IS HEATHER MILLS MCCARTNEY VEGAN?

I only phrase it as a question because this source that has the scoop also casually calls Linda McCartney a vegan, which she wasn't. Um, Mr. Reporter, you do know what "vegan" means, right?

OBLIGATORY MEAT RECALL POST

Here's a recall of nearly six tons of chicken products for listeria, one that I didn't even hear about till today, even though the listeria was discovered on Friday and announced on Saturday, when everyone is riveted to their respective news sources.

VEGCAST #5 IS HERE

A spooky Hallowe'en edition of Vegcast, the Veggie Podcast, includes some truly scary news about avian flu, a whimsical song about a bag of candy, and a feature interview with Neal Barnard, the head of PCRM. While known for his groundbreaking work in vegetarian research and advocacy, Barnard also has a band, Verdun, that has to be heard to be believed. Plus, watch out for those Bloodthirsty Vegetarians. You can listen right away or head over to the VegCast site for more podcast goodness.

I know, I know, it seems like this is only a blog about a podcast. It's crunch time right now, and will be for the next couple weeks. But I'll be sure to get a couple things in here.

MONEY! YEAH, THAT'S THE TICKET

Here's what Newsday says: Rx for avian flu: money - Its spread can be contained by paying farmers whose sick birds are killed. Yeah, that's a good long-term strategy. Keep on raising birds not just to be needlessly killed for food, but to be needlessly killed for nothing. I'm sure that'll stop the flu, as well as whatever the next zoonotic disease is on the horizon...

MOCKING MEAT

The Washington Post has a cute piece about mock meats, which contains this tasty morsel: "There is wizardry afoot in a large number of Washington area restaurants, where the skill for counterfeiting meat has become rather sophisticated. ... Mutton isn't dressing up as lamb, soy is."

Except that other than seafood, almost all mock meats are derived from seitan, not soy. It's not a big deal, it just brought home to me that "soy" is becoming a false generic like "kleenex," in this case meaning "that non-meat, healthy-type food."

But who am I to complain? The book from which this blog takes its address has almost nothing whatsoever to do with soy. No, really.

COMPASSION OVER KILLING WINS ON EGG LABEL

This happened last week, but I missed it: Egg producers across the United States can no longer stamp the "Animal Care Certified" logo on egg cartons, after the deceptive nature of the logo was brought to the attention of the FTC and BBB by Compassion Over Killing. Congrats to them - they worked hard on this. And note that this change, while not a huge step in reducing animal suffering, is one that was brought about by convincing authorities to enforce existing laws, not by targeting the neighbors and relatives of the egg producers themselves.

UPDATE 10/11: ... or by hitting them in the face with a pie. Come on, people.

WARNING LABELS FOR MILK

PCRM has launched a class-action lawsuit over the lack of warning labels on cows' milk. Even if the suit itself gets thrown out of court, the action will succeed in bring press attention to the fact that "everybody should drink milk" is not only a ridiculous, cynical, profit-driven generalization but also has racist overtones - white people are the only ethnic group of whom a majority are not lactose intolerant. "The white stuff is the right stuff," is it?

VEGCAST #4

It's here - shownotes here. For the fourth Vegcast we stop in at the Blessing of the Animals art opening at the Allens Lane Art Center, including some sound clips of interviews and a great song by Tyler Shepherd called "Animal Eyes." We also have part II of our Michael Greger interview, focusing on strategies and tactics in vegan activism, plus a recipe for chocolate tofu pie.

SIDE NOTE: Sorry for the outage again. As I continue working on Vegcast there is inevitably some time siphoned away from Meat Facts. For the foreseeable future I will try to keep up with both, but posting here will probably not occur on a daily basis. Thanks and feel free send any correspondence, tips or flames about this to me.

THE WAR ON VEGANS

I suppose it's no suprise that the Dept. of Homeland Security considers vegans to be such enemies of the state as to require violation of their fourth-amendment rights. After all, the vegan agenda would dismantle one of the largest, and certainly the oldest, institutions of crony-based capitalism in the annals of U.S. history - the beef industry.

WHAT A SHOCKER - TOOTHLESS MAD COW RULES!

Since NYT has gotten even more restrictive about their content, I'll link right to Organic Consumers' version of this (which is where I saw it anyway), but the long and the short is that those new feed rules, promised back in January of 2003 and not even due to go into effect until sometime in 2006, still retain many of the loopholes that keep our country at risk of spreading Mad Cow.

ANOTHER FRIDAY...

Another 92 tons of bad beef recalled - not for the suspicion of E.Coli but for a documented illness linked to these Georgia-based ground beef patties. And yet - show of hands - how many of you had heard about this before coming here? Thought so.

PHILLY ZOO BATTLE HEATS UP

Advocates for elephants are gearing up for a major campaign against the proposed expansion of the Philadelphia Zoo's pachyderm exhibit, and have already started leafletting and protesting at the zoo. This Inquirer story is typical mainstream coverage, essentially ignoring the basic issues the activists are raising and diverting the discussion to how much the zoo loves and cares for the elephants. And classically, it ends with the as-ever-unproven trope that such displays "educate the public and create empathy for wildlife" - sorry, Pete, what was your peer-reviewed source on that again?

WHAT KIND OF WORKPLACE...

... would tolerate this kind of inhuman abuse in the 21st century?

African Americans were routinely abused and a "whites only" sign was pinned to the lavatory door. Tyson Foods is accused by 13 workers of maintaining a segregated system in a break area at one of its plants in Ashland, Alabama, that was "reminiscent of the Jim Crow era". In addition to the posting of the "whites only" sign, the workers allege that the lavatory was padlocked and only white workers were given a key, that workers hung a noose in one of the recreation rooms and annotated a picture of monkeys with the names of black staff. When the workers complained, they say the plant manager told them the facilities had been locked because they were "nasty, dirty [and] behaved like children".

Yes, that's right, the kind of workplace where the work itself is inhuman. Just a coincidence, I guess...

UNLUCKY SEVEN

I made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to do anything on this purported Idaho CJD cluster until there were seven people in the area who had died. Well... "State health officials say a northern Idaho woman may be the seventh person to die in 2005 of Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, a fatal brain-wasting illness that robs people of their ability to control body movements or even speak before it swiftly kills them. Kathy Isenberg, 53, died Sept. 5 at the Kootenai Medical Center in Coeur d'Alene. In May, she became unsteady on her feet, said Jonathan Isenberg, her husband. By mid-August, she was in wheelchair and needed 24-hour care. She spoke her last words -- 'I love you' -- to her husband on Aug. 31, he said."

VEGCAST #3

It's here! The third Vegcast features our first book review - expanded from the version below - of the book Vegan Freak, plus a soundseeing tour of Chinatown in Philadelphia where there are four vegan restaurants within a very short walk. Also included is a Science Fact dealing with antioxidants and mainstream journalism, and music from Heidi Howe and Green Beings.

VEGAN FREAK REVIEW

Vegcast will be out later today. But as promised, here's a trimmed version of what will run on the podcast:

VEGAN FREAK
By Bob Torres and Jenna Torres
Tofu Houd Press

When your biggest complaint about a book is that it should have been longer, it's what you might call praising with faint damnation. And indeed there's plenty to praise about Vegan Freak, as well as plenty of damn-ing (along with more colorful verbiage). Bob Torres and Jenna Torres hit on all the major issues of "Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World," maintaining a youthful vernacular and straight-talking style that makes Vegan Freak a standout among vegan how-to books.

Those of you familiar with the Vegan Freaks weblog will not be very surprised by the tone or content here, but for the world at large this is a refreshingly frank, new take on the intro-to-veganism genre. The book ranges widely through a diversity of topics including the best way to go vegan, arguments that do and don't work, the hell of family food celebrations, vegan travel, and even vegan sex toys. They list which brands of beer are vegan and caution that some "non-dairy creamers" actually contain milk ingredients. They urge vegans to stand up for our choices and be resolute: "Meek vegans suffer!" becomes a mantra by book's end. In all, the authors keep the tone lively and fun, moving through the vegan landscape at cruising speed or faster.

And this is where that complaint I mentioned comes in: While this keeps the book from getting boring, I often felt myself wishing they had provided just a few sentences more information or perspective on a given topic before jumping exuberantly on to the next. At 150 pages, there was certainly room for the main text of the bok to be longer (there are 20 more pages of helpful appendices - in which this blog is listed as one of the resources). And although there aren't any glaring omissions overall, the result is sometimes a more superficial treatment of something that would have benefited from a more in-depth, fully researched approach. The best example of this is in the section on B12, where the advice "take a supplement every now and then" was criticized by Dr. Michael Greger (as the authors explained on their podcast) for not being rigorous enough and for downplaying the seriousness of adequate B12 intake among vegans.

In sum, one might wish Vegan Freak had been a little more thoroughly researched, a little more in-depth about some issues, but hey: As Donald Rumsfeld would say, you go to war against mainstream consumerist culture with the book you have, not the book you wish you had. And depsite any of these quibbles, I can honestly say that Vegan Freak is worth a read whether you're considering veganism or are already there. It's an ambitious task to try to write for both of those constituencies, and although it sometimes results in a bit of a scattershot tone, the authors ultimately pull it off with verve, attitude and conviction, and wind up with a book that may well serve as a bridge to veganism for an entire segment of the population who have so far been all but ignored by our moevement.

So to "Vegenaise" and "Pleather:" Rock on, dudes!

FALL ON YOUR SWORDFISH?

This sounds like a broken record, but as long as they keep reporting these, I'll keep pointing them out, because "fish" is so often smuggled into other stories about healthy plant-based diets: "Store-bought swordfish contained mercury levels above the legal limit in a study released yesterday by environmental groups. A University of North Carolina lab found elevated mercury concentrations in 24 swordfish samples from supermarket chains including Safeway, Shaws, Albertsons and Whole Foods." Note that this isn't just about finding elevated mercury levels out in the ocean. This is the actual fish people are buying and eating. And of course, mercury is only one of the health problems with eating fish, but that's enough for now.

REASON #523 WHY ANIMAL TESTING IS A BAD IDEA

Mice Infected With Bubonic Plague Missing. Yep. You heard right. "Three mice infected with the bacteria responsible for bubonic plague apparently disappeared from a laboratory about two weeks ago, and authorities launched a search though health experts said there was scant public risk." Oh, that's good to hear. Wait, what's this? "Federal official said the mice may never be accounted for. Among other things, the rodents may have been stolen, eaten by other lab animals or just misplaced in a paperwork error." Oh great, that fills me with confidence. Nope, no risk from those animal-testing bozos.

MORE BSE MADNESS

Having just taken steps backward from protecting the American public against Mad Cow, the cattle/regulatory industry - known jointly as the FDA and USDA - may be in for another dope-slap: UPI reports that the federal meat inspector who was charged with misconduct by the USDA after claiming mad cow disease safeguards were being violated at slaughterhouses said he plans to file charges against the agency.
"Stan Painter, a USDA inspector and chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the inspectors union, notified the agency's management in a letter last December he was aware of instances where the riskiest parts of older cows were not being marked or removed from processing." And here comes the kicker... "On Dec. 28, 2004, the agency charged Painter with personal misconduct for not revealing the names of the inspectors who told him of the SRM violations. Officials also told him he was under a formal investigation, which was dropped last month after the release of internal documents revealing more than 1,000 violations of the USDA's SRM regulations." Hmmmmm.

And how about those assurances, just before the 2004 election, that Japan was thisclose to dropping their ban? "Japan's food safety panel said Monday that U.S. cows were exposed to a higher risk of mad cow disease infection than their Japanese counterparts due to insufficient feed control in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Kyodo News agency reported. Panel head Yasuhiro Yoshikawa said in the report that the extent of feed contamination in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s was up to 10 times as high as that of Japan." Hmmmmm... and Japan has had how many mad cows?

LOW-FAT VEGAN DIET: NO GAIN, NO PAIN

"Women who stick to a low-fat vegan diet are more likely to lose weight than those whose diets include meat," the Daily Mail reports, citing a PCRM study published in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Medicine. "Dr Barnard, working with Georgetown University Hospital and George Washington University, found those on the vegan diet were able to lose weight without feeling hungry." The journal article also refers to a study of 55,000 women in Sweden which reinforces Dr Barnard's findings. Researchers at Tufts University in Sweden found that of the group, 40% of meat-eaters were overweight or obese compared to 25% to 29% of vegetarians and vegans.