Jourgensen lived with Leary for two years in the mid-90s, during which time both he and Gibby Haynes were test subjects for Leary’s experiments with psychedelics.
This explains so much to me! Ministry and Butthole Surfers were among my favorites way back when. I didn’t know they had this connection.
And we’re back to my complaint about the article. For some people, veganism is hard. Obviously it isn’t hard for everyone, and I never said everyone, but for some people it is.
Articles like the one posted created a divide and encourage the belittlement of people trying to do better rather than suggesting anyone try to help people get closer to veganism.
You said that I said:
“Cooking vegan is hard”
False. I said BEING vegan is hard. It is morally correct, but it can be difficult. Later you compare eating cheese to being a sociopath. I’m pretty sure that even sociopaths can feign compassion in public when someone explains how they are having trouble achieving their goals.
You said:
90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients.
This is where I know you are not serious. 90%? Please. My mom visited from out of state a few weeks back. At restaurants and her friend’s house where she stayed (she won’t stay with us), she ate: eggs, bacon, buttered toast, coffee, lox and cream cheese on bagels with red onions and capers, oysters, lobster, calamari, moussaka, hummus, baklava, general tso’s chicken, sushi, sashimi, gyoza, chicken tandoori, saag paneer, vegetable pakora, roast beef in aus jus, brussle sprouts with bacon, pepperoni pizza, deviled eggs, macaroni salad, a black and bleu burger with onion rings, and so on. I don’t know how to make eggs and bacon without eggs and bacon. I don’t know how to make lox without fish. I CAN make moussaka with veggie crumbles instead of meat, but I don’t know how to get that eggy quality without the eggs in there. I do make vegan hummus. Baklava without honey? How? Sashimi? How? Gyoza? How? Saag is vegan. Paneer is not. I’ve never been able to make Indian food properly despite repeated tries, so while in theory I could make a Saag without paneer, the reality is it would be awful regardless of the animal content. I have to stick with whatever the restaurant has.
But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?
Yes to both counts. I am saying, “I pay people to torture animals for me and despite my regrets about that, I am not going to stop until there is another way to get a similar joy-of-food experience.” AND I am saying that YOU should say, “I know it is hard for you to stop paying people to torture animals for you.”
Do you also yell at depressed people for bringing everyone down? Do you think people are unaware of their failings? What sort of juvenile ego tripper gets off on yelling at people during their confessions?
What type of soil do you have? To simplify, let’s limit it to three choices: sandy/loose, loamy/rich, or clay/rocky/stiff?
My biggest advice is to use your own tree leaves and any lawn clippings that weren’t mulched back into the yard to make compost and NOT use things like MicracleGro that add salts to your soil because – while the initial crop may benefit – the salts will linger in that soil after the nutrients are absorbed and you won’t be able to keep using that soil if you keep adding those chemical fertilizers. You don’t have to go crazy about composting. Just pile the leaves together and let it sit. If you have lots of leaves, make your pile a row-shape so it is as long as you want, but no thicker than 3-4 feet. Thicker than that means oxygen can’t reach the center.
I learned that from this radio show back when I gardened: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/1087444113/you-bet-your-garden
That guy has all kinds of advice for the serious gardener, too, and I was never serious about it. There are people who actually FLUFF their compost! Can you imagine going out every week or so to toss around dead plant matter with a pitch fork just for aeration? Noooooo! I just let it sit and didn’t worry that it would take longer.
If you want to go beyond the pot and have a spot with sun, I recommend trying strawberries. Get live plants and pop them in the ground, then wait until the next spring. They are an easy early crop and they will replenish themselves with runners so you can get years of enjoyment out of them without having to buy more plants. Also, home grown are going to taste a thousand times better than anything in the grocery store. It looks like Maine has already figured out which grow best there. Note some are more disease resistant than others. https://extension.umaine.edu/highmoor/research/strawberry-variety-testing-at-highmoor-farm/
Other easy crops (2 for pots, the rest for ground):
Anyone try meat glue? Transglutaminase? Yes, it is ALSO used to glue small low-quality bits of meat into roasts and such, but in addition to being a glue, it is also used as a thickener. I’m pretty sure all the “Greek yogurt” we’ve seen in the last 20 years are because Transglutaminase was added to regular yogurt (cheap!) rather than the traditional Greek method of straining regular yogurt until the water was halved (expensive!).
Info:
sample vegan versions:
Edit: I linked to the wrong moo gloo. Added the correct link (first was milk-based, new link is microbial based).
Maybe I shouldn’t post here because I’m not vegan, but I respect vegans for doing the obviously correct thing. Personally, I don’t have the willpower to do it, but I HAVE tried to reduce my meat consumption. That said, I get annoyed with articles like this for reasons I will describe beneath relevant quotes. I offer these thoughts as a starting point for a better way to nudge omnivores towards less cruel consumption.
Imagine you knew a way to cut your carbon footprint by more than half; it was easy, required no real major sacrifice on your part…
Depending where you live, avoiding meat, eggs, dairy, honey, et cetera is NOT easy and IS a real sacrifice. If you live in California, you can find vegan options everywhere. If you live in Minnesota, Kansas, or various other places, you are effectively saying you will never eat out again, never sample the flavors of your Church potlucks, and bring all your own food to the family reunions. This is a hard social sacrifice to take and will be accompanied by eye rolls and some negative feedback. The authors surely know this, but act like it is nothing. At the very least, the requirement that you never ever eat out again – even when you are sick or worked a double shift and now have to make your own dinner because the closest thing to vegan you can order is a sad meatless, cheeseless pizza is an effort.
“People quickly derail the topic,” she said, “and begin talking about other things, such as how they seek to avoid food waste and plastic packaging.”
Of course they do! Who doesn’t try to change the topic when someone is trying to push you into something you don’t want to do?
Cutting out meat entirely was seen as an absurd position – and one only taken by haughty stick-in-the-muds, Ditlevsen explained. “There was a tendency for them to […] scold vegans for being extremists,” she noted.
Well, yeah, when an article suggests that veganism is easy, requires no sacrifice, doesn’t take time to learn new recipes and methods of cooking, intonates that there’s something wrong with trying to talk about other things, and doesn’t then see itself as haughty better-than-thou radicals, then it is time to call that article extremist.
For a lot of people – myself included – veganism is HARD. It would be easier if vegans could sympathize with that. There’s a growing contingent of low-to-no-meat eaters that mostly cook without meat, but have things they aren’t going to give up. For me, I’m not giving up cheese. I can try to get slightly more ethical cheese, but we all know cheese means calves aren’t with their moms. It is cruel. I know. If I’d never had cheese, I’d never start eating it, and I am eagerly anticipating cheese made with lab-grown milk, but for now I know I’m contributing to animal abuse.
If you came up to me and said, “You know CHEESE is ABUSE” I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn’t have lab-grown cheese yet. I’ve got beyond burgers for my beef cravings, but all the vegan cheeses I’ve tried have failed me (I want something like a St. Andre triple creme).
I used to raise ducks for the eggs. We had freakin’ happy ducks with their own pool, lots of space, and frequent treats. Most of our ducks died of old age, but we did lose some to animal attacks. We ate the remnants where we could. We are back to buying eggs maybe once a month or so, but only eggs from happy chickens we can visit.
If you tell me that isn’t good enough, I have to tell you that sometimes I want eggs.
Heck, sometimes I want fast food and can’t think of a vegan option. In fact, my company had a California/Indian Manager come visit and the first thing I was asking him was if he was vegan or vegetarian because that would matter for getting lunch. He assured us all that he’d have no problem finding lunch and to simply pick a place that could easily seat 12. Stupidly, we listened to him. He IS vegetarian and his only lunch option was off-menu buttered spaghetti because the place that is both close and has big tables is also mostly meat. They only serve spaghetti with meat sauce and the only vegan item is a side salad. The ‘regular’ salad has ham and cheese.
I’ve gone on too long. I’m just saying that the article minimizes the difficulty and encourages an attitude that won’t win anyone over. I hope the lemmy-verse is better than that and maybe we all can encourage more people to minimize animal consumption even if those people aren’t ready to go… cold turkey? You know what I mean. Don’t make Perfect the enemy of Good.
Thank you for letting us know the tag was properly recorded. Good on you! :-)