"If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud." ~ Emile Zola
November 1st is not only World Vegan Day, but kicks off World Vegan Month and Vegan Month of Food (Vegan MoFo)! :)
What is "vegan"?
A "vegan" is someone who chooses to live free from animal products for compassion and peace, health, the planet (or any combination of these things). A vegan diet is easy and healthy, based on fruits and vegetables, grains, beans and legumes. Vegans choose to save the lives of other living beings each time they eat or shop! They do not consume meat, fish, eggs, dairy, honey (some vegans do eat honey) or any other food that is derived from an animal or processed using animal ingredients (such as bone char used to refine some sugars and salt). Most vegans do not use or wear any products that are tested on animals or that are derived from an animal, like wool, fur, silk, and leather.Have you thought about trying a vegan lifestyle? Try it for one meal, one day, one week, or one month to see if being vegan is the right choice for you! Take the first step by taking the "Vegan Pledge!"
I made these yummy, super simple vegan pumkin cupcakes for Halloween yesterday! Delish!
Here are just a few of my favorite resources for vegan information and recipes. Check my blog throughout this week for more resources for vegan living!
Compassionate Cooks
International Vegetarian Union
Live Vegan
Post Punk Kitchen (PPK)
The Vegan Society
Vegan Outreach
VegWeb
Free Vegan Starter Kit
Happy World Vegan Day!
Today is October 15th and Blog Action Day 2010! Powered by change.org, this year's Blog Action Day will bring together thousands of bloggers from all over the world to help shed more light on water issues around the globe.
Here are some facts that illustrate the severity of the global water problem, and why Blog Action Day 2010 is such an important opportunity to raise awareness about the issue:
* Unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation kills more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Unclean drinking water can incubate some pretty scary diseases, like E. coli, salmonella, cholera and hepatitis A. Given that bouquet of bacteria, it's no surprise that water, or rather lack thereof, causes 42,000 deaths each week.
* More people have access to a cell phone than to a toilet. Today, 2.5 billion people lack access to toilets. This means that sewage spills into rivers and streams, contaminating drinking water and causing disease.
* Every day, women and children in Africa walk a combined total of 109 million hours to get water. They do this while carrying cisterns weighing around 40 pounds when filled in order to gather water that, in many cases, is still polluted. Aside from putting a great deal of strain on their bodies, walking such long distances keeps children out of school and women away from other endeavors that can help improve the quality of life in their communities.
* The average American uses 159 gallons of water every day – more than 15 times the average person in the developing world. From showering and washing our hands to watering our lawns and washing our cars, Americans use a lot of water. To put things into perspective, the average five-minute shower will use about 10 gallons of water. Now imagine using that same amount to bathe, wash your clothes, cook your meals and quench your thirst. One of the most negative impacts upon the global state of water is animal agriculture and the consumption of meat and other animal-derived foods. Subsequently, transitioning to a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle is one of the most critical actions you can take to help shift ongoing degradation of the world's water supply (and the environment as a whole). Here are some important reasons to go vegan or vegetarian for water, for the planet, and for and all of its inhabitants:
* It takes 6.3 gallons of water to produce just one hamburger. That 6.3 gallons covers everything from watering the wheat for the bun and providing water for the cow to cooking the patty and baking the bun. And that's just one meal! It would take over 184 billion gallons of water to make just one hamburger for every person in the United States. (Blog Action Day 2010)
* The livestock sector is probably the largest contributor of water pollution, the major sources being animal waste, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and pesticides used for animal feed crops, and sediments from eroded pastures. (EcoHearth)
* The largest amount of water the agriculture sector uses for livestock is to provide them with food. The feed production industry uses huge amounts of water to irrigate the land on which food is grown for all these animals, which have been bred to provide people products like meat, dairy and eggs. It has been estimated that the livestock sector may account for about 45 percent of the global budget of water used in food production (source Zimmer and Renault 2003). (Vegan Peace)
* Plant-based diets only require around one-third of the land and water needed to produce a typical Western diet. Farmed animals consume much more protein, water and calories than they produce, so far greater quantities of crops and water are needed to produce animal ‘products’ to feed humans than are needed to feed people direct on a plant-based diet. With water and land becoming scarcer globally, world hunger increasing and the planet’s population rising, it is much more sustainable to eat plant foods direct than use up precious resources feeding farmed animals. (Vegan Society)
* In most of the developing world, untreated manure enters water used by people for drinking, washing and bathing. Along with the manure flow lots of other undesirables including pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, and their breakdown products, not to mention the surplus of nitrogen and phosphorus coming from fertilizers placed on the feed crops. All of this livestock-related influx upsets balance in nature. It can lead to fish kills and algal blooms which can deaden lakes. (Vegetarian Resource Group)
* It takes 5,000 gallons (18,900 Litres)of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons (94.5 Litres).A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons (1134 Litres) of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons(15,120 Litres) of water per day. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year. (useecofriendlyproducts.com)
While these facts may be grim, there is hope for real solutions as more and more people around the world are waking up to the clean water crisis. It's not too late to join the efforts of Blog Action Day 2010! By registering your blog, sharing something you've written or come across about water, embedding an action widget, signing the petition, fundraising for clean water and spreading the word, you're helping shed light on an often over-looked, yet incredibly important issue.
Be a part of this amazing day of blog activism!
I've been vegan for over 11 years now. Originally, I went vegetarian without knowing much about it other than that it involved choosing not to eat animals. I became vegan a year or two later for health reasons (milk allergy and lactose intolerance), again, not really knowing much about it. My understanding and knowledge about being vegan has grown a thousandfold since then. Once I started meeting other people who were veg/vegan, my whole idea about it changed. Through reading, asking questions, and listening well, I became more educated about veganism and the impact on the planet and on animals themselves of consuming living creatures for food and utilizing them for human purposes. I choose it as a lifestyle now for deep ethical, spiritual, and moral reasons. Every year I have been vegan, my veganism and the ethics, morals, and beliefs that have formed around it and because of it have grown more complex and more deeply ingrained.
Today I am vegan because I want to try my best to honor and respect all beings as equally deserving of compassion, love, and freedom. Being vegan is about intentionally living compassionately and with love toward all beings, and choosing a way of being in the world that has as little and as positive an impact as possible. I am vegan to give back to Earth, to help to heal it rather than take from it. I am vegan to maintain a healthy mind, body, spirit, and soul. As best as I can, I want to live as an example of how to walk tenderly, harm minimally, love fully, and lead with a compassionate heart, and to learn from others who are doing the same. Living compassionately spreads love. I am vegan to hopefully help to counter all of the fear, hatred, and cruelty out there with peace, kindness, and openness, while also attempting to make up for my own negative crap I send into the world.
My reasons for being vegan aren't all pretty and all about love and peace and happy-happy, joy-joy, though. There's an ugly, insidious part of it. Every day, millions of animals endure intense, incomprehensible suffering or die lonely, prolonged, painful deaths at the hands of humans who treat them as worthless objects. Animals have souls, too. They are sentient beings that think and feel and hurt, develop lasting communities and families, and build strong attachments and loving relationships. Most of us live in a society where exploitation of animals for human purposes is not only condoned and justified but also turned a blind eye to, the experience of many other marginalized populations around the globe.
On farms, in rodeos or circuses, in puppy mills or fur farms, trapped in a pharmaceutical lab or the home of a callous pet owner, or hunted in the wild, so many animals are destined for lives filled with chronic abuse and neglect, hurt and confusion, grief and loss, and mistreatment of unimaginable proportions. And related industries like factory farming wreak havoc and destruction on the health of the environment and people. Most experience horrible, prolonged, painful deaths. I feel that any use of animal products on my part says that I'm okay with this, puts a stamp of approval on animal cruelty to further human ends and reinforces living beings being treated as objects. And from an energetic standpoint, the last thing I want to put in my body is any animal product that carries with it the trauma of a life and/or death of tragic suffering. For me, being vegan is a way of giving the animals a voice and honoring their lives so that they are no forgotten- they so desperately deserve and need that. I definitely do not live a "perfect" vegan life, if there is such a thing. I am fallible, and I find it hard as hell and pretty near impossible to be 100% vegan 100% of the time. But I try with all of me to do so.
It's kinda been a natural progression to move toward eliminating everything reasonably possible from my life that isn't compassionate, including materials used in creating my art and jewelry. Anything else feels 'unnatural' and incongruent with who I am, what I care about, and the impact (or lack of one) I want to make in the world. Plus, I put so much of my true self into creating things that to me (and hopefully others) are pure and convey beautiful things. Cruelty isn't beautiful. Materials that are derived from cruel methods or that dishonor other beings aren't beautiful.
Living a vegan lifestyle is strongly aligned with my spiritual and religious beliefs. I am a yogi and a Buddhist, as well as an advocate of rights for all beings, humans and animals and plants and the planet. Animals, human beings, and the planet- all are one, and in essence, of the same energy and spirit. I also don't think humans are any less valuable or have any less potential to be pure of heart and spirit than animals- we're all created equal and are all sacred beings. We just have much more of a chance and likelihood to become deluded or or lost and disconnected from love and compassion. Anyway, all of that stuff is entwined with being vegan for me, really hard to separate out.
I don't judge people for not living a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle. At any given time, everyone falls on a spectrum in terms of global awareness and what compassion means to them. That tends to change for people as they go through life and have different experiences. Each of us makes the decision that is best for us at the time, something only we can know. In my opinion, it's compassionate awareness, living from the heart, and deep understanding of the impact of choice and the consequences of inaction that are most important- how we live our lives tends to naturally follow intention and thought. The heart is never wrong.
