Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India

This book looks like a good read. Apparently the author, Tristram Stuart, is also, or used to be, a freegan. While I can see the sense ethically and ecologically - freegans eat food thrown out by supermarkets - I'm not sure I have the will to try it. Maybe I'm just too old, I'm sure I would have as a radical student, back in the day.

Anyway, here's an extract from the book.

Slaughter brings Ramsey close to tears

Channel 4 will tonight show two pigs being slaughtered on the programme the F-Word. It even features the show's star, hardman chef Gordon Ramsey and owner of the two pigs, close to tears. PETA, and others, I'm sure, hope the programme will turn scores of people vegetarian overnight, so veggie restaurants around the country should stock up in anticipation!

Apparently, Channel 4, on the other hand, are bracing themselves for a flood of complaints over the screening. A spokesperson for the channel said: "A lot of people are in denial about how products arrive on the shelf, and the conditions of farm animals, and one of the points of the series is to show how that happens."

If any meat eaters reading this feel like testing themselves by watching the show, let us know how it goes. I, for one, will be watching football on ITV.

Confessions of a vegetarian vivisectionist

What to say about this? A vegetarian vivisectionist! I've discussed at length on many previous posts the ethics of vegetarianism and veganism in relation to animal rights, and in some regards her reasoning makes logical sense, that killing animals for medical research is slightly more ethical than killing them for food. I personally find this cold calculation hard to swallow, (no pun intended), but I can, however, understand the logic that, after dissecting and experimenting on animals all day, she suddenly lost all desire to eat them. In fact, it makes me wonder how any vivisectionist can not be a vegetarian.

Soya fights back

Well, wouldn't you just know it, it turns out that the man with the dead parrots mentioned in the Is soya safe? article is a director of the Weston A Price Foundation, a body that promotes traditional farming and the consumption of butter and cow's milk, at least according to Dr Justine Butler he is, who is herself a campaigner for the Vegetarian & Vegan Foundation. The plot thickens.

The problem with research of any kind is that it is almost always conducted, or at least funded, by people with vested interests. Which leaves you not able to believe anything. It's almost enough to start you ranting against capitalism, the system that puts making money at the heart of society, but that should probably be taken up on another blog somewhere else.

In the meantime, I'm tempted to let soya milk back into my life, but in a lesser capacity, just in case. It turns out that rice milk is actually quite nice over cereal; at least I think it is. However, it's not so hot in cooking. We tried making white sauce with it the other day and it turned into an unappetising, brown, watery substance that really did our cauliflowers no favours.

The end of soya as we know it

Firstly, apologies to the few of you who check my site regularly for not writing for a while, but we've been on holiday, camping in Devon on the south-west coast of England. We found some lovely hidden sandy coves. I returned to work yesterday to find this minorly earth-shattering article about the dangers of eating too much soya. Now, as any vegetarian or vegan knows, we eat a lot of the stuff. I have it pretty much everyday; soya milk, tofu, soya-protein, soya sauce, miso - the lot. So what do we do?

I had actually heard about all this before, but somehow managed to ignore it or think it was just some extremist trying to annoy me. But for some reason this article has laid it on the line, and I've been forced to take note. I even went out and bought my first carton of rice milk last night. I haven't tried it yet, but I will let you know.

What is even more scary, is the effect it can have on small children. My eldest daughter is two and a half and has been drinking soya milk for almost two years now. She was breastfed until two, so it was never her main source of milk, but she did drink it, and she loves veggie sausages and tofu (although tofu, it seems, is probably fine to eat because of the way it is made, according to the gospel that is this article). But, either way, a seismic shift in our eating habits has been set in motion.

I recommend you read the article (here's the link again) and if you feel like it, let me know what you think. Am I overreacting? And do you know of any good alternatives to pour over my breakfast cereals in case the rice milk turns out to be disgusting?