Ambivalent Ambition

T.O.F.U. Magazine: there is an alternative

Veganism and Forms of Oppression

This most recent issue covers the intersection of veganism with forms of oppression, such as racism, homophobia, and emotional abuse. Highlights include interviews with Jasmin Singer (Our Hen House) and Breeze Harper (Sistah Vegan), and articles from Naomi  Martinez (Hermana Resist) and Dan Hanley (The Gay Vegans).

The new issue can be downloaded for free, or with a donation, at http://tofu.limitedpressing.com/products/15130.

Jan 5, 2012 @ 5:49 pm

post tags: t.o.f.u. magazine breeze harper vegan veganism oppression privilege

sitaraspeaks:

creatrixtiara:

cooledskin:

[snip]

There are some god points in this post, and some not so good points.

The main argument, that the shaming associated with some vegan rhetoric like “chicken periods” has a strong relation to the shaming of other cultures’ food by Western society, is a really good one. This has ALWAYS bothered me about vegan activism, and I think it’s part of a larger ethnocentric, middle-class, white privileged issue within the movement.

Two minor quibbles:

Some vegans (myself included) DO know what it’s like on a farm… Some of us grew up on farms or spent a lot of our childhood on one. In my family, my granddad had a cattle farm and my “in-laws” did as well. I have spent a lot of time with farmed cattle. I also come from Manitoba, an area where more farmed cattle actually have a pretty ok life, where they get to develop relationships with other cows, graze, and live comfortably. Most vegans tend to quote statistics about factory farms, which are by-and-large an American problem. But not all of us have that experience, and some of us do know and choose veganism/vegetarianism anyway.This doesn’t really disprove anything you said, I just wanted to put it out there that we do exist, since we seem to get erased both in mainstream vegan and omni rhetoric.

Second, cows do not just lactate on their own; they aren’t like chickens. There is a huge difference between drinking the milk of a cow who was impregnated as part of the herd you manage, subsistence-style, or even selling that product as part of a small business, and the large-scale dairy farming common across the Western world. From Wikipedia:

The production of milk requires that the cow be in lactation, which is a result of the cow having given birth to a calf. The cycle of insemination, pregnancy, parturition, and lactation, followed by a “dry” period of about two months before calving which allows udder tissue to regenerate. Dairy operations therefore include both the production of milk and the production of calves. Bull calves are either castrated and raised as steers for beef production or veal.

Female calves become future milk-makers. And yes, I have also been on dairy farms. Coming from a rural agricultural area, I had many opportunities to see them. One of my best friends in middle school came from a dairy farming family… And the operations are disgusting. The issue isn’t whether milk as a concept is icky (for me), but the way the cows are treated. For the most part, dairy cows rarely walk on grass or dirt, resulting in fungal infections, lesions, dermatitis, and other painful issues in their legs and hooves. From what I’ve seen, they’re also incredibly dirty operations. Most dairy cows don’t live longer than a few years and they live that entire time constantly in a state of pregnancy and lactation. Does it hurt? Hell yes, not being milked hurts - I lactated myself, I know this - but we impregnate them in order to milk them. We make them hurt and then claim they need us to alleviate the suffering? How fucked up is that?

In many cases (and some vegans may shoot me for this) I think cows raised for beef on the kind of farms you find in Manitoba actually have a much better life than dairy cows. For me, eating Manitoba beef would be more ethically sound than drinking commercially produced dairy. I consider it an issue of ethics because milk is also almost entirely nutritionally redundant (unlike meat, for example) - there is nothing in milk that you can’t find elsewhere in more readily absorbable forms (calcium is a good example of this). Yes it is delicious, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to put dairy cows through what we do in the commercial industry. 

Anyway, this is purely based in the Manitoban agricultural context. I’ve seen pictures of dairy farms in New Zealand, for example, with happy dairy cows grazing over lush fields of grass so maybe it’s not as world-wide as I assume it to be? In which case, I apologize. From my experience growing up surrounded by the industry, though, I suggest you remove the “cows will hurt if not milked!” justification from your argument. The rest is really strong, but that bit is totally off base. 

I got the milking-cows thing from a couple of dairy farmers - for some reason I ran into them more than I did other types of farmers %) (including a cutie named Angus. Ah Angus. You and your accent and your adorableness. But digressing.)

Yeah I don’t know if this applies to the rest of the world and I didn’t grow up in a farm either - closest I’ve been is going back to my family’s hometown in Bangladesh once in a while, seeing cows and goats roam, and seeing the lines by beggars and the homeless for bags of meat during Eid. Somehow I HIGHLY doubt they’d deal with just veges. (Also when you’re unable to deal with breast milk, as the mother or the baby, sometimes all you have is cow’s milk because the rest is really freakin’ expensive or just hard to get.)

Thanks for sharing :)

The main argument, that the shaming associated with some vegan rhetoric like “chicken periods” has a strong relation to the shaming of other cultures’ food by Western society, is a really good one.

The idea of ‘chicken periods’ being somehow terribly off-putting makes me angry as well.  Eating eggs is no more weird or gross than eating fruit or displaying flowers.

There are issues surrounding egg farming, but it’s nothing to do with them being ~periods~.

I agree. Tons of omnivorous animals eat eggs… I choose not to because I don’t like the conditions in egg farming and because I just don’t like the taste (never really have). There’s nothing about eating eggs that’s objectively gross. Mushrooms on the other hand… (I fucking hate mushrooms)

Oct 7, 2011 @ 12:32 pm

post tags: vegan veganism milk production dairy animal cruelty

veganexperience:

afickleheartandabitterness:

Vegan Lasagna With Pumpkin Bechamel Sauce by elengenesse_ajm on Flickr.

PUMPKIN?? Oh yes!!!

Um, eff yeah.

2011-10- 07T12:23:28Z Oct 7, 2011 @ 12:23 pm

post tags: vegan lasagna gluten-free

creatrixtiara:

This cartoon was on Facebook, and variations on the theme irk me so much that this pushed me over the edge.

I really don’t like this culture of trying to shame people for what they eat by saying “DON’T YOU KNOW IT’S BEE BARF/HORSE HOOF/whatever”. It rings too closely of how people from other cultures were often shamed and made to be “barbaric” simply because we would eat animals and plants that Anglos won’t touch. Our people found food from everywhere; it’s not our fault you’re squeamish.

Mark’s mum has a book about the food of the early settlers to Australia and there’s a very telling letter by one of them essentially whining that the Aboriginals were offering them all this food but because it wasn’t sheperd’s pie they can’t deal. WAAH WAAH WAAH. Sucks to be you, people who can’t seem to adjust to new cultures.

Here’s what I eat and have no shame eating:

Bee barf
Quarduped hooves
Chicken periods
Animal internal organs and muscle (including the icky parts. mmm liver.)
Fish heads and all their contents
Roots, weeds, seeds
Plant sex organs 

I’m sure there’s more if I care to remember. But I don’t really, because I’m done with being shamed for apparently being this uncivilized person who doesn’t know what I’m eating.

As it is there’s so many assumptions being made about how animals are farmed and slaughtered, made by people who probably never took it onto themselves to find out what the hell actually happens on a farm. I’ve heard farmers get upset because no one will understand that cows will hurt if they aren’t milked, I’ve heard racist indictments against Jews and Muslims because people assume kosher/halal slaughter is “barbaric” (by whose standards?!), I’ve heard people assume that it’s a UNIVERSAL MORAL VALUE that you NEVER eat an animal you name or respect and don’t think about the zillions of people who do and don’t have qualms about it. I’ve heard people dismiss the question “do plants not have lives too?” as some sort of derail when that is actually a serious question for many people. I’ve met people who make their cats - carnivorous animals by nature - VEGAN claiming “animal rights”. I’ve met people who somehow forgot that they too will be back to the ground or sea or air, consumed by plankton and worms, eaten in some form or another by the very beings they thought they were “too respectful of” to touch - as though omnivores don’t respect animals because they don’t see food as a moral folly.

If you don’t want to eat animal products, fine.
If you find certain foods squeamish, fine.  

Don’t make it a moral judgement.

There are some god points in this post, and some not so good points.

The main argument, that the shaming associated with some vegan rhetoric like “chicken periods” has a strong relation to the shaming of other cultures’ food by Western society, is a really good one. This has ALWAYS bothered me about vegan activism, and I think it’s part of a larger ethnocentric, middle-class, white privileged issue within the movement.

Two minor quibbles:

Some vegans (myself included) DO know what it’s like on a farm… Some of us grew up on farms or spent a lot of our childhood on one. In my family, my granddad had a cattle farm and my “in-laws” did as well. I have spent a lot of time with farmed cattle. I also come from Manitoba, an area where more farmed cattle actually have a pretty ok life, where they get to develop relationships with other cows, graze, and live comfortably. Most vegans tend to quote statistics about factory farms, which are by-and-large an American problem. But not all of us have that experience, and some of us do know and choose veganism/vegetarianism anyway.This doesn’t really disprove anything you said, I just wanted to put it out there that we do exist, since we seem to get erased both in mainstream vegan and omni rhetoric.

Second, cows do not just lactate on their own; they aren’t like chickens. There is a huge difference between drinking the milk of a cow who was impregnated as part of the herd you manage, subsistence-style, or even selling that product as part of a small business, and the large-scale dairy farming common across the Western world. From Wikipedia:

The production of milk requires that the cow be in lactation, which is a result of the cow having given birth to a calf. The cycle of insemination, pregnancy, parturition, and lactation, followed by a “dry” period of about two months before calving which allows udder tissue to regenerate. Dairy operations therefore include both the production of milk and the production of calves. Bull calves are either castrated and raised as steers for beef production or veal.

Female calves become future milk-makers. And yes, I have also been on dairy farms. Coming from a rural agricultural area, I had many opportunities to see them. One of my best friends in middle school came from a dairy farming family… And the operations are disgusting. The issue isn’t whether milk as a concept is icky (for me), but the way the cows are treated. For the most part, dairy cows rarely walk on grass or dirt, resulting in fungal infections, lesions, dermatitis, and other painful issues in their legs and hooves. From what I’ve seen, they’re also incredibly dirty operations. Most dairy cows don’t live longer than a few years and they live that entire time constantly in a state of pregnancy and lactation. Does it hurt? Hell yes, not being milked hurts - I lactated myself, I know this - but we impregnate them in order to milk them. We make them hurt and then claim they need us to alleviate the suffering? How fucked up is that?

In many cases (and some vegans may shoot me for this) I think cows raised for beef on the kind of farms you find in Manitoba actually have a much better life than dairy cows. For me, eating Manitoba beef would be more ethically sound than drinking commercially produced dairy. I consider it an issue of ethics because milk is also almost entirely nutritionally redundant (unlike meat, for example) - there is nothing in milk that you can’t find elsewhere in more readily absorbable forms (calcium is a good example of this). Yes it is delicious, but I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to put dairy cows through what we do in the commercial industry. 

Anyway, this is purely based in the Manitoban agricultural context. I’ve seen pictures of dairy farms in New Zealand, for example, with happy dairy cows grazing over lush fields of grass so maybe it’s not as world-wide as I assume it to be? In which case, I apologize. From my experience growing up surrounded by the industry, though, I suggest you remove the “cows will hurt if not milked!” justification from your argument. The rest is really strong, but that bit is totally off base. 

EDIT: Re-reading this I recognise that in some contexts milk is much more readily obtainable than vegan/vegetarian/non-dairy sources of nutrients so I’d like to add that I don’t want to make ethical pronouncements there. My issue is with the notion that industrial milk production gets away with gross mistreatments and people still sell the whole “but cows need to be milked” bullshit.

2011-10- 07T10:31:00Z Oct 7, 2011 @ 10:31 am

post tags: vegan veganism milk production dairy animal cruelty

veganfeast:

quesadillas veganas by CreatiVegan.net on Flickr.

Eat…Now!

Not gonna lie: I thought this said “quesadillas vaginas,” and was really stoked about it.

Sep 27, 2011 @ 10:38 am

post tags: quesadillas vegan veganas recetas comida vegetariana veganismo vegetarianismo queso soja tortillas colorful cocina chef creativegan

findvegan:

Coconut Cream Pie

Sep 14, 2011 @ 6:10 pm

post tags: vegan recipe get in me submission

findvegan:

Butterscotch Pie!

Aug 6, 2011 @ 3:15 pm

post tags: food porn vegan veganism recipe submission

findvegan:

Digestion Friendly Carrot and Fennel Soup

ANYTIME

Aug 3, 2011 @ 11:15 am

post tags: soup recipe vegan veganism submission

inherhipstheresrevolutions:

thezomz:

THIS IS NOT ACTIVISM THIS IS SEXISM

Animal rights activism should not have to rely on sexism to get a message across. 

Objectifying women by comparing them to slabs/cuttings of meat to get your point across? How classy, PETA.

Vegans and vegetarians (all of us) need to stop making excuses for PETA. At this point I think they do more harm than good.

Aug 2, 2011 @ 1:46 pm

post tags: vegan veganism vegetarian peta sexism exploitation

yummyvegan:

Crispy Coconut Crusted Tofu Poppers with Chili Mango Cream

Serving Size: 4

Ingredients:

for the tofu:

• 1 lb. tofu

for the marinade:

• 1/4 cup tamari or soy sauce
• 1/4 cup water to thin the marinade
• 1 lime or lemon
• pinch salt
• pinch ginger powder

for the crispy batter:

• 1/2 cup flour, separated
• 1/2 cups panko bread crumbs
• 1/2-3/4 cup coconut flakes (your choice as to sweetened or plain)
• light vegetable oil for frying
• light pinch of salt after cooking the tofu

for the chili mango cream:

• 1 large sweet ripe mango
• 1 canned pineapple ring
• 1/2 cup plain soy yogurt or soy cream cheese as Tofutti
• 3-4 tablespoons Thai Chili Sauce
• 1/2 jalapeno (optional)
• small pinch salt

Directions:

to prepare the tofu:

1. Drain and lightly pat the tofu dry.
2. Cut into large bite sized cubes.
3. Make the marinade and place the tofu pieces in the marinade to soak for 1/2 – 1 hour.
4. Meanwhile, make the mango chili cream.

to make the mango cream:

1. Slice the mango and discard the seed.
2. Peel the slices, and place in a blender or food processor.
3. Add the pineapple ring, soy yogurt or Tofutti and the Thai chili sauce.
4. If desired add 1/2 of a deseeded jalapeno.
5. Whizz the mixture to a smooth consistency.
6. Season to taste with salt.

when ready to make the meal:

1. Spread 1/4 cup of dry flour on a large plate.
2. Put 1/4 cup of flour in a shallow bowl and add enough water to form a thin paste.
3. Mix the panko and coconut in a 3rd shallow bowl.
4. Dredge each marinated tofu piece through the flour, evenly coating each piece.
5. Then dredge each piece through the flour ”paste”.
6. Finally dredge each piece though the panko/coconut mixture so that each side is covered with crumbs.
7. Heat a large frying pan with vegetable oil and lightly brown each side of the tofu pieces.
8. When golden, remove from the oil, drain on paper towels.
9. Lightly sprinkle a pinch of salt over the cooked tofu pieces.
10. The tofu pieces can be kept warm until ready to serve, in a moderate oven.

Serve the tofu poppers with a bowl of mango cream for dipping.

(via vegalicious)

Fuck yes.

2011-08- 02T11:21:13Z Aug 2, 2011 @ 11:21 am

post tags: recipes vegan tofu poppers veganism