I got some bloodwork done recently and in the words of my physician my results were great. This news has put me in a good, affirming, and reflective mood about the journey so far.

Going vegan seemed like a big deal at first, when I considered it before taking the plunge (I was already vegetarian) and afterwards when learning to socialize around food with non-vegans, but after a couple years it's just become what I do. And it's not a big deal to me that my diet isn't the norm. I do live in a big cosmopolitan city, which definitely makes being vegan easier.

It took me a couple years before I clued into supplementing. PSA: If you're vegan, you should take a B12 supplement of some form. Supplementing other things isn't as important.

Just about my only frustration is the greater cost of prepared goods and sweets, which I privately dub the ‘vegan tax’ lol. Vegan donuts or ice cream are twice or thrice the price of their equivalents. That kind of thing. It add ups if you have a sweet tooth like me :P, although maybe the added financial cost has some health-related benefits related to number of donuts consumed per year, etc.

I've never thought about going back, as in eating animal products again. I do do a couple non-vegan things for cost reasons at the moment, like I buy jeans from Winners that have the leather patches on the rear that jeans are seemingly are obligated to bear. My cosmetics and bathroom products are probably not all vegan, although many are. I recently learned that my water-based sexual lubricant probably isn't vegan due to glycerin. That's a new frontier of learning for me :)

In the last couple years I’ve started only using the term vegan with other vegans, as a shorthand, or when I want to refer to the underlying philosophy. In everyday conversation I use "plant-based", as I don't want non-vegans to feel judged, because I think many feel judged simply by hearing the word regardless of my intent, and I ultimately think their feeling judged is counterproductive.

I think going vegan changed me a little in ways I didn't expect, like it generally made me a more critical thinking, conscientious, and compassionate person over time. If I could have cloned myself before I went vegan and compared two versions of me - with and without being vegan the last 8 years – I think the vegan me would score higher on a measure of anti-racism or anti-ableism or egalitarianism, know more about greenwashing, and be more critical of the effects of capitalism – just as examples. That’s just a guess. And I might be confusing cause and effect. As I understand it now, veganism is more central to my identity and worldview than practically anything.

To celebrate my veganniversary I think I might try to make my first vegan pizza! I’ve had delicious vegan pizzas before with vegan cheese, nooch, slices of potato, and pesto as a base versus tomato sauce. Other toppings as well, but I highlight those as I think they combine cheesiness, creaminess, and saltiness to approximate traditional pizza cheesiness quite desirably. Time for me to try making it on my own!

Thanks for listening to my rambles. Feel free to chime in with your own!

In short, this is a proposal for an abolition of compulsory work for all beings. It involves rewilding at least 75% of the Earth with guidance from local and Indigenous communities, and ensuring that the remainder of the planet “abolish[es] the wage system, and live[s] in harmony with the Earth” as proposed by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (2021).

From "Hey Beatnik! This is The Farm Book" - a visitor's guide from a commune in Tennessee in the 70s.

cross-posted from: https://lemmus.org/post/6039150

Sarah's Scribbles by Sarah Andersen, June 29 2024.

If anyone has a better idea for a title, this one’s a little iffy…

I found a new yogurt flavor (alpro lemon-lime) that tastes just like key lime pie to me. I’d like to make it into an actual pie, but it’s a bit too runny.

I’d prefer to avoid cooking the yogurt, so I figured corn starch, flour, and tapioca would all be out. I could do chia seeds, but I don’t necessarily want that texture.

Any ideas?

I live in a vast rural area in the central valley of California. Here, people are fanatical carnivores. There is very little vegan food and I live very far from where most of it is available and don't drive for many reasons many of them environmental. Getting there would require riding a bike in the heat most of the year and people here hate bicyclists. Delivery like doordash is really expensive and only the same two dashers will take my vegan order I've noticed.

Has anyone found any useful tips for this basic kind of situation that I'm driving at?

In this episode we film more habitat destruction in South Texas, this time for the purposes of grazing cattle in a desert.

Echinocereus enneacanthus, Coryphantha macromeris runyonii, Ancistrocactus scheeri and others are prevented from being destroyed in this act of senseless bulldozing. Ecotourism possibilities abound here due to the presence of numerous rare birds and cactus species and an abundance of winter texans that would happily pay to see and protect this land, but ranching and cattle are the convention here, and human beings rarely break with convention unless forced to by unforeseen circumstances which are sure to arrrive to the region, eventually.

Canonical YouTube link

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16526178

Scientists and environmental organizations around the world urge a shift toward plant-based foods as one of the most impactful actions we can take to reduce climate destruction and improve our health.

That’s why we created the Climate-Friendly Food Guide to provide more details, recipes, tips, and resources.

There's a PDF version there too.

UK Version

Via Reddit

Sounds like a cool new Lemmy instance.

Abstract

Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.

Original on New Politics, Winter 2022

Although the UN released a special report two years ago stressing that one of the most effective ways to mitigate warming is a plant-based diet,^[4]^ not one day of COP26 was devoted to the issue, in stark contrast to the time dedicated to energy, transport, and finance. Even as protests outside the conference called attention to this issue, the delegates inside ignored it.

One reason cited for the omission was that addressing animal agriculture would unfairly target historically oppressed communities, continuing the Global North’s legacy of dominating and controlling those they’ve colonized.^[5]^ While this may seem motivated by the noble impulse to be “sensitive” to colonial dynamics, the knowledge that these same imperialist nations’ delegates also removed from the conference’s concluding agreement the so-called Loss and Damages Finance Facility,^[6]^ which mandated compensation be paid to poorer countries for climate damages, should put any uncertainty about their true motives to rest. This is just one manifestation of how the call for sensitivity toward oppressed groups is exploited by those most responsible for current crises in order to avoid making transformative changes within their own societies.^[7]^

Unfortunately, the Western left bears some responsibility for this manipulative usage of political correctness, due both to its collective failure to reject the neoliberal exploitation of identity politics, and to its constant smearing of veganism and animal liberation as “middle class and white.”^[8]^ While it’s certainly true that vegan and animal advocacy are often conducted in colonial, Eurocentric ways, that does not mean there are no liberatory ways of advancing these goals, or that no marginalized individuals do this type of work themselves. Around the world, Indigenous, colonized, and working-class people engage in praxis that recognizes how the fates of other species enmesh with our own, and that our collective survival depends upon the liberation of humans and other species alike.