Just a quickie today: is it weird to anyone else that there’s a movement to rename type I diabetes and a movement to rename high fructose corn syrup? No? Just me? I know the two aren’t especially related, but still, it seems like a weird connection. Because I read too many stories, mostly.
More irrelevant news tomorrow, irreverently.
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Perhaps this could be the compromise to get things rolling?
Eons ago, we tracked the career of Takeru Kobayashi, a competitive eater from Japan who held various records for most hot dogs eaten in a certain amount of time. In fact, it was pretty much the only thing we’d put in the “diet and fitness” category here, mostly because that was very very funny.
But today, the laughter stopped.
No, just kidding, it’s still going, and it’s vegan: Kobayashi was at an event last weekend in Toronto, of all places (hint: that’s VP’s home base) to promote some new Donkey Kong game, and he performed his eating magic for the crowd – by eating bananas.
16 bananas in 1 minute, actually, which is pretty impressive, especially for this fact: they’re not hot dogs.
Granted, it’d be hard to rationalize hot dog eating to promote a video game about a big gorilla, but I’ve decided to be overly optimistic about this: could this be the secret to opening the world of competitive eating to all?
Bananas just make so much more sense than hot dogs, for competitive eaters and “regular folks” alike. They’re safer, people can tell you what they’re made of, and for some of these competitors, it might be the only fiber they get in a week – which would make the post-competition phase almost as much of a spectator sport as the main event, frankly. No, not watching them poo. Watching them digest, that’s all. That’s all.
Incidentally, this would be the second vegan-friendly competitive eating event to be held in Toronto. The first is the annual (there’ve been 2 or 3) spicy dosa eating contest, which I don’t go to see because that little voice in my head that makes me do unwise things also really loves dosas. I hereby proclaim Toronto to be the vegan competitive eating capital of the world, and if you object, please submit your complaints on edible stationery.
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It's not the school I mind, it's the damned Big Mac theme song that they keep chanting at the football matches...
Remember when people would get upset about fast food getting to close to the classroom? Yeah, things have gotten a bit beyond that, with McDonald’s set to offer its own university program. I’m not talking Hamburger University here either – this is an accredited degree course at Manchester Metropolitan University, whose new slogan is probably officially something to do with getting fries with that.
I don’t know if the program is available to the general student body or just McDonald’s staff, but I do see from their website that MMU offers a degree in Honours Business Sandwich, so there’s that. It’s not clear what’s actually in the sandwich, so for clarity vegans should petition for the more obvious Honours Business Salad, and if someone can get on that I’d appreciate it.
Despite the easy jokes (OK, I make them look easy, but that’s just the years of training kicking in,) the course doesn’t seem to have much to do with flipping burgers – it’s a management program, for managers, who will learn how to manage, likely in a managerial fashion.
And I’m sure there’s some kind of, oh, perhaps financial incentive for MMU to get on board with this thing, but if I were them, I’d push for some alternative concessions as well. Perhaps the licensing of some of McDonald’s characters for us in Inappropriate Creative Writing 101, or for the fashion program, a competition for new uniform design (did I mention the word crotchless yet? I thought it went without saying, but it is fun to say.) The biology department could get first dibs on any, er, samples left in restaurant washrooms. Yes, any samples. The list goes on and on, really, and what’s money compared to the chance to teach our up and coming youth how to write McDonaldland porn scripts for these guys?
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Today’s stories don’t have a whole lot to do with veganism, other than some connections to plants and animals, and I’m sure I could string something together, but folks, honestly, I’m just amazed at these articles and felt like sharing.
A British Columbia man has been charged with feeding bears. Feeding bears is a no-no, because they’ll get all domesticamicated or something, so Allan Wayne Piche is looking at potential fines of up to $100,000 or a year in prison. There’s no word on what charges he’ll be facing for the one thousand marijuana plants found on his property, which was why the cops raided his property in the first place, but hey, you go get ‘em, Ministry of the Environment!
In all, well, most, seriousness, the Ministry was able to “wean” the bears back to nature by gradually reducing the feed levels, which means they didn’t have to euthanize any of them, and kudos to them for properly cleaning up after a drug bust, but I just love how the story’s all about the bears and the drugs are an afterthought.
In other news, British Columbia has gained a new plant species: the world’s deadliest mushroom has been spotted and is likely to stay. Wanna know how deadly the mushroom is? It’s called the death cap mushroom. It’s so deadly it can kill you. It’s, like, lethally deadly.
Oh, and THEY CAN LEVITATE.
I don’t have anything to add, I just liked the picture.
OK, one more, from the same website, because I think they’re speaking to me, and this one isn’t terribly funny but it’s good news just the same: a diet rich in nutrient-dense foods might lead to stronger bones. Nutrient-dense foods are ones with high ratios of nutrients to calories, as opposed to calorie-dense foods, which have high ratios of calories to doughnuts. Plant-based foods are packed with nutrients and don’t usually have a lot of calories, so they win, and people who eat a lot of them tend to have fewer fractures.
Fish also gets mentioned, but let’s just ignore that because there’s lots of plants in the article and fish have more heavy metals which means you’ll trigger the airport detectors even more often if you eat them, or so says my science, so just stick with the plants and you’ll have a better chance of being an 80 year old pro-wrestler, body slamming and top-rope diving like the strong boned person you are.
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Stolen from MyShimmer - click it for the original and a vegan pumpkin pie recipe
Researchers at the – and this is a Real Thing – Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center in Chicago have spent considerable time figuring out the age old question: what smell arouses a man the most?
The good news? It’s easily veganizable.
The better news? It’s pumpkin pie.
Did I mention how much I loved Southern Tier‘s Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale this season? Read into that what you will.
Oh, and the runner up was vanilla, which is already a plant, so you don’t need to veganize it.
Now, in a bid to make a paragraph that’s more than two lines, let’s dig deep into this article and the real reason I wanted to talk about it. That’d be this choice quote: “If your partner enjoys sex on a regular basis, allow him to pull the strawberry-rhubarb pie out of the oven” to which I reply, what is the pie, and what is the oven? Seriously, that’s a crazy quote to throw into an article filled with references to penile blood flow, which, by the way, was increased by 40% when men were presented with the odours of pumpkin pie and lavender.
No non-vegan smells were mentioned, assuming you veganize the pumpkin pie, which is pretty darned cool, although the test set was limited to 40 smells, all presumably linked to Thanksgiving foods. Pretty much every smell turned somebody on, but there was no mention of what the smells did for women.
You know how real estate agents tell you to bake bread or cookies just before a house showing to improve the prospect’s mood? I’d avoid pumpkin-based products, unless you want a more thorough testing of your home that you’d bargained for, particularly in the bedroom.
Anyway, there’s a cookbook in the works here, for sure. Anyone want to pick the title? It’s a little long, but I’m going for “Smell you later, like in the morning, after that dinner you made with recipes from this vegan cookbook that increased my penile blood flow.” It’s a working title.
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Angela and I have a great relationship: I send her links to stuff about Batman and Star Wars, and she sends me links to stuff about dolphin sex. The beauty of the internet is that we’re both able to find plenty of links for each other.
Of course, I only share the really good stuff with you, my internet friends, and today we’re in for a treat: Isabella Rossellini walks you through the finer points of dolphin sex.
Now, be warned: there’s an awful lot of aquatic adventuring going on in the linked video. It’s using cardboard cutout dolphins, but they’re very anatomically correct. Or so I assume. I haven’t seen enough dolphin dong to be able to say, and yes, I’m aware that that sentence will get truncated to remove the “to be able to say” part, and someday I will run for political office, and my opponent will run ads quoting me as saying “I haven’t seen enough dolphin dong,” and you’d better believe “enough” will be underlined. Such are the perils of a vegan pornographer.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ve seen something else from this series, and very likely wrote about it, but I can’t find a link, so I encourage you to devote as much of your work day as possible to discovering more “Green Porno” segments by Isabella Rossellini. My recent web stats suggest that most people actually search for porn after lunch, so somehow that must be helping the economy, and at least your searching has a conscience.
Back to the video, did I mention that there’s a lot of dolphin sex in it? We’re talking oral, missionary, and yes, blowhole, and some of it’s dude on dude, so if you have a problem with the idea of dolphins getting it on, well, it’s probably a big part of why you’re vegan, so celebrate that, but click that link at your own peril.
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No, this isn't a Matt & Nat design, as far as I know
Vegan handbag maker Matt & Nat is in the news this week over their “no meat in the workplace policy,” which is news because it’s been around since the company started in 1995, but darn it, the news desk fell behind back in ’92 and there’s only so much you can put in a newspaper. Look out for tomorrow’s headline about Microsoft’s new operating system that’ll blow Windows 3.1 right out of the water!
No, it’s in the news because someone complained about it. A “former employee” who feels that the policy was a violation of her human rights. Now, this whiner wants to remain anonymous, which is as good a sign of her willingness to stand by her convictions as anything, but apparently she was “forced” to hide meat in her purse (hopefully not a Matt & Nat model) to get around this draconian policy.
There’s no word on why this person left the company – it could have been for eating meat in the workplace, or it could have just been for massive stupidity. Or lots of other reasons. This is all just speculation, and I want to be clear on that, because I’d hate for her to have to complain that I called her a stupid, well, not in a legal complaint kind of way, but maybe to someone who might be able to do something, maybe. Seriously, is it just me or does whole thing have the stench of sour grapes, and cowardly grapes at that?
The nice part of this story, and I’m glad there’s a nice part, because there’s a bit of an attempt to try to make Matt & Nat look bad for actually having principles, which is a shame, but the nice part here is that it reinforces the fact that there’s actually nothing, at least in the Canadian legal framework, that makes it wrong to enforce a meat-free workplace. And to be clear, all they were doing was keeping the office meat-free. Sneaking a burger in her car probably didn’t even violate the rules, despite her best efforts to be a rebel, and people could eat whatever they wanted at home.
That said, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure I’m legally allowed to hire only vegans here at VP, if I were in a hiring mood, at least under the Charter. There’s a list of things you can’t discriminate on, and it varies from province to province, but in Quebec, where Matt & Nat are based, it’s “race, colour, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, civil status, age except as provided by law, religion, political convictions, language, ethnic or national origin, social condition, a handicap or the use of any means to palliate a handicap.” Unless someone wants to make a case that they’re actually addicted to meat and dairy, which would have amazing repercussions for those products’ respective lobby groups, I can’t figure how anyone – meat eater or vegan – can claim protection from discrimination on the basis of diet (and yes, that means I can be fired for being vegan, probably, but that would be kind of awesome, actually. Especially since I’m self-employed.)
Of course, that won’t stop Ms. Anonymous from showing her ignorance, either of the law or of what it actually means to work for a company with values.
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You know, something tells me he doesn't care either way
Sometimes – and this will come as a shock to some – I go for the easy joke here on Vegan Porn rather than highlight the salient facts. To be fair, it’s usually because I don’t know the salient facts, but that’s more often a function of a lack of time (I do actually sleep from time to time) than a desire to overlook things that would get in the way of the joke.
And that’s where you come in to call me out on it, like when I talked about Mike Tyson going vegan, and Colleen pointed out how he’s a convicted rapist.
So what do I do with a story about Mike Tyson possibly opening up a vegan restaurant chain? Well, there’s uncertainty, a tendency to pull back, and so on. But not because of the rape thing, at least not directly.
It’s because I can’t figure out how to merge this with tales of Michael Vick’s comeback on the football field. Dude killed dogs, yo.
And so, like the title asks and I’m compelled to repeat, would we all love Michael Vick if he went vegan? I think it’d show some actual reflection had gone on regarding his past crimes, so maybe it’d be worth considering, but it’s pretty much a desert island scenario in terms of probability. Since he hasn’t, does that mean he’s still scum?
That’s not a rhetorical question; I really don’t follow sports enough to be able to tell. Honestly, if he hadn’t killed a bunch of dogs I wouldn’t know who the guy is, and yet somehow that puts him ahead of the tax auditor, garbageman, nail technician and the retail clerk who all got sentenced for some form of animal abuse in the past year in terms of notoriety. I not only don’t know who they are; I don’t even know for sure what they did (and I just made up those professions, but odds are good that some people in a variety of fields did nasty things to animals.)
I’m not trying to say “hey, other people kill animals and they get less attention than Vick, so give him a break,” nor am I saying “don’t eat at Tyson’s restaurant even it it’s 100% vegan because the guy’s a convicted rapist.” I just think there’s some weird continuum going on here, and as vegans it’s way to easy to put the blinders on when things are swinging pro- (Tyson) or anti- (Vick) vegan, is all.
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People would watch the Fox Reality Channel to escape the reality that has the Fox Reality Channel. Amazingly, it failed.
The UK has some kind of reality show called I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! that’s apparently like Survivor but with semi-famous people. Or maybe they’re really super-famous people, I don’t know – we’ve already discussed my inability to remember anyone who came to prominence after Vanilla Ice.
This week, there was some disgusting insect and worm eating, and one of the contestants didn’t do too well, refusing to eat any of the bugs, claiming, and I quote, “I need you to know that I’m vegan so I won’t eat any insects. It goes against everything I believe in so I’m just not going to do it. I have tried very hard but I’m definitely not going to eat an insect.”
Let’s pause a second and acknowledge that vegans and non-vegans tend to have at least this in common: very few of us on either side of the fence believe in eating insects. Yay, culinary harmony!
Anyway, this person, a Gillian McKeith who is on the show on account of being a TV nutritionist, later ate a “cheese fruit pastry,” and I was all set to drop me some WTF bombs, but apparently cheese fruit is vegan friendly. It’s also known as vomit fruit, so “friendly” might be a strong word, but kudos to McKeith for sticking to her beliefs, even though she had to know that by even being on the show she was going to make veganism look silly. I mean, if a diet keeps you from entering bug-eating competitions, well, that’s a deal breaker for someone out there, I’m sure.
But this is the thing: it’s really, really hard to be vegan and sell your dignity for 15 minutes of fame on a reality show. I remember watching Fear Factor, and they did some crazy degrading stuff, but the most humiliating part of the show was usually the “eat a disgusting thing” segment. I haven’t watched many other reality shows (I did see the British one on a farm with Vanilla Ice, natch,) but even on The Apprentice (which I’ve watched every season of, except for… wait for it… the celebrity editions,) vegan and vegetarian contestants haven’t had a great time.*
Part of me worries – and this isn’t a strong enough worry to warrant a Staying Vegan video, but there’s something there – that as reality shows continue to refuse to die, there’s a growing population of, well, idiots, I guess, who are basing all their hopes and dreams on winning big on some reality show or another, to the point where they’ll actually train (OK, maybe they’ll buy a hat) for the event, and if veganism is going to keep them from victory, it’s a deal breaker.
For serious! People don’t need good reasons not to change, they just need a reason, and if “I could never win a reality TV show” helps them maintain the status quo, this inanity will go unchallenged, even when shared with friends, who will spread the idea like a really lazy virus.
In response, our mission is clear: we need millions of dollars to launch 37 different vegan-themed reality TV shows. Nothing so simple as America’s Next Top Vegan; I’m talking America’s Best Vegan Skydiver. That Dance Crew Thing But With Vegans Which Makes it Amazinger. Vegan Lumberjack Quest 2011. So yeah, any ridiculous reality show you can think of but with the word vegan cleverly added in, so veganism isn’t how you win (but oh snap, that’s how we win) but it’s a requirement.
Russell Simmons has been vegan for 12 years and is probably the best person to run with this, so my work here is done. I look forward to mis-programming my VCR and missing all the fun, only to make crap up about it for future blog posts here on vegan porn.
(* To be fair, I’d guess vegans on The Biggest Loser would probably do well, but I don’t know the rules to that one.)
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No news story today to riff on; this one’s all me, like, freestyling and all that. Mostly because I already found the photo I wanted to use to go with this post (you’ll know it when you see it) and pairing photos with random internet news stories is harder than pairing whiskey with ’80s cartoons, although both get easier after 2 or 3 attempts. I’m looking at you, Thundercats.
Today I’m thinking about Daiya, the infamous vegan cheese substitute.
Except it’s not a cheese product, legally; I read somewhere that one of the delays in getting it introduced in Canada (where’s it’s actually made) was that they weren’t allowed to call it cheese on the packaging, because, you know, customers would get confused more than that time they read the ingredients on non-dairy coffee whitener (which contains dairy, oddly enough.)
No, Daiya has to call itself “a revolutionary new vegan non-dairy product that shreds, melts, stretches and tastes delicious.”
COME ON.
Like that isn’t going to confuse consumers? Seriously, are they talking about a cheese substitute or are they describing me to a T? What? I shred!
But if you read back over everything I’ve written, then you’ll realize that this line on inquiry will never get us to the image I want to use, so let’s move on.
No, the problem with Daiya is that omnivores just don’t understand. Even if they’re parents.
No, not the image I wanted to use, but a good opportunity
Every vegan I know is like, “oh em gee, have you put Daiya on [insert product, sometimes a food here] yet? SO GOOD!” and that’d be OK if it was just inside the vegan clubhouse, but with Facebook and Twitter and that site you’re using that I’m not cool enough to know about, there are a lot of omnivores out there who are like, “uh, cheese isn’t new.”
Seriously, there are a lot of omnivores out there who think we’ve just discovered cheese, which isn’t what’s happened at all, but they just don’t get it. You can tell them that it’s cheese without killing, but that leads to a long-winded explanation about how animals are killed in the course of dairy production, and the sucky lives of those left to do the work, and by the time you’ve come up with 4 sentences they’re already thinking of their 38th joke about it. Let’s not make the same mistakes as Mr. Gore, mmmkay?
No, we need naming and logistics that more clearly explain why we’re so stoked to have a cheese-like product that melts and shreds. Something that consumers will understand in an instant. So here it is: wanna know how Daiya can convert 87% of the cheese-eaters? From a naming perspective, I believe that “pus-free” needs to feature prominently. There are 13% of cheese-eaters who are in it for the pus, but the rest can probably see the value in this new discovery.
And that leads me to the image that inspired this whole outburst:
Dude, we invented pus-free cheese! Can I get a high five? Don't leave me hanging or I'll totally eat your face!
Anyway.
Oh, and if I had picked a news article, it probably would have been about this cat nursing a puppy, so feel free to start your own porn blog and write about that.
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