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.)

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!

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.

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.

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 Live 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”.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.