More noodles: I'm so boring

I was going to have the curry sauce on rice and vegetables, but when I got back to my room and saw all the peanut sauce I already had, I didn't want to open a new container and waste what I had left, so I cooked the veggies, reheated some noodles and served it up. Please don't think that all vegan meals are so boring. It's just that I made scads of peanut sauce and don't want to have to throw it out. It's still tasty.

I'll have to throw everything that won't travel out tomorrow morning, and anything that I don't eat tomorrow will have to go tomorrow night, because I won't be able to take it on WestJet.

Meeting People

I felt like being social and having some kind of interesting snack, so I walked down the street to the one cafe in town that has a chance of serving something vegan. My clue was that they have vegetarian lasagna, and a kind of wholesome menu. I asked the woman there if she knew what vegan was, and she did, but she also knew that there wasn't anything there that had no butter, cheese or eggs.  "But we should!" she said.

She is semi-vegetarian and we chatted a bit about veganism. She recommended a health food store in town. I actually knew there was a health food store, but hadn't sought it out, because I wasn't interested in vitamin supplements. She assured me that it was an excellent store and had actual food. She also recommended a book called Thrive by vegan athlete Brendan Brazier, who has a line of vegan products called Vega. She called the store to see if they were open, but there was no answer.

It was on my way back to the hotel anyway, so I went by and it was open. There was a grocery section. The woman there apologized for a lack of selection in vegan food: there just isn't demand for it there.  I hadn't been expecting any, so I was happy. I bought some herbal tea and some organic spicy curry sauce, then got a ride up to the grocery store with another customer and bought some more vegetables.

Seeking organic food in a small northern town was a point of commonality, so I ended up with two different nice people's contact information.

Life Without Suffering

A tenet of veganism is that animals shouldn't suffer. The lives of animals untouched by humans are steeped in suffering. They starve, freeze, endure infections, are torn apart by predators, drown, die in natural forest fires and contract diseases. Infants may be abandoned or eaten by their parents; newly matured males are driven away from their family grouping, and the injured or infirm may be left behind. I'm not sure whether most vegans ignore this, disbelieve it, make an exception, or consider it a problem to be solved later.

Humans suffer too. I think that most humans die painfully or at least stressfully. We all want to live to an advanced an healthy age and then die peacefully in our sleep, but most of us suffer prolonged and/or painful deaths from disease. (Ironically, a lot of those diseases would be prevented if we ate a vegan diet).

Just because animals suffer in nature doesn't give humans the right to inflict suffering on them. I imagine that if there were blogs in the 19th century many of today's arguments supporting the treatment of farm animals would be found in the blogs of those arguing for slavery. Most animal cruelty laws exempt "standard industry practices" so that you could get in trouble with the SPCA for throwing your pet chicken alive into a meat grinder or a scalding dishwasher, but that's legal and acceptable in the egg hatchery industry.

Going for the Gold?

So this Go Vegan Week is a come on, because you see tomorrow is World Vegan Day, the kickoff for World Vegan Month. And then they'll announce that 2010 is the Year of the Vegan and then where will I be?

The UK Vegan Society is trying to get people to pledge to follow a vegan lifestyle for a week, a fortnight or --the "gold" level-- a month. I think I probably will extend this one more week, I was kind of thinking of it anyway, so I can try more recipes, and shop and cook like a normal person, and not have to worry about being asked to travel to another province the next morning.

Right now I'm hungry because I haven't eaten yet (the potato chips actually all got eaten yesterday) but I don't really want any more of the same thing I've been eating for two days straight, but I shouldn't buy different food when I have to finish or discard what I have before tomorrow, when I expect to be moving on.

No Way!

I found a flavour of potato chips with no whey. I ate the whole bag. I guess all this healthy vegan eating was a shock to my system. Still eating leftover peanut sauce and pasta, too. This is the last day.

How Do You Say It?

I've heard the pronunciations VEE-gən, VAY-gən and VAY-jən. I think they are all acceptable. The last makes the most sense, because the g in vegetable is soft, but I like the one that sounds like someone from the Vega star system. I suppose after I quit this, I can be a lost vegan, too. I could move to Nevada and then go wandering around without a map and be a lost vagrant Las Vegan lost vegan. But it wouldn't be worth it.

Apparently the word is supposed to be derived from being the beginning and end of a vegetarian diet.

Fences Around Fences

I learned the title expression from a friend who was explaining how Kosher laws progress, for example from the prohibition "thou shalt not cook a calf in its mother's milk" to a home with two kitchens completely separating utensil, dishes and preparation surfaces for milk and meat. (Hmm, looks like veganism might be a simpler answer for the ultra-orthodox Jew). The idea of fences around fences is that a prohibition is a fence standing tightly around the taboo, but it leaves open the possibility that you might slip and accidentally stray over the fence. So you concoct another prohibition, more restrictive than the first, so that if you accidentally fall over the first fence, you're still outside the second. And because the second fence is observed by tradition, it becomes the new prohibition itself, so a third fence becomes necessary. And thus you have people, especially around special observances, strictly adhering to rules that are so far removed from the biblical prohibitions that I didn't recognize them.

This isn't quite accurate in describing the various levels of veganism, as each  deeper level of veganism is actually taking into account ways in which animals are harmed by a person's lifestyle. Mission creep might be a closer match. Here's a list of vegan issues, including the glue on postage stamps. Some vegans reject sugar because burning canefields harms the animals that live in them. And even your cruelty-free all-organic vegan broccoli has to get to market somehow. Do you reject it because the truck in which it arrived may have hit a deer, and most definitely killed thousands of bugs, on its journey from the farm? Do you cultivate your own, or live in fear that your trowal may have inflicted suffering on a worm?  It's an unachievable goal. That's okay. Lots of life philosophies centre around striving asymptotically towards some sort of perfection. This one is a concrete goal, and most people are going to agree with some aspect of "be nice to animals."

Vegans have been characterized as unrealistic, and I thought there might be a lot of holier-than-thou back-biting, but here is an example of a vegan having to choose or reject a tetanus shot, knowing it was not vegan, and both she and all the commenters seem to be agreed that accepting it was sensible and reasonable.