Women sometimes stop being vegan when they become pregnant, either because they or their doctor thinks you cannot have a healthy vegan pregnancy.
To help provide support for a vegan pregnancy, Vegan Outreach has added a page of kids whose mothers were vegan during pregnancy and who have been raised vegan.
[via VO's newsletter]
Cows have regional accents, a group of British farmers say, and phonetics experts say the idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Lloyd Green from south-west England is one of a group of farmers who first noticed the phenomenon. Mr Lane says accents among cows probably develop in a similar way as among humans and resulted from spending time with farmers with differing accents. Kinda cute story, but not that surprising when you think about it.
I posted about cows with accents this morning, but apparently it’s a hoax by some dairy company to help promote their regional brand. The professor quoted in the article has blogged a rebutal denying what they quoted him as saying.
They had been engaged by a cheese manufacturer, West Country Farmhouse Cheesemakers, to publicize their regional varieties of cheese. They telephoned me to ask whetheer there was any possibility that cows’ moos might vary geographically. I told them I thought it highly unlikely; but that there was well established scientific evidence that several species of bird exhibit regional variability in their calls, so you could not entirely rule out the possibility. (To see some evidence re birds, do a Google search on “avian dialects”.)
He goes on to say
Cows, of course, do not in general form stable isolated populations such as would presumably be necessary to allow such regional diversity to develop. On the contrary, cattle are bought and sold and trucked around the country and indeed internationally.
Which makes total sense – Now I feel really dumb for falling for the original news story!
Thanks to Becci for pointing me to the other side of the story.
[link]
We discovered this INCREDIBLE cheeze-like sauce from “The Saucy Vegetarian” a few months ago and thought it about time we shared it here.
This isn’t your normal fake cheese per se, like Follow Your Heart, but a thick sauce.
We love nutritional yeast gravy and thought this might be something along those lines. We were pleasantly surprised to find the primary ingredient in this was tahini, and white miso also gave it a slightly sharp, almost aged cheddar-y taste, but — disclaimer — neither of us have had cheese in over a decade.
It also was a great dressing on a sandwich, too, with some tofurky slices and spinach.
Here’s the recipe:
3/4 cup water
6 tbsp tahini
2 tbsps nutritional yeast flakes
2 tbsps fresh lemon juice
2 tbsps chopped onions (*)
2 tbsps sweet white miso
1/4 to 1/2 tsp salt
(*) we used 2 green onions
Place all ingredients in a belnder and process until creamy and smooth.
Very simple and can be made in minutes and easily stored in the fridge to be used for a few days.
Author Stepaniak recommends this for elbow macaroni and lima beans; whole-grain toast points with sliced tomatoes; yukon gold potatoes and collard greens.
We had a vegan chief friend resist making this for over a month – but soon apologised once she tried it.
Give it a try, and let us know what you think!
The ability of scientists to improve health and disease management of cattle and enhance the nutritional value of beef and dairy products has received a major boost with the release this week of the most complete sequence of the cow genome ever assembled.
“This is very valuable information,” Dr Ross Tellam says. “We could potentially achieve as much improvement in cattle breeding and production in 50 years as we have over the last 8000 years of traditional farming.”
Cattle geneticists will use the bovine genome as a template to highlight genetic variation within and between cattle breeds, and between cattle and other mammal species.
“We can use this data to identify those genes that are involved in important functions like lactation, reproduction, muscling, growth rate and disease resistance,” Dr Brian Dalrymple says.
[via dvorak.org]
I wonder how much guidance will come from considerations of public health and nutrition — and how much from agri-business and Walt Disney?
When we’re tabling or doing outreach we get asked all the time about organic and free-range beef, eggs, milk etc. and how they must be better for the animals.
I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that people are in denial and looking for an out so they can continue to eat what they want and fool themselves into thinking they’re doing the right thing.
We try and educate the best we can, and often end up advising that the only sure way to know how the animals are being treated is to visit the farm.
This story in the Chicago Tribune re-inforces that you can’t trust big business to do the right thing.
Critics say dairy tests the boundaries and spirit of what `organic’ means
With its neat white barns and lush green pastures, the Horizon Organic dairy farm on the outskirts of this tiny town on Maryland’s picturesque Eastern Shore would seem to fit the organic ideal.
But on a recent Wednesday morning, with crisp blue skies and temperatures in the low 80s, there was something missing from Horizon’s pastures. Namely, there were no cows.
Critics of Horizon, including two former workers, say the empty pastures are emblematic. The dairy’s new management, installed a year ago, has been so obsessed with increasing production to meet the soaring demand for organic milk that it has mostly kept the cows in the barn, the former workers allege, despite a U.S. Department of Agriculture requirement that organic cows have access to pasture.
Where the cows once routinely spent their days munching on clover, now they are allowed out in pastures infrequently, typically at night or when a tour group visits the dairy, the workers said.
“One of my frustrations was putting cows out for tours to make it seem like we were really grazing,” said Jacob Tice, who served as grazing manager from February 2004 to July 14 of this year, when he quit in frustration. “Their primary objective was production. They didn’t want grazing to interfere.”
[more]
Also Peter Singer and Jim Mason point out in their latest book “The Way We Eat“, that often organic egg producers often fill the organic boxes with regular non-organic eggs when they run out of the correct packaging. Once in the boxes and on the shelf there’s no test to see what they did – and it comes down to trust at the end of the dya and big business is proving they can’t be.
If you’re looking for something different for your desk or a friend, then maybe these Stereo Pig Speakers fit the bill.
I can think of a few activist friends who’d would love to get these on their birthday.
These little guys (or gals, whichever you prefer) get fired up by four AA batteries, and can easily connect to any sound source, such as your iPod, CD player, computer, or anything with a headphone mini-jack. As if the idea of having a matching pair of pigs on your desk wasn’t cool enough, the volume controls aren’t handled by those run-of-the-mill up / down buttons; instead, you’ll get to crank it up quite literally when you spin its corkscrew tail around to adjust the decibel level.
Great news. Harvest Home Animal Sanctuary has recently opened in Northern California to aid homeless and abused domestic and farmed animals in the San Francisco Bay Area and the San Joaquin Valley. The sanctuary’s mission is to provide life-long care for animals, and to educate the public about humane animal care and practices.
Please visit their website for more information.
The Department of Homeland Security recently ran a cyber-wargame in which the US defended itself against an adversary consisting of anti-war groups, labor activists, vegans — but not Al Quaeda.
At the top of the pyramid is the Worldwide Anti-Globalization Alliance, which sets things off by calling for cyber sit-ins and denial-of-service attacks against U.S. interests. WAGA’s radical arm, the villainous Black Hood Society, ratchets up the tension on day one by probing SCADA computerized control systems and military networks, eventually (spoiler warning) claiming responsibility for a commuter rail outage and the heat going out in government buildings.
The Black Hoods are a faction of Freedom Not Bombs, whose name is suspiciously similar to the real Food Not Bombs, which provides vegan meals to the homeless.
Another allied lefty-group called the Peoples Pact joins in, crashing portions of the power grid. Things get confusing when the “Tricky Trio,” three evil hax0rs who are 50 percent more devious than the Deceptive Duo, hacks the FAA, issues false Amber Alerts, and manipulates the communications system of the U.S. Northern Command.
[more]
How can anyone thing that Food not Bombs is a threat to society?
I was just browsing the SuperVegan blog, and they had an interesting post on the impact your diet has on animals, the environment and yourself. The article talked about various calculators on the EatingGreen.org website to figure this stuff out for yourself.
So I thought I’d give the one titled “Eating Green calculator” a try. There was no option to say that I ate a vegan diet, and only presented me with meat and dairy choices, so I didn’t type anything and simply hit enter. It then threw up this amusing error -
Please double check your entries — some of the data was either missing or not valid.
Serving sizes must be between 0 and 40.
I’m sure it’s a programming bug, or did the US government finally jump the shark and make meat consumption mandatory?
The other calculator “Score Your Diet” did much better and at least had vegetables, nuts, beans etc listed.
Cool T-shirt on Cafepress.
Reads “My Heroes Have Always Been Vegetarian”
