I Can't Believe It's Vegan!

A tip o' the hat to the All Animal Life blog for this one.

So you wanna be a vegan, because 1) it's better for the environment 2) it's morally "correct" and 3) it's healthier. But what can you eat? Are you doomed to a life of wheatgrass and alfalfa sprouts?

Heck no! The folks at PETA have compiled a handy list of vegan-friendly products that can be found at your local supermarket. That's right, kids - you can save the world and yourself and still enjoy Cracker Jacks, Cocoa Puffs and KoolAid.

Take a stroll through your local grocery store, check some ingredients, and you'll see what we mean. You may even be surprised to find that a few of your favorite indulgences happen to be vegan! For example, did you know that Pepperidge Farm Turnovers, Murray Butter Cookies, and Cracker Jacks are all vegan? They may not all be "health foods," but they are great for the taste buds! Just remember, one cannot live on Goldenberg Peanut Chews alone.

There is also an abundance of chips, dips, cookies, candies, frozen pies, soups, and other mouth-watering items by mainstream food manufacturers that are also vegan.

I will give PETA the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this list is intended to seduce SAD-eating non-vegans into seeing that a vegan diet can be...fun! You don't have to eat nothing but soy "meat" and kidney beans. You can keep your Pop Tarts! Froot Loops! Tater Tots!

Awesome. If I ever ate any of that shite, I'd sign right up.

Course, I am a tad curious as to how eating any of these foods helps the environment. I mean, can you get 100 Mile Cap'n Crunch? Keebler Fudge Pops that aren't manufactured in a large, pollution-pumping plant? Betty Crocker Hash Browns made using fresh, local ingredients sourced from small, sustainable family farms? And how does eating mass-produced processed food help the soil, air, water? If we all ate like this, pollution etc from factory farming operations would certainly decrease (though we'd still have all that methane from rice paddies to worry about) - but wouldn't we just be replacing one issue with another?

Well, at least we wouldn't be killing any animals. Except during large-scale crop production, of course. And unless you count human beings as animals, in which case they'd be dropping like flies after a few decades.

About 25% of us would suffer metabolic syndrome/insulin resistance, so would step lightly out of the population via diabetes and its associated conditions. Anywhere from 1 in 22 to 1 in 4 of us would be stricken with the more than 150 medical conditions that result from gluten intolerance, and get to spend our lives on medication to treat, among other things: thyroid disease; colitis; Crohn's; arthritis; lupus; gallbladder disease; depression; ataxia; migraines; schitzophrenia; Addison's disease and multiple sclerosis.

If the only criteria for selecting a food item is whether or not it's vegan, then that criteria is sorely misguided. Apparently, it's fine by PETA. My concern is that young people, researching veganism, will read this list and stock up. On it's website, PETA does warn that "you can't be healthy if you eat nothing but junk food" - unfortunately, their version of healthy food still causes trouble for a whole lotta people, even if it's whole grain and organic.

If PETA could admit that people can be and in fact are very healthy on a diet that includes meat (which, if they really read the science from the late 1800's onwards, they would HAVE to concede) and based their position on moral grounds, I'd have no problem with that. Morality is, after all, subjective. If you feel that it's "wrong" to eat animals, then don't eat them (and take your vitamins). But to take the science that suits your beliefs and ignore the rest is, in my opinion, immoral.

If they would read, say, Good Calories Bad Calories, for example, and actually LOOK at the work that has been done (and ignored by the mainstream) for literally centuries, or examine the paleoanthropological evidence regarding human diet, PETA could do some good to both the general public and it's members. They have no problem, for the most part, embracing "alternative", non-mainstream information - and Taubes' book is a huge eye-opener as far as information suppression by the mainstream goes. Instead, they create websites like Atkins Exposed, which recycles the same old myths that those of us who've actually read the literature and the studies (from both sides) know to be false.

And now, they're promoting factory-made, highly packaged and processed, trucked-all-over-the-country-to-get-to-you junk food. Way to go, guys.