by Jason on August 17, 2010
This has sat in my “write about this” folder for about 2 weeks now, but you know what’s awesome about writing for vegans? You don’t have to be all that timely with your advice, at least not when it’s about how to safely handle raw chicken.
The British Food Standards Agency is now advising consumers that they should not, repeat, not, wash raw chicken before cooking it. It turns out, and this sounds remarkably straightforward when you think about it, that trying to wash the deadly bacteria off the chicken before you cook it only serves to spread the stuff around the kitchen. Food safety people are fond of saying that chicken’s perfectly safe as long as it cooks thoroughly at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, but nobody has, to my knowledge, come up with a way to cook an entire kitchen to ensure it’s clean afterwards. I have a hard enough time figuring out the dishwasher, frankly.
So, as the title of this post suggests, remember to avert your eyes when in the presence of raw chicken, lest it infect your soul. Again, not something I have to tell the readers of a vegan site, because that stuff’s kinda a turnoff to begin with.
In years past, I would have jumped on this story as yet another example of why people are completely utterly insane to even contemplate eating animals, but I’ve since come to the opinion that this is just another thing that technology will solve one way or another. We’re still early in the discovery phase where we as a society are still figuring out cause and effect with food preparation, but as illnesses and deaths get linked closer to certain practices, somebody’s going to figure out a way to bypass the risk.
In fact, I believe that the future of food safety, at least when it comes to poultry preparation, has been staring most of us in the face for more than 20 years now:
I don’t know how or why the chicken will be made into glowing green cylinders but that’s what we call the price of progress for a society. For the individual, there’s always the option of taking yourself out of the insanity and eating the most healthy and compassionate foods you can, which will only increase your lungpower as you laugh at the hoops the rest of the world has to jump through to maintain a way of life that, upon inspection, might not be so awesome when it involves suiting up in full protective gear just to make a sandwich.
by Jason on April 16, 2010
Rejoice and be glad, for not only do I bring you news of reduced manboobitude, I also no longer have to resort to the list of animal serial killers that I was going to write about today. It’s still an enjoyable piece of internet literature, but I worry about being too list heavy. Much like how many men worry about becoming too top-heavy on a vegan diet, what with soy being pretty much everywhere.
As it turns out, soy consumption doesn’t seem to cause man boobs, or gynecomastia, as the book smart call it (the “book without pictures” smart, anyway.)
There’s an interesting shift happening right now with things like coconut milk and gluten replacing many of the soy products vegans of yore would tend to purchase, and I suspect that the average omnivore has a higher soy consumption than they did in the past through incidental ingredients and whatnot (soy lecithin, soy oil, soy moustache wax and so on.) Further to that, I think obesity in general is more of a factor in moobs than actual medical condition like the afore-italizized gynecomastia (though you can’t spell “gynecomastia” without “eco” so happy Earth Day everyone!)
It’s also mentioned in the article that marijuana can cause breast tissue growth, so I can see how some of the confusion may have came about, since, by flow of logic, vegans are hippies are pot smokers, or so the Triangle of ThewordthatstartswithTthatIcantthinkofrightnow goes. And the word isn’t escaping me on account of me being at all high, I promise. Though Ange brought home a ton of goodies from the vegan grocery store, so this would be a perfect time to have the munchies, if only I was less Clintonesque in my inhaling ability. But I digress. From a point I’m pretty much done with. Have a great weekend!
by Jason on February 24, 2010
OK, I mentioned this in yesterday’s porncast and I know it’s just a matter of time before I either receive a phone call from Sir Fartsalot asking why I haven’t posted these yet, or I’ll just get 40 emails with additional calendar scans. Or both. Probably both.
Rest assured, our researchers at Thrust Labs are working vigorously to verify and/or counter any and all claims contained in this post, and part of me is wondering if I missed an opportunity to add fart jokes to the latest Eazy Vegan video about pressure cookers.
First of all, it appears, under the authority of a page a day calendar, anyway, that vegans are more prone to releasing hydrogen and methane into the atmosphere:
Now, just in case you have any omnivore friends with this calendar who have taken to blaming you for global warming, let’s consider the fact that according to one recent study, the average grass-fed cow will “emit” 800 to 1000 litres of gasses, including methane, per day. That was enough to account for 30 percent of Argentina’s greenhouse gas production.
I’m only slightly ashamed to admit I just spent 30 minutes researching how much methane could fit into a standard party balloon to figure out how many balloons you’d have to fill (with your butt!) every hour to match a cow’s output. Sadly, I couldn’t find anything conclusive, though I came close to engaging the services of the reference desk of the library I’m typing this in – I happen to like this particular library though, so I refrained in an effort to not be labelled “the fart guy.” For as long as that lasts, anyway.
Now, there’s the matter of February 19:
If we were still in the business of making vegan t-shirts, you could bet that the rest of my day would be spent trying to figure out how best to represent a sphincter in a graphically pleasing way. Instead, I find myself wondering the same damned question yet again: forget larger and bulkier, how about simple frequency? Just how many times a week do omnivores poop? I’d speculate, but this seems to be a job for the BatPoop Network. (They probably have a signal that you can shine into the sky, but I’ll leave it to your imagination.)
Anyway, this concludes the calendar stuff, for this week, anyway.
I love the headline that Magic Stones sent in: Toxic products found in blood of BBQ lovers. It’s like, dude, barbecuers have poisonous blood! Veganism would be a lot harder if vampires really existed, because my friends would be all like, hey, you’d better eat these ribs so your blood will be toxic to vampires, and I’d be all, no way eh, I’m like vegan and stuff, and I’d be totally risking my life for my principles instead of living my cushy real world vegan existence where I feel awesome and have reduced risk of all kinds of health problems and oh yeah, I don’t have as many toxic products in my blood.
To be fair, while the story’s about cooking meats at high temperatures, it’s not clear if cooking other foods at high temperatures create the same compounds. All the same, the summer’s a great time to try out a raw dish or two. That goes for you too, vampire dudes. Check out the beet juice, asap.
by Jason on April 26, 2007
So… How many high fat meals do you figure it takes to, you know, get the negative momentum going, health-wise? According to a recent study, the answer is one. Catch this: a breakfast of McDonald’s food brings on a 25 percent worse response to stress as compared to some other breakfast within two hours of eating the stuff. This isn’t a case of McDonald’s versus a big bowl of bran either – the other breakfast was full of sugar via cereal, a Froot Loops cereal bar (tha wuh???), and Sunny D. We’re talking the kind of breakfast that I never could have had when I was a kid because deep down I’d know how wrong it was, even if I was in Vegas and I knew that whatever I ate there would stay there, and people who ate it were still better able to function than the folks who downed the high fat McD’s meal. If the researchers have any money left, I want to see one more iteration pitting McDonald’s against a meal made entirely with the Play Doh Meal Makin Kitchen.
by Jason on April 25, 2007
Curses notes that a group in Singapore has devised a new classification system for four degrees of erectile dysfunction, as described by foods. Men are now being asked to rate their hardness as it compares to either a cucumber, a banana, a peeled banana, or tofu, with cucumber being the desirable end of the spectrum. As Curses says, “this group sounds unaware of the sexually compelling power of tofu (which compels you sexually).” To be certain, it’s a weird mindset where thinking about the undesirable (in terms of state) can deliver you to the desirable (in terms of ooh yeah tofu baby come here), but them’s the breaks.
Oh, and the fact that the food list is vegan is not lost on me.
by Jason on April 18, 2007
anipal posted this in the forums already, but pseudoprometheus also submitted it and shouldn’t be punished by my schedule, and I’m in love with a certain phrase (which phrase? ooh, the tension!), so here we go again…
Regular consumption of cured meats like bacon may lead to damaged lung function. The lung function is an oft-overlooked but crucial Microsoft Excel macro that makes things better, as in when you’re really stressed out about your quarterly results, you apply the lung function. When you’re racing up the stairs to get to your meeting on time to make your report and start wheezing and feel like you’re going to pass out, you apply the lung function. When you need to yell at the printer, because “PC Load Letter? What the frak does that mean?” you apply the lung function. And maybe, just maybe I need a vacation, but the point of the story is that the lung function is pretty darned important, and eating bacon on the order of, say, 14 times a month, which sounds like a lot until you realize that’s every other breakfast for some people, but eating bacon on a regular basis can cause lung damage that’s similar to emphysema, which pretty much wrecks your lung function to the point where you’d have difficulty reading this incredibly long sentence out loud without gasping. So there.
by Jason on April 17, 2007
PonderingWillow has found a link between a news article and a link between pollutants found in oily fish and type two diabetes. This isn’t one of those “if you do this you’ll get this” links, but it is one of those “people who eat this tend to have this” links.
(Aside: the open source people have this great “free as in beer” and “free as in speech” set of analogies to describe which kind of “free” they’re talking about in any given situation. Science needs something like that for “link.” Any proposals?)
In this particular study (that’s “study as in research,” not “study as in room where Professor Plum did it with the candlestick,” and yes, that “did it as in killed someone,” not whatever your poor depraved mind was thinking), it seems that something called a persistent organic pesticide (POP) tends to sit around in fatty deposits for a long time, so when a fish absorbs them and then gets eaten by a human, the POP goes into the human’s fatty tissues, food-chain style, and these POPs may be linked in some way to type 2 diabetes, which was the one they used to call adult onset diabetes before the kids started jumping the queue.
At the moment, the research seems to be a chain of statements that may or may not make up a logical conclusion: POPs may be linked to diabetes. POPs can gather in oily fish. If you eat oily fish you may inherit those POPs, and their possible link to diabetes.
Isn’t it weird that fish oil is supposed to be slippery, and yet all these nasty things like POPs, mercury, heavy metals, PCBs, etc tend to get stuck in it?
by Jason on April 9, 2007
According to an article from PonderingWillow, children in rural areas of Crete don’t get a lot of asthma or other respiratory allergies, and whenever you get some statistical outlier like that the scientists like to dive in and start slicing people open and poking at their insides. Well OK, maybe they don’t do that, but if it were rats without asthma, you could be sure they’d be at the border declaring 37,000 scalpels. In this case, all they could do without the pesky ethics board poking them was to observe the children’s diet. Guess what they found? A diet with lots of fruits and vegetables appears to reduce the risk of asthma and other respiratory allergies. Of course, the BBC is calling this the “Mediterranean diet,” so parents everywhere are probably stocking up on feta right now, which is just going to add to consumer confusion for another 30 years. I don’t know how “plant based foods” could be reduced to a simpler soundbite, but when you’re old and grey people you’ve known all your life are going to come up to you and say “hey, why didn’t you tell me about this vegan thing earlier?”
by Jason on April 4, 2007
Last week we talked about red meat’s influence on your sperm count (spoiler: it goes down), and that’s all well and good for the guys looking for an excuse to ban the beef, but what about the ladies? Well, as PonderingWillow reports, red meat also hates boobies, with a recent study finding a significantly increased risk of breast cancer in women who ate red meat regularly, and don’t even get me started about processed meats. Researchers spent 7 years looking at boobies, and at the end of it, the magic formula seems to be red meat bad, fibre good – the more fibre in the women’s diet, the lower their risk of breast cancer. Now, I just know there’s someone reading this who’s shrugging and saying they don’t eat steak, so I need to spell this out a little clearer: yes, red meat includes hamburgers.
