INTRODUCING BLOODLESS MARY

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Don't know if I'll regret this, but I want to introduce you to my ... friend, for lack of a more suitable word. She calls herself Bloodless Mary. She's not very sociable with other humans, but I value our relationship because she says what she thinks and she definitely does think. I don't know if she actually likes me or not but we do trade recipes. We sometimes go to farmers' markets together, too.

I didn't make up that name "Bloodless Mary." She named herself that. She's been vegan for a long time, decades, even before it was trendy. Being vegan is not really trendy now but it seems to be more accepted. What I honestly think is that social media such as Facebook are helping show the horrors of livestock life and death, so more people are becoming aware.

Wish I could post a photo or two, but Bloodless Mary doesn't like her picture taken. "Post something meaningful," she grouses.

"It's meaningful to me," I counter.

"A hundred years from now when the picture is sitting in a box at a flea market, nobody will be interested. It's pointless."

I really want a photo of her. "You're in the Digital Age now," I tell her. "There won't be boxes of photos at flea markets a hundred years from now."

The tiniest of twitches lifts the corner of her mouth for a moment. I think that counts as a smile. She waddles into the other room, her voice sailing behind her. "You can post a picture of Mai Tai."

Mai Tai is one of her cockatiels. That's "COCK-A-TIEL," not "COCKTAIL." Here's Mai Tai:

One of the good things about having a cockatiel for a pet is that it is a vegan pet for the most part. That right there was one of our first arguments, the ethics of feeding meat and other animal products to pets. 

Bloodless Mary's thing is that each dollar we spend supports the industries whose products we buy. It's simply the law of supply and demand. "Nobody cares what happens after you buy it. You're promoting it by buying it." 

I don't know what to think about this. My thing is that carnivores are carnivores and they evolved that way and we're depriving them to feed them vegan diets. I told Mary that there are a couple of small local farms that humanely raise ostriches, elk, and other critters, but she glared at me without a word. I told her about my friend with a shar pei that has a lot of skin sensitivities that include an allergy to soy, so he has to feed his dog real meat. "Nobody HAS to do shit," she told me. 

Well, time to go see what's going on in the garden before Mary and I head out to the farmer's market. Most of the Roma tomatoes aren't changing color but they weren't visibly harmed by this week's frosts, either. I'm new to vegetable gardening. I took several tomatoes in to ripen inside on a sunny window sill, and I'm leaving the rest outside to do whatever it is they're going to do. I was able to harvest a few green bell peppers and lots of basil and sage before the frost. 

I leave you with a photo I took from last week's shopping, a darling baby we saw being pushed about in a stroller: