3 weeks ago i started the 21 day vegan kickstart diet. mostly i stuck to it. no cheese (which for me was the hardest thing to give up). no eggs (which meant no sweet baked good too). i still have a drop of milk in my coffee. and i still eat yoghurt - haven't found a soya yoghurt here that i like.
i have to decide how strict i'm going to be from now on. newfoundland, outside of st. john's, is a hard place to be vegan. it's definitely a fish and meat based diet. the grocery stores carry some vegan alternatives now (when i moved here over 30 years ago (as a vegetarian) it was very difficult to eat well). most restaurants have no vegetarian options on the menu so if i become vegan now it will be harder to go out to eat.
aside from a vegan diet being the healthiest for me, i'm finding it harder to turn a blind eye to the treatment of most kept animals. and what it does to the planet. and the hypocrisy of my spinning with animal fibres... so this is my dilemma.
4 comments:
Could you be more specific about "the hypocrisy of spinning animal fibres"?
As far as it goes, a good farmer does no harm to the sheep when raising them for the fleece - many treat them like part of the family. Cotton, bamboo and other plant fibres are often much more detrimental to the environment in terms of the processing that they require to make a useable fibre. I don't think it is such a cut and dry situation.
Have to admit, I have never understood the anti-wool, vegan perspective. We all do harm, even eating plants only (as a farmer friend said, you don't think some little bunnies weren't killed harvesting that wheat (or whatever)." Unless you know ALL the farmers you buy from, or grow it all yourself, then you are, for sure, complicit in doing harm. And even then.
It is a question of drawing lines, but that gets very tricky, very fast!
I'd love to hear more....
in case you don't already know, there is a powdered egg substitute that works marvelously for baking- look in the baking aisle of sobeys or foodland. Freddy is allergic to eggs, and I have been using it for years now.
As for the treatment of kept animals? Just get yourself a pet sheep and treat it with kindness and love, then chop off a handful of fleece when he's not looking!
One of the Pixar short films is made about a sheep being very embarrased about his pinkness after being sheared- if you haven't already seen it, look it up!
I grew up in Newfoundland and always had a terrible time eating because the diet of my family never suited me (whenever I would try to eat the same way they would [fish, salt beef, pork, etc) I'd get incredibly sick). Whenever I go back, that's the only thing I dread about home. Last summer I brought a 3lbs bag of quinoa with me so at the very least I knew I had something that wasn't all white flour or cooked in salt meat.
Have you been to The Sprout in St. John's yet? I went for the first time last summer and was completely charmed by it. I wish they had that kind of joint around 15 years ago because I probably would have eaten much better as a teenager.
Robyn just asked the same question I was going to ask. From what I have seen and heard from rancher friends, not shearing a sheep is about as cruel as it gets. I have heard that growing and processing cotton requires lots of chemicals...as does making fibers from bamboo, soy, and the other sort of trendy things you see on the market now. I worry more about those things. I refused, for a very long time, to carry super wash wool for this reason. I know I don't know what you're specifically thinking about, but it seems like working with wool is one of the purest things you can do (especially since the kinds of sheep who provide our wool aren't feed lot animals who undoubtedly DO suffer abuse and unnamed horrors). This is a great conversation, I'm glad you brought it up.
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