bornean Orangutan is endangered. (The other great apes are Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Eastern/Western Gorillas, and – lest we forget – Human). See also:

• “Orangutan Island” (Video, Discovery Channel)

The Orangutans are a symbol, but not the only threatened species; the Sumatran Rhino is thought to number fewer than four hundred;  and the Sumatran tiger is also critically endangered:

with just 1 percent of the Earth’s land area, Indonesia’s rainforests contain 10% of the world’s known plants, 12% of mammals and 17% of all known bird species – Rainforest Action Network

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

The RSPO includes a wide range of producers, traders, and consumers of palm oil as well as NGOs. It marks palm oil that is traceable to source and produced in line with its principles and rules as CSPO (Certified Sustainable Palm Oil)

• The RSPO website provides information on consumption, production and purchase of CSPO
• Rainforest Action Network summed up the case against CSPO in a series of blog posts; and reported on breaches of local regulations and RSPO rules by Cargill (PDF)
• I mentioned the complaint against IOI; or see this letter to the press from one of the complainants (hat tip COP).

The RSPO revised the specifics of some of its rules in 2013: I mentioned that WWF was so disappointed with this revision that they want to set up a new, stricter, certificate within the RSPO (PDF).

Catherine includes more information about Green Palm and CSPO on her blog post about what consumers can do.

Makers of Vegan Margarines

Kerry Foods

Kerry Foods make “Pure”, the UK’s leading brand of vegan margarine. They are RSPO members (membership page). Their Annual Communication of Progress for 2010-11 said only 2% of their palm oil was CSPO. My comparison with 10% of Palm Oil production being CSPO was based on these RSPO figures for CSPO production. Kerry failed to file an ACOP in 2011-12, as shown by their absence from this list. The RSPO process does at least make it obvious when someone does not even fill in the paperwork.

Earth Balance

Earth Balance are produced by Boulder Brands. They are not RSPO members, and have a web page about their palm oil sourcing.

Thanks

… go to Robb Masters and Miskin Porno for the music. The title of the Miskin Porno song used in the show, translated and bowdlerised, is “F___ palm oil”. The illustration pic of Indonesian deforestation is by Vincent Poulissen, used with permission; the sound clip pic is of Orangutan is Kani from Melbourne Zoo by Macinate (and yes, I did try to find a pic of a freeliving Orangutan) used under CC-BY.

The post Palm Oil: with Catherine Laurence, Eric Lambin, Orangutan rescuer Daniek Hendarto, RSPO SG Darrel Webber first appeared on The Vegan Option.

From Jonathan Swift’s talking horses to Star Trek’s Vulcans, from HG Wells to the Wachowskis, science fiction tackles the big questions about our relationship with other animals.

Join the experts who investigate where animal studies meets media theory. Discover the themes in famous books, film, and TV – as well as the cult sci-fi stories that examine food ethics, the boundaries of humanity, and alternative ways of living.

Discover what the experts really think of Planet of the Apes; what Soylent Green used to made from before they started using people; and hear everyone’s favourite Time Lord try to talk a monster out of eating humanity in our Doctor Who sketch.

Play or download (18.5MB MP3) (via iTunes)

Guests

Dr Sherryl Vint

Sherryl Vint edited the Animal Studies Issue of the Journal of Science Fiction Studies and has written Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal.

She is a professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where she reads science fiction and popular culture. She previously lectured at Brock University in her native Canada, which is a centre of animal studies theory.

She calls herself a “vegetarian with vegan tendencies”; those tendencies include eating vegan apart from honey, alcohol filtered in non-vegan ways, and similar exceptions.

Dr Robert McKay

Robert McKay lectures in English literature at the University of Sheffield, England, specialising in animal studies and literature after 1945.

He is part of the UK’s Animal Studies group, and contributed an essay to the collection Killing Animals. The Introduction and Conclusion by Erica Fudge are available to download via Academia.edu. He is vegan.

Tara Lomax

Tara Lomax is a PhD candidate in screen studies at the University of Melbourne, and a vegan activist. She is currently working on a conference paper on animal issues in Twleve Monkeys.

• Tara Lomax at academia.edu

Tara is vegan and a campaigner.

Books, Films, and TV cited

Gulliver’s Travels

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Jonathan Swift, 1726

• Gulliver’s Travels at Project Gutenberg
• Gulliver’s Travels at Wikipedia

Frankenstein

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley, 1818

• Frankenstein (1818 edition) at Project Gutenberg
• Frankenstein at Wikipedia

Sherryl Vint mentions that the creature was made of human and non-human animal parts.

When petitioning Victor Frankenstein to create him a bride, the creature promised to take the vegan pledge:

If you consent, neither you nor any other human being shall ever see us again: I will go to the vast wilds of South America. My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment. My companion will be of the same nature as myself, and will be content with the same fare. We shall make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food. The picture I present to you is peaceful and human, and you must feel that you could deny it only in the wantonness of power and cruelty.

To be fair to to Victor Frankenstein (and to angry torch-wielding mobs everywhere) the creature had already killed at this point. Hat-tip to Philip Armstrong for the quotation.

Mary Shelly was almost certainly vegetarian (although I haven’t tracked down a citation that would give me absolute confidence). Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was an advocate of Rousseauist “back-to-nature” vegetarianism under the mentorship of her father. After Percy’s early death, she was best known for publishing his works, including pro-vegetarian poetry.

Island of Dr Moreau

The Island of Dr Moreau, by HG Wells, 1896

• The Island of Dr Moreau at Project Gutenberg
• The Island of Dr Moreau at Wikipedia

Our hero Prendick returns home distrustful of other humans:

Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere,—none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale.

War of the Worlds

The War of the Worlds, by HG Wells, 1898

• The War of the Worlds text at Project Gutenberg
• The War of the Worlds at Wikipedia

I mentioned that – despite comparing the carnivorous Martians to humanity’s own habits – HG Wells mocked vegetarians. For example his 1908 novel Ann Veronica features parody vegetarians Mr & Mrs Goopes.

Sirius

Sirius: a Fantasy of Love and Discord, by Olaf Stapledon, 1944

• Sirius text at the University of Adelaide
• Sirius at Wikipedia

Beyond Lies The Wubb

Beyond Lies The Wubb, short story by Philip K Dick, 1952

• Beyond Lies the Wubb at Project Gutenberg
• Beyond Lies the Wubb at Wikipedia
• Reading of “Beyond Lies The Wubb” by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau as part of her podcast Vegetarian Food for Thought

I ended up leaving this out of the show, even though it includes a conversation about food ethics very similar to our Dr Who skit.

To Serve Man

To Serve Man, short story by Damon Knight, 1950

• To Serve Man at Wikipedia

To Serve Man, Twilight Zone episode, screenplay by Rod Serling, 1962

• To Serve Man at Wikipedia
• To Serve Man at IMDB

Doctor Who

The clip is taken from:

The Bells of Saint John, written by Steven Moffat, 2013

• The Bells of Saint John at bbc.co.uk
• The Bells of Saint John at IMDB
• The Bells of Saint John at the Tardis Wiki

The Doctor himself turns vegetarian in 1985’s The Two Doctors. A 1986 comic has him lapse; but Paul Cornell’s 1995 novel Human Nature (adapted for TV in 2007) suggests that he’s still vegetarian in his subsequent, seventh, incarnation. Either way, he was not vegetarian on his return to TV in 2005.

Planet of the Apes

The franchise begins with Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel. Tara Lomax and Sherryl Vint specifically discussed …

Planet of the Apes, screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, 1968

• Planet of the Apes shooting script
• Planet of the Apes at Wikipedia
• Planet of the Apes at IMDB

Escape from the Planet of the Apes, screenplay by Paul Dehn, 1971

• Escape from the Planet of the Apes at Wikipedia
• Escape from the Planet of the Apes at IMDB

Rise of the Planet of the Apes, screenplay by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, 2011

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes at Wikipedia
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes at IMDB

Rise of the Planet of the Apes has attracted praise and caution from animal activists. I mentioned:

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes receives Peta’s seal of approval – Peta.org
• “Human, all too human” – Dr Nik Taylor of Flinders University disagrees in a column in The Guardian

Soylent Green

Make Room! Make Room!, novel by Harry Harrison, 1966

• Make Room! Make Room! at Wikipedia
• Review and commentary by Paul Tomlinson

Soylent Green, screenplay by Stanley R Greenberg,1973

• Soylent Green at Wikipedia
• Soylent Green at IMDB
• Soylent Green review in an episode of Our Hen House podcast

Bladerunner

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K Dick, 1968

• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at Wikipedia

Bladerunner, screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peeples, 1982

• Bladerunner at Wikipedia
• Bladerunner at IMDB

Star Trek

The clips are from:

The Slaver Weapon, by Larry Niven, 1973

• The Slaver Weapon at StarTrek.com
• The Slaver Weapon at Wikipedia
• The Slaver Weapon at Memory Alpha

Yes, I did begin this show with yet more carnivorous cats. Is that not a perfect segue from the last show?

Lonely Among Us, by D.C. Fontana and Michael Halperin, 1987

• Lonely Among Us at StarTrek.com
• Lonely Among Us at Memory Alpha
• Lonely Among Us at IMDB

There are a range of commentaries on the franchise’s treatment of animals:

• “A vegan’s view of Star Trek”, blog post by “Busy Vegan” Veronique Nicole, 2012
• Vegetarian at Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki
• “Where no vegan has gone before”, blog post by Daniel of Austin TX lifestyle blog Red Hot Vegans, 2012

Uplift

Uplift, series of novels by David Brin, 1980-1998

• Uplift Universe at Wikipedia

The Matrix

The Matrix, screenplay by Lana and Andy Wachowski, 1999

• The Matrix at Wikipedia
• The Matrix at IMDB

Tara Lomax mentioned that the themes of the Matrix have been adopted by The Grace Communications Foundation in their series of satires The Meatrix. GCF argues makes an environmental and welfare case for non-intensive animal farming.

Animals

Animals, by Don LePan, 2000

• Animals at Don LePan.com
• Don LePan at Wikipedia

Transhuman Space

Under Pressure, role-playing game sourcebook, written by David Morgan-Mar, Kenneth Peters, and Constantine Thomas, 2003

• Transhuman Space at Steve Jackson Games
• Transhuman Space at Wikipedia

This near-future hard science fiction setting is notable for two reasons. Firstly, it posited a European Union that had banned land animal farming. And secondly, I contributed a few paragraphs – undersea “pan-sentient” activists who kidnapped fish-farm executives and forced them to relive the braintaped last moments of dying tuna.

[Spoiler Alert: Title Redacted]

Even naming this book in this context would spoil a major turn of the plot – a spoiler that was impossible to completely avoid in the show. The curious can follow this link, and find out about the film adaption via the studio and IMDB.

Wess’har

Wess’har, series of novels by Karen Traviss, 2004-8

• Wess’har at Karen Traviss.com
• Wess’har at Wikipedia

The Doctor Who Skit

The skit was written by myself with Sally Beaumont; and performed by Sally Beaumont.

The skit references the Doctor’s acquaintanceship with Vegan miners working on Peladon, Leonardo Da Vinci (and his vegetarianism), and (in the extended version) convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation.

Sally Beaumont is an actor, playwright, and voiceover artist. She has played Ada Lovelace in a BBC documentary and sold Chewbacca a hair dryer in a TV commercial.

• Sally Beaumont at IMDB

I am obviously very very grateful to her. Thanks :).

(No, Time Lords do not always retain the same gender across incarnations. Thank you for asking.)

See Also

Discussions of science fiction of interest at:

• VeganSciFi.com – upbeat blog about animal questions and vegan personalities in science fiction
• Fiction with a vegan / animal rights sensibility at LibraryThing

Thanks

… go to Robb Masters for the music and voiceover, Catherine Laurence for voiceover, the guests, and to Sally Beaumont.

Many academics took the time to help me with my research, but for whatever reason did not end up interviewed on the show. These include Nik Taylor, John Miller, Claire Molloy, Susan McHugh, and Philip Armstrong.

Copyright

Doctor Who, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, The Matrix, The Meatrix, and Bladerunner are copyright their respective owners. No challenge is made or implied. Short clips are used under fair dealing for the purposes of media criticism.

The Dr Who skit used freeware sounds “Connecting to Earth” by Philip Bock,  “Giga Core” by Cosmic Dreamer, “Crowd Talking” by SoundJay. It also used Tardis, Sonic Screwdriver and Sting sound effects that are copyright BBC, and used without permission. I am grateful to the BBC’s tolerant attitude to unauthorised work, make no challenge to the BBC’s copyright, and will remove those sound effects if the BBC requests.

As I recognise that some of these corporations could, in principle, get out their lawyers and contest my fair use, and because I am using BBC intellectual property without permission, I cannot make this show available under a Creative Commons licence.

The post Science Fiction and Animals: from Jonathan Swift and HG Wells to Star Trek and Doctor Who; with Sherryl Vint, Robert McKay, and Tara Lomax first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Last show’s investigation of whether cats can be vegan leaves us with an ethical quandary. What should vegans feed cats? Erin and I reflect on listener’s comments. The three expert veterinarians examine the moral issues. And I ask Eric Weisman, CEO of major US vegan cat food brand Evolution, some tough questions. (30 min) Play or download (18MB MP3) (via iTunes)

Veterinarian Guests

There is more information about Lorelei Wakefield, Andrew Knight, and Jean Hofve on the episode page for the last episode, “Cats: Can They Be Vegan?”. Since then, Lorelei Wakefield’s site, vegetariancats.com, has returned, and there’s lots of information there. She is also conducting a new study, with a focus on the urinary tract issues we discussed in the last show, and is asking cat owners to complete her survey and share medical records.

Erin “Red” Grayson

Erin can be found at Tumblr (currently), ErinRed.com (under construction), and @ErinRed on Twitter. She mentions a discussion about the ethical dilemma of vegan cats with Prof Gary Francione in a February 2012 episode of Red Radio, and quotes Hamlet.

Lisa Freeman’s 2004 Study of Cat Foods

Lisa Freeman was the senior member of a team that tested:

• Vegecat KibbleMix, from Harbingers of a New Age
• Evolution diet vegan gourmet vegetable stew entrée, Evolution Diet

(Technically, I should be calling it the Gray study, as she is the primary author.) In our brief conversation, Dr Freeman strongly backed the veterinary consensus, saying there was no safe way to feed a cat vegan. The study is: Christina M. Gray, Rance K. Sellon, Lisa M. Freeman (2004), Nutritional Adequacy of Two Vegan Diets for Cats. Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association 225:11, 1670-175

Eric Weisman and Evolution Diet

Eric Weisman is the Chief Executive of Evolution Diet, manufacturers of vegan foods for cats, dogs, and ferrets, in St. Paul, Minnesota USA. He also posts at WeismanNutrition.com.

Loss of Chiropractic Licence

Eric Weisman gained his licence in 1979, but in 1982, he was reprimanded and put on probation for one year; and again in 1986 and 1987. The complaints process ended in a 1997 Order in which Mr Weisman agreed that he’d committed a number of practices, including:

Advertisements in connection with Respondent’s [Mr Weisman’s] pet food business which identify Respondent only as “Dr. Eric Weisman” and from which a reader could reasonably infer that Respondent is a veterinarian instead of a chiropractor.

He accepted a penalty of 300 hours of community service, a $15,000 fine, and some ethics courses. In 1999, the board found he had paid the penalty in time or money; and in 2002 the board revoked his licence for breaches of the 1997 order [PDF] , including:

Engaged in advertising that is false or misleading

The memo that the board attached to the order said that:

The advertisements admittedly issued by the Respondent also include claims that his treatment programs for animal and human disease have “good long-term results in most cases.” During his January 9, 2001, conference with the Panel, the Respondent stated that he defines a “good long-term result” as an instance in which an animal using his products and/or treatment programs survived longer than was originally predicted by a veterinarian. Because the Respondent’s definition of “long-term is contrary to its common dictionary definition,” his claims about “good long-term results” also are false and misleading. The Respondent has disseminated advertisements in which he claims his research or the research conducted by his pet food company proves dogs and cats can  live 20-25 healthy years and thereby implies that the use of his products lengthens the life expectancies of animals. He admitted, however, that he does not have a dog that has lived 25 years, he did not conduct any actual research other than calling about 30 veterinarians, and he was not referencing animals that had used his products, the Respondent admitted  during his conference with the Complaint Panel that this claim is “just an assumption” on his part because he distributes the food throughout the United States. This claim is false or misleading because the Respondent has no actual data or information to support this representation. His claims about animals’ life expectancies, therefore, are false or misleading.

Thus, “overselling”. The Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the revocation the following year. Those documents, again, are:

• Minnesota Board of Chiropractic Examiners, Stipulation and Order, 17th July 1987
• Minnesota Board of Chiropractic Examiners, Eric Weisman revocation order

Court Action

The Minnesota Board of Veterinary Medicine sued Weisman in 2002; the parties settled the case in 2003 by agreeing an injunction [PDF]. This banned him from, in part:

Engaging in any conduct that constitutes the practice of veterinary medicine … … making any claim that Defendant’s pet food or other products for animals will treat, prevent, or otherwise affect a disease or condition … unless Defendant has first obtained written authorization from the Food and Drug Administration … Directly or indirectly representing or implying, in connection with the sale of pet food or any other product or service, that he or any business in which he has an ownership interest has conducted “research,” including, but not limited to, “clinical trials,” “human studies,” “case studies” or “literary research,” that supports claims about the efficacy of the pet food, product or service. Directly or indirectly representing or implying that that (sic) any animal’s life will improve through the use of Defendant’s pet food or other products …

In 2011, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office brought 58 charges of practicing medicine – on humans and other animals – against Weisman [PDF]. But in February 2012 all of these were dismissed bar three charges of contempt of court [PDF]  – to which Weisman plead guilty. Local media covered the case:

• Jessica Lussenhop, Minneapolis CityPages, “Eric Weisman won’t stop playing doctor”, 2011 Jul 20
• Jessica Lussenhop, Minneapolis CityPages, “Eric Weisman pleads guilty to three misdemeaonor charges in bizarre veterinary medicine case”, 2012 Feb 28
• Sarah Horner, Twin Cities.com, “In Little Canada, probation for ex-chiropracter, satisfaction for city”, 2012 Feb 23

He has also been criticised by blogger SkeptVet. Ida Fong on Animal Voices podcast and Dan Robinson who runs the Vegan Cat Institute website both offer strong anecdotal criticism; whereas the majority of Amazon reviews offer positive anecdotes.

Thanks

… go to Robb Masters for the music, to all the interviewees, and Erin Red. The illustration is a cat in Peru by Ilke Ender on Flickr, used under a CC-BY licence.

Production Note

This is not veterinary advice. It is a radio show with vets.

The post Cats: Ethics. With Erin Red, Evolution Diet’s Eric Weisman, and vets Lorelei Wakefield, Andrew Knight, and Jean Hofve first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Three experienced veterinarians with experience of vegan cats say whether and why they think cats can thrive on a vegan diet.

Jean Hofve argues – out of bitter experience – that cats need meat.

Andrew Knight advocates a vegan diet for cats – if you do it right.

Only Lorelei Wakefield has published a peer-reviewed study to try to discover who is right.

(23 min) Play or download (15MB MP3) (via iTunes)

Veterinarian Guests

Lorelei Wakefield

Lorelei Wakefield’s study site – vegetariancats.com – is currently down, but you can access vegetariancats.com via web.archive.org. That peer-reviewed paper is:

• Wakefield, LA; Shofer, FS & Michel, KE (2006). “Evaluation of cats fed vegetarian diets and attitudes of their caregivers” .Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 229 (1): 70–3.

She does housecalls in NYC, and her site is ComfortsOfHomeVet.com.

Lorelei is vegan. Her own cat, Noel, used to be vegan but is now on a meat-based prescription food.

Andrew Knight

In between extreme ironing , vegan campaigning, and writing a cost/benefit analysis of Animal Experiments, Andrew Knight also runs VegePets.info, which offers advice for people considering vegetarian diets for dogs and cats.

Jean Hofve

Jean Hofve is a retired veterinarian with an interest in nutrition and alternative veterinary medicine.

She writes at Little Big Cat .com, including about vegetarian cats.

Other Guests

Erin “Red” Grayson

Erin offers listeners to Red Radio “vegan banter with a bite” – strong vegan opinions and supportive commentary, as well as guests, compassionate clips, and rants.

She’s Canadian transplanted to Brooklyn, where she co-founded “The Seed: a vegan experience”, and practices muay Thai.

Erin can be found at Tumblr (currently), ErinRed.com (under construction), and@ErinRed on Twitter.

She discussed the ethical dilemma of vegan cats with Prof Gary Francione in a February 2012 episode of Red Radio.

Mazzy

Mazzy is a female tortoiseshell rescue cat, and she’s on my lap as I’m typing this.

She’s also had struvite crystals (when on a meat-based diet) so she’s also on a meat-based prescription diet.

Mainstream veterinary opinion

David Dzanis wrote in the Veterinarian Newsletter in 1999, concluding of both dogs and cats:

… while both species can eat and utilize some plant-source ingredients (dogs more than cats), they simply are not intended to eat only plants as are other animals such as cattle and sheep.

• Vegetarian Diets for Pets?, FDA Veterinarian Newsletter May/June 1999 Volume XIV, No III

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals say:

When it comes to felines, it really is best to provide a diet that includes meat.

I’m going to pass this on to other websites, but we mentioned that the challenges for vegan cats are:

That US National Research Council released dietary guidelines for Cats and Dogs in 2003 (before Lorelei Wakefield’s study) saying that cats:

should not be fed a vegetarian diet because it could result in harmful deficiencies of certain amino acids, fatty acids, and vitamins

The show specifically discussed how cats need Taurine and B12; and the dangers of urinary struvite crystals.

Other vegan experiences

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau addressed the issue in her 2007 podcast episode, What do Vegetarians Feed their Dogs and Cats? – and, as I mentioned, feeds her cats meat.

US writer and activist Jo Stepaniak blogged about how she feeds her cats meat after they did not thrive on a vegan diet.

Vegan vet Armaiti May advises having a vet monitor your cat’s urine pH, rather than doing it yourself.

Animal Voices (Toronto) covered this topic in 2006 with a round table discussion, involving two local activists whose cats fell seriously ill on a vegan diet, as well as Eric Wiseman of Evolution pet food.

Thanks

… go to Robb Masters for the music, the three veterinarians for our interviewees, and of course Erin Red.

Production Note

The interview with Andrew Knight is from back in 2010, hence some rookie mic handling noise.

This is not veterinary advice. It is a radio show with vets.

Next show: Cats, the ethical quandary, and the criminal vegan pet food CEO

The post Cats: Can they be vegan? With vets Lorelei Wakefield, Andrew Knight, and Jean Hofve; and special guest Erin Red first appeared on The Vegan Option.

The shows usually focus on topics rather than individual interviewees – talking to a range of people to get a full picture. This can mean that only a few minutes out of an hour-long interview gets into the show. (This isn’t unusual for public radio documentaries.)

Some full interviews are posted on the website – such as our conversations with Peter Singer and Gary Francione for the episode “Peace on Earth”. But should they go in the podcast feed as well? Diana asked on the Facebook page and “yes” not only won the vote, but for some people it was the only way to get the extended interviews.

So from now on, rough edits of extended interviews will go in the podcast feed as well as the website. This starts with Diana’s full conversation with Dr Julia Minson, part of the “Judgemental!” show:

(24 mins) (download or play MP3 file 16MB)

If you want to only hear the edited shows – particularly if you are catching up with the archive – it’s easy to skip the extended interviews. They’ll still be there if you want to come back to them.

More changes are coming, once the next show (about the dilemmas that vegans with cats face) is ready.

The post Extended interviews on iTunes, starting with Dr Julia Minson first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In 2009, I travelled through South East Asia from equatorial island to the far north of Thailand, discovering the vegetarian threads running through the region. Hear Diana and I banter about my trials and triumphs on everything from missing passports to cheeky elephants.

(25 min) Play or download (MP3 26MB) (other formats) (via iTunes)

The Restaurants

I talked with:

• Jack from Whole Earth restaurant in Singapore
• Chong Keng Hoon from Luk Yea Yan in Penang, Malaysia
• Nan from Taste from Heaven in Chaing Mai, Thailand
• Nicolas from Chamkar in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

These links are mostly to reviews on Happy Cow – whose founder Eric Brent was on our episode about Digital Vegans.

Elephant Nature Park

Taste from Heaven raises money for the Elephant Nature Park, where I volunteered. I talked about washing Elephants in the show: here are some of my holiday snaps. Click on the thumbnails for the full picture.

Verdant Reports

Before The Vegan Option, I produced some five minute podcasts under a pseudonym, and released them at Verdant Reports .org. They include three five minute clips about my journey through SE Asia.

(Verdant Reports didn’t really catch on. Perhaps because they didn’t have Diana to keep me in check, and perhaps because the name is both obscure and difficult to spell out in your web browser.)

Those reports use the same interviews but are more focussed on travel advice, so you might find them useful if you’re planning to go to the region.

Also

20% of chefs surveyed by the Time Out New York Kitchen Report admitted to putting animals in the ostensibly vegetarian option (in a graphic that’s since been removed from the page).

Diana mentioned the Supreme Master restaurants (which we in London know as “Loving Hut”).

Other Vegan Travelogues

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau was part of our last episode, Judgemental!, advising us on how not to be, well, judgemental. She podcast her visit to the UK (although, sadly, she did not visit us in London):

• A Journey Through England and Scotland Through the Eyes of an Animal-Centric, Anglophilic, Literary Geek

Jasmin Singer and Dr Mariann Sullivan of Our Hen House drove across the United States to get to Marianne’s new job in Portland. During their “Great American Road Trip”, they continued to podcast every week:

• Episode 130, with Honey LaBronx
• Episode 131, with  Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Katie Olson, and Brian Endl
• Episode 132, with Bonnie Goodman from Mordamart, Sue Eakins from New Dawn Sanctuary, Kit and Pete Jagoda of Rivers Wish Sanctuary, and Tracy Martin of Rabbitron
• Episode 133, with Rich Roll

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters and the Elephant Nature Park mahouts for the music, and our interviewees including Lisa Green, Izzy, and Dr Peter Flügel of SOAS, University of London.

Thanks also to Kip Dorrell of Messy Vegetarian Cook, who took the picture of Taste from Heaven’s Choo Chee Curry at the top of the page during her own trip to Thailand’s Kin Jay national vegetarian festival.

The post South East Asia: Finding Vegan Food in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Those judgemental vegans. A charge you’ve probably heard (or perhaps even uttered).

But what is “judgement”? How does it really affect the relationships between vegans and others? What can scientists say about it? And how do vegan activists react to the charge?

Dr Julia Minson explains the science.

Marla Rose explains exactly how Bacon Loving Hipsters Can Kiss Her Vegan Ass.

And Colleen Patrick-Goudreau discusses the psychology and experience of “judgemental vegans”.

(30 min) Play or download (29 MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Colleen Patrick-Goudreau

The compassionate cook is a leading vegan advocate across several media, including podcasts (VegNews favourite podcast 2011). Another podcast host – Erin Grayson of Red Radio – has a tattoo that asks what Colleen would do.

Just in case you haven’t heard of her, she’s the author of several vegan cookbooks, the producer of the 30 Day Vegan Challenge online course, and a speaker who is famous for espousing veganism in a spiritual and non-judgemental way.

She relates Julia Minson’s research to her experience as an advocate, and discusses how she tries not to be judgemental – even at barbecues.

Marla Rose

Marla Rose practices a range of advocacy.

Her Vegan Feminist Agitator blog and Bacon Loving Hipsters Can Kiss My Vegan Ass Facebook group offer vegans laughs; she’s written a book about a 15 year old vegan superhero with empathy superpowers; and when we called her home was in the midst of preparations for the outreach event Chicago Veganmania.

Diana asks her if her humour is, perhaps, judgemental: and Marla describes how she resented the smug vegan who convinced her to drop animal products.

Dr Julia Minson

Our thanks go to Robb Masters for the music; and a hat tip to Our Hen House for originally mentioning Julia’s study in their own podcast.

Production Note

During our chat with Colleen, we played her Dr Minson’s interview and summarised Marla’s; and then I edited it together. The guests don’t sound like they’re on VoIP because this month all our guests sent us recordings of their side of the conversation. Thanks!

The post Judgemental: with Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, Dr Julia Minson, and Marla Rose first appeared on The Vegan Option.

As the athletes celebrate their victories and defeats, and the Spice Girls rock the closing ceremony, we look back over the Olympics and update you on the vegan stories behind the games.

This show:

• We catch up with the vegan stories behind the Olympics, like Sandra Hood, Pogocafe, and Frys
• Ian updates you on the use of animals in the Opening Ceremony
• Rudy tells us who’s been coming to Vx, the little vegan shop that was braced for a difficult Olympics
• We sum up the experience of vegans looking for food at the Olympic Venues

(15 min) Play or download (14MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Athletes

Vegan-Sponsored Olympians

In the first Olympic show, Diana suggested athletes you might want to cheer on the basis of their vegan sponsors rather than their flag:

• US Rowing, sponsored by “Perfect Snaque”, won 1 Gold and 2 Bronze medals
• The Women of US Water Polo, sponsored by vegan hair care products Malibu C, won Gold
• Unfortunately, Simon Whitfield broke his collarbone in a Triathalon cycling crash.

Vegan Cross and other businesses

Rudy owns and runs Vx (pronounced “V Cross”).

My local vegan anarchist cafe is Pogocafe; and we mentioned Ms Cupcake.

Animals at the Opening Ceremony

I shall blog about this soon. First Choice Animals went public in an article “Meet the Real Stars of the Olympic Opening Ceremony” in the UK Independent.

Vegan Food at the Olympic Venues

Update 19/8/12: I have blogged about the experiences of vegan spectators, as they reported on social media and to us.

The short version is to take your own food, but check the rules first.

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters for the music, to Rudi for his time, and to everyone else I chased for answers and information.

The post London Olympics: Closing Update with Vx, Animals in the Opening Ceremony, and Vegan Food first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Kara Lang  holds the record as the youngest woman ever to score a goal in international soccer – but her passions also include vegan cupcakes.

Now retired from football, she took time out from her busy schedule as part of Canadian station CTV’s Olympic team to talk to me about her story, touring, and the vegan mentor she improbably found in her own national squad.

(10min) Play or download (9.5 MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Kara Lang

You can find Kara Lang at:

• @Kara_Lang on Twitter
• Kara Lang on Tumblr
• Kara Lang on CanadaSoccer.com
• Her journalism at CTVOlympics.ca

Sportsnet.ca interviewed her about her retirement from football.

London Places

Lara mentioned fellow Canadian Ms Cupcake and vegan shop Vx.

Amy Walsh

Amy was that vegan mentor. You can find her at:

• @amyhwalsh on Twitter
• Amy Walsh on CanadaSoccer.com

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters for the music, and to Kara Lang for her time. Where we recorded turned out to be under a busy flight path, so there’s a bit of non-Olympic background noise.

The post London Olympics: interview with Kara Lang, vegan Olympian, Canada soccer team first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Athletes from across the world are coming to East London – where we produce the show – but what are the vegan perspectives on the Olympic games?

This show:

• Diana talks to Sandra Hood, who wrote the book on raising vegan children, about carrying the Olympic torch
• Amazingly, keeping the Olympics supplied with a vegan mince that caters can use as a drop in substitute for ground meat is down to one small company – I visit the father and daughter who are supplying the Olympic games with the vegan option
• What do the locals think? The staff of the nearest vegan cafe to the games have their say.
• We fill you in on the stories you might have heard in the media – Venus Williams‘s diet, the Chinese volleyball team, and the use of animals in the opening ceremony

(24 min) Play or download (20MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Athletes

Venus and Serena Williams

Venus Williams and Serena Williams represent the US at Tennis.

Venus has Sjögrens syndrome. You can see her discuss her raw vegan diet on CBS (Jul 10);  she called herself a chegan (“cheating vegan”) in a press conferences, reports Tennis Panorama.

Some vegans say that her sister, Serena, with whom she won the Wimbledon Ladies Doubles title, is also vegan; Celeb Buzz quotes her as saying that she won’t eat chicken at home with Venus.

The publicist told me that:

Serena’s diet is more “Raw” then “Vegan” although it is quite close.

Barcelona, 1992

We mentioned:

• Carl Lewis, who competed in Barcelona on a vegan diet.
• Fiona Oakes, who cycled for Britain in Barcelona, and now runs Tower Stables animal sanctuary.

Nearly Olympian Vegans

Pam Boteler, American canoeist, is raw vegan – but only men’s sprint canoe is an Olympic sport

James Southwood is one of the world’s leading Savateurs – French kickboxers – as well as being a former marketing officer for the UK Vegan Society. Paris was a close second for hosting the 2012 games, and would likely have added Savate as at least a demonstration event, as it did in 1924.

An already-Olympian we didn’t mention is Kara Lang, Canada, Football/Soccer – who competed in Beijing (2008) but was prevented from competing this year by an injury.  She’s in London as a journalist.

Vegan-Sponsored Olympians

Diana suggested athletes you might want to cheer on the basis of their vegan sponsors rather than their flag:

• US Rowing, sponsored by “Perfect Snaque”
• US Water Polo, sponsored by vegan hair care products Malibu C
• Canadian Triathlete Simon Whitfield, who uses and endorses the approach and supplements of vegan ultramarathon runner Brendan Brazier.

Sandra Hood, Registered Dietitian

Sandra Hood has spoken for the UK Vegan Society on diet issues, and wrote Feeding Your Vegan Infant with Confidence. The Olympic Torch Relay page on Sandra Hood has more information about her work on diabetes.

We discussed the Chinese volleyball team, whose complaints have been mentioned by NPR’s The Salt (who mentioned they were on the road without access to untainted meat) and The Guardian (who reported that they were only avoiding pork, whilst eating fish and “protein powder”).

I did not mention that the additive Clenbuterol is also unlawful. In 2009, over 70 people in China fell ill after eating Pork contaminated with Clenbuterol.

My local vegan anarchist cafe is Pogocafe; Diana cited the Olympian Economics episode of Freakanomics Radio.

Animals at the Opening Ceremony

You can read more about that story at:

• LOCOG announcement about the opening ceremony, including that it will involve farm animals
• UK group Viva’s page about the campaign against the use of animals in the opening ceremony
• Guardian coverage of the controversy

The calculation of 20,000 chickens being eaten was based on the quantity of poultry mentioned in the LOCOG Factpack, assumptions that this was from birds of the same weights and proportions as 2010 UK production of carcasses and that 85% of a carcass is, ethics notwithstanding, edible.

We recorded the show on Friday afternoon and uploaded it (without show notes) as the opening ceremony was beginning.

Frys’ Veggiemince at the Olympics

I visted Frys Distribution, who import from family business Frys Vegetarian in South Africa. Because some will want to know, of the voices you heard, Lisa is vegan, Pat is almost, and Kevin is omnie.

Local radio in Durban, South Africa also interviewed manufacturer Tammy Fry.

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters for the music, to Sandra Hood and to Fry’s and Pogocafe for their time.

The post London Olympics first appeared on The Vegan Option.

What is the secret of making cheese without dairy that stretches and melts?

Is there a cheese addiction?

What’s the past, present, and future of vegan cheese?

And if you brought together the leading vegan cheeses from Europe and the Americas – like Redwoods Cheezly, Vegusto, and Daiya – that aren’t meant to be available in the same country, let alone the same pizza – who would win?

(28 min) Play or download (26 MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Spoiler warning: the results of the taste test are below the fold.

Casein and Casomorphins

Neal Barnard summarises the case for regarding cheese as a narcotic 2003 article in PCRM Good Medicine Magazine, Breaking the Food Seduction:

At first, the researchers theorized that it must have come from the cows’ diets. After all, morphine used in hospitals comes from poppies and is also produced naturally by a few other plants that the cows might have been eating. But it turns out that cows actually produce it within their bodies, just as poppies do. Traces of morphine, along with codeine and other opiates, are apparently produced in cows’ livers and can end up in their milk.

But that was only the beginning, as other researchers soon found. Cow’s milk—or the milk of any other species, for that matter—contains a protein called casein that breaks apart during digestion to release a whole host of opiates called casomorphins. A cup of cow’s milk contains about six grams of casein. Skim milk contains a bit more, and casein is concentrated in the production of cheese.

Traces seem unlikely to have a psychoactive affect, so we did not mention morphine or codeine in the show.

Casomorphins, on the other hand, are real and unambiguous; Diana examined the literature, discussed them in the show, and will also blog about them shortly.

Eva Batt’s Vegan Cheese Recipe

I followed a recipe for vegan cheese taken from a 1985 update of “What’s Cooking” by Eva Batt (1973), and you can see Diana posing with the 1980s vegan cheese. The recipe – soy flour, soy margarine, and yeast extract – represents the era more than it does Eva.

Eva Batt played a leading role in British veganism in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, including the “Open Door” film mentioned in our Born Vegan show and, of course, cookbooks.

How to Make Vegan Cheese Stretch

I sent interview requests to half a dozen companies, including Daiya and Redwoods, and was glad to speak with Mark, the Director of Vegusto UK, to hear his views on where the analogue food movement is going. Though it didn’t get a mention in the show, he’s vegan.

Dr Jonathan Gordon consults at Glasgow Consulting in Rhode Island, USA.

You might also enjoy “Cracking the Code: Making Vegan Cheese taste Cheesier” on NPR’s Food Blog, The Salt.

The Vegan Cheese Taste Test

We chose Redwoods Super Melting Cheezly (from the English Midlands, owned by Heather Mills) as the best UK melting vegan cheese, and Daiya Mozzarella style shreds as Diana’s favourite in the US.

London Vegan boutique Vx had recently recommended the new Vegusto No-Moo Melty, so we added that too.

This took place in May 2011; so this show was over a year in the making.

Method

Diana made two pizzas on storebought crust- tomato mushroom and spinach pesto, and I added the cheese in three concentric circles. From inside to outside, I put Redwoods Cheezly, Vegusto, and Daiya on one pizza and reversing the order on the other pizza. It’s important to be fair. All ten guests scored the pizzas out of 10. Let no-one tell me I don’t know how to party.

Results

The average scores for the whole group were: Daiya 3.2, Redwoods 3.9, and Vegusto 4.1. The four vegans ranked them the same, but with higher scores (5.3; 6.0; and 6.3).

Conclusions:

Use vegan cheese as a seasoning rather than a bulk ingredient, particularly with those who eat dairy cheese. Don’t forget flavour. It’s steadily getting better – this unknown cheese from Switzerland is actually reasonably good, and the Daiya Jack Style Wedge went down well with Diana’s mother and her husband.

Diana mentioned Gwendolyn Mather’s third prize with a vegan Daiya/Tofutti sandwich in the Grilled Cheese Invitational; Gwendolyn blogged about this for Compassion over Killing.

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters (who coincidentally reviewed vegan cheese for the London Vegan Campaigns vegan pledge) for the music, to our friends at the garden party for tolerating the taste test, and to Mark Galvin and Jonathan Gordon for talking with me.

And to the people who make vegan cheese. I still like it.

The post Vegan Cheese: Casein, Casomorphins, and the Daiya Redwoods Vegusto Taste Test first appeared on The Vegan Option.

We took the show on the road to VegfestUK to find out how parents met the challenges of raising children vegan in a non-vegan world. What do they tell their children about how the rest of the world treats animals?

Ian tracked down Mair Perkins from her entry in an old pamphlet of vegan case histories, and talked to Ruby Roth, who has defended her children’s book “Vegan is Love” on US Networks from Fox to NBC.

Diana talked with Lauren and her parents when they came to our recording of the show at VegfestUK Bristol.

(18 min) Play or download (20 MB MP3) (other formats) (via iTunes)

Ruby Roth

Ruby Roth is the author of This is Why We Don’t Eat Animals and Vegan is Love, as well as an illustrator (NSFW) of liberated womanhood and hip-hop.

She has made her case and defended her book across TV and newspapers internationally. She’s also been on many animal issues shows: Animal Voices Vancouver; All Things Vegan Radio (Oregon, USA); AR Zone (discussing feminism, and socialisation), and Sentients (KZFR, California, USA).

VegFestUK

The organisers of VegfestUK in Bristol say it’s the world’s largest vegan event with 25,000 visitors. It’s a showcase of vegan wares, with live music drawing the omnivorous punters in.

They also run the VegfestUK awards. We were very grateful to be nominated in the “best vegan media publication or website” category.

We didn’t win, but if thousands of votes have been cast then to get 7% of them, despite being such a new show, is extremely humbling.

Benjamin Zephaniah, who took part in our show about Syria’s national poet, the medieval vegan rationalist Al-Ma’arri, won “best vegan musician/performer”.

Plamil

Plamil was set up in 1960’s Britain to produce a “plant milk” alternative to dairy. Being a vegan company, they also published some vegan pamphlets and tried to help support vegan parents.

They published Vegan Infants Case Histories, which combined the experience of parents with pages by a GP and a dietician.

The company is now run by the late founder’s son, Adrian Ling, and produces a range of vegan confections and dairy alternatives.

Mair Perkins, who featured in the case histories, is also an artist; an animator and illustrator, her video won first prize in the 2008 Design against Fur competition.

Thanks

Our thanks go to Robb Masters for the music, and to Mair Perkins, Ruby Roth, and Lauren and her parents for their time.

Because we took over a talks session at the festival to run our show in a tent, we relied on much more help than usual. Our thanks to Tim of VegfestUK and the staff of BES for help and information about the sound system so that I could prepare our setup; and Petrina Butler (formerly of WZBC) and Kevin Butler for helping so much with setup and organisation of our recording. As you can probably hear, I was struck down with a cold that weekend, so all help was very much appreciated.

Our thanks particularly go to the audience for turning up and helping us make the show. I’m more grateful to Diana than usual for going through with the ambitious plan to record at VegfestUK.

(Production footnote: I added the music in post-production, but I think that’s obvious.)

The post Born Vegan at Vegfest UK, with Ruby Roth, Mair Perkins, and a studio audience first appeared on The Vegan Option.

What is it like to grow up vegan in a non-vegan world? We hear three stories of vegan childhood:

• Rosemary- appeared as a baby on a BBC programme about veganism in 1976
• Elishama  – grew up in the Hebrew Israelites, a religious community trying to rebuild the lifestyle of Eden
• Andrew – the son of veteran animal activists

Open Door

In the 1970s, the BBC’s Community Programmes Unit helped different groups produce episodes of Open Door to present their perspective. In 1976,  The Vegan Society presented”To a Brighter Future for All Life” (BFI listing) featuring stalwarts like Kathleen Jannaway and Eva Batt who were involved in the first years of the organised vegan movement.

This 1976  issue of The Vegan describes the Open Door show and the large response to it. Also featured is an article by Rosemary’s parents titled “Veganism can be cheaper too”. In an age without video recorders or YouTube uploads, it offered a blow-by-blow account of the show. Here is Rosemary’s appearance:

The Bland Family – Jenny, Harold, and baby Rosemary – were shown under the hazels in the garden. They told of the healthy diet they had been following for ten years and which they found helped them to enjoy all kinds of outdoor activities – cycling, camping, canoeing, walking, as well as carrying on their working live.

Harold explained with the help of charts that the vegan diet is very economical in terms of land usage; wheat yielding  ten times as much protein per acre as beef and three times as much milk (allowing for the biological factor). He maintained that Britain could become self sufficient in food and that, over 40% of the world’s grain harvest was being wasted by being fed to animals. Jenny maintained that they found the diet very interesting as well as cheaper and easier to prepare.

Activist Kim Stallwood credits Open Door with convincing him to go vegan. Portland blogger @lovemotionstory says she’s “kind of in love with this vintage, BBC series”. These reactions follow someone posting Open Door: To a Brighter Future for All Life in full on YouTube. Rosemary is at the start of part 2.

Hebrew Israelites

Elishama was born in the African Hebrew Israelite community in Dimona, Israel. Their plant based diet is part of a wider belief system about recovering the lifestyle (and lifespans) of Eden; it includes wool, silk, and honey.  Founder Ben Ammi cites Genesis and says that because man was created from dirt, dirt can bring forth all we need to be healthy [Video].

• African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem on Wikipedia
• AfricanHebrewIsraelitesOfJerelusalem.com, their own site
• Kingdom of Yah [God] on YouTube
• Archived CBS story on the first Hebrew Israelite to represent Israel at Eurovision

They run the chain of Soul Vegetarian restaurants; the AV Club interviewed Yohanna Brown, co-founder of one of the first.

Nutrition

If you’ve come here looking for nutrition information, you might want to go instead to:

• Vegetarian Food for Thought Podcast: Vegan with Child, a Healthy Combination – Colleen Patrick Goudreau summarises nutrition advice for pregnancy
• VeganHealth.org: Pregnancy, Infants and Children
• UK Vegan Society: The Vegan Diet for Infants and Children

Credits

Thanks to all contributors, not just Rosemary, Elishama, and Andrew but also Mair, Daniel, and Hedi, who we didn’t have time to feature. Thanks also to the people who helped put us in touch: Brian Jacobs, Harold Bland, Elishama’s aunt Danielle, and Angie.

Particular thanks to Andrew’s family for tolerating us: his wife Hannah and children Florence (on our opening credits) and Tom (playing in the background).

The film is (c) BBC; a minimum clip is used in the show under fair use, on the basis that talking with its youngest cast member three decades later counts as comment.  Robb Masters, aka Idiotech, wrote our theme.

(Listener Aimee Daniels did, rightly, point out that we’re all born vegan. But we couldn’t think of a better title.)

The post Born Vegan: from 1976 UK TV to the Hebrew Israelites, three very different vegan childhoods first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Lab Meat

A future with cheap lab meat could be drastically different – for humans and animals. How would it work? And is the development of this technology good for animals?

Ian talks to Nicholas Genovese, a PETA-funded scientist working on the stem cells that could make up what he calls cultured meat. I ask two vegans, transhuman philosopher David Pearce and activist Jordi Casamitjana, why they are for or against in vitro meat; and I reveal the results of my survey. Will vegans and meat eaters ever be able to get beyond the “ick” factor of cultured meat?

Nicholas Genovese, cultured meat scientist

Dr. Nicholas Genovese joined us from the University of Missouri.

You can find out more about Dr Genovese’s work on cultured meat in his interview at the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies. Michell Sherrow of Peta has blogged about their sponsorhip of Dr Genovese’s work on lab meat.

David Pearce, transhuman philosopher

David Pearce co-founded Humanity+  and  has collected his interesting writings on transhumanism and the abolition of all suffering on his site The Hedonistic Imperative. 

Two blog posts that were very critical of in vitro meat, one by Jeff Perz [Facebook]  and the other by “The Rational Vegan”, inspired my questions for David.

Our thanks to all of you who filled in our survey – the results of which I’ll post soon; our interviewees Nicholas Genovese, David Pearce, and first ever studio guest Jordi Casamitjana; to Digital media artist Robb Masters who wrote our theme  …

… and VegFestUK, for nominating us for their media award. Please vote for us!

The post Lab Meat: Can in vitro meat save the animals? With Nicholas Genovese, David Pearce, and Jordi Casamitjana first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Rebel Poet: The Life of Al-Ma’arri

A thousand years ago, Al-Ma’arri was writing Arabic poems of extreme complexity, promoting a rational ideal and most remarkably, making an ethical case for veganism. We tell the story of his life in conversation with fellow vegan rebel poet Benjamin Zephaniah.

We first found out about Al-Ma’arri through a blog by Gary Francione and were both intrigued and surprised more had not been said about him.  Al-Ma’arri’s conversations and opinions seem progressive even by today’s standards. And, like anyone with views ahead of his time, he was questioned by society. The show dramatises his exchange with a leading cleric about veganism.

Benjamin Zephaniah

In this episode Benjamin Zephanaiah, the vegan rebel poet of today, joins us to bring Al-Ma’arri to life.

Benjamin Zephanaiah began as a dub poet and his verses reach people who don’t often enjoy poetry; his rhymes have been celebrated around the world and in a BBC vote to find the UK’s favourite poet he was the only living poet in the top ten. He campaigns in poetry and deed for causes from animals to miscarriages of justice.

He once publicly rejected a royal honour – an “Order of the British Empire” – saying “Whoever is behind this offer can never have read any of my work”. In the show, he finds common ground with Al-Ma’arri.

You can read Benjamin Zephaniah’s poetry and find out more about him at his website.

Thanks

As well as Professor Benjamin Zephaniah, our thanks also to contributors Richard Foltz (who has also written specifically about Animals in Islamic Tradition and Muslim Cultures), Ghazala Anwar, and to voice actors Motaz Al-Shehail (Al-Ma’arri in Arabic), Will Trimble (Al-Ma’arri in English) and Ian Peacock (the Cairo missionary). Thanks also to folk who helped me with research: Sarra Tlili, Sandhya of MEVeg, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies SOAS Radio (who let me use their studio) and Marta of SOAS Veg.

Sources

Because most contemporary sources are in Arabic, and I can’t read Arabic, I relied largely on the work of Victorian Orientalists, particularly David Margoliouth and Reynold Nicholson. Fortunately, much of this is available online, thanks to the work of Google and the Internet Archive.

Reynold Nicholson:

• Studies in Islamic Poetry and Mysticism, 1921
  • Chapter 2, The Meditations of Ma’arri (pp 43-289), which includes a brief biography and selections of his poetry organised by theme
  • Full translation of “I do not steal from nature”  (not, as far as I can tell, a title Al-Ma’arri gave it) pp 134-6
  • “I do not steal from nature” in Arabic (197) on pp 258-9
• A Literary History of the Arabs, 1907
  • Al-Ma’arri pp 313-24

David Margoliouth:

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society:

I did check some other more modern sources, but unfortunately those aren’t in a form that I can link to.

Sound

Digital media artist Robb Masters wrote our theme. I also used these actualities and sound effects for atmosphere:

• Cavernscape, donated to the public domain by Blaukreuz
• Niger village muezzin call, donated to the public domain by Felix Blume
• Early Morning Riad by Gazdooks under CC-BY licence
• Essaouira Walkabout by acclivity under CC-BY licence
• Drop Slow Long 1 by Mich 3D under CC Sampling+ licence

In line with the usual artifice of radio, I edited our discussion with Benjamin Zephaniah and re-recorded some dialogue for clarity and flow.

The post Rebel Poet: Benjamin Zephaniah discusses the life of Abul ʿala Al-Maʿarri (أبو العلاء المعري), the medieval Arab vegan philosopher poet first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Digital Vegans

How has the digital revolution changed being vegan? We talk to Eric Brent, founder of leading vegetarian restaurant finder Happy Cow. Diana reviews smartphone apps. Ian finds out how the digital revolution changed his local vegan group in London.

The age of information brings together the Beijing Vegans and the Vegan Club of St. Petersburg in Russia and makes being vegan a lot easier. How has veganism changed? And what are the challenges to older organisations?

Veggie Restaurant Finders

Happy Cow is the best-known and one of the longest – I interview founder Eric Brent where he looks forward to changes for Happy Cow in 2012. It has apps for several mobile platforms.

VegDining, also launched in 1999. Looking for places to eat in London, I could see some problems with the interface (the seven districts of London were all called simply “London” and some were impossible to select) and content (it listed Otarian London, which closed in 2011, as “opening in 2010” whereas Happy Cow has removed it).

VegGuide is a project of Minnesota USA group Compassionate Action for Animals along with national US group Mercy for Animals and joined this month by Vegan Outreach. They’ve been going since 2002, share their information via an open API and a Creative Commons share-alike licence; but have no apps. Their content seems up to date.

Most local vegan groups list restaurants; that’s too many to mention here. Listener Stephen Fenwick-Paul has created BunnyGo, which maps restaurants in the UK, and has an iPhone app and API.

Smartphone Apps

Diana mentioned these iPhone Apps:

• VeganXpress with vegan options at major chains (mostly in the US), vegan candy/junk food, wine and beer
• Recipe finders such as The VegWeb vegan recipe finder
• VegOut (which Eric said wasn’t being updated; there is the official Happy Cow app)
• iVegan and AnimalFree for looking up ingredients

Ian mentioned VeganEasy which also uses the alcohol lists from Barnivore.

VegNews has various articles listing 10 Vegan Smartphone Apps and 11  iPhone Apps.

Some of these, such as Animal Free, are also available for Android. Vegan Eating Out offers a similar fast-food list to VeganXpress, although it includes foods with honey. Eric Brent recommended the barcode-scanning Vegeble for Android.

Animal Hack-tivism

Jasmine Singer reviewed a range of apps in January 2011, suggesting that if you’re a software developer looking to “change the world for animals”, an Android app would be a good place to start.

A couple of our contributors appealed specifically for volunteers. Eric Brent would like Happy Cow to develop its Android app, and would like to hear from an Android developer. Stephen Fenwick-Paul is also appealing for folk to help him test his UK restaurant finder BunnyGo.

We link to VeganFeed.com‘s list of other podcasts in our “help” section.

Contributors

Our thanks to contributors Eric Brent of Happy Cow, Peter Despard of London Vegans, Stephen Fenwick Paul of ActiVeg, Sara from Belgium, and vegan lawmaker Kerry McCarthy MP. Digital media artist Robb Masters wrote our theme.

The post Digital Vegans: with Happy Cow founder, iPhone apps, London Vegans, and Kerry McCarthy MP first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Peace on Earth?

This season of peace and goodwill, in our special Christmas show, we ask whether there will ever be peace on Earth.  Steven Pinker, author of “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, says that human violence has decreased over the centuries – but does that include violence to other animals? Diana asks him. What does “peace on Earth” mean to Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and grandfather of the modern animal movement? What does animal rights iconoclast Gary Francione think of Steven Pinker’s theory? Listen to find out.

Steven Pinker and “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined”

Professor Pinker’s book has gathered a lot of media coverage, including a review by Peter Singer in the New York Times where he calls it “supremely important”, as well as a more skeptical one in Scientific American. There’s more about Steven Pinker’s core thesis, about human intraspecies violence, here:

• the London School of Economics podcast of Steven Pinker’s talk, which Diana attended and features in the show
• Steven Pinker’s TED talk on the myth of violence
• Better Angels of Our Nature

You can find him on the web at:

• Steven Pinker .com
• Publisher page for Steven Pinker at Penguin USA

Gary Francione

What Pinker doesn’t understand is most of the advances towards supposed more humane exploitation of non-human animals – he doesn’t appreciate that for the most part, most of those efforts result in the more efficient exploitation of animals.

Gary Francione  (@GaryLFrancione)  is a distinguished professor of law and scholar of law & philosophy at Rutgers Law School, New Jersey, USA. More information from and about Professor Francione is available here:

• Gary Francione’s website, The Abolitionist Approach
• Professor Francione’s own podcast, Abolitionist Approach Commentaries
• Gary Francione’s faculty page as a Professor at Rutgers Law School
• Gary Francione fan site, with transcripts of interviews

Peter Singer

Ultimately one day we would stop using animals for food …

Professor Peter Singer (@PeterSinger) is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton, New Jersey, USA, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He’s best known as the author of Animal Liberation. More information is at:

• The Life You Can Save, his charitable giving campaign
• Peter Singer’s faculty page as a Professor at Princeton

He recently appeared in the hundredth episode of “Our Hen House“, where Jasmin Singer also asked him about “Better Angels of Our Nature”.

The post Peace on Earth: will we ever have it? With Peter Singer and Gary Francione discussing Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of our Nature” first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Veganism in Politics 3: The Debate

At the end of our last episode, Kerry McCarthy MP said she’d asked for a debate in Parliament to mark World Vegan Day.

She was successful, and at the end of business on November 1st the House of Commons debated veganism. I was watching from the gallery.

In this episode, concluding our series of three about veganism in politics, we give our account of the debate. We explain what’s going on, who everyone is, and tell you which of the MPs who spoke against is officially the least sexy Member of Parliament.

Who’s Who

The three vegan MPs, Kerry McCarthy, Chris Williamson, and Cathy Jamieson, are profiled the first set of show notes from this series about veganism in politics.

Jim Paice MP is the minister of state at the Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs – or farming minister – who answered Kerry McCarthy MP. Not all holders of that portfolio are as hostile to veganism. Under the previous government it wasn’t unusual for a vegetarian – like immediate predecessor Jim Fitzpatrick – to hold the portfolio.

Simon Hart MP asked Kerry McCarthy for peer-reviewed science on how farm animals were treated.

Jim Shannon, the UK’s least sexy Member of Parliament, quoted his GP as saying we needed to eat meat. There are, of course, vegan medics and dieticians.

Also present in the chamber (identified in a tweet by Kerry) were:

• Alistair Carmichael, the chief “whip” (organiser) of the smaller government party, the socially liberal and fiscally middling Liberal Democrats. In contrast with Caroline Lucas, who lives in Brighton on England’s south coast, his constituency is two islands off the north of Scotland.
• Robert Goodwill, another whip, for the governing Conservatives
• Kerry pointed to a while a Labour Party comrade, also a whip, as someone whose bacon joke she’d just had to put up with.

The sole Green Party MP, mentioned in the show for not being at the debate, is Caroline Lucas.

Watching the full debate

In our show, we summarise and analyse the debate in 20 minutes.

You can also get the whole half hour debate:

• watch on BBC Democracy Live
• watch at the UK Parliament website (the adjournment debate is the last half hour)
• read the official Hansard text at Parliament.UK
• read the annotated marked up version at They Work For You

The Nocton Dairies controversy

Kerry McCarthy traded blows with Farming Minister Jim Paice over this defeated plan for a large intensive dairy farm – not for the first time. This time, it was over whether it was multi-story.

The proposal had been the target of the award-winning “Not in My Cuppa” campaign by several British animal welfare groups. Farming Minister Jim Paice had been supportive of intensive dairies, but Nocton Dairies withdrew the proposal in February after the Environment Agency insisted the risk of groundwater pollution was too high.

I checked the original planning application from 2007:

Update: these plans have since been taken down (perhaps because there’s no need for a local authority to display withdrawn plans), so these links are now broken:

• The overall plan;
• Plan showing that milking parlours have a second story, but not one that the cows would use
• The planning application doesn’t show how much space the cows would have had when confined, but dividing the length of the “accommodation” in plans by the number of cows shows that each cow could not have had more than 70cm (2’3″) of width, including any space taken up by fixtures between cows.

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Veganism in Politics 2: Q & A

The three vegan Members of the British Parliament (MPs) answer your questions. Are they afraid about how voters will react to their veganism? And what’s the food like at the House of Commons?

Press the play button to find out. (Or, better still, subscribe via iTunes or your podcast catcher of choice.)

Veganism in Politics

This is the second of a series of three shows about veganism in Politics: you can also hear the first show, in which we profile vegan advocates in politics around the world, and the MPs answer questions from their counterparts Maneka Gandhi and Dennis Kucinich. The third show will be about the World Vegan Day debate.

Show notes

The first show’s notes have more about interviewees Chris Williamson MP, Cathy Jamieson MP, and Kerry McCarthy MP.

Jordan Wyatt’s show is Coexisting with Non-Human Animals. His World Vegan Day episode included us amongst dozens of vegans talking about their year. Other people provided questions here on this blog.

Diana mentioned Peter Singer being offered ham by someone in the RSPCA. This incident is in his book Animal Liberation.

Robb Masters wrote our theme.

A tangent about the Green Party

Kerry McCarthy MP and Cathy Jamieson MP, from the main opposition Labour party, both talk about lawmakers from the environmentalist Green Party. Listeners from the United States might be used to a two-party system and surprised to hear a minor party get elected; listeners from countries with more proportionate systems might wonder why the Greens only have one MP.

The Green Party is the fifth Great-Britain-wide party in opinion polls. The British Parliament, in common with national parliaments in the USA and India, uses an electoral system which hurts minor parties with evenly spread voters. This is why it’s taken the Greens until the 2010 election to gain a single representative. The Scottish and European Parliaments use more proportionate voting systems, so the greens have more representatives there. In the show, Cathy Jamieson mentions green Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

I talk about some of the other ways that animal activists engage with British politics in my Verdant Reports blog post about the 2010 UK general election.

The post Veganism in Politics: Chris Williamson MP, Cathy Jamieson MP and Kerry McCarthy MP answer your questions first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Veganism in Politics 1: Worldwide

We profile the handful of people who combine veganism with politics at their country’s national level. I went to the UK Parliament to meet Britain’s three vegan MPs. What was their path to politics? And I took with me questions from their counterparts in the rest of the world.

Press the play button to find out. (Or, better still, subscribe via iTunes or your podcast catcher of choice.)

The British Vegan MPs

Chris Williamson (@ChriswMP on twitter) has an official site at www.chriswilliamson.org, but also find: Chris Williamson on Wikipedia; Chris Williamson at They Work for You ; Chris Williamson on BBC Democracy Live

Kerry McCarthy (@KerryMP)’s official site is www.kerrymccarthymp.org. Also: Kerry McCarthy on Wikipedia; Kerry McCarthy at They Work for You ; Kerry McCarthy on BBC Democracy Live

Cathy Jamieson (@cathyjamieson) is officially at CathyJamieson.com, but also: Cathy Jamieson on Wikipedia ; Cathy Jamieson at They Work for You ; Cathy Jamieson on BBC Democracy Live

The American Congressman

Dennis Kucinich (@repkucinich) has two official sites: kucinich.us and, for his constituency, kucinich.house.gov. He’s also Dennis Kucinich on Wikipedia.

The Indian MP

Maneka Gandhi chairs People for Animals. She is, obviously, also Maneka Gandhi at Wikipedia.

As Diana mentioned in the show, Maneka advocates veganism and sometimes identifies as such, but admits she doesn’t always live up to it.

References for science

I referred to studies by the large long-term EPIC-Oxford study, in particular their 2009 paper on cancer incidence. The team have a particular interest in vegetarians and vegans, and I reported their results in my 2008 podcast short at Verdant Reports.

Diana talked about sex differences between men and women with respect to vegetarianism and veganism, and levels of testosterone. Her sources were:

• (for vegetarian sex differences) Beardsworth, A., & Bryman, A. (1999). Meat consumption and vegetarianism among young adults in the UK: An empirical study. British Food Journal, 101(4), 289-300. doi:10.1108/00070709910272169
• (for vegetarian sex differences) Neumark-Sztainer, D., Story, M., Resnick, M. D., & Blum, R. W. (1997). Adolescent vegetarians: A behavioral profile of a school-based population in Minnesota. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 151(8), 833.
• (for veganism being equally distributed between sexes) Stahler, C. (2006). How many adults are vegetarian. Vegetarian J, 4.
• (for vegan men having the same testosterone levels as omnivores)  Key, T. J. A., Roe, L., Thorogood, M., Moore, J. W., Clark, G. M. G., & Wang, D. Y. (1990). Testosterone, Sex Hormone-Binding Globulin, Calculated Free Testosterone, and Oestradiol in Male Vegans and Omnivores. British Journal of Nutrition, 64(01), 111-119. doi:10.1079/BJN19900014

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The Pledge

We start our show at the beginning – when folk choose the vegan option. In this case, for a month, challenged and supported by London Vegan Campaigns. I talk to mother Ananthi and middle-aged couple Bryan and Cliff. What challenges will they come across? And will they last the month?

Diana has the statistics from three years of pledges, and finds out what makes people more or less likely to stay vegan. And she’s very surprised by what she finds.

So go on, press the play button. (Or, better still, subscribe via iTunes or your podcast catcher of choice.)

Our thanks to Ananthi, Bryan, Cliff, Lesley and our other contributors, and to London Vegan Campaigns for letting me record there and inviting Diana to analyse the data. Robb Masters wrote and composed our theme.

Other similar events, where vegan activists challenge and support pledgers to go vegan for a month, happen in Baltimore and Philadelphia in the US and Victoria, Australia. Colleen Patrick Goudreau has a book out on a similar theme, The 30-day Vegan Challenge.

I mentioned vegan podcasters Gary Francione and (should he return) Bob Torres.

The post The Pledge: the London Vegan Campaigns challenge to go vegan for a month first appeared on The Vegan Option.

This is a small introductory snippet to let folk who get our podcast in iTunes or other podcast readers check that it’s working – and the first hint of our theme tune.

The post A very small sneak peek. first appeared on The Vegan Option.