VEGGIE OPTIONS AT BALLPARK

If you're in Philadelphia and you haven't yet signed up with Club Veg to go to the Phillies game on June 12, get on it! Here's Scott Geiger's message:

This season is the first ever in Phillies history that veggie burgers (vegan) will be offered at the Phillies ballpark. And, vegan cheeseless veggie pizzas will be available for this game. After working with the Park for several years, Club Veg was finally able to get them to carry a vegan burger on a vegan sesame seed bun. To celebrate, we are having Club Veg day at the Phillies! Even if you aren't a baseball fan, we encourage you to come out to support the vegetarian food options.

Contact Scott at your earliest opportunity at scottg@clubveg.org.

FIGHTING CANCER: PLANT FOODS YES, ANIMAL PRODUCTS NO

These are really quite unrelated, except that they emerged on the same day and can be easily encapsulated by the above headine. "In men with recurrent prostate cancer, drinking 8 ounces per day of pomegranate juice significantly increases the time it takes for prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels to rise," says Reuters, while "[t]reatment with a shark cartilage product does not prolong life in patients with advanced cancer, nor does it improve quality of life, new research indicates."

THE ANIMALS WE DON'T WANT SMART

Here's a fun article that scratches at the surface of a fascinating conundrum in the "animal intelligence" field - it's easy for our culture to accept smart apes, cats and dogs, but we don't want to think of the animals we're eating as having any smarts whatsoever. Unfortunately, coming from ABC News, it skims and then darts away rather than probing this sore spot, but at least the issue is raised. "Was Your Meat Smarter Than Your Pet?" begins, "Testing the IQ of a sheep may seem laughable. But at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, England, they know better. One sheep who got a reward every time she recognized a human face correctly on a video screen scored a perfect 50 out of 50. 'If it was a monkey, no one would have any problems, possibly even if it was a dog,' said Keith Kendrick, a neurologist at Babraham. 'They would say, 'Yeah, yeah, that's expected.' But a sheep, no one really believes.'"

Intentionally or not, the article manages to show the paucity of argument on the "dumb animal" side of the equation: "John Redmore, who runs an organic farm in England, disagrees. 'We've been eating meat since we've managed to stand on hind legs,' he said. 'A natural part of being human is to eat meat.' It's natural to eat animals even if they're smart, he added. 'Yeah, they'd eat us,' Redmore said." Well, sure, the smartness has nothing to do with the "naturalness," but as usual that last term is being used speciously. Are you really saying sheep and cows would eat people, farmer John? Uh huh... now who, exactly, is smarter here?

"THAT'S PIG WATER"

Yep, but now that raw sewage is drinkable - with just a few hours of processing. "Don Lloyd dipped his empty bottle into a tank of water that six hours earlier had been flushed out of three nearby pens filled with thousands of hogs. "There, that's pig water," Lloyd proclaimed as he held up the bottle and tipped it back for a thirst-quenching chug. Lloyd's demonstration was to show just how confident he is in his system to purify the kind of putrid, waste-filled water dumped into hog waste lagoons across North Carolina." Mmmmmmm, sounds delicious and perfectly safe - just like that mad-cow free hamburger the British Agriculture Minister so confidently fed his daughter on live TV. Me, I think I'll pass on drinking "purified" hog waste-water, for as long as possible, anyway.

ANOTHER WIN FOR PLANT FOODS

In "Vitamin E cuts Parkinson's risk," the BBC informs us that research has found that "A diet rich in vitamin E could protect against Parkinson's disease." They go on to dutifully inform us where we can get it: "Good sources of vitamin E include green leafy vegetables, nuts and vegetable oils." Yep, plants again.

VEGAN OF THE MONTH

She's always been a sidebar to the story of her boyfriend Morgan Spurlock, the 'Super Size Me' star/provocateur, but here we get a more in-depth look at Alexandra Jamieson, the vegan chef and nutrition planner who rescued the documentarian's health after he spent the month eating only fast food.

IT'S OFFICIAL: NO MORE EXOTIC ANIMAL ACTS FOR COLE BROS.

"It's been a tradition every year -- we've had elephants and tigers. But times have changed, and we're hoping to bring more action," [Cole Bros. senior marketing director Ron] West said. "All the animal rights people -- I hate to say this -- but they've won the war." But Cole Bros., which is celebrating its 121st year, says by no means can it be considered a loser. This year, the circus sold about $7,600 in advanced ticket sales for the four evening performances that end tonight at U-Sell Flea Market on South Delsea Drive. That figure is the highest in the past five years that the traveling circus has set up shop there, West said.

Of course ending animal-abuse entertainment is a win-win. But though the so-called 'war' isn't won yet, the trend lines are obvious to all but the most thick-headed. Within five years, elephants and tigers in circuses will be a thing of the past.

CATCHING UP

OK, here's a bunch of stuff that's been piling up while I've been busy being lazy...

We'll start with the inevitable update on the bird flu: "China has sealed off nature reserves and rushed more than 3 million doses of bird flu vaccine to a remote western province after migratory birds were found dead from the H5N1 strain, which can be fatal to humans. The WHO said last week the spate of human bird flu cases in Vietnam this year suggested the deadly form of the virus may be mutating in ways that are making it more capable of being passed between humans."

If only there were something we could do to stop it... you know, I mean something that wasn't inconvenient.

LIGHT POSTING

In case you didn't notice. Back with more Meat Facts goodness in a trice...