December 2009

GREETINGS

YES, we did pull off what may have been our best PreThanksgiving Feast ever.

We fed 190 people (which maxed our hall) at the largest and prettiest venue we’ve ever used; we had exactly enough food for everyone; the lines moved smoothly; the food was delicious; we made enough money to keep going for another year and maybe a tad more (the Feast is, after all, our annual fundraiser); and it did look as if a good time was had by all.

A special Thank You goes to all the people who worked to make it happen: Mary Brennan and Josephine, Barb Eisenberg, Mohan Embar, Jean Groshek, Ann Jensen, Barb Mikula, Kathleen Mohr and Andre, Pat O’Neill, Dustin Paluch, Bill and Jan Seybold, Judy and Ron Strampe, Monica Thomas, and most extra specially Jody Johnson who coordinates the food and kitchen, and David Paluch who does the posters and literature and coordinates the signage, as well as Chuck Quigley (and me, who coordinates registration). We could not even begin to bring this feast off without our volunteers.

Also, welcome to those of you who are receiving this for the first time because you signed up on our “For Further Contact” list. This newsletter is how we communicate with interested people; you can either subscribe to the snail-mail publication for $9 per year, or find it each month on our website, marveg.org; a subscription form is found on page 3 if that is your preference.

M.A.R.V. ACTIVITIES

Sunday, Dec. 6, 5 PM, regular potluck at the Friends’ Meeting House, 3224 N. Gordon Pl. in Riverwest (from Humboldt Blvd., go east on Auer a few short blocks to the parking lot).

Food theme is red and green foods. (For anyone new, you can either bring a theme food or anything else).

Other Veg-Friendly Potlucks

The December macrobiotic potluck will be hosted by Allen Owen on Sunday, Dec. 20 at 5 PM at 5310 W. Loomis Rd., RSVP 414-421-1725; this is the annual Christmas potluck.

The Urban Ecology Center’s vegetarian potluck will be on Thursday, Dec. 17, at 6:30 PM at 1500 E. Park Pl. – bring plate and fork as well as your meatless dish. Phone is 414-964-8505.
To find out about Vegan Meetup’s possible December events, check the Vegan Meetup website.

QUOTES OF THE MONTH

“Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

NEWS

Animal foods are still bad for you. An e. coli outbreak in the Northeast forced the recall of over 500,000 pounds of “Fairbank Farms” ground beef. Worries about mad cow disease are still making news: Taiwan lifted its ban on US bone-in beef products and promptly saw mass demonstrations in its streets against that decision; meanwhile, US cattlemen protested to the new Obama administration against Bushera relaxation of measures against Canadian beef, where several cases have been found. Chronic Wasting Disease, the deer equivalent, is up in Wisconsin from about 10% of adult bucks to about 15%. And a different problem with meat came from a study that found lower male fertility in men whose mothers ate lots of beef during their pregnancies with them.

An EPA study found that almost half of all American lakes and reservoirs contain harmful amounts of mercury – which means that fish swimming in them do too, and can poison people who eat them. And the Obama administration ran into a bit of a buzz-saw when it proposed to ban raw oysters harvested during warm months along the Gulf Coast in an effort to keep about 15 people each year from dying after eating contaminated ones. A different water issue involves water use in California, where the legislature, faced with a booming population and decreasing water supplies, passed a series of bills aimed at overhauling the whole system of the state’s water usage.

A different issue involves milk: we have reported that the Cornucopia Institute sued Aurora dairy for its violations of its organic license; now industry groups have filed briefs in the case asking that Aurora not be disciplined (even though its “organic” milk under WalMart, Costco, and other labels really is not what people expect “organic” to be).

An interesting article in Wisconsin State Farmer described how an Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection agency meeting was attended by a number of citizens demanding a greater say in the rules permitting confinement animal operations, and more attention to ecological, human-health, and property-value issues in making such decisions. Ethanol too is coming under fire: on the one hand, the demand for ethanol as a renewable fuel is not up to expectations, while on the other hand the number of Americans who lack food security is on the increase due to the recession. Both these statistics do suggest that government subsidies should be redirected away from using food as fuel and towards making food affordable to eat.

On a different note, the Vegetarian Resource Group did another survey to try to find out how many vegetarians there are in the US. Their results suggest that about 3.4 % of Americans never eat meat, poultry, or seafood, .8% of Americans are vegan and another 1.3% would be vegan if they didn’t eat honey. This includes people who never make exceptions; it is known that there are much larger numbers who eat meat only occasionally.

And this is good, because plant foods are still good for you. One recent study found that soy consumption helps reduce the risk of prostate cancer, while another suggests that daily soy consumption helps prevent breast cancer. And a study by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine found that study participants on a vegan diet lowered their heart disease risk better than those on an American Diabetes Association omnivorous diet.

This month it was NY Times writer Jane Brody who spent a column discussing bone health and the ways in which eating animal protein contributes to bone loss and thus increases risk of osteoporotic bones fractures; getting plenty of vegetables and fruits, and most or all of one’s protein from plant sources, is becoming very clear as a primary tactic for keeping one’s bones strong.

An interesting tidbit was the news item that the Moldovan army, concerned about swine flu, is issuing garlic and onions to its soldiers to keep them healthy. And Prevention magazine addressed the cold and flu season with advice to eat nutritious foods to combat both colds and fevers (in contrast to the old “feed a cold, starve a fever” dictum). Another article suggested foods that can help people stay healthy; these included yogurt (or soygurt) with active cultures, garlic, black and green tea, mushrooms of any sort, and omega-3 fatty acids (the article named fish, but vegetarians can eat dark green leafy vegetables, ground flax seeds and their oil, walnuts, and hemp oil instead).

A different item praised green tea: it is already known to be good for the skin and help fight cancer, and now a study found that drinking 4 cups a day helped exercisers decrease abdominal fat more than other caffeinated drinks; other “flat-belly” foods mentioned in the same article were whole grains and nuts.

Another item noted that freeze-dried fruits and vegetables are especially high in vitamins and minerals. And still another explained that sesame seeds are good for joints, sunflower seeds help prevent sun damage to skin, and ground flaxseed is good for the heart.

THE VEGGIE TABLE

Chuck and I have discovered a restaurant that is new to us, and which we like a lot.

Royal Garden is a Chinese restaurant at 206 W. Silver Spring Drive in Glendale, open daily: 11 AM to 9 PM Mon. through Thurs., 11 AM to 9:30 PM Fri. and Sat., and noon to 9 PM Sun., telephone 414-906-0998, website royalgardenchinese.com. The restaurant’s delivery service is available 11:30 AM to 9 PM. Lunch and dinner are served, and we were able to order from the menu even during the lunch buffet hours (an important point, since the buffet has mostly meat dishes).

The cuisine includes Mandarin, Szechuan, Cantonese, and Hunan dishes. Six of the seven dishes on the “Vegetables” section of the menu are vegan, and there is also a vegetable lo mein, a vegetable pan fried noodle dish, and vegetable chop suey and subgum; the “diet lunch specials” include steamed broccoli with mushrooms, and steamed mixed vegetables. So there is a significant variety available. We have eaten there several times, and each time we found the dishes very tasty, and each one had a different taste and character. A number of dishes are marked as “hot and spicy,” but a note indicates that any dish can be prepared either spicy or mild, and that no MSG is used.

DIALOG

I mentioned in last month’s issue that I had found a vitamin D3 supplement labeled vegetarian. Questions were raised, and I have now learned that it comes from sheep’s wool. I figure the vegetarian label came from the fact that no meat or even animal cruelty is involved in this product: sheep are neither killed nor hurt in being sheared. I guess it all depends on whether your orientation is animal rights (“no animals should be exploited/used by us”) or animal welfare (“no animals should be unduly hurt for us”).

It is an interesting distinction, and one that is examined in a new book, Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer is a novelist whose first child’s birth sent him on a 3-year investigation to decide whether to feed his family meat or not; after exposure to factory farming he decided not to, and has lately been writing about it a good bit. But in the course of his research he also met with people who do raise animals for meat in a genuinely humane way that gives full scope for the animals’ natural behaviors and comfort while they live and insists on a genuinely humane death for them. And while Foer has decided for himself just not to eat meat or factory-farm food at all, he does acknowledge that which orientation you start from can lead you to a different choice which is defensible from your point of view.

One of the people Foer interviewed was Nicolette Hahn Niman, a vegetarian who married a humanely-practicing rancher and became fully involved in the operation (though she is herself still vegetarian). And interestingly, she was the author of a recent NY Times op-ed article, in which she argued that operations like hers, which graze animals entirely on grass in areas that would be grasslands in any case are neither that bad for the environment nor very heavy contributors to greenhouse gasses (no machinery use for growing feed or transporting it, or nitrous oxide emissions from manmade fertilizers). Her article – and another by one Gary Steiner who complained of loneliness as an ethical vegan – predictably generated a raft of responses from people with radically differing degrees of willingness to give up meat. One was from someone who pointed out that responsible hunting of overpopulated wild animals is a very “green” activity. Another complained that if meat was only available from such farms as Niman’s, it could not possibly be as affordable or as abundant as is now the case.

Perhaps that is exactly what’s needed. Many of the objections to meat-eating do center on factory farming, which is surely an abomination as well as an ecological disaster. If only heritage breeds of meat animals were raised, and only in perfectly humane ways within the carrying capacity of land that could not feed people in any other way, there would be a lot less meat, which would improve human and ecological health while reducing animal suffering. On the other hand, this would still be wholly unsatisfactory to anyone who objects to animal foods on animal rights grounds.