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:
For most of us in the northern hemisphere, October is autumn, when the warm days of summer begin to fly south, pulling down the cold Canadian air. Soup time! Chilly weather makes hot soup taste sooo good!
Annie Chun's Miso Soup Bowl will satisfy you. Not only vegan and low-fat, it is made in the U.S.A. Even the packaging is earth-friendly, using recycled cardboard for the outside, using no shrink wrap inside, and using a bowl made partially from cornstarch. The ingredients include thick udon noodles (see below for explanation) in a rich miso broth seasoned with scallions, spinach, and chunks of tofu.
Udon noodles are fat, chewy Japanese wheat noodles best eaten fresh. For a fun site explaining different kinds of Asian noodles, check this out:
It leaves no weird aftertaste, only a hankering for a second bowl! As the label comments, "Our only request is that you slurp your noodles if you're enjoying yourself!"
Ohhh, to eat the crispy, mouthwatering snacks that are a veritable symbol of our culture, even though they are steeped in non-nutritious chemicals and carcinogens. If you haven't already, make a point at the grocery store to read the labels on the various pickle jars. You won't lose your hankering but you'll be very disappointed. Pickles equal poison.
If I may say it, what a pickle!!!
The power of networking comes into play here. Pickling vegetables and fruits has been a tradition in the American countryside for hundreds of years, and people love to share their family recipes as well as culinary explorations. Talk to people and googlegooglegoogle! You can learn to make your own pickles just to your liking! One inspiring and useful site can be found below, the Vegan Reader:
Alternatively, you can check out your local health food shops. I got my first jar of junk-free pickles made by Woodstock Foods. Unfortunately, while committed to sustainable and healthful agricultural practices, they are not vegan. The pickles were pretty good, though.
I will leave you with a tidbit of non-useful information. Do you want to learn to say "cucumber" in Hebrew? It's a fun word to say over and over. You'll feel so accomplished. Okay, let's start:
Today is the first day of MOFO, but it's not what you think! It refers to the Vegan Month Of Food Blog. How fun this will be! I'm newly changing to a cruelty-free lifestyle, not as easy as you might think. No matter what your religious views, most of us were raised hearing about the Golden Rule, doing unto others as we would have others doing unto us. I invite you to listen to the music of Robin Trower's group as they perform A LITTLE BIT OF SYMPATHY:
The light is strong and the man is weak
And the world walks in between
So rise above on the wings of love
See and let yourself be seen
See and let yourself be seen
So fill your cup and drink it on up
For tomorrow never comes
If you wield the rod, answer to your god
But me I'll be up and gone
I'll be up and gone, gone
I'll be up and a gone
If the sea was glass and the land all gone
Would you still be a friend to me
When my time has passed, is it too much to ask
For a little bit of sympathy
Just a little bit of sympathy, lord
A little bit of sympathy
A little bit of sympathy, lord, yeah
Little bit of sympathy
Little bit of sympathy
A little bit of sympathy
A little bit of sympathy
A little bit of sympathy
My dog Maple, a chow/lab mix, was killed on a country road just over a year ago, only a few months after being rescued from a hoarder who had confined several hundred dogs in an unlit, filthy hog barn. When I first met Maple, she was terrified of everything. She cowered in a corner at the animal shelter, shivering, her muscles clamped as hard as wood. She was crusty with mange and ragged with old scars. In the few weeks that she was home with me, the wrinkles on her forehead began to relax. Although I never got to see her wag her tail, she was beginning to meet my eyes, beginning to nuzzle me, beginning to cuddle. In the darkness of the pre-dawn mornings, she would roll over on her back, not cringing in submission but inviting me to rub her tummy. With both of us living with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, we were able to sympathize with each other's emotional state.
One day on the front porch she was startled by a loud sound and bolted loose. She only ran across the street, nervously waiting for me to come save her. Tragically, the thing that she was the most afraid of came upon the scene, a white guy in blue jeans. She RAN. She ran and ran and ran and ran. I found out a few days later that she headed for the nearby cemetery where my mother is buried, a peaceful place I'd brought her several times. Near there she was hit by a pickup truck and smashed to bloody chunks. I found out what happened to her because of a phone call from a sympathetic man who found her ID tag with my number on it; I didn't question the circumstances, nor how the battered tag and scrap of collar came to be so clean. I also heard from the Street Department in my town and got a parallel story from a very sympathetic man whose job it is to clean up shattered animal corpses from the roads. I resolved to make Maple's short and painful life count for something by helping other dogs who were suffering similar lives.
The thing about the human brain is that it naturally extrapolates. It comes to a conclusion and then relates that conclusion to other nearby situations. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before I involved myself not only in dog rescue, but in cat rescue as well. My husband and I began driving rescue transports, volunteering to save dogs and cats from certain death in the pound by helping bring them to a safe haven, either to a foster environment or to what is referred to as their "furever home." These transports often involve multiple drivers across many state lines. The animals seem to understand that they're being helped and are usually not only calm, but seem genuinely grateful.
Time went by and I started volunteering at a local shelter, walking dogs that stay in single concrete runs with metal bars just like jail cells: dogs that were lucky and were eventually adopted, dogs that were eventually put down because the shelter filled up beyond capacity with newcomers. I also started saving my newspapers for another shelter that takes in stray cats and countless dogs rescued from puppy mills, the factory-type operations that mass-produce puppies for sale by confining the breeding parents in small wire cages for their entire lives, never allowing them to experience grass or kiddie pools or rawhide chews or any of the things that should make up a family dog's life. Their nails overgrow, their teeth decay, their fur mats, and often they become blinded by the spray of high pressure hoses used to clean their wire cages.
It was a surprise to me when one summer afternoon I saw a ripple in the backyard birdbath and discovered a wasp struggling in the water. The Old Me would have done nothing, but the New Me saw a doomed creature suffering, so I couldn't turn away. I got a stick and helped her crawl onto it, setting her down in the grass so she could fly away and get on with her life. I felt strange. I felt good. I realized that struggle is struggle and pain is pain and that if I were committed to honoring the memory of Maple by easing others' pain, then the struggle of a wasp should be no less respected than the struggle of a cat or a dog.
Seeing videos on Facebook showing what happens during the slaughter of livestock -- called "processing" by people in the industry -- was worse than the situation with the wasp. The domino effect continued ... the way chickens are treated, the way pigs are treated, the way dairy and beef cattle are treated, the way fur animals are treated ... all the things in life that I'd taken for granted for decades came crashing down, each crash leading to another realization and another crash.
My bowels have taken a few months to get used to the dietery changes. I no longer buy fur, leather, or any products tested on animals. I found an app for my smartphone that can be used at the grocery to find out if a company or product is vegan. It was the first app I ever downloaded, in fact. And speaking of the grocery store, I go there less and less because so many of the products are obtained with the torture of sentient beings. No more Chef Boyardee ravioli, no more Campbell's pork and beans, no more Sarah Lee cheesecake, no more eggs, no more ice cream, no more bread, no more most of that shit. I found a health food store that sells locally-produced vegan products and I found a little farm shop outside of town that sells what it grows. It was bittersweet to buy some home-made maple syrup, as if Maple were showing me her sweet approval.
In future MOFO blogs, I'll describe some of the products I'm discovering. To quote Robin Trower, then:
Omigosh, look what I found! A NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/) for vegans! A National Novel Writing Month challenge for vegan-oriented people, to post twenty blogs in the month of October! Since I've recently lost my vegan virginity and have begun indulging in cruelty-free practices, I've found a whole new world that I'd love to share with you. Go explore VEGAN MOFO, the Vegan Month of Food, at http://www.veganmofo.com/
It's like safe sex ... you have to make some changes but you can still have all the fun you want, including butter! ;-)
