Haha, after bragging on this week’s porncast about hitting a 5 day a week post schedule for a while now, what’s the first thing I go and do? Yeah, skip 2 days. I have excuses, but that’s all they are. Thankfully, Amanda has my back: the cattlemen are getting worried! Well, they were worried in October, which is when the link is from, but they’re probably terrified now.
It seems there’s some contest encouraging people to make up healthy recipes for kids or something. Honestly, I don’t know, exactly. I mean, I read the rules, but it starts right off saying that bribes won’t help (but not that they don’t hurt,) and the top prize is only $3,000, and I don’t even write really good blog posts for less than 5, really (this one’s a freebie, and you get what you pay for, you porn searching fiend, you.)
What I do know is this: 1) the recipe categories have theme ingredients, 2) none of these theme ingredients are meat, and 3) the cattlemen are upset, as per the first link.
Why are they upset? Well, it’s probably pretty obvious, but let’s hear it in their words, straight from the secondary source: “By excluding meat from its healthy kids recipe contest, USDA continues to add to the misconception that meat is over consumed in the U.S.”
Now, I thought pretty much everything was over consumed, but let’s think about that for a minute. What do you suppose the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association would consider to be the correct amount of consumption? Their job is to raise beef sales, right? Logically, if consumption is at x pounds per person, then their job would be to get that number to x+1. And once it’s at x+1, well, x+2 is looking to be a good target. In other words, as an unbiased opinion on the proper amount of beef to consume, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association is about as accurate as I am (Me: zero. Them: all of it.)
Also, this complaint was found in Beef Magazine, which was reprinting a story from the Texas Cattle Feeders Association’s October 1 newsletter. There was a call to submit beef-based recipes to the contest to “show beef working in a healthy diet,” and with the semi-finalists being announced March 1 we’ve got a while to wait to see if anyone from the industry actually steps up and does something other than whine.
(As an aside, while tracking that trail I learned that only 18% of Americans know the proper temperature for cooking beef safely and yet 95% of Americans eat red meat. If I were American I’d proudly be in that ignorant 82%, but I’ve got a little less at stake.)
Yes, a while between shows. Not two months though! That would have been terrible.
Today’s podcast covers an amazing line of topics, and I even edited out the big embarrassing bit where I couldn’t find the thing I wanted to talk about and sang a song about suing me to get my vegan airplane to fill in the space. Lost to history forever, who will think of the children, pass the peanuts, and so on.
Apparently Sarah Palin made a snuff film, says a guy who doesn’t like Sarah Palin, and I’ve got to say I liked the hunter’s response better, but that’s partly because it exposed once again the biggest problem with hunting that the pro-gun group never likes to talk about.
From Palin on reality TV we moved on to Palin and the food lobby, with several amusing responses to proposed dietary guidelines from the PR groups that promote sugar, salt, and dairy (their response was particularly interesting…)
Then a brief segue into Wal-Mart, which has nothing to do with veganism but could be the future of big meat company legal defence strategies if and when a food safety mishap kill millions. Bookmark this page, because it’s bad form to follow the death of millions with an I told you so.
And finally, there seems to be some way to triple your testosterone with a cheap plant-based drink, but I’m too scared to try it. Not because of the testosterone, but because of the consequences of single-vegetable juicing based on a really bad experience I’m sharing with you today.
Today’s show runs for almost 24 minutes, and you can subscribe in iTunes here to get it automatically (or grab the podcast rss if that’s how you roll,) or of course you can listen directly here:
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I’m not sure how I missed this back in April, but Amanda sent me a reminder of the time that Anthony Coffman went nuts in a grocery store and destroyed a bunch of meat, some of it with a hunting knife, which has a weird poetry to it. Damages to the store: $200. Damages to everyone in the area’s perception of vegetarianism: priceless.
It’s funny, when someone kills someone with a crossbow, the bow and arrow people try to distance themselves, while to the rest of us they’re pretty much the same group. When vegetarians do something weird, vegans don’t tend to call them out as much. No idea why that is, but that’s veganism for you: we’re more loyal than Green Arrow.
Anyway, Amanda suggested a proper punishment for Coffman would be to get shot “in the nads with a tofu cannon,” and that reminds me of some feedback I got this week about Spawn Better, our vegan parenting site, where someone said that they imagined the Council of Vegan Parents to be like that tribunal at the beginning of Superman 2 where Zod and his gang got sent to the phantom zone (yes, two superhero references in one post, but isn’t Coffman like a crazy super villain here?)
This totally has to happen: forget the vegan police, I want Vegan Court. Defendants will stand in one of those spinny ring things like this:
But instead of Marlon Brando, it’ll be some vegan dude with a tofu cannon. Aimed at your nads. And after the shot is fired he’ll shout KNEEL because it’s what one does when one mentions Zod.
The Book of Vegan Law hasn’t been written yet, but it won’t get in the way of the pettiness of the vegan police. Stuff like making vegans look bad by being a vegetarian who messes up a grocery store is pretty universally recognized as a tofu-nadding offence, I reckon.
This is a quickie for today, because I’m tired. And The Simpsons already did the joke, which I’ll repeat in a moment: Former Rep. William Jefferson was busted a while back for bribery or conspiracy or something else that cops and lawyers would be able to tell you about, but it doesn’t matter really; the point of the tale is that he hid the avails of his crimes in veggie burger packages in his freezer.
Does anyone else remember the Lisa the Vegetarian episode of The Simpsons, where at the end Apu had his hidden staircase behind a fake display of non-alcoholic beer, and Lisa asks what he does when someone wants a non-alcoholic beer, and Apu says it’s never come up? Well, William Jefferson, welcome to 2010, where people actually want veggie burgers.
Seriously, if you have a fast food chain near you that serves veggie burgers, at least ones that are any good, sit near the counter and listen in on orders. There simply aren’t enough vegetarians and vegans out there to make up the demand I’m hearing around here, which means the things are going pretty mainstream. I just wish I knew why – not that I think they suck, I’m just too lazy to survey some customers and understand what’s driving them away from meat, if just for one meal…
You’re right, they’re probably hoping to receive a bag containing thousands of dollars that was poorly hidden by someone not up on current market trends. Damn, I need to go shopping.
Café owners, current and future: be sure your offerings are vegan, or you’ll run the risk of using contaminated tuna in your sandwiches. Which you’ll run the risk of selling in an order of about a hundred. Which you’ll run the risk of delivering to police officers. Of whom you’ll run the risk of making 47 ill.
Police officers don’t like to be poisoned, as it turns out, and Muriel Morris has been given a four month suspended sentence, a curfew, and an electronic monitoring device so police will know if she gets within 5 feet of a loaf of bread. OK, probably just so they’ll know if she breaks curfew – it’s not fair to tag all the loaves of bread because of one person’s mistake. Incidentally, I need one of those electronic monitoring devices for my keys, but I don’t want to poison 47 cops to get one – er, I don’t want my keys to poison 47 cops.
The solution is obvious to me, but so are many things and nobody’s elected me world ruler yet: if you’re going to run a café, make it a vegan one, and it’ll be 100% free of contaminated tuna. You might think that cops will never order 100 vegan sandwiches, but that just means you haven’t been listening: all the sandwiches will be vegan because every café owner will follow my advice. It’s the least they can do, really.
McRib, McShrib. Come to think of it, lots of foods would become limited edition if more people went vegan.
Gosh, the internet sure likes lists, don’t they? I’m still waiting for “8 letters that come before I in the alphabet” but in the meantime we get things like 9 Limited-Edition Foods with Cult Followings. Interestingly, that list was taken from a Woman’s Day article listing 10 items, but for whatever reason they chose to remove a beer from the list. The beer is Barnivore-approved, so I submit it not as an example of Yahoo! not wanting to promote alcohol but rather as another example of the global anti-vegan conspiracy.
Or maybe they just wanted to leave room so I could add a limited-edition food to the list. Are you ready? Here it is:
Any vegan menu item at any major restaurant chain.
We rejoice when a chain adds a vegan item to the menu, but we’re generally quiet when it gets pulled. We make excuses like “I try to support local vegan businesses” or whatever, conveniently forgetting how excited we were when things like the vegan brownie came to Starbucks (even if it looked kind of poopy.)
New food items of any kind take a lot of work to gain traction, and by work I mean major marketing dollars, and the sales levels the companies are looking for simply aren’t the kinds of things the vegan community can sustain on its own – sorry folks, we’re simply not big enough, and 1% of the market isn’t going to be able to move that needle far enough even if we try to convince (or double dare) our non-vegan friends to try new things.
Thankfully, product managers seem to have short memories, or simply move on to new jobs, and it’s just a matter of time before the new guy thinks that vegans would be a good market to cater to. And it begins again. Every once in a while, something sticks, and the company rejoices (food illness scares are generally, but not always, lower with vegan products, as are ingredient prices.) Over time, a very long time, vegan selection improves.
In the meantime, enjoy your limited edition whatevers while you can – each time you try them really might be the last.
I wrote about this back in October when it just seemed like a silly notion, but Amanda wrote in to remind me that Chris Voigt, Executive Director of the Washington State Potato Commission, has completed his stated mission of eating nothing but potatoes for 60 days. To meet his caloric needs, he had to eat 20 a day, and not much else besides seasoning and oil for cooking (which I think is cheating a bit but they’re his rules, so there you go.)
Worst. 60 day vegan challenge. Ever.
Still, kudos to Voigt. I really like beer, but I don’t think I could drink it every day for 60 days, even as part of a varied diet. I don’t care how much you live potatoes, you don’t love them as much as I love beer, so by this very academic proof you can see that eating potatoes every day would be terribly hard, and that’s with other foods. This guy ate just potatoes, and I know potatoes are kind of his job, but that just makes it harder really, taking work home with you and all that. It’d be like if I ate nothing but porn for 60 days.
As stunts go, it’s refreshing to see a vegan one, even if it’s just incidentally vegan. I don’t know if we’ll see any other ones anytime soon – the thousand monkey theory of the internet kind of dictates that all food stunts will occur in time, and if we’re lucky the non-vegan ones will paint omnivore food in a negative light as Super Size Me did, but who knows?
Anyway, it’s from midway through his campaign, but Amanda sent in an interview with Voigt that’s a lot more readable than his website, and pretty darned interesting.
Now enough about this guy. My kid’s been eating the same food for 6 months now. His whole life, actually. Someone oughta interview him, he’s a frigging genius, I tell you.
This is the look of a man who's come to peace with what he's done, isn't it?
Well, not jailed, but convicted and soon to be sentenced: Stephen Trevor Montgomery has been found guilty, by a jury, of a host of charges that don’t include theft but all started when he tried to walk out of a supermarket with a family pack of steaks stuffed down the front of his pants.
As people do.
Well, maybe they do. I don’t know. I’ve been vegan for so long I can’t remember the correct way to transport steaks. I think you’re supposed to pay for them though, which Stephen didn’t, which resulted in a scuffle. And, uh, national security. Yes, national security was at risk. Hear me out:
This happened in America, and with the recent security changes in airports, the solution is clear: the TSA must expand their mandate to supermarkets. Full body naked scanners for all! Well, except for vegans. We’d get a pass somehow, because duh, why would we steal steak?
Admittedly, this is just a lame attempt on my part to divert security attention to meat eaters, because, well, really I just wanted to show the Spinal Tap clip about plant-based airport security:
I haven’t seen that in a while, so thank you, Steven Trevor Montgomery, for inspiring me. Next time, please consider stuffing a more humane grocery item down your pants, like a cauliflower or a dozen lemons.
This doesn't look like yogurt, but it apparently has something to do with oil sands. Any more investigation would constitute research. Ew.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers has saved itself some embarrassment over some recent ad campaigns after the Advertising Standards people said they weren’t misleading, despite complaints from the Sierra Club of Canada.
How awesome is that?
Oh, let me explain: the ads said that tailings from the oil sands were “essentially like yogurt.”
Some people felt that the ads were trying to compare the tailings to a healthy food, but according to the decision, that’s not the case, and I don’t know how many nutritionists are on the standards committee, but I’m declaring yogurt as healthy as oil sands tailings.
Janet Annesley, CAPP’s vice-president of communications, had this to say: “if some members of the activist community believe we are suggesting tailings are good to eat, that is not our intent,” and clearly, one can interpret this as a condemnation of yogurt.
Folks, did you ever want to just put all the lobbyists from all the industries in a tiny room together, and, I don’t know, Rick Roll them for a few hours? Wow, me too!
I know very little about the oil sands, and frankly, I don’t know much about the health advantages or disadvantages of yogurt. I don’t eat the stuff, there are soy versions available, and it’s easier to roll it into the animal cruelty argument anyway.
Except now I can compare them to oil sand tailings, which I find irresistible. If you’re trying to give up any dairy products, this would be a good comparison to draw up in your head. Frankly, you probably won’t have to imagine it for long: some dairy marketer is going to get confused about the issue and release black tar yogurt. Uh, as a product in stores, not out of his or her butt. I just need to make that clear. Because you see, I am in fact 3 years old at times.
I know it’s not Wednesday, so this is a little early for Business Time, but I just read the most fascinating stat about McDonald’s and their Happy Meal.
Apparently, the thing accounts for less than 10% of annual sales. Now, for some reason the article seems to accept “less than” as “9.999%” from the way they’re talking about it and comparing it to sales figures from other companies, but that’s advertising people for you (zing!)
Still, given that most Happy Meal customers don’t come into the store by themselves, the box with the toy and the debatable food is a powerful lure to bring in adult-sized food orders as well, so let’s call it 10%.
This is the part where I get edumacational and point out that decimate doesn’t mean the same thing as obliterate, like many people seem to think, but rather the removal of one in ten, and yes, common usage generally wins out, but my story sounds better if we go with the old school version.
Here, clearly, is how you kill 10% of McDonald’s business (leaving them with only 28 billion in sales, true, but the profits from young children feed vampires more than your money): remove the Happy Meal. They tried in San Francisco, but maybe it’s enough for some other company to win the kids over. You know, like how Friendster lost to MySpace which lost to Facebook which lost to Vegan Porn Sexy Book Club? OK, the last part is merely my dream.
And it might not be too hard for someone to do someday: it’s inexplicable to me, but while 37% of kids surveyed picked McDonald’s as their favourite restaurant, the runner up at (granted, a distant) 10% was Subway. Maybe the subs can be swung like swords, I don’t know. I don’t have to understand kids who eat solids yet. Burger King came in third with 8%, and you’ve got to figure there are a lot of other entries with tiny percentages, since we’ve got 45 percents left to play with.
Or maybe, just maybe, I can be optimistic, and reckon that parents are starting to at least make a “do as I say, not as I do” play and are going to stop taking their kids to McDonald’s, which means it’ll be less of a connection when they get older, and in the end only weird people will go there. Kinda like cigarettes, yeah?
Yes, a while between shows. Not two months though! That would have been terrible.
But instead of Marlon Brando, it’ll be some vegan dude with a tofu cannon. Aimed at your nads. And after the shot is fired he’ll shout 
