Vegan Life Tips

One core tactic to protecting large numbers of animals is to find something that’s already getting publicity, and then discover a way to align animal protection with it. This happens automatically whenever celebrities go vegan or who get heavily into animal advocacy—whether it’s Paul McCartney or Ricky Gervais or Tom Brady or Pamela Anderson or Moby, you’re starting with somebody who already has the interest of millions. Now that they’re speaking up for veganism or animals or whatever, they’re guaranteed to influence large numbers of people. And you can help them make an even bigger difference just by getting the word out.

Same goes for anytime something even vaguely oriented makes the news. Got a big meat recall, an undercover cruelty investigation, or the latest meat industry scandal? Time to use your social media accounts to publicize it, and spin this news as yet another reason to consider veganism. They say that life is all about timing, but that’s quite not true. Effort and passion remain king and queen, but timing is what makes the difference between sailing with the wind or against it. So the best activists capitalize on things that are hot right now, in order to spin momentum in the animals’ favor.

This is also true for holidays and other annual events, with Thanksgiving the most obvious chance to turn the focus on turkeys into an annual liability to the industry. Over time, expect Thanksgiving to turn from the turkey industry’s greatest strength to its greatest weakness, as they brace themselves for another onslaught of activist publicity every November. The Super Bowl likewise remains the best occasion to publicize vegan party snacks, and over the years the game has given these foods a mountain of free publicity.

So far I’ve covered only the big things. Celebrities don’t get much bigger than Paul McCartney and holidays don’t get much bigger than Thanksgiving, but this same approach applies to small things. Even tiny little things we’ve all heard of, like spring cleaning. Why not turn spring cleaning into a way to help animals?

Life comes in two parts: acquiring and letting go. The acquiring is the easy part. Stuff accumulates that once seemed vital: nice clothing, DVDs, stereo gear, furniture, and a thousand other things. But most of your beloved acquisitions eventually fall into disuse, make their way to your garage, and sit there for unused for years or decades. While some of this stuff is outright junk, much of it is far too valuable to throw out on the street or to just give away. Finding a buyer can be tough, but ultimately satisfying for several reasons. You’ll be relieved of unwanted possessions, you’ll make somebody happy, you’ll reduce your footprint on the earth, and you’ll also be rewarded with some easy cash.

It’s amazing what you can unload with the help of Craigslist or eBay. Craigslist is free, and it’s perfect for heavier items where you can find a local seller. eBay gives you a worldwide audience but you’ll pay a commission plus lose more money to shipping. While it may take repeated ads on these platforms, eventually your glass slipper will find its Cinderella. Over the past few years I was able to get decent money for several albatrosses hanging from my neck: a 1940s Erector Set I was given as a kid but never used, a Nintendo 64 in its original packaging, and a 60-inch vintage flexible flyer sled. Undoubtedly you’ve got things every bit as weird and potentially valuable if only you get the word out. Imagine how good it will feel when this stuff is no longer cluttering your garage, and the money you’ve gained is donated to help animals.

So why not grit your teeth this spring, do what it takes to part with a few things, and devote the chunk of change you receive to creating a chunk of change for animals? All you need to do is send your earnings to whichever animal advocacy group of you like best. It’s a win all the way around. Admittedly, the act of purging yourself of possessions can be about as unpleasant as a physical purging, but once the lady drives off and there’s money in your pocket you’ll feel so relieved. If you’re ready to get on-board, why not close the loop and post about what you’ve sold, how much you earned, and where your donation went?

Maybe collectively, we can raise funds this spring that will save thousands of animals, and perhaps we can collectively save millions of animals each spring as the years roll by. Post about your sales results using to this thread on Facebook or using the #SpringCleaningForAnimals tag on Twitter or Instagram. Spring cleaning has never before been a thing for animals. Why not start now?

The post Spring Cleaning for Animals appeared first on Vegan.com.

Vegan Pizza Dough Ingredients

• 2 ½ cups unbleached white flour
• 1 cup warm water (~110 degrees)
• 1 teaspoon organic or raw sugar
• 1 tablespoon active dry yeast
• 1 teaspoons salt
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
• 1 tablespoons olive oil

Vegan Pizza Dough Directions

Mix the yeast, water, and sugar in large bowl. Add 1 ½ cups of the flour. Mix well to blend.
Add the oil, salt, garlic, nutritional yeast, and remaining flour and stir well.
Transfer the dough to a flour covered board. Dust your hands with flour.
Knead for 5 minutes, adding flour if it gets too sticky. (If you have a Kitchenaid, you can use your dough hook and let it do the kneading for you.) Roll dough into a ball and place into a lightly oiled bowl. Cover bowl with towel and set in a warm place for 45 minutes to an hour. (In the winter, I use the ‘proof’ setting on my oven.)

Vegan Pizza Toppings

• 1 can or jar of organic pizza sauce (or you can make it from scratch using this recipe)
• 1 red pepper
• ½ bunch kale
• 1 watermelon radish
• 1 carrot
• vegan mozzarella cheese (I recommend a nut-based cheese)

Vegan Pizza Topping Directions

Peel the carrot and the radish using a veggie peeler. Using your veggie peeler, peel slices from your carrot until the entire carrot is used up.

Slice the radish as thinly as possible.

Grate your vegan cheese.

Wash the red pepper. Remove the stem, seeds, and white parts from the inside. Slice it thinly so it makes flower shapes.

Wash the kale, remove stems, and tear the leaves into small pieces.

Knead dough again. Flour a large flat surface. I used to use a cutting board, but I recently purchased this rolling mat, and it is the best thing ever! I highly recommend getting one if you ever make pizza, pie, or cookies. The dough never sticks to it the way it used to stick to my cutting board, and it’s way easier to wash.

Plop the dough ball down onto the floured mat. Sprinkle flour on top of the dough and coat the rolling pin in flour too.

Roll into a thin crust. Fold in half.

Cut out half a heart using kitchen scissors. Unfold.

Place on a baking stone (if you don’t have a baking stone, you can use a cookie sheet).

Decorate with sauce and toppings.

Bake for 12-15 minutes at 475º.

Remove from oven.

Cut (I use kitchen scissors, instead of a pizza cutter) and serve with any remaining sauce.

This recipe is courtesy of Vegan Dollhouse.

The post Valentine’s Day Heart Pizza appeared first on Vegan.com.

So last week, I tried out Twitter’s newish polling feature. I thought it would be cool to see where Vegan.com’s largely-vegan Twitter following stood on the US Presidential election. My question: “If you’re vegan—and only if you’re vegan—who has your vote?” The poll ran for 24 hours and here are the results:

If you’re vegan—and only if you’re vegan—who has your vote?

— Vegan (@vegan) May 9, 2016

I had my suspicions that vegans would lean towards Bernie, but the results were far beyond what I expected: 9 percent for Trump, 76 percent for Bernie, and only 15 percent for Hillary. As with any poll, the results raise more questions than answers. In particular, do the results indicate adoration for Bernie or are they more reflective of contempt toward Hillary and Donald?

Most importantly, is there something about a vegan worldview that would make vegans overwhelmingly favor a candidate like Bernie?

Polls of any kind are notoriously unreliable and a Twitter poll is about as unreliable as polls get. For one thing, there’s nothing to guarantee that respondents were registered voters or even US citizens. And Twitter polls are easily manipulable by vote brigading, although there’s strong reason to think that this did not occur here. Matt Ruscigno MPH RD tweeted something I also observed:

pretty incredible that these percentages have stayed nearly identical from the first 5 minutes through 23 hours.

So I think that it’s likely this poll flew under the radar, and hit the sweet spot in terms of having a statistically significant sample size (1713 respondents) without being large enough to attract efforts to manipulate the results.

The phrasing of the poll question was, I think, about as neutral and unleading as possible. But it would be nice if Twitter could rotate the response order each time a poll is displayed, so that each candidate would display first on the list one-third of the time. I think it’s probable that Hillary got a little extra juice out of my decision to list her first.

I don’t know what to make of the results. Maybe vegans tend to be philosophically inclined to favor the rhetoric of Sanders over Clinton or Trump. Or maybe they’re just a contrarian bunch, who can be counted on to favor the underdog. One things’s for sure, though: for whatever reason, Bernie Sanders seems to have the 2016 vegan vote in the bag.

The post Vegans Overwhelmingly Favor Bernie Sanders appeared first on Vegan.com.

Until today, I thought the only bad thing about Greenpeace was the blight of day-glo wearing college-age canvassers they parachute into every affluent downtown area. These employees specialize in creating awkward moments when you’re just trying to walk down the street and have a conversation with a friend.

But it actually turns out that Greenpeace backs something even more repugnant: the seal fur trade. Check out this October 2015 MSNBC video featuring Jon Burgwald, who works as an arctic campaigner for Greenpeace.

Here’s most of what Burgwald said in the video. A bit of his comments were garbled but I did the best I could with this transcription:

We need to move beyond the notion that all sealing and seal products are bad things…it’s actually sustainable. I think it’s good that we can start promoting the sustainable seal products. It’s a sustainable hunt. They use all of the animal. Like they eat the meat, and what they can’t eat they use for the dogs. And so it’s a very sustainable way of hunting and there’s no problem with the population or anything so we’re actually fully supportive of the indigenous seal hunt.

Life is messy, no person or organization is perfect, and Greenpeace surely does a great deal of good in the world. But to actively promote a resurgence of the fur industry is something that has probably cost Greenpeace my support for life. I’m sure there are millions of people who care about animals who will feel the same way. It’s appalling that a group with such a hard-won reputation for environmental advocacy is now squandering it by promoting seal fur.

I guess the silver lining to all this is that, next time you’re accosted by a Greenpeace canvasser, you now have the perfect rejoinder that will enable you to walk away: “Greenpeace supports the seal trade.”

***

Erik Marcus publishes Vegan.com and is the author of several books including, The Ultimate Vegan Guide.

The post Greenpeace Supports the Seal Trade appeared first on Vegan.com.

For more than a generation, meat has been linked to a variety of ailments. But not all meat is equally risky, and it’s been clear for some time that cured meats like bacon, ham, and sausage carry far greater health risks than other types of meat. It’s never been terribly difficult to imagine why, since if you lay some baloney slices on your car overnight it’ll eat through the paint by morning—so just imagine what the stuff does to your digestive tract when you eat it!

For decades now, studies have revealed strong connections between red meat consumption and cancer. In particular, people who eat the most processed meat have consistently suffered from alarming rates of colon and rectal cancer. Yesterday, the Daily Mail broke the story that the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has determined that the cancer risk associated with eating processed meat is as clearcut as that of smoking.

This is obviously a watershed moment for the food movement. If the U.S. Surgeon General’s famous warning labels on tobacco products are appropriate given the health risks of smoking, surely it’s now equally appropriate for bacon and other processed meats to carry similar labels. After all, if a product available for purchase is likely to give you cancer when used as intended, shouldn’t you be warned? If bacon indeed poses as clear a cancer risk as tobacco, what justification could there possibly be to put warning labels on cigarettes but not on bacon?

As you might expect, the meat industry is presently taking an identical stance to the 1960s tobacco industry: denial and the usual bad-faith rhetoric about moderation and sensibility. The North American Meat Institute has already issued a response saying the IARC’s findings amount to, “dramatic and alarmist overreach.”

Never has there been such good reason for all the players within the food movement—vegans, reducetarians, and conscientious omnivores alike—to join forces. Warnings labels on bacon won’t destroy the meat industry any more than the Surgeon General’s warning destroyed the tobacco industry, but it’s the right thing to do and a moral imperative given what we now know about cancer risks. There has never been such cause for the various factions of the food movement to team up to ensure that processed meats get suitably labeled so that people know the risks they’re taking.

A decade ago it probably would have come off as unreasonable to contend that bacon deserves the sort of warning label found on a pack of cigarettes. But as of today, the legitimacy of this point of view can no longer be denied. It’s now inevitable that some meats will eventually carry health warning labels—and there can be no better metric of the food movement’s maturity and effectiveness than how quickly we can unite to make this happen.

The post It’s Time for Bacon to Carry Warning Labels appeared first on Vegan.com.

There’s probably never been a time when so many people have been interested in giving veganism a try. What do you think aspiring vegans need the most help with when it comes to embracing a lifestyle free of animal products?
Yes, it feels like there is more interest in vegan living than ever before, and it’s a very exciting time to be immersed in this lifestyle. I think aspiring vegans mainly need simple, practical advice and support for shifting to a plant based life, including information as basic as knowing where to shop and how to prepare vegan food. Humans are creatures of habit, so a big part of making the change involves adopting new daily habits. And, this can be pretty easy, as most people already eat many vegan foods (fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, etc.)

So how long have you been vegan?

I’ve been vegan since 1985.

It’s a whole different world for vegans today than back when you made the switch. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen in the availability of vegan food over the past decade?

Yes, it’s very different today than it was in 1985, in a good way. Vegan foods are more plentiful than ever and vegan awareness is making its way into mainstream consciousness. Over the past decade, the availability and convenience of vegan foods has skyrocketed. Supermarkets are selling plant based alternatives to cows’ milk, and plant based “meatless” meats are widely available, even at places like Walmart. New vegan restaurants are opening and expanding, and non-vegan restaurants are adding plant based options to their menus. Vegan businesses have been established, vegan chefs are creating amazing dishes, and plant based athletes are demonstrating how human bodies can thrive on plants. We are experiencing a convergence of issues and interests, encompassing ethics, earth and health. Momentum is building, and it’s a very exciting time for the vegan movement.

So tell me about your new book, Living the Farm Sanctuary Life. Who is your target audience, and what are the main things you hope your readers get from the book?

This book is for people who are interested in good health and who want to live responsibly and compassionately, especially in regard to their food choices. Practically everyone shares these aspirations, but some people are more aware and concerned with our broken food system, and more inclined to pay attention, and that is the target audience. The key takeaway message is that each of us makes daily food choices that have profound impacts on our well-being, and on the well-being of other animals and the planet. Eating plants instead of animals represents a win, win, win – for ourselves, other animals, and the earth. And, making vegan choices is easier now than ever.

The post Interview with Gene Baur appeared first on Vegan.com.

If you love healthy food and snacks as much as we do, you are going to love this! We’re giving away two large UrthBoxes packed with healthy non-GMO vegan foods and snacks from UrthBox.

What’s UrthBox? This company offers the one of the best ways to discover new healthy non-GMO foods and snacks. They are one of the fabulous vegan subscription box companies focusing on full-size non-GMO foods, snacks and beverages.

Starting at just $9/month, UrthBox will send you a monthly box of healthy full-size Vegan snacks delivered to your door. Products include snack bars, superfoods, nuts and seeds, trail mixes, dried fruit and vegetables, chips sweets and chocolates, new age beverages and more. This is a great way to discover healthy new brands for your home, the office or on-the-go every month.

This week we’re giving away a large UrthBox to two lucky contestants!

A subscription to UrthBox can make an incredible gift for a friend or family member who is trying to eat more health conscious, or it could be the ultimate office box surprise. Please keep in mind that not every type of Urthbox is Vegan, so you’ll need to specifically select their Vegan type of boxes when ordering.

So don’t miss out on this amazing chance to score a box full of incredible vegan food. Click here to enter now!

The post UrthBox Vegan Snack Box Giveaway appeared first on Vegan.com.

The most stupid lawsuit in the entire history of stupid lawsuits has just been dropped, thanks in no small part to the litigators realizing that it was, well, a stupid lawsuit with zero chance of success. Mayo giant Unilever, which owns the Hellman’s and Best Foods brands, has dropped its lawsuit against Hampton Creek’s Just Mayo, just one day after the small startup announced it had attracted another $90 million in financing.

Unilever filed the lawsuit against Hampton Creek for violating truth-in-labeling laws, since there is an obscure 1957 FDA regulation specifying that mayonnaise must contain eggs. Unfortunately for Unilever, the company was itself selling healthier mayonnaise-style products that didn’t live up to the FDA’s definition either. What’s more, after filing its lawsuit, the company began quietly modifying its website to alter references to these products.

As is typically the case in this sort of thing, Unilever isn’t admitting wrongdoing, and instead issued a mealy-mouthed non-apology over the incident:

Unilever has decided to withdraw its lawsuit against Hampton Creek so that Hampton Creek can address its label directly with industry groups and appropriate regulatory authorities.

For its part, Hampton Creek likely owes Unilever a massive thank-you for generating a level of publicity that money can’t buy. Dozens of major media pieces covered the incident, nearly all siding against Unilever for bullying and displaying a level of dickish intent rare even among multinational food conglomerates.

So now, the “Mayo Wars” will be won, not in the courtroom but in the marketplace. Given that Just Mayo’s the better, healthier product, don’t be surprised if one day it edges past Hellman’s/Best Foods as the #1 selling brand of mayo.

The post Unilever Drops “Just Mayo” Lawsuit appeared first on Vegan.com.

Finding the perfect gift for a friend can be challenging, so here are a few ideas that you can make yourself and customize to suit your friends’ tastes. The secret ingredients? Mason jars packed with your favorite vegan things!

1. Snack Lovers’ Jar

Pack a large mason jar full of your favorite vegan treats like chocolate, gelatin-free gummies, macaroons, Cocomels, and more. Perfect for all the snackaholics in your life!

2. Pampering in a Jar

This is for the friend who had a tough year and needs a break. Pack an extra-large mason jar with your favorite cruelty-free spa products, nail polish, candles, and cozy socks. Just make sure your selections are thin enough to fit through the top of the mason jar!

3. Vegan Dog Cookies

A guaranteed hit for all your friends with canine companions. You can use store-bought dog cookies, but it’s an even more personal gift if you make your own! Just try our vegan dog treat recipe.

4. Custom-Crafted Succulent Plant

This gift is perfect for anyone who loves the outdoors. Plant a succulent in a mason jar for a gift that can spruce up any living space and will last well beyond the holiday season. You can find succulents in all shapes and sizes at your local Home Depot or gardening store.

[youtube id=”zj3uWrbr1wU”]

The post DIY Vegan Holiday Gift Ideas appeared first on Vegan.com.