I wanted to share this amazing post with you guys from Vegan Outreach. Matt Ball talks about the hows and whys of veganism beyond what you do and don’t eat, and I feel like he really gets at the heart of the matter:
If we believe that being vegan is important, being the most effective advocate for the animals must be seen as even more important! The impact of our individual veganism – several hundred animals over the course of a lifetime – pales in comparison to what we have the potential to accomplish with our example. For every person inspired to change their habits, the impact we have on the world multiplies!
He really stresses that it’s about effective change and really focuses on the big picture. I’m basically in love with this bit from the last part of the article:
Situations are subtle and opportunities unique, thus there can be no set answers. But if our decisions are guided by a desire to accomplish the most good, we each have enormous potential to create change.
I fully agree with this post…it’s not about a list of ingredients but living by example and hoping folks will see that it’s possible to change their habits without giving up happiness.
You can check out his whole post over at Vegan Outreach. It’s definitely worth the read!
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[...] been talking food here lately, so I thought I’d crosspost somethingfrom my blog about veganism as animal rights activism. I was really moved by Matt Ball’s “How Vegan?” post and thought you guys might [...]
Well said. <3
Right? I really dug his take on activism! It’s hard to remember sometimes that you catch more flies with honey. Or agave nectar?
This article that takes a look into the bacon industry really caught my attention.
-Jessica, NYC
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Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction
By Arun Gupta, The Indypendent
Among my fondest childhood memories is savoring a strip of perfectly cooked bacon that had just been dragged through a puddle of maple syrup. It was an illicit pleasure; varnishing the fatty, salty, smoky bacon with sweet arboreal sap felt taboo. How could such simple ingredients produce such riotous flavors?
That was then. Today, you don’t need to tax yourself applying syrup to bacon — McDonald’s does it all for you with the McGriddle. It conveniently takes the filling for an Egg McMuffin, an egg, American cheese and pork product, and nestles it in a pancake-like biscuit suffused with genuine fake-maple syrup flavor.
The McGriddle is just one moment in an era of extreme food combinations — a moment in which bacon plays a starring role from high cuisine to low. There’s bacon ice cream; bacon-infused vodka; deep-fried bacon; chocolate-dipped bacon; bacon-wrapped hot dogs filled with cheese (which are fried and then battered and fried again) … bacon mints; “baconnaise,” which Jon Stewart described as “for people who want to get heart disease but [are] too lazy to actually make bacon”; Wendy’s “Baconnator,” six strips of bacon mounded atop a half-pound cheeseburger, which sold 25 million in its first eight weeks; and the outlandish bacon explosion, a barbecued meat brick composed of two pounds of bacon wrapped around two pounds of sausage.
It’s easy to dismiss this gonzo gastronomy as typical American excess best followed with a Lipitor chaser. Behind the proliferation of bacon offerings, however, is a confluence of government policy, factory farming, the boom in fast food and manipulation of consumer taste that has turned bacon into a weapon of mass destruction.
To read the entire article exposing how the pork and food processing industry have teamed up to spoil our environment and ruin our health by becoming the “manipulator of the consumers’ minds and desires,” visit http://www.indypendent.org/2009/07/23/bacon-as-weapon