Free Vegan Food? What do you think?

[okka north]

What would you all say to coming along to sample free vegan food? Come and see for yourselves at the Free Vegan Food Fayre at The Quaker Meeting House, 10 St. James Street, Sheffield. Saturday 9th December, 12-3.30pm.

 

This can only be a positive day! Free tasty food that doesn't harm animals, is better for the enviroinment and your health. Organised by Animal Aid and Sheffield Animal Friends. Who's coming?

 

 

Don't care what the food is called or the ethics of it, well actually do consider the ethics and the air miles, but don't care for labels. As long as it dosen't involve oysters, raw tomato or soggy type food, I am happy to give it a go. Is that near the blood bank or somewhere close to the big church on West Street?

[duckweed]

Meeting House is between Blood bank and Cathedral.

[plekhanov]

oh, you cant have wine, cos wine is clarified with isinglass, made from the bladders of sturgeon fish, or egg whites, or geletin, all animal in origin. you could perhaps drink cloudy wine.

 

.........how surreal is this thread??

There's plenty of vegan wine, increasingly info as to whether it's vege or vegan safe is on the back label, the Co-op & tesco both do so on quite a lot of their own brand wine.

[pinklady]

I'll be there ... will they be giving veggie recipes out? ... I PERSONALLY LOVE A STEAK BUT MY SONS A VEGGIE

 

oops, sorry for shoutin, locken my caps:hihi:

[plekhanov]

If it's like any vege/vegan event I've ever been to their be recipies and crazy leaflets about the evils of just about all the things you like to eat a plenty.

[CharleyF]

so if we all chose to eat the same narrow range of foods the intensive farming necessary to sustain this would ruin the planet.

 

You mean like meat farming does now? Growing crops to feed to animals and then feeding the animals to humans is much more of a burden on the earth's resources than feeding humans directly with crops and avoiding such inefficient conversion of energy.

 

Large-scale animal production wastes resources such as the water consumed by the animals over their lifetimes, land for crop-growing, land cleared for grazing, the crops themselves (converting 34% of the world's grain into animal manure instead of just eating the crops? Efficient?), then there's the water pollution caused by run-off of said manure from slurry heaps which affects plants and creatures living in rivers, and the fact that farm animals are responsible for 1/3 of the world's methane production, a gas which is 10 times worse than C02 in terms of global warming.

 

It has now been calculated that changing to a vegan or vegetarian diet reduces a person's C02 footprint more than by switching to a hybrid car. (Source: http://www.worldveganday.org/, click on the link to 'Eating the Earth')

 

If anyone's interested in the facts:

 

http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/studies/report-58013.html

http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-30610-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/sc1.html (note the hamburger figures)

http://www.viva.org.uk/guides/planetonaplate.htm

http://www.vegansociety.com/html/environment/

 

And anyway - "narrow range of foods"?? Not in my kitchen :-)

 

Also there are not enough vitamins and minerals in Vegan food to maintain a healthy lifestyle without taking supplements and many people cannot absorb synthetic supplements.

 

The only vitamin, mineral or any other necessary nutrient that is not provided by a vegan diet is vitamin B12, which produced by bacteria and can be obtained through fortified foods.

 

I have had friends who were Vegans and had to give up because it was making them ill.

 

That doesn't make a vegan diet unhealthy, it just means that they probably just didn't learn enough about nutrition. There's a difference between adopting a vegan diet and just stopping eating animal products and not replacing the nutrients with the right kind of plant foods. Either that or they couldn't be bothered to stick with it any more but didn't feel like admitting it.

 

But anyway, back to the original question - nice one, hope it goes well! Btw, I was most impressed with the leaflet I got through my door today about the event :-)

[CharleyF]

I've never quite got my head round why vegans don't eat eggs or honey, the chickens lay the eggs anyway and the bees make the honey, it's not like we're forcing them to.

 

The thing about eggs is that egg-laying chickens are generally kept in poor conditions - not enough space to stretch their wings or carry out natural behaviour, get debeaked so they can't attack other chickens when they get frustrated due to their conditions - and they're only kept for about a year, at the end of which they're worn out due to the rate at which they produce eggs that they can no longer produce enough eggs to be considered profitable, so they're then slaughtered and put in low quality meat products like pies, pet food and so on. Their natural life span would be around 7 years.

 

Also there's the problem that when egg-laying chickens are bred, you get around the same number of male chicks being hatched as females, and as the male chicks are useless to the industry they get either gassed or thrown in a mincer (still alive) at one day old. They can't use them for meat as they're the wrong breeds - chickens bred for meat are selectively bred to grow as fast as possible and egg-layers don't grow at the same rate, so it's not profitable enough keep them for meat.

 

More info: http://www.ciwf.org.uk/campaigns/primary_campaigns/egg-laying.html

[lizzmobile]

Also with eggs, hens only keep laying them if they are removed. They may lay a few eggs per season but not one every day for the best part of a year. It's not natural.

 

I have read that a lot of bees are killed during the collection of honey.

[plekhanov]

That doesn't make a vegan diet unhealthy, it just means that they probably just didn't learn enough about nutrition. There's a difference between adopting a vegan diet and just stopping eating animal products and not replacing the nutrients with the right kind of plant foods. Either that or they couldn't be bothered to stick with it any more but didn't feel like admitting it.

The fact remains though that a strict vegan diet is not an easy one to sustain and make healthy particularly not for growing children and it is much, much more difficult to have a balanced vegan diet than it is a balanced meat eating or even vegetarian one.

[beansforyou]

So, if we just eat the crops and don't eat the animals, there's no reason for the animals to be alive is there?

 

SO they'd be killed, because there's no point in keeping them alive, as this would cost us money in cereals, which we'd want to be eating...

 

So do we just kill all the animals and not eat them?

 

We can't set them free as they'd either 1.die or 2.breed too much and become vermin.

 

 

If it wasn't for man being a carnivore most of the species alive today would be extinct, or never have been bred.

 

Sure people have their own lifestyle choices to make and i'm all for it, thats great, nock yourself out with celery n stuff. What really gets my goat is those people who then push their 'beliefs' onto animals by trying to make their 'pet' dog / cat vegan!! so much for allowing the animals to live naturally

 

 

I remember one of my ex's was a raging 'Vegan' until I started pointing out his beer had fish in it, etc..he used to get so angry

 

Nothing like an angry stick thin 'vegan' to make you realise how bizarre humans really are.