I’d love to be able to download a regular sample of vegan content – like the “Best of the Left” podcast, or BBC Radio 4’s “Pick of the Week”. It would gives everyone even remotely interested in vegan stuff a taste of what they might be missing.

I don’t currently have time for another project. But in the hope that someone else will like this idea and run with it, I’m summing up the six things that would, I hope, make this work. Interested? Please say in the comments.

1. Varied

Something with short clips (no longer than five minutes) from different (say three) sources, without going back to the same source too often. (By “source”, I mean a YouTube channel or particular podcast.)

2. Short & frequent

Fifteen minutes every week or two; something that ever vegan podcast listener would want to subscribe to to make sure they didn’t miss anything great.

3. Wide ranging

I’d include YouTube videos (where the audio stands by itself); and the full range of vegan perspectives. (You’d expect that from me). Part of the objective is to introduce people to a wide range of sources; podcasts they might enjoy but hadn’t heard of.  I would include mainstream media featuring veganism now and then as well – such as the NPR or BBC reports on Veganz superstores in Berlin.

4. Curation

The best of the week’s vegan content.

5.  Context

The presenter should tell listeners who is going to be speaking, enough about what they’re talking about to be able to follow the conversation, and then get out of the way. After the taster clip, the presenter should tell the listener where they can get the whole thing.

6. Teamwork

This could work well as a  team project, with a rotating set of presenters.

If you would like to do something like this, mention in the comments: perhaps a team of folk who want to do this will adapt the idea and make it happen :). I’ve deliberately avoided suggesting a title in the hope that whoever carries this forward has a sense of ownership.

I’ve come back to say I’ve got no plans to update this site, and to welcome you to The Vegan Option for really interesting radio that just happens to be vegan.

Thank you for sharing my first foray into podcasting, and I hope you’ll join Diana and I at The Vegan Option if you haven’t already.

I haven’t done a blog post for almost a year, or a podcast since 2009. This was always an experiment, and it did not find its audience – although the 2010 election blog post is now the top result on Google for “vegan MPs”.

Verdant Reports was a terrible name for a podcast. Few know what it means, and even fewer can spell it, which is fatal for a radio programme. It doesn’t even turn up on iTunes when you search for “vegan”.

The new podcast is “The Vegan Option“. To vegans, it’s what we scan menus for. We also hope that the title represents an invitation to non-vegans to look at the world differently.

Please like The Vegan Option on Facebook if you want to hear more when it happens. This public moral support spurs us on to put get the show on the road.

Britain gets two more vegan MPs

Only one MP in the 2005-10 parliament was vegan – Kerry McCarthy, Labour MP for Bristol East.  This was a safe seat. Even though she might have accidentally broken election law with a tweet, she kept it.

• Kerry McCarthy on Wikipedia
• Kerry McCarthy at They Work for You
• Kerry McCarthy on BBC Democracy Live
• www.kerrymccarthymp.org (official site)
• @KerryMP on Twitter

Kerry McCarthy tweeted that two new Labour MPs are vegan.

Cathy Jamieson (Labour, Kilmarnock and Loudoun) has been the resident vegan in the Scottish Parliament since 1999. She took charge of Scotland’s courts and legal system as Justice Minister from 2003-7.  Although she happily signs helpful  “Early Day” motions on animal welfare, this former social worker seems to focus her politics more on children and the poor.

• Cathy Jamieson on Wikipedia
• Cathy Jamieson at They Work for You
• Cathy Jamieson on BBC Democracy Live
• CathyJamieson.com (official site)
• @cathyjamieson on Twitter

Chris Williamson (Labour, Derby North) is a trustee of the League Against Cruel Sports, and openly interested in animal welfare in Parliament. One activist blogs that he was hunt sabbing in the 1960s. There is no public reference to him being vegan (that I could find) He confirmed his veganism to me by email.

• Chris Williamson on Wikipedia
• Chris Williamson at They Work for You
• Chris Williamson on BBC Democracy Live
• www.chriswilliamson.org (official site)
• @ChriswMP on Twitter

(Updated 10th July 2010, then 26th August with Chris Williamson’s confirmation. Added links Mar 20 2011.)

… and lost three campaigners

Two notable Labour party campaigners lost their seats, including David Drew who proposed an EDM asking for better labelling of vegetarian and vegan food. One retired.

The all-party group on animal welfare in the 2001-5 parliament was led by:

• Eric Martlew (Lab, Carlisle, Chair) – retiring (and seat was lost)
• Dr Nick Palmer (Lab, Broxtowe, Vice-chair) – defeated by Conservatives
• Elliot Morley (Lab, Scunthorpe, Vice-chair) – held
• David Amess (Con, Southend West, Treasurer) – held
• Mike Hancock (LibDem, Portsmouth South, Secretary) – held

These two MPs stood out for the number of animal welfare Early Day Motions they proposed or seconded:

• David Drew (Lab, Stroud) was defeated by Conservatives
• Norman Baker (LibDem, Lewes), another veteran campaigner, held his seat

Update 12/5: Animal welfare coalition Vote Cruelty Free say that 43 MPs were elected after signing their pledge.

One Green MP joins them

The Green Party now have an MP. After targetting three seats, their big hope, Caroline Lucas, won in Brighton Pavilion. She is vegetarian, and the Green manifesto has more commitments on animal protection than the three main parties.

Animals Count lost its deposit

This vegan-led party contested one seat: Richard Deboo standing for Islington South.  The LibDems were fighting hard to take this marginal from Labour, failing by a wide margin. Richard won only 0.3% of the vote, compared to 0.8% won elsewhere in the 2009 European Election. The party reasonably put this down to being squeezed by tactical voting. They admitted disappointment and promised that they “will keep fighting”.

The Animal Protection Party force out a pro-animal experiments MP

The SPEAK campaign against animal experiments at Oxford University spun off a political party, which has in turn become the Animal Protection Party.

They stood four candidates, running attack campaigns against three sitting MPs they view as apologists for animal abuse and a “shut Wickham Laboratories” candidate in a new constituency. Even amongst longstanding vegans, their approach provokes controversy.

Keith Mann is their candidate against Dr Evan Harris in Oxford West and Abingdon. He a longstanding animal activist who has spent years in prison over convictions related to his activism, such as arson of meat lorries and contempt of court. His leaflets criticised Dr Harris not only for his support of the Oxford animal experiments, but also followed the mid-market pro-Conservative tabloid “Daily Mail” in labelling the pro-science secular LibDem as “Dr. Death”. They caricatured a range of other stances Dr Harris has taken that might repel voters – such as his support for secularism,  voluntary euthanasia, and evidence-based medicine. They could have mentioned his votes against the hunting ban, but didn’t. Anglican priest Lynda Rose sent out leaflets attacking him as “anti-life” and “anti-religion”. “Bad Science” Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre pleaded with his readers to support Dr Harris.

On the night, he lost to a social and political conservative by 176 votes.

Given that Dr Harris lost so narrowly, did the Animal Protection Party campaign make the difference between victory and defeat? The rationalist twitterati who found those leaflets “disturbing libellous” or “amusing” were joined by vegans like Jonny Nexus (LibDem) and Paul Blanchard (Lab) who were sorry to see this “evidence based campaigner” leave parliament.

All four results:

• Oxford West and Abingdon, targetting Dr Evan Harris, who lost his seat to a Conservative
• Huntingdon, targetting Jonathan Djangoly, who kept his safe seat
• Vauxhall, targetting Countryside Alliance chair Kate Hoey, who kept her safe seat
• Meon Valley, getting 255 votes (0.5%)

Reports of heavy-handed policing of protests in 2008 and spring 2009 unfolded in mainstream media such as The Guardian and the BBC’s Panorama. Citizen journalists trickled out footage of police violence and absurd searches. I decided the best way to support peaceful protest and proportionate policing was to volunteer as a legal observer.

This does not mean I necessarily disagree or agree with Climate Camp. My goal was certainly not to help protesters break into a power station and shut it down. It was to make sure that they did not get beaten up.

I do Verdant Reports to find things out and tell people. But being a legal observer makes it impossible to do a good podcast. Firstly, I am busy. Secondly, I am only getting one side of the story. Thirdly, wearing the bright orange legal observer vest implies to everyone that I will not put what I am told on the internet.

There are lots of questions about the Ratcliffe-on-Soar protest and its policing. I hope someone else will get to the bottom of them.

Meanwhile, I hope the tweets gave a hint of the atmosphere and the variable supply of vegan cake.

Here are some proposals. Please vote (you can choose more than one) and comment.

One or two of these are a bit ambitious, and definitely not solo projects. So if you have or are developing the skills and like the idea of getting involved in one of these projects, please email me, and we can see if we are thinking along the same lines. For example, Podding the Pods would need to include vegans and vegetarians in Africa and Asia.

Finally, I am sure you could think of better names. Any ideas?

I used an Asus 901 running Linux with a 20GB solid state disk. I installed Audacity per this guide, more or less. I did succeed in editing together one podcast, but decided not to use it because of poor sound quality at Whole Earth restaurant. (There is a snippet of Jack talking about food at the end of the Chinese food report.)

The inbuilt microphone was unsurprisingly bad. Using the 3.5mm plug on the ASUS meant I got a little hum from the electromagnetic noise in the machine. I would have liked to use a USB mic (they turn the sound into a digital signal away from the PC and avoid this), but getting the ASUS to recognise other USB microphones was problematic.

I bought an Audio-Technica ATR35s Lavalier microphone at the massive Sim Lin Square technology mall in Singapore, and did all my recording on that. A Lavalier microphone is small enough top clip onto a shirt, but not good enough to pick up any background noise.

Alas, it did not produce good enough audio to use when worn on the lapel. (This is why the podcasts include so little of my cooking lesson in Chiang Mai – only snatches were good enough to use.) The only good sound came from holding the mic in front of the speaker, which is how I recorded Izzy and Nicolas.

The laptop and mic weight too much (1160g / 2lb 8oz) for me to carry them around all the time. This meant I missed some interesting people and places which would have been nice to record.

My usual audio recorder, the Marantz PMD 660, would have given me professional recording quality for only slightly less weight (with one Sure SM58 mic and lead, 1070g / 2lb 6oz). But I would still have had to take my laptop if I wanted to use it for notes. Also, I would have risked being mistaken for a journalist and turned back by customs. (Not because the countries I visited take a dim view of journalists, but because I was travelling on tourist visas.) So it remained at home in London.

Since then, I have acquired an iPhone and an acceptable microphone which weigh very little (140g / 5oz) and would have been better for keeping with me all the time.

So if I attempted this again, I would take a smaller purpose-built recorder instead, perhaps keeping my iPhone with me to capture things on the spur of the moment. I would also choose a less gruelling schedule, so that I had time to edit.

Peranakan Cuisine in the Whole Earth Restaurant, Singapore

Throughout Southeast Asia, Chinese Buddhist vegetarians kept Bill very well fed. He finds out more about this other vegetarian movement – and tries lots of food.

Download internet radio report (5 mins 02 secs): Travelling and Eating Vegan in Southeast Asia: Chinese Restaurants (MP3 3.64MB) (other sound file formats)

This is the final of three reports from Bill’s travels. Please follow these podcasts and blogs for more reports; or enjoy an episode of The Vegan Option about this Southeast Asian trip.

Bill on Chinese Vegetarians

From Singapore to Thailand, I ate plenty of Chinese food. In both the trading areas which face Sumatra across the Melaka Straits, and in the big cities like Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok, there were so many vegan or almost-vegan restaurants that I sometimes stumbled across them without having to seek them out. Until I got to veggie-friendly Chiang Mai at the northern tip of my journey, they were all run by the Buddhist Chinese.

As a bonus, they often took local speciality dishes and veganised them, giving me a culinary journey.

Curious about what motivated this, I talked to the managers and chefs.

This contrasts a little with Thai Buddhism. This has a tradition that every man should become a Buddhist monk at least once in their life, so I had plenty of chances to talk to former monks as well as monks currently wearing the orange robes of Thai monks. They told me that they do eat meat placed in their begging bowl, and that they believed this tradition was what based in what the Buddha did. So where did the idea of vegetarianism come from? I visited Dr Peter Flügel, a lecturer in Jaina studies in London’s School of Oriental Studies, to get his answer.

To hear more, I hope you will listen to the report.

But is Chinese mock meat really vegan? Operation Pancake

Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the Quarrygirl vegan foodie blog had been doing an undercover investigation of supposedly vegan restaurants. They tracked fake meats that tested positive for egg and milk back to suppliers in Taiwan. Contaminated vegan food has become a big enough issue there for ministers to try to strengthen and enforce labelling laws.

This is an international problem, affecting Chinese food from Taiwan to the USA. But how much does it affect the Chinese food travellers eat in Southeast Asia? I asked the International Vegetarian Union co-ordinator for the whole of Southeast Asia, Susianto Tseng.

“Yes, the Chinese vegetarian restaurants in Indonesia also purchase some mock meats from Taiwan, but most of them are purchased from Malaysia’s and Singapore’s manufacturers. We have heard about the contamination of mock meat made in Taiwan so that IVS [Indonesia Vegetarian Society] informs the vegetarian in Indonesia to be careful and aware of that.”

So there is a possibility that the meal will not actually be vegan. But this is always going to be a risk, and both the level of contamination and the risk seem low in the context of other SE Asian restaurants.

I was very glad that the Chinese diaspora were there to feed me in my travels.

See also …

• Hail, Seitan by Caitanya Bhagavat Das of the Hare Krishna movement in Utah, USA
• Ting Jen’s legendary history of China and vegetarianism on the IVU website, with a letter from a missionary in 1889.
• Buddhist Cuisine on Wikipedia
• List of vegetarian restaurants run by followers of Supreme Master Ching Hai, a modern asian religious organisation with a vegetarian leaning

My thanks go to Dr Peter Flügel of SOAS, University of London, to Chong Keng Hoon from Luk Yea Yan in Penang, to Jack from Whole Earth restaurant in Singapore, and to the kin who ate all the mock meat whilst I interviewed Jack.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you can easily subscribe to future Verdant Reports podcasts here.

I planned to post about how I am going to be presenting on Green Radio 87.7FM, bringing the whole Big Green Gathering festival to every corner of every tent, and how you can even listen to Green Radio online.

But on Sunday the festival organisers called it off under threat of a High Court injunction by the local authority.

The council cite safety and blame the organisers for failing to hand over signed and sealed assurances for things like security and road closures. The festival organisers claim that everything was being constructively resolved, the threatened injunction came as a surprise, and they believe there was a political decision to shut the festival down. Wags on Twitter point out that the first thing the police did after the Big Green Gathering was cancelled for not being able to close roads … was to close roads to stop more people coming to the site. The occasional online comment and the letter from Mendip Council which threatened an injuction both allude to financial problems at the Big Green which follow on from the loss the festival suffered in 2007.

• BBC:
  Festival cancelled over safety
  Festival cancellation “political”
• Guardian:
  Big Green Gathering festival cancelled after ‘political pressure’
  Nicholas Taylor in “Comment is Free”
  Bibi van der Zee in Environment Blog
• SchNEWS:
  The Hippy, Hippy Shakedown
• Bristol Indymedia:
  Big Green Gathering cancelled due to police & district council pressure
• Official statements:
  Mendip District Council (response to accusations)
  Avon and Somerset Police

Pre Rup

Bill toured the temples of Cambodia, and found a foodie Frenchman running a vegetarian restaurant.

Download internet radio report (4 mins 53 secs): Travelling and Eating Vegan in Southeast Asia: Cambodia (MP3 3.33MB) (other sound file formats)

This is the second of three reports from Bill’s travels. Please follow these podcasts and blogs for the other two; or enjoy an episode of The Vegan Option about this Southeast Asian trip.

Bill on Cambodia

Eating on the tourist trail in Cambodia took a bit more effort. It was harder to communicate because fewer people spoke English, I had learnt even less Khmer than Thai, labels were rarely in English, and the usually useful Vegan Passport failed me in Cambodia.

This is all a little frustrating, because communication is more important in Cambodia. My guide book had already warned me that many Cambodians do not understand vegetarianism, so I wanted to be sure I was clear. Many food stalls lacked a supply of water, so street traders cannot wash pots after cooking meat, or blenders after making milkshakes, even if you could ask them to.

User Simpson Yellow added some useful phrases to the Happy Cow Cambodia notes page. Nicolas pronounced “Dtai bon-lai” (“only vegetables”) for us. If you know Khmer, and can advance our collective knowledge by confirming the information already out there and telling us how to make sure, please do add them in the comments – or better still, to the Happy Cow notes page.

(The UK vegan society would love to hear from you if you can translate the Vegan Passport text into Khmer.)

The major tourist sites have their own vegetarian restaurants. In Siem Reap, I discovered the western-style V&A and Nicolas’ Chamkar with its Khmer cooking.

My guide and translator Em was invaluable, not just for the history of the monuments I visited and communicating with restaurants, but for a window into Cambodian culture. I asked him to tune the radio into Khmer stations and explain the songs. One stuck in my memory: the singer was a bridegroom worried about his wedding night because his bride was not a virgin. Worse for the groom, the ex-boyfriend was a his best friend. Em described the conflict between the countryside that expected virgin brides and the pressure of the cities. As culture changed, Cambodian women were caught between expectations.

When I cycled around temples, I would keep myself going with snacks and fruit. The famous rule for staying healthy on local food is “peel it, boil it, cook it, or forget it” – which meant forgoing all the pre-sliced mango sold on a stick in plastic bags. I did cave in and try it when I was about to go home, and it was very tasty. Going back, I would have brought a sharper knife for peeling mango.

One of my many regrets about Cambodia is not stopping by a greengrocer stall and trying all the exotic varieties of fruit. I tried only one. It was awful. It was like eating a dry sponge. Another taste I have yet to acquire from Em is the sharp tang of unripe mango, neatly sliced with sauces.

You may wish to read other people’s experiences, such as the Vegan Undergound trip earlier this year, and the VegNews tour in 2006. Both stayed longer and went to places I did not, including the capital Phnom Penh.

My thanks go to Nicolas, Ananda (voice of the Time Out New York Kitchen Report infographic), and the Elephant Nature Park mahouts for your contributions.

If you enjoyed this podcast, you can easily subscribe to future Verdant Reports podcasts here.