Sep 30
Grist’s Umbra answered this question yesterday: I recently became a vegetarian for environmental reasons. Everyone says I should start eating soy products and tofu. But doesn’t soy come from evil industrial farms in Iowa? I thought the idea was to…
Sep 29
I know that Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi had a vegan wedding and I think that’s great. They’re clearly on their way and sending well-calculated messages to the world. I’ve been watching as Ellen’s talk about animals and their…
Sep 28
REAL probably isn’t a good word. But “abolitionist” these days is so loaded that I’m happy to sound a little Valley Girlish (or would that be if I used “Totally”?). Regardless (or, irregardless, which oddly means the same thing), two…
Sep 27
Human breast milk ice cream. That’s got to need some hyphens. All those nouns in a row can’t be correct. Yesterday morning, on The Today Show, Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Gifford were talking about the PeTA request that Ben…
Sep 26
Jenny was kind enough to inform me that the day I posted my review of Catherine Friend’s ode to betrayal and slaughter, The Compassionate Carnivore, Jenna Woginrich posted “Is Eating Local Meat Kinder Than Vegetarianism?” Woginrich, a vegetarian, actually bought…
Sep 25
I was supposed to be in Aspen for nine days, starting today. I’d be staying at the St. Regis and spending lots of money there and in town. The petsitter situation became unworkable, however, and alas, I’m sitting at my…
Sep 24
I read The Compassionate Carnivore, by Catherine Friend, thanks to my local public library. As you probably have guessed, the book is an advertisement for small farms. It vilifies factory farming, and oddly fetishizes smaller farmers and their practices. The…
Sep 23
Did you see that Catherine Price of The New York Times “Sort[ed] Through the Claims of the Boastful Egg” for us last week, then Tara Parker-Hope “Unscrambl[ed] the Egg” a couple of days later? Parker-Hope writes: And what about “cage…
Sep 22
I’m filing this under Gray Matters (among other things) because, embarrassingly, I don’t think I know enough to say I know exactly what I believe. Immigration. Lou Dobbs is really angry about it–that much I do know. There are 50-something…
Sep 21
I don’t like the term “moral schizophrenia” and I don’t use it. Maybe because I was raised by a therapist who specialized in treating people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), which used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), and…
Sep 20
Footage from Steve Best’s keynote as well as the panel discussion from One Struggle (Animal Rights Africa) is available here. Though they live a world away from me, the activists’ issues weren’t a world away at all. From struggling to…
Sep 19
Two things happened last week that made me think about how effective direct action can be. They both involved phone calls, e-mails and other forms of pressure to not hold an event. 1. The Cole Bros. Circus, which is not…
Sep 18
Today’s question is: Are there too many people on the planet, or are some of them/us using far too many resources, and we would do just fine with 6.7 billion people if our (as in, most Americans’) consumption was decreased…
Sep 17
Eleni Vlachos of Porch Life Productions (and “Seeing Through the Fence”) is also a musician (she’s a singer, drummer and strummer in Beloved Binge). Check out Beloved Binge’s MySpace page, and particularly the song “I Don’t Like People.” I don’t…
Sep 16
I’ve mentioned Christopher Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, but never did it justice. And I won’t now. But what I will do is say that the combination of essays (most were previously published, but the material…
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