 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ARTICLES |
TO THE MAX! Our popular columnist finally gets his head on the website. |
 |
The trouble with the world today is that there’s just too much black comedy for a poor boy to fit into one short column. Quote of the Quarter: “And then I knew I was on the right path, for I smelled it. If only field hospitals did not always have the selfsame reek as latrine trenches. But so it is when metal lays open the bowels of living men and the wastes of digestion spill about. And there is, too, the lesser stink, of fresh-butchered meat, which to me is almost equally rank. I stopped, and turned aside into the bushes, and heaved up bitter fluid. Something about my state just then, bent double and weak, brought to my mind the recollection of my father, caning me, for refusing my share of salt pork. He believed a meatless diet such as mine made me listless at my chores. But what I shirked were the tasks themselves, foul and cruel. No soul should be asked to toil all day with the yellow oxen yoked up, unwilling, their hide worn raw by the harness, their big blank eyes empty of hope. It drains the spirit, to trudge sunup till sundown at the arse-end of beasts, sinking into piles of their steaming ordure. And the pigs! How could anyone eat pork who has heard the screams at slaughter when the black blood spurts?” – from the novel March by Geraldine Brooks, inspired by vegan pioneer Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott who wrote Little Women. Thanks
to satirical online mag The Onion for this one: “Executives
at Philip Morris USA have unveiled Marlboro Earth, a new eco-friendly
cigarette that gradually eliminates the causes of global warming and
environmental destruction at their source. ‘By killing off the
No. 1 threat to the environment, new Marlboro Earths will have a long-term
effect on the overall health of our planet,’ Philip Morris spokesperson
Janet Weiss said. ‘If everyone in America does their part and
joins our new green-smoking movement, then together we can eradicate
man’s destructive practices once and for all.’ My local paper The Northern Rivers Echo has informed me about a “free BBQ for mental health” aimed at the Aboriginal community. Just what Australia’s indigenous people need: a plateful of charred sausages to bring a little colour to their cheeks and improve the state of their psyche. Incoming Casino Beef Queen, 23-year-old Amy Morton, is a qualified butcher at the southern hemisphere’s largest abattoir, based in northern NSW. “I wanted to be a teacher,” said Morton, “but I decided butchery was more challenging.” Prawns and shrimps around Britain are getting high on anti-depressants, say experts. A rising level of drugs like Prozac in coastal waters is changing the habits of marine life. Sea creatures are five times more likely to swim up to light when exposed to drugs. The behaviour puts the mud-loving crustaceans at risk of being eaten by fish or birds, which could have a devastating effect on their numbers. Dr Alex Ford said: “If behaviour is being changed this could seriously upset the balance of the ecosystem. It’s no surprise that what we get from a pharmacy will be contaminating the waterways.” He said some marine life was coping with prescription drugs of whole towns. Anti-depressant use has soared in recent years, with doctors in England and Wales prescribing more than 26 million annually. Users excrete them into sewage, yet the environmental effect has been largely unexplored. Fat Facts: Enough fat to fill nine double-decker buses has been removed from sewers in central London in the largest ever sewer clean-up of its kind. A team of “flushers” equipped with full breathing apparatus was drafted in with shovels to dig out an estimated 1,000 tonnes of putrid fat from an area under Leicester Square. The build-up of fat and grease underground is the result of years of “sewer abuse” – when anything other than water, human waste and toilet paper is put down drains. Danny Brackley, Thames Water’s sewer flusher, said: “We’re used to getting our hands dirty, but nothing on this scale. We couldn’t even access the sewer as it was blocked by a four-foot wall of solid fat.” TO
THE MAX! appears in every issue of Vegan
Voice, available in selected outlets and by subscription.
This
extract is from our Sep-Nov 2010 issue. |
 |
DISMANTLING THE DEFENCES Jack
Styles is consumed by a passion for animal rights and being vegan. Call
him unstoppable. He says it’s important to stay positive and not
let the bad stuff get you down. Puts us to shame, does Jack. The interview gets off to an embarrassing start when the VV office phone line proves to be dead, causing the recorder not to work. I tell Jack Styles, patiently waiting in Melbourne to be grilled, that I’ll call him back. I suspect a bush rat has bitten through the wire. Which indeed they have. This probably wouldn’t happen if he was talking to The New York Times, I say a short while later when we’re ready to roll again. I want to know, as ever, what started him down this road: vegetarian at 11, vegan since April 2009. He’s now 14. He’s already said that it began almost overnight, but there must have been a catalyst. “Well, I always really loved animals,” he says in a speedy, no-time-to-waste tone, “and I became vegan because of the animals. They were my motivation. It all began when I learned about the cruelty in meat and dairy production.” Online? “Yeah, and through Animal Liberation Victoria which I was beginning to get heavily involved with. I really like doing things and being busy. And as you know they’re a vegan organisation and they only promote veganism. So I learned all about dairy production and to me it’s just as bad as if not worse than meat production. If you really want to help all animals, veganism is the only option.” So he up and told his family he was going vegan? Did that freak them out? “I’ll tell you a funny story. My parents are supportive of everything I do, and I’m really thankful for that because all the time I hear stories of parents not letting their kids go vegetarian or vegan. But in the beginning the one condition they made was that I could go vegetarian but not vegan. Mum was very insistent about it. And one day I turned around and said to her, ‘I know I said I wouldn’t, but now I’m really passionate about it and I want – I need – to go vegan.’ But Mum still said no. And eventually I said, ‘Well, guess what? I’m going to be stubborn about this. I’m going vegan.’ And my parents were supportive all over again.” Jack says he does love to cook “and I often cook with my mum. My dad and my little brother love meat but Mum is now mostly vegetarian, I would say. So we’ll often eat the same thing. Just make big batches and freeze it.” He’s into Asian food. “And I love Italian as well. Noodles, pasta, I make really nice pizza … Sometimes I use Cheezly but I find olive oil is really good on top of pizza instead of cheese. It moistens it up. I do love vegetables and salads, and I’ve got some of my recipes on the ALV Vegan Easy website.” Why are men usually so hard to break of the meat habit, more so than women? “I’m not sure it’s a gender related thing, I think it’s more … well, men like being outdoors. And in Australia being outdoors in summer means barbecues. And people don’t think outside the square, that you can have a vegan barbecue. Also, I think it’s just habit because, you know, my dad loves vegetables as well. It’s all from what’s happened with their parents. I’m surprised I was able to break free so quickly. Because I liked meat when I was younger.” He says that going vegetarian was hard at first because he was still at primary school and didn’t know anyone who didn’t eat meat. “And it was hard at high school too, because I really played it up; I would constantly talk about veganism and animal rights issues and people get sick of that. I don’t talk about it as much anymore unless I’m asked. So I find that it’s a lot easier now.” He’s often asked if he could ever eat meat again and he says that if he didn’t do so much animal rights stuff, maybe. But he’s done a lot of activism over the past two years – he runs three organisations now – and he knows too much about the issues. Aside from Animal Liberation Youth, he’s involved with the Duck Army – anti-duck shooting in Victoria – and he runs a brand new organisation called Kindness Kids. I’ve been reading Jack’s Facebook page and he got my attention with the line “pretending not to care but actually wanting to cry”. What does he mean by that? “I think it’s mainly the issue of people … you know, when you’re out on the streets people often turn a blind eye. But when you’ve been doing it a while you can often tell from body language what they’re really thinking.” Like when you’re doing a stall? “Everything. You know, stalls, protesting, even just talking to a friend. They can put up a face like I don’t care, I love my meat, but you can see inside them and they feel really upset and they feel really guilty.” Okay, so why are we humans so hard? Is it just from having to deal with day-to-day life that we’ve erected these walls and defences? “I think so. It’s also that people have been brought up like this and they think it’s too hard to change. They often feel so bad about what they’ve done but they put barriers up. Ultimately, if you look at what animal rights activists and vegans are doing, we are telling people to go vegan because eating meat is wrong. And we are telling them that what we have been brought up with is wrong. People don’t like to be told that.” You can read the rest of this interview in the Dec 10-Feb 11 issue of Vegan Voice. |
 |
SHOOTING FOR THE SUN VV
talks to vegan ‘homeboy with a gold tooth’
Jarid Manos about his book Ghetto Plainsman,
and how he finally learned to live inside his own skin. I’M PHONING Jarid Manos, the Ghetto Plainsman himself, at his new office in Houston, Texas. When he picks up I tell him I’m excited to speak with him, because his book knocked me sideways with its intensity and passion. But most of all, I say, I was deeply affected by his journey down the road to redemption. Ghetto Plainsman tells pieces of Manos’s life story up until about 13 years ago when he moved to Texas for good and began work on his longtime vision, the Great Plains Restoration Council. Hustler, drug dealer, lost boy, he was always inexplicably drawn to what was once — before the cattle ranchers came — the American prairies, to the buffalo and the prairie dog. It took him many years to make real his dream of beginning to restore the land, some of them years in which he did not even want to go on living. Gritty, tough and searingly honest, Ghetto Plainsman took Manos eight years to write. Essentially a howl of rage against himself, the system and the destruction of the natural world, the book also reveals his torment about his own sexuality and describes his constant crisscrossing of America in an attempt to find meaning. Then it moves onward and upward as its author slowly learns how to convert his pain and anger into action and empathy. Manos writes in the introduction that he was lucky he had his journals to help him remember who he used to be. Does he think that without those journals he could not have ventured down some very dark alleys and succeeded in capturing the way he was back then? He laughs. “I can’t even remember where I put my keys but I can remember in detail things that happened and imprinted on me. But I think that for some of those at-the-edge, emotional-state scenes, it would have been more difficult. The journals allowed me to key in to some specific things. You know, somethin’ had me being a survivor. I work with so many people who have given up or got into a track that got them killed or imprisoned. Yeah, it was difficult. Some of that stuff in the earlier part where I had no power at all, having to go back to that, it made me feel sick again.” Does he think, I ask him, that some people come out of the womb geared to self-destruct? Or is it life, what life does to them from the minute they’re born? Long silence. “Wow. That’s a question … I love that question. I’ve been pondering that same thing and, beyond self-destruction, whether some people are geared towards doing great damage.” I can hear him thinking. Then he says, “I don’t have that answer, really. But I appreciate the question.” I tell him I think about it when I consider the different paths people take, the places people end up, alive or dead, and you can call it luck or you can call it something mystical … I mean, look at the way he himself was drawn from a young age to nature, to the Texas Plains and to wanting to be healthy and to eat vegetarian. Where the hell did all that come from? He laughs again. “You’re right, there was something that made me different … Even when I was ready to check out, there was something that was keeping me standing upright. There certainly is some power much greater than us.” There’s a scene in the book where he’s in a deserted shack in the Texas Panhandle. Lying on an old mattress, almost dead of starvation and willing himself to die, he sees something “big, dark and monstrous” hovering over him. It’s a profoundly disturbing moment. Was that a demon, I ask, or was it his own inner demon he saw there above him? “I don’t know,” he says, thinking hard again. “And that definitely happened as I described it. Like, I just live, and I don’t have a lot of explanations for things. Sometimes you see things and maybe your eyes are open but you don’t really feel like you’re seeing them with your eyes, if that makes any sense.” I apologise for starting the interview with such heavy questions. It’s just that the book itself is so deeply personal. “I think that unquestionably there is great evil in the world,” he says slowly. “I think that there is also something, you know, so incredibly holy and powerful that all of our noise has erased or pushed to the shadows. I’m not a moralistic type. I mean, I believe in a certain basic code, a way of being …” He stops, laughs just a touch crazily. “There are some things out there …” You can read the rest of this interview in the Sep-Nov 2010 issue of Vegan Voice. |
 |
NO ONE HERE GETS OUT ALIVE US
writer and activist Bob Chorush tells VV about being young
in an exciting era, accidentally discovering he was vegan and why comedy
helps in tragic times. I’VE BEEN laughing at Bob Chorush’s online animal rights humour for a while now. Eventually I got the idea it might be nice to interview him, little knowing that the man would turn out to have a most thrilling past. When we get to talking, Bob informs me he used to write for the LA Free Press in the early ’70s and was editor of Rolling Stone. (If you take a look on YouTube you can see him interviewing Jim Morrison.) He hung out with Charles Bukowski when a friend — who became Dee Dee in Bukowski’s book Women — was “dating” him. (This same friend later ran off to Bora Bora with Hunter Thompson’s three-hundred-pound Samoan attorney from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.) Bob’s written an unpublished story about the Bukowski episode, called Breakfast With Bukowski, which he’s sent to me. Yes, I really scored big time when I asked Bob Chorush for an interview. Bob tells me he turned his back on the music business to work as an ambulance driver. He says he got tired of selling records and the people he met weren’t all that nice. I ask him whether it was hedonism, capitalism or just the human condition that killed the hopes and fire of those times. “It’s funny how certain periods of time seem particularly liberating, but are then followed by increased repression,” he says. “Before she died I asked my mother, who was born in 1917 or so, if she remembered the ’20s. She got this glazed look and told me that she remembered when she was eight or nine, a girlfriend of hers had an older sister who was a flapper. They used to sneak into the sister’s room and try on dresses and try to do the Charleston in them. “When I was a teenager living just outside New York City, I used to hop on my motorcycle and go to Greenwich Village where I could hang out with (or at least near) Allen Ginsberg and all the folksingers of the day. I moved to LA in 1969, where I worked for Rolling Stone and underground press. People who have become iconic were just hanging out in bars or clubs or recording studios. It was very exciting to be in the middle of that emerging culture, particularly as a 20-something smartass kid. I gave away the tapes of my interview with Jim Morrison shortly after I’d done it. I had no idea they’d even survived until I saw them on YouTube. “There were a lot of factors that contributed to making the ’60s and early ’70s such an exciting and revolutionary time and they ranged from the war in Vietnam to the introduction of birth control pills. There was a new sense of emerging freedom and power that was reflected in the music and art — from The Grateful Dead to Easy Rider. This new personal freedom was coupled with a sense of power as the culture realised the impact it could have against segregation and the war. The repressed American society of the ’50s had largely failed, both to achieve political advances and to offer anything more than personal contentment and timesaving appliances. Remember, the American goal after the Great Depression was a chicken in every pot. By the end of the ’50s, this was the reality, at least for white Americans. “There was no way to stop a large segment of the population who felt free and powerful and were willing to forgo security for joy,” he continues. “Protests were the social and cultural activities of the day. In college my friends and I would get together on Friday nights to make posters, trying to decide whether to go to the civil rights protest to see Joan Baez and Richie Havens, or the anti-war protest to see Phil Ochs or Country Joe and the Fish. Everything was free and everything was fun. Memories of those days are partly why I think that animal rights protesting should be fun, too. “They were dangerous times, in a way. I came very close to being killed by a cop and beat up by a mob in Mississippi in 1965. I drove a taxi nights in New York while I was in college, so of course I was robbed at gunpoint once or twice, but even the crooks weren’t so whacked out in those days — all they wanted was money. Drugs were dangerous, too, although they were widespread. The soft stuff — pot, hash and pharmaceuticals — was fun. LSD added a bit of uncertainty to the mix, and heroin and crystal speed pretty much killed things. One of the reasons I got out of the music business was that, in a relatively short period of time, a half dozen people I knew who were my age died, from Jim Morrison to various record business execs.” I ask Bob what sort of fun and joy he finds in modern times. “I’m funny but not very joyful,” he says. “I’m reclusive and live with my dog on a 100-acre farm a half mile away from my nearest neighbour. I enjoy like-minded people, but don’t find them very often. At this point in my life, I mostly just want to stay away from people. The internet is great for being able to keep in touch without the messiness of participation — sort of like a robotic pet.” So how and when did he become vegan? “I was a pretty dim bulb when it came to becoming vegan,” he says. “I did it little by little over 25 years. In fact, when I officially became vegan 20 years ago, I’d never heard of the word. Why I became vegetarian is really more interesting. My dad was a kosher butcher and food distributor, so we always ate meat. Certainly for lunch and dinner and often for breakfast. Mostly we ate steaks. For hamburgers, my dad would grind up steaks. One evening at dinner, when I was 15 years old, I cut into my steak and heard a voice. I didn’t know if it was a hallucination or what. “The voice said, ‘Why are you eating yourself?’ “I looked at the steak, then looked at my hand, then looked back at the steak, then put down my knife and fork. I pushed the plate of steak away from me and never willingly ate animals again. It was nothing I had ever thought about. My mom did force me to eat meat for a time. She also made me visit our family doctor. “I told the doctor that I didn’t want to eat animals, that it felt cannibalistic. He slid his glasses down on his nose, gave me a kindly look, then said, ‘If you don’t eat animals, you’ll die.’ Well, I didn’t care much about dying, but I didn’t see any reason to eat a bunch of animals along the way. You can read the rest of this interview in the Mar-May 2010 issue of Vegan Voice. |
 |
THE SHOCKING TRUTH Controversial
American vegan activist Dave Warwak talks to VV about telling
children the truth, not staying silent and not being part of the problem. I'VE BEEN up to no good chatting to Dave Warwak, radical vegan “troublemaker”, about children, lies, and life on this here Earth. First, though, a little background. Warwak was an art teacher at a Wisconsin junior high school in the winter of 2006 when he discovered veganism. When he returned to school after the Christmas break, Dave was quite literally a different person. He wanted to spread what he’d learned about compassion so he bought some marshmallow peeps – yellow candy shaped like tiny chicks – for his students and for the faculty. He asked that each person personalise the peeps and keep them safe and sound for three days before returning them. Many of the children became attached to the peeps and only reluctantly gave them back to their teacher. Next Dave took the personalised peeps and put them in a mural in the school’s hallway. On the first day he took some peeps, dismembered them and put their heads on plaques painted on the walls as if they were hunters’ trophies. The next day he put a few peeps in cages as if they were in a zoo. On the third day he put some of the peeps between slices of bread. Others were left crushed as roadkill. The point of the peeps was clear: animals, like the peeps, should be cared for, not jailed, eaten and killed. The school instructed him to stop what he was doing, which he did. Then Dave noticed some “milk moustache” posters had gone up in the school, so he bought copies of John Robbins’s book The Food Revolution and gave them to his students. They discussed what was done to animals to make them into food and Dave suggested that the only way animals could avoid this fate was for humans to go vegan. Soon parents, wondering why their children would no longer eat meat, began calling the principal. Dave was asked to stop teaching veganism. He then demanded that the school cafeteria go vegan and also asked the district attorney to look into child endangerment by the school for serving the children meat and dairy. To cut to the chase, Dave was fired. Almost
two years to the day, I’m hearing this amazing tale direct from
the man himself. I tell him that it seems to have happened very quickly, from him going vegan to being embroiled in a major battle for the hearts and minds of his students. “I didn’t even know what a vegan was,” he says. “At 43 years old I had never heard the word. What happened was I self-actualised. I looked in the mirror and I thought, ‘Why should I feel bad about anything? I’m healthy and fit, I’m relatively young, what’s the problem in the world?’ And then I realised just from sitting down and thinking about everything … well, I just looked at things different, and I realised I was the problem in the world. You know, I was a fishing guide for 30 years, teaching people how to kill. I was totally desensitised to it. That’s how I was raised. But when I self-actualised, I realised I had to change what I was doing.” Dave says the idea to go vegan came out of the blue. He remembers learning about self-actualisation in psychology class at college but never thought anything of it. “I never really understood it and when it happened to me I didn’t know what was happening. It really was during a 24-hour period where it was like the blinders were taken off and I saw society how it actually was. And one of the things I saw was myself. And I looked down at my plate and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what am I doing?’ I realised that this was once an animal, you know, for the first time in my life.” I ask Dave if he had expected to lose his job over the peep project or if he genuinely believed he would win people over. “Well, when I did the peep lesson it was really in response to a need from my students. I was doing a graphic arts class, sixth grade, and several of the boys were being mean to animals on the computer. We started talking – we had a good relationship – and they told me exactly what they got up to after school. They would go down to the river and stick these bowie knives right through the centre of frogs’ bodies and then pin ‘em in the dirt and watch the frogs wriggle in intense pain. You can’t even imagine the kind of nightmare it would be, pinned on a knife like that. And then they laugh for an hour and they watch the thing die. And then they go home and they crush beetles and have a conversation about who can kill the most beetles. That’s what they told me. “So, as a teacher, if I know this is going on I have to do something about it. I went to the principal and he asked if I’d talked to the parents and I said yeah, I talked to the dad and it turns out that he sits in the backyard with his son and a BB gun and they shoot everything that moves. So he’s OK with it. And the principal says, well, in that case there’s nothing we can do. And so I go and speak to the school psychologist and the social worker and they’re all telling me, just do what my boss tells me to do. Drop it. That’s when I went out and I got the peeps. I was addressing the needs of the children, it wasn’t to teach the adults anything. It was just an honest attempt at educating the kids about what I thought was one of the most important things in the world, and that is reverence for life. And why not bring that into an art classroom? And when the rest of the school saw how much fun my sixth grade class was having, they wanted to participate. That’s why the principal and the teachers all had their own peeps, that’s why the whole school felt attached to them. They didn’t eat the peep, they took care of it. “I was kind of shocked that they reacted the way they did because I was very upfront with them about the lesson and I gave them handouts explaining what I was trying to do. But they didn’t take the time to read and think about the invitation. They were so indoctrinated they didn’t make the connection. I said, I’m here to show what we do with animals. I was upfront with everything. What they saw with their own eyes was very powerful, so they overreacted. The teachers filed a petition behind my back to remove the show, and these were people I’d worked with some 10 years. You know, people were ignoring me, treating me like I was from outer space, a leper. I’d been getting nothing but praise from everyone for my teaching for years. All of a sudden I’m the antichrist. Yeah, it shocked me and then when my principal flipped out too, it shocked me even more but I was still compliant. I took down my art show with the peeps and I didn’t do anything more with animals. And that’s when I lost respect for myself. And I had to do something with the milk moustache posters, otherwise I would be part of the problem.” I’m curious to know if Dave was ever threatened with violence by anyone in the community. “Well actually,” he says, “I was beat up by some guys in hoods. I couldn’t identify them. This was in my hometown, some 35 miles away from Fox River Grove where I worked, which was, you know, the community that was mad at me. But it was in my hometown that I was jumped in the middle of the night and my face was mashed into the ground. I was told to drop it otherwise they were gonna come back and do worse. But it didn’t stop me. You can’t let stuff like that … It’s not really worthy even talking about stuff like that.” |
| You can read the rest of this interview in the Dec 09-Feb 10 issue of Vegan Voice. |
 |
THE GREAT PRETENDER Chrissie Hynde comes over all mealy-mouthed and timid (nah, just kidding). IN 1978 rock legend Chrissie Hynde formed The Pretenders. With her trademark dark fringe, outspoken views and “anti-fashion” look, she’s remained the epitome of cool and set many a guy and girl’s heart racing for the past three decades. Nowadays she uses her celebrity platform to campaign for animal rights in her role as PETA spokeswoman, even going so far as to get herself arrested for the cause. She spoke with Katrina Fox. When
did you first become vegetarian? So
what led you to it? You
said in an interview in 2004 that you are “not interested in gender
issues”. What did you mean? Are
you disappointed that more musicians aren’t vegetarian, if not
vegan? As
a celebrity, you get to stand up on a platform and speak about a good
cause. How do you feel about that? |
 |
MRS BEASLEY AND ME Monique
Steinhardt talks to VV about ‘that dear Dr Barnard’
and how he made MONIQUE STEINHARDT is 77 years old and a new vegan. Here’s how it happened. In early December of last year, Monique was listening to her usual classical FM radio station when she found herself riveted by the voice of vegan doctor Neal Barnard talking about his book The Reverse Diabetes Diet. In an interview with presenter Margaret Throsby, Dr Barnard laid out the facts about how a low-fat vegan diet can prevent and reverse diabetes, as well as other chronic disease. Monique wanted to know more. Recently she had been experiencing a tingling in her lower legs and had been having attacks of dizziness for years. Many times she could not get up from her chair and had to crawl across the floor just to answer the phone. Her GP wanted her examined by a specialist to check that it wasn’t an indication of angina. Monique did a bit of detective work and tracked down Vegan Voice. I picked up the phone and the first thing Monique asked me was whether I could help her change to a vegan diet. We had a long conversation during which Monique informed me that she used to be a vegetarian until her doctor advised her to add some red meat to her usual (huge) plate of steamed vegies for lunch. The doctor insisted red meat was needed for iron. Monique reluctantly added the meat but told me her doctor would have been horrified at the small quantities. Then, when Monique heard Dr Barnard say that iron could be easily obtained on a plant-based diet, she decided to investigate. That’s when she called VV. “Why haven’t we been made aware that we can do without meat?” she asked me. “Why isn’t it common knowledge?” Why indeed. Monique
went shopping the next day for soy milk, tofu and tempeh. I told her
that if she didn’t like them she didn’t have to eat them
and that there were many alternatives. “Yes, that lovely Dr Barnard
said there was plenty of protein in plant foods,” she told me.
Monique’s previous diet was very simple and fairly healthy, so she was not a difficult person to convince. (Dr Barnard had already done that.) She loved fruit and veggies and did not want to eat meat or dairy. Easy. She told me she had always adored animals and could not bear the thought of them being hurt. “That’s been my worry all my life,” she said. “That’s why I’ve been a vegetarian for many years.” You can read the rest of these interviews in the Mar-May 09 issue of Vegan Voice. |
 |
RAISING VEGAN CHILDREN Alison Waters is angry that the dairy industry is using the public school system to promote their unhealthy and unethical products under the guise of education. MY
DAUGHTER starts primary school in a couple of weeks. Sadly, but inevitably,
she isn’t We have overcome one small school-related hurdle: I have purchased a pair of non-leather school shoes. As expected, there are some unhealthy and very non-vegan foods sold at the school canteen. I am not expecting this to be a huge problem because we can choose to avoid the canteen (my preferred option at this stage), or purchase only vegan foods (of which there are very few options). Or I could take over management of the canteen and veganise the menu (my secret fantasy). I wonder about the aspects of my children’s schooling that I may not have any control over, such as the school curriculum. What challenges await us? I recently learned about the Picasso Cows National Curriculum Program after seeing an article in our local paper titled “Our region’s most udderly beautiful cows”. The article reported that a local primary school had “topped the regional titles in the Picasso Cows art competition organised by Dairy Australia”. There is an accompanying photograph of school students with the life-size, colourful fibreglass cow they decorated. One boy is dressed in a cow suit, another is wearing a skeleton suit (perhaps to promote dairy’s supposed role in strengthening bones). One northern NSW primary school visited a dairy as part of the program. At dairyaustralia.com.au I discovered that the Picasso Cows National Curriculum Program is “aimed specifically at primary schools … [and] aims to educate students, teachers and parents about dairy nutrition and key aspects of Australia’s dairy industry”. The website features quotes from teachers who have been involved in the program, including the following from excitable teachers at one participating school: “We have certainly created an awareness of the need for dairy in the diet! Some kids believe it or not were having zero serves a day!” [sic] The winning cow in 2009 “featured a gallery of children with ‘milk moustaches’ that reflected the American-style ‘Got Milk?’ campaign”. Apparently the judges were “blown away” by the creativity of the entry and in awe of the financial support received from the local milk manufacturer. It is readily apparent that Picasso Cows is much more than an art competition. The winning school was presented with a gift voucher from a major sports equipment chainstore to the value of $3000. Dairy Australia must be ecstatic at the amount of national promotion that the industry obtains for such a measly amount of money. In my opinion, the winning design lacks originality. But I imagine that the three judges (two of whom work in the dairy industry) were thrilled that the winning cow was a ready-made advertisement. The Picasso Cows document for schools includes two student surveys: an entry survey to be undertaken before beginning the project and an exit survey to be carried out upon completion. The students are asked to provide responses on a scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree to statements such as: “I know a lot about the dairy industry and how milk gets from the cow to me!” and “Dairy foods are good for my health and nutrition.” The document also includes this statement: “Research has shown that children and adults who regularly consume dairy foods have better quality diets — they are more likely to have an adequate intake of many of the essential nutrients than those who eliminate dairy foods.” It did not come as a great surprise to discover that the topic of calves and the reason cows lactate is not discussed in the section “Fast facts about the dairy industry”. Ironically at the end of the section there is a photo of a calf being cuddled by students. Under the guise of teamwork and design, students are bombarded with “dairy is essential to your health” messages. There is no information about other sources of calcium and students who are vegan or lactose intolerant will not find any useful nutrition information in the document. In fact those students are likely to feel ostracised by participating in this project, particularly as their dairy-munching friends are also learning that children who consume dairy have “better quality diets”. It angers me that the dairy industry is using the public school system to promote their unhealthy and unethical products under the guise of education. Read the rest of this article in the June-August 10 issue of Vegan Voice. |