Vegetarian is not enough.

Photo by Meade, which he describes as "City bus 3 blocks from Ag school dairy building."

It's an impressive and persuasive slogan, but one might also say: Because you consume vegetables, rodents, birds, snakes, and amphibians die.

But the calf is a lovable being, one could respond, speciesistly. Look at its sweet face!

"The lone star tick... was first found on Martha’s Vineyard in 1985 but has become more established in recent years, feeding and breeding on the thousands of deer..."

"... that roam the island’s lush woods and beach grass.This is reflected in the rising number of alpha-gal diagnoses. Some 523 new cases were reported on Martha’s Vineyard last year.... [E]xperts fear the situation on Martha’s Vineyard is only going to get worse due to the island’s growing deer population. [Biologist Patrick] Roden-Reynolds said there are anywhere from 55 to 75 deer per square mile — up from 40 to 60 in 2011. This is up to ten times the amount of deer needed for a healthy forest ecosystem, he said, adding: “Each deer this time of year probably has a couple of hundred ticks on them that are attached and feeding and producing new ticks for the next year.” Locals have called for an increase in deer hunting to manage the island’s population. 'Even doing some sort of hunting tourism-promotion thing here would be helpful in a way,' said [Kate Sudarsky, a 26-year-old teacher on the island who was diagnosed with alpha-gal]."

I'm reading "'We can no longer eat burgers or ice cream — all because of a tick bite'/A bug-borne disease has taken over Martha’s Vineyard and is turning people vegan, locals claim" (London Times).

Not enough deer hunters on the island. Hard to imagine the kind of tourism they could set up that would bring in enough deer hunters to do the kind of thinning they'd need. Hire professional sharpshooters. 

Before you riff on the rich-people problems of Martha's Vineyard, take a look at this map showing the range of the lone star tick in the U.S.

"Skeptics doubted that diners would pay hundreds of dollars for vegetables and fruit, no matter how artfully prepared."

"Others dismissed it as another high-end stunt from a chef who had taken the restaurant through a series of different menus since he took over in 2006, including one that required waiters to perform card tricks.... The meat-free menu met with mixed reviews. Although the restaurant retained the three stars that Michelin first awarded it in 2012, other critics were not as impressed. Pete Wells, then The Times’s restaurant critic, described vegetable dishes that... 'are so obviously standing in for meat or fish... that you almost feel sorry for them.'"

From "Meat Is Back at Eleven Madison Park, After 4 Vegan Years/The Manhattan restaurant drew global praise and skepticism with its climate-minded, all-plant menu. Now its chef wants to be more welcoming — and popular" (NYT).

"The restaurant has had varying levels of financial success since introducing the vegan menu.... Bookings for private events, an essential stream of income, have been particularly sparse. 'It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant'...."

Maybe there's just no way to be expensive and vegan. Pick one. It is, apparently, too much of a strain to shore up the customer's delusion that nonmeat items are very, very posh. We're told there was "tonburi, the seeds some call land caviar."

"Five years ago, meat hit a wall. Plant-based burgers were catching on, and the amount of meat the average American ate..."

"... per year started to wane. By 2022, it was down to 264 pounds — a drop of 10 pounds in two years. Editors at the recipe website Epicurious announced in 2021 that beef would be banished from all future content, citing its contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions. That same year, the chef Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park in New York City — considered one of the world’s top restaurants — retooled his $335 tasting menu to eliminate animal products. Restaurants of all sorts added vegetarian dishes for environment- and health-minded diners. Meat’s rebound surprised researchers.... The research showed that nearly 98 percent of households buy meat and 73 percent consider it a healthy choice, up 10 percent since 2020."

From "Meat Is Back, on Plates and in Politics/After years in which 'plant-based' was the mantra, meat once again dominates the national conversation about dinner" (NYT).

At the Moral Urgency Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photo — showing the University of Wisconsin's central campus at night — was taken by my son Chris.

And here's another Chris pic that has an animal theme (see the kittycat?):

"The 150g tins — enough for a single meal — will cost roughly £1 and contain a chicken dish created without harming a single animal."

"Rather than slaughtering chickens, Meatly’s scientists extract a sample of cells from a chicken’s egg, which are replicated and grown in vats in a process similar to making beer or yoghurt.... Meatly, which is also planning a product for dogs, hopes to appeal to animal lovers’ environmental conscience, with a growing trend for pet owners to feed their animals a vegan diet.... [Owen Ensor, the founder of Meatly], 35, who is vegan, has tasted his firm’s product. 'It tastes like chicken,' he said.... [H]e does not need to worry about texture, which bothers humans much more than animals. 'Pets care what food smells like and they care what it tastes like, and if it has the right nutrients,' he said. 'But they don’t particularly care what it looks like or if it has the right kind of texture.'... [R]eplicating the correct texture from a vat of cells is tricky."

From "Britain’s first lab-grown meat: it’s for cats/Tinned chicken cultivated from cells taken from an egg will be marketed to owners who want to supply a normal diet without the guilt. Its vegan creator explains" (London Times).

With cats in the picture, I'm inclined to read "lab-grown" to involve Labrador retrievers.

How does Ensor know cats don't care about texture? But it's not as though traditional cat food is providing the texture I presume cats love (which is the texture of a freshly killed mouse).

By the way, as a human being with a greatly diminished sense of smell (AKA taste), I am overwhelmingly concerned with the texture of food. Food texture matters!

"The enduring challenge for any activist is both to dream of almost-unimaginable justice and to make the case to nonbelievers that your dreams are practical."

"The problem is particularly acute in animal-rights activism. Ending wild-animal suffering is laughably hard (our efforts at ending human suffering don’t exactly recommend us to the task); obviously, so is changing the landscape of factory farms.... In 2014, the British sociologist Richard Twine suggested that the vegan isn’t unlike the feminist of yore, in that both come across as killjoys whose 'resistance against routinized norms of commodification and violence' repels those who prefer the comforts of the status quo...."

Writes Elizabeth Barber, in "What Would It Mean to Treat Animals Fairly? Each year, billions of animals die for human ends. In two new books, Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer insist that we stop the suffering" (The New Yorker).

"Mimi and Fluffy refused to use a litter box for weeks, but Tredwell couldn’t open the windows for fresh air, lest the cats escape."

"The cats threw up, shredded the furniture, and clawed her face while she slept. She was allowed to let them roam with expensive G.P.S. tracking collars, but the cats ran away from her when she tried to steer them away from lark territory. She gave Mimi and Fluffy to her mom, who lived outside the lockdown zone, but they disappeared and turned up at Tredwell’s door two days later. When she was finally allowed to let them out again, on September 1st, they disappeared for another three days. Many residents of Walldorf started to think that efforts to enforce the lockdown went too far. 'There were people running around taking pictures, trying to gather information about the cats'.... When I visited Tredwell at her home, she seemed exasperated. 'I’m vegetarian,' she said. 'I’m really trying to take care of my carbon footprint. And now I’m getting treated like I’m a bad person.'"

From "The Cat Lockdown That Divided a German Town/Cats in Walldorf, Germany, can’t go outside when crested larks are breeding. Is it cruelty or conservation?" (The New Yorker).

"What would be the point of hedonism?" — the automatic transcription mistranscribes. He said "heganism."

 

(Yes, 2 David Sedaris posts (almost) in a row. It just happens sometimes. I don't artificially separate posts from other posts.)

"You could go from vegetarianism to cannibalism in one fell swoop."

 I wrote, here.

"Inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat...."

"There is an inherent conflict in asking people to change their most personal habits because of climate change when government policy puts few restraints on polluting industries like oil, gas, coal and automobiles.... Rising prices for all kinds of consumer goods are exerting pressure on Americans, but our food spending can be modified more easily than what we pay at the gas pump. We do not have to become, overnight, a nation of vegetarians and vegans, but we could adjust what we eat to save both our pocketbooks and our planet.... The inflation of the period between the Gilded Age and World War I gave Americans a taste for peanut butter, pasta and stews and casseroles graced with but not dependent on meat. The 1970s brought us brown rice, granola, exciting vegetables like eggplant and zucchini, and every conceivable way to prepare a lentil. Freed from having meat in every meal and with a world of recipes at our fingertips, what will the delicious culinary legacy of this inflationary period be?"

Writes Annaliese Griffin, in "Inflation Should Make Us All Vegetarians" (NYT).

Poverty is such a lovely opportunity, if you think about it! And it's always nice to discover an opinion piece in the New York Times that nudges us to think about it. 

Did you know it could "free" us from having meat in every meal? Did you realize your excess money was enslaving you to eating meat 3 times a day?

Am I missing the tone? Could this be intentional humor? I mean... "exciting vegetables." As we used to say in the 70s... Call and they'll come to you/Covered with dew/Vegetables dream of responding to you...

"Although US consumption of beef fell from about 80 pounds annually per capita in the 1970s and early ’80s to a low of 54 pounds in 2017, it’s steadily rebounded since then to 58.6 pounds in 2021."

"Yes, we are eating more beef today than we did five years ago, despite plant-based 'Impossible' meat and Beyond Burgers taking over American menus and even McDonald’s."

The NY Post reports.

"New York City public school cafeterias are going vegan-only on Fridays under a new policy from famously health-conscious Mayor Adams, who has touted the benefits of a vegan diet."

The Daily News reports. 

Vegetarian is too easy. It includes favorites like pizza and mac and cheese. 

Education officials said there will be a grace period where some nonvegan but vegetarian backup options like cheese sandwiches will still be temporarily available. Vegan backup options like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hummus and pretzels will also be available....

Gianni Faruolo, a seventh-grader at the Professional Performing Arts School, said he thinks the plant-based switch is “cool.” His mom, Dana Faruolo agreed. “I think it’s great, having options, teaching kids new things.”

Yes, it's valuable to teach through what's for lunch. I hope what they teach is that a meal without meat or eggs or dairy can be perfectly appetizing. It's at least as likely that they end up teaching that vegan = disgusting.

Judged by a wasp — "This tiny individual was judging me."

I'm reading Jordi Casamitjana interview: I’m a vegan thanks to Franco and wasps/An ‘ethical vegan’ fired by a charity has changed the law for his fellow animal lovers. His campaign began with a nest of insects" (London Times):

Something life-changing happened while Jordi Casamitjana was working on his PhD on the social behaviour of wasps. He was observing a nest when one of the insects turned and looked straight at him. “My heart was thumping,” he recalls. “This tiny individual was judging me. And it decided ‘you’re fine’ and didn’t raise the alarm [to the rest of the nest].” He vowed that day to devote his life to helping animals....

[His] devotion to his beliefs led a judge to rule... that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010...

"Some farmers are injecting pregnant sows to cause abortions. Others are forced to euthanize their animals..."

"... often by gassing or shooting them. It’s gotten bad enough that Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, has asked the Trump administration to provide mental health resources to hog farmers. Despite this grisly reality — and the widely reported effects of the factory-farm industry on America’s lands, communities, animals and human health long before this pandemic hit — only around half of Americans say they are trying to reduce their meat consumption. Meat is embedded in our culture and personal histories in ways that matter too much, from the Thanksgiving turkey to the ballpark hot dog. Meat comes with uniquely wonderful smells and tastes, with satisfactions that can almost feel like home itself. And what, if not the feeling of home, is essential? And yet, an increasing number of people sense the inevitability of impending change....  One of the unexpected side effects of these months of sheltering in place is that it’s hard not to think about the things that are essential to who we are.... We cannot protect against pandemics while continuing to eat meat regularly. Much attention has been paid to wet markets, but factory farms, specifically poultry farms, are a more important breeding ground for pandemics. Further, the C.D.C. reports that three out of four new or emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic — the result of our broken relationship with animals.... As in a dream where our homes have rooms unknown to our waking selves, we can sense there is a better way of eating, a life closer to our values."

Writes the acclaimed novelist Jonathan Safran Foer in "The End of Meat Is Here/If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals" (NYT). He also does non-fiction with "Eating Animals" (2009) and "We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast" (2019). From his Wikipedia article:

Foer was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."... He has been an occasional vegetarian since the age of 10... In his childhood, teen, and college years, he called himself vegetarian but still often ate meat....

I thought that meat-as-home image was interesting. Meat almost feels like home, but you know those dreams where you find other rooms in your house? In your home that smells of meat, there's another room, and it has no meat in it, you've seen it in your dreams, and you can find it in real life. Or something. It's a bit cornball, and the references to "home" are at the beginning and the end — much farther apart in the actual article that in my snippet above — so it would be easy to miss.

Something else that caught my eye: At one point, he says: "These are not my or anyone’s opinions, despite a tendency to publish this information in opinion sections. And the answers to the most common responses raised by any serious questioning of animal agriculture aren’t opinions." There's something dictatorial in that: This isn't opinion, this is truth. Ironically, that makes him sound more opinionated. It yells: I am a polemicist, an ideologue.

I can appreciate a good polemic, and Foer seems to be striving to be a first-rate polemicist. I suspect that his great success as a novelist makes him think that if he does polemics he'll trounce the other writers. This didn't work on me, though. Who exactly is supposed to be horrified by pigs getting abortions and euthanasia? People who support abortions and euthanasia for human beings? People who accept that pigs are raised for slaughter, want to eat meat, but are morally opposed to abortions and euthanasia for human beings? If it's just people who feel sorry for the farmers who won't make the money they'd planned to make from their hogs because of the pandemic, that has nothing to do with the inevitability of an impending transition to vegetarianism.

AND: Senator Grassley has been advocating for mental health resources for farmers since long before the current pandemic. See "Grassley Signs Onto Bipartisan Ernst Legislation to Provide Mental Health Support to Agricultural Communities" (press release from Grassley, May 24, 2018)("("[O]ur farmers and agricultural workers experience disproportionately high levels of suicide... 'We must do more to ensure those who work tirelessly from sunrise to sundown to feed and fuel our world have access to the mental health resources and supports they need'")).

"When you classify yourself as vegan, you’re now being watched. In my DMs, I’d get all these messages from activists for protests. I’m just not that guy..."

"... I did this for the purpose of eating better," said the food blogger, Reynolde Jordan, quoted in "It’s Called ‘Plant-Based,’ Look It Up/There’s a difference between disavowing all animal byproducts and simply trying to eat less meat" (NYT).

Thomas Colin Campbell, the Cornell University biochemist who claims responsibility for coining the term plant-based [said,] “I wanted to emphasize that my work and ideas were coming totally from science and not any sort of ethical or philosophical consideration”....

I'm giving this my "euphemisms" tag, even though I don't think that's exactly right. I considered "propaganda" and "rhetoric." There are 2 intertwined subjects here. At least 2.

One is that "vegan" feels like it means more than just not eating animal products. To say you're a vegan seems to be adopting an identity that has been defined and is being defined by other people and you don't want all those stereotypes sticking to you.

Another is that you seem to be committing to absolutely no animal products, and maybe all you want to do is to build you diet around plant products and minimize the consumption of meat. Personally, I know I need to eat some meat, but I don't eat very much.

Is "plant-based" a euphemism? I'm thinking yes, in the case of someone who follows a vegan diet but doesn't want to be seen as the stereotype vegan, with all morality baggage. But it's not a euphemism — though it seems like a bit of a misnomer — if what you're trying to say is I actually do eat some meat (and dairy and eggs).

"[T]he co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods only eats only three organic, vegan meals a day, barely drinks water and never snacks — or eats dessert — except for an occasional Medjool date."

"[John] Mackey estimates that he eats about 15 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. 'A plant-based diet is pretty high in water,' Mackey says, 'so, the actual truth is I don’t need to drink water most of the time.' And if he did snack outside his three meals, he says he would get a stomach ache. Mackey is so dedicated to his rigid diet and wellness routine that when he travels for work, he typically packs a rice cooker with him (to make his morning steel-cut oats) to ensure he doesn’t slip while on the road... At 5 a.m., Mackey wakes up and does his spiritual practices for about 30 minutes to an hour. That includes meditation, reading an array of spiritual literature and daily affirmations.... At 6 a.m. Mackey either has one of two breakfasts: a smoothie or steel cuts oats (the oats are usually for when he’s on the road).... After breakfast, Mackey exercises by going on a short walk followed by some yoga.... Mackey says he eats lunch early, at about 11 a.m., to beat the crowds at the Whole Foods’ buffet line, which is connected to its corporate offices.... After work, Mackey heads home at about 7 p.m. to make dinner with his wife, Deborah. 'We’ll chop up a bunch of different veggies and throw it in the steamer,' he says, 'And then we’ll have some kind of lentil or beans with it and a nut sauce.' Mackey puts down his phone for the night at 9 p.m.... Mackey reads for bit and then heads to bed at 10 p.m."

CNBC reports the virtuous if boring routine of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.

What part of John Mackey's daily regimen bothers you the most?

Skimping on drinking water.

So much roughage in his digestive tract.

That he's telling us all these details about his personal life, invading his own privacy.

He's flaunting virtue and assuming we'll admire him for it.

I'm worried about Deborah and her life of throwing vegetables in a steamer.

What the hell is "nut sauce"?

Multimillionaire carts his rice cooker with him when he travels.

Grown man contends he'd get a stomach ache if he snacked.

With all these details, why nothing about the timing and dimensions of his bowel movements?

 

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Things that made me say "Oh, no!" out loud while sitting alone.

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I recently read a gossip piece wherein Natalie Portman said that we’d never dated. This confused me, as we did, in fact, date. And after briefly dating in 1999 we remained friends for years. I like Natalie, and I respect her intelligence and activism. But, to be honest, I can’t figure out why she would actively misrepresent the truth about our(albeit brief)involvement. The story as laid out in my book Then It Fell Apart is accurate, with lots of corroborating photo evidence, etc. Thanks, Moby Ps I completely respect Natalie’s possible regret in dating me(to be fair, I would probably regret dating me, too), but it doesn’t alter the actual facts of our brief romantic history

A post shared by moby xⓋx (@moby) on May 22, 2019 at 3:23am PDT

I'm seeing this because I was starting to read "Moby's treatment of Natalie Portman is a masterclass in beta-male misogyny/While the musician might not spout misogynistic lyrics, he’s no feminist" by Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian, where you see a cropped version of the picture (cropped above the nipples). I wanted to form my own opinion and get the code to embed the Instagram, and I clicked through and saw the full chestal expanse. Oh, my! What to think? The man is not attractive, but he's not totally horrible, but he's grimacing as if to try to look as horrible as possible, while she's just as pretty as a girl can be.

What's going on? Why doesn't she look uneasy? She's an actress — Who knows what she's thinking? Maybe she's only thinking of looking good in a photograph — which is what I think most people try to do when they know they're being photographed. What's he thinking? Something other than what I think most people think. Maybe I'm a beast — this is Beauty and the Beast — so go full beast, that's my only hope at some version of dignity.

I've already written about the Moby-and-Natalie tiff — here, with excerpts from his book — so please go there if you want to know what I think about it. This post is just about my reaction to Moby's Instagram and to The Guardian's effort at doing feminism about it. Reading the Guardian article, I see he's got a second Instagram, just fretting about his reputation now that Portman is turning people against him. He writes:

I'm just glad it's Meatless Mondays, because meatless Fridays would seem religious.

NYC Mayor de Blasio Rolls Out ‘Meatless Mondays’ In Public Schools To Combat ‘Global Warming’

pic.twitter.com/yBQYkbea4A

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) March 11, 2019

"And they believe in Meatless Mondays...."

I mean, it still does sound like religion, just steering clear of intersection with traditional Christian religion.

Anyway, I see that "Meatless Monday" has a substantial Wikipedia page. It suggests that Monday is the best meatless day because it's the day you get back to work after the indulgent activities of the weekend. You re-establish your regular routine, so maybe going without meat on Monday will lead to going without meat on Tuesday and even Wednesday before the decline into the weekend sets in again.

The current "Meatless Monday" campaign began in 2003, "endorsed by the Center for a Livable Future (a division of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) as well as over 20 public health schools."

It seems that in the U.K., it's called "Meat-free Monday," and that's got me wondering about the difference between "meatless" and "meat-free." Is it like the difference between "careless" and "carefree"? I'm looking a lists words and conclude that the "-less" ending is the one you use with something you want, and the "-free" ending is the one you use with something you don't want. That's why "careless" and "carefree" have such different meanings. "Careless" refers to the good kind of "care" — attention and thoughtfulness — and "carefree" has the bad kind of care — trouble and worry.

So isn't it interesting that the Americans say "meatless" — highlighting the deprivation and sacrifice to the greater good — and the Brits say "meat-free" — suggesting that meat taints you and you ought to want to be rid of it? Those 2 different orientations are also found in religion, by the way.

Here's Paul McCartney talking about "Meat-free Monday":



The idea is to get people started going without meat, and maybe they will go fully vegetarian, because they'll see how easy it is to go a day without meat. I think, if we really want to reduce the greenhouse gases produced by livestock, it's more effective to get a lot people to eat less meat than to get a much smaller number to go completely vegetarian. But — as Paul says — once people get used to enjoying going without meat one day a week, they may ultimately go vegetarian.

"How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy? Force-feed them meat?"

For the Annals of The Era of That's Not Funny, that's the joke that required an editor of a food magazine to resign (BoingBoing reports).

William Sitwell, editor of UK grocery chain Waitrose's in-house magazine... was responding sarcastically to a pitch from freelance writer Selene Nelson.... He also suggested making them eat steak and drink red wine, with Nelson responding: "I'm certainly interested in exploring why just the mention of veganism seems to make some people so hostile."