https://discord.gg/mj4fcE2Q8B

I am making a book where 95% are vegan and animal agr. is illegal, thus 5% of humanity goes black market to buy their corpses.

Then we go the cute lena working at a science lab. One of the badgers stopped visiting her feeding ground. Soon the badger will become a kaiju and cause destruction on earth.

Hi vegans I’m an animal activist who just published a poetry collection with a strong vegan and environmental message. I wrote it for people like myself struggling with vystopia, eco anxiety, and trauma. I hope it helps you feel less alone. I would very much appreciate a review. Thank you! 💚🌱

https://www.amazon.com/Awake-Arise-Amber-Sylvain/dp/166292349X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=SWVPJ96I0DLM&keywords=awake+and+arise&qid=1656064276&sprefix=awake+and+arise%2Caps%2C108&sr=8-1

The Jungle is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). The novel portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. The book depicts working-class poverty, lack of social supports, harsh and unpleasant living and working conditions, and hopelessness among many workers. These elements are contrasted with the deeply rooted corruption of people in power. A review by the writer Jack London called it "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." - Wikipedia

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Full VideoBook here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7GTcSmznf8&list=PLqPQQc4SlnxIkYKSFW1znHDbzucBy4k6w&index=1

[ Removed by reddit in response to a copyright notice. ]

I just wrote a blog post with 5 of my favorite books that touch on both veganism and running. It's pretty specific, but if you're into either, you might be interested. I love them all for various reasons -- Michael Greger's book How Not to Die is useful to have around if you want the nitty gritty on specific fruits and veggies, but if you're just looking for a good story there are other suggestions. I love these so maybe worth checking out: https://thetipclub.com/5-must-read-books-for-plant-based-runners/

. Wasn’t sure where else to ask this and was suggested this this sub in r/vegan.

Does anyone here have a copy of Practical Ethics by Peter Singer that they have read and no longer want? I went on Amazon to get it for my kindle but it’s not available in that format and the formats that are available are $30+. Figured it would be worth a shot to ask and then only have to pay shipping costs versus the $30+ and then tax.

Thank you in advance!

Looking vegan pdf book willing to trade with other book The Blue Zones Kitchen, More Plants Less Waste etc please and thank you :)

Looking vegan pdf book willing to trade with other book The Blue Zones Kitchen, More Plants Less Waste etc please and thank you :)

Humane or Hypocrite?

I don’t have a heart, I rip the limbs of animals apart. I eat a calf for dinner and wash it down with his mothers milk because I’m a sinner, I have no remorse for the babies in chambers filled with gas, after all, I am masked. I don’t see you dangling one leg from the celling screaming for your life, I don’t think twice before I slit your throat with my knife. “Love, Peace and Equality” I say as I stomach a product of violence and fear. I shower my puppy with nothing but love, but send pigs through the mud, bathed in blood. My mother said we all bleed the same, although true, she forgot to disclaim, sometimes it’s okay to inflict pain on to others, as long as you aren’t the one holding the gun. society is f*cked and our world is in pain. Everything is dying and only we are to blame.

Hello everyone! We are students of the Bologna Business School in Italy, working towards obtaining a Masters degree in Business Administration. We are carrying out a survey for a project work which has as its object the possible launch in the US market of a vegan cheese based on almonds and cashews and your opinion is very important for us. In specific, it is a type of product called "fermentino" and is obtained through a fermentation process of almonds and cashews, water, salt and natural ferments. We kindly ask you to dedicate a few minutes of your time to this questionnaire, which is totally anonymous.. All data will be used only for educational purposes. A huge thank you in advance for taking the time out of your day and answering these questions for us. Let's begin! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScH4K1ETVVH6l3bWKglZ9uMTQx1n9akHXScCCpkmjmSE2gFrA/viewform?usp=sf_link

I'm going through this right now, and it's worth a read I'd think for anyone who was interested in a brief overview of classical through to contemporary writers on animal rights. Be ready though, there's a lot of anti-animal rights material, some perfectly laughable in that they're the exact same arguments we face on a daily basis in our lives and in r/vegan (plants tho, canines, animals don't have feelings and don't matter).

I'm not quite finished, I have another fifty pages to go or so, and then I'll probably make another post here with some things I've noticed during reading, to see if anyone would like to discuss the ideas further.

Link to the book

I just finished this book and while it's not a vegan book I think there are some good parallels. The focus of the book is on Carol Ruckdeschel who is a self-taught turtle biologist. She fights for animal rights, mostly sea turtles, and is a driving force to end shrimp trawling. She is fighting to create underwater wilderness and for sea turtle rights. She isn't a vegan, though I would consider her a fregan because she doesn't hunt animals. The only meat she eats is from roadkill or dead animals she finds in the Cumberland Island wilderness.

I found this book to be really inspirational to what it's like to "fight in the trenches" for animal and wilderness protections. Also, I just visited the island on a backpacking trip and I really enjoyed Carol's story and the island history.

The book talks about bycatch and urges readers to stop eating shrimp. I put a post it in the back urging people to stop eating seafood in general. Hopefully a little vegan advocacy goes a long way. :)

http://imgur.com/a/NKKap

Let's discuss the book "Esther the Wonderpig"! What did you think? Did you like it? Love it? Hate it? My personal rating is a 7/10.

Gary Francione & Anna Charlton recently published this short book. I got my copy in the mail recently, but I haven't yet read any more than the introduction. I thought it might be a good one to consider discussing here!

Here's a link to the blog post announcing it: http://www.abolitionistapproach.com/our-new-book-animal-rights-the-abolitionist-approach/

This page has some links to where you can buy a copy: http://abolitionistapproachbook.weebly.com/

Any thoughts about reading this one together?

Anyone want to help out? I've been lax lately, partly because of some health issues I've been struggling with, and with working on projects of my own.

If anyone would like to help out, please comment or send me a private message.

In the meantime I'll keep this going best I can! Feel free to start new discussions and post about new books as you come across them. Join in with discussions new and older.

Good reading :)

Hi all,

As above, this is the discussion thread for the science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. This was my 4th read through of the book (first time as a vegan though!) and it seems like for everyone else it was their first time, so I would love to hear what everyone thought in general and if they felt there were any "vegan messages".

Hi everyone, I realize this was supposed to have been going a while ago, but it's going now!

The new non-fiction, since there weren't a lot of suggestions for non-fiction books, will be The China Study, which while it doesn't specifically tie to veganism because it focuses on eating a plant-based-diet, it may be handy to understand some of the impacts that a meta-analysis of various studies can show.

If there's no one else who would like to, or if there isn't a reason to wait longer, I'll start discussion on this book in a month, on Nov. 16. I may break it down into discussion topics or not, depending on how dense the book is.

As always, please weigh in with books that you'd like to read, or new thoughts on ones we've already gone through. The more threads the merrier!

I've got a copy of Frankenstein - I read it a while ago, before I was a veggie, but the discussion Carol J. Adams had in the Sexual Politics of Meat has me interested in reading it again and talking about the veg aspects of the monster.

Any book is fine though! Weigh in on this thread :)

Hi all,

This is a slow subreddit so if no one read this book I understand. I didn't get a chance to reread it since I lent it to a friend, so I don't have an in-depth overview to write. But if you did read it, I'd love to know what you thought!

There were a lot of great references to classic and modern vegetarianism literature in The Sexual Politics of Meat (check out the discussion of Part II for a partial list), as well as other options that were discussed in the last book selection thread, so I would like to again open nominations for a book to be selected. Selection of the next book will be in two weeks, from this thread, and depending on the type of book I think it will be likely that discussion will again be broken down into two or more parts, to facilitate more in-depth and varied discussion.

I'm looking forward to getting into whatever book the community decides on next!

Due to some personal circumstances this is a bit overdue, but here is the official discussion thread for Part III of Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat.

• “Vegetarians identify a connection between a healthy body and a diet that honours the moral relations between us and the other animals,” page 193. There is more discussion of this throughout the following chapters, including on page 195 where Adams talks about how vegetarians are about 50 per cent less likely to die from heart diseases than are meat eaters, as well as having lower cancer mortality rates.

• There is more discussion in Part III about how much more similar are bodies are to other herbivorous animals, rather than to carnivorous ones. I would be interested in seeing how this has held out over the few decades since TSPOM was published. Specifically on page 193, Adams mentions the teeth, saliva, stomach acids, and length of the intestines of humans.

• “Many people who stop eating meat for a limited period of time comment on the differences they felt. They were no longer sleepy after a meal, a certain undefinable lightness replaced a heaviness or grossness they had associated with food consumption,” page 196. I personally have found this too, at least on my transition from a vegetarian to a vegan diet.

• On page 197, Adams talks about the uniquely human invention, implements that are designed to kill, butcher, season, and cook animals. On the following page, she mentions how vegetarian writers of the past, from Plutarch to the modern period, were concerned that in eating animals humans did so in ways very unlike the other animals.

• The transformation of meat from its natural state to one of food, through cultural intervention, on page 198, which ties into discussion on the following page where a person who has problems with meat is viewed as dysfunctional, rather than the society that permits and supports eating meat. On page 209 she goes into this in more depth, asking “Does vegetarianism, then, manifest a psychological problem with food?” She states that when a refusal to eat meat is labeled phobic, the dominant society is enacting distortion; “it cannot grant positive status to objections to eating animals.” This ties into the idea of hidden vegetarianism throughout history as well.

• Adams raises an excellent point on page 199 that health benefits of vegetarianism should not be as important as the moral reasons for doing so. She quotes Isaac Bashevis Singer, who replied to a woman saying that her health had improved when she stopped eating meat, that “I do it for the health of the chickens.” I think it’s easy to become focussed on the health aspects - especially since they’re so exciting - but I find myself in person and on reddit, when health is brought up, trying to bring discussion back around to the foundation of why we’re vegetarian or vegan, for the animals, and that our personal health is great but is a side effect of a larger choice. Adams further says, “finding organic meat acceptable can arise from the tendency to focus solely on health concerns.

• On page 200, Adams states that there are arguments made against vegetarianism, that it must accommodate meat eating so as not to accommodate racism. Adams states that the conflict isn’t between these two groups, but rather between the role of meat as representation and the reality of meat eating. “But to posit the meaning of meat to something other than the animal,” she says on page 201, “is to participate in the structure of the absent referent.”

• Several times throughout Part III Adams raises the point that vegetarianism seems unimportant to many feminist writers, historians, and chroniclers. She calls this the “double hidden history” on page 202, “the hidden history of women, and the illusive history of animal activism and women’s vegetarianism.” She talks about distortions occurring in history because historians and literary critics fail to take seriously their own meat eating, and that as a result vegetarianism is trivialized, and “judged as irrelevant to a serious study of women’s lives.”

• Adams also talks extensively about vegetarianism being seen as a fad, among other motives as a way to delegitimize the movement, starting on page 203.

• On page 207, she talks about how “vegetarianism provided a form of female networking,” and as how some women see themselves as emancipated by their change in diet, as liberation from being enslaved by the dominant culture.

• On page 211, Adams points out that disgust at the thought of meat might be the person recognizing the absent referent in the food, the dead animal. “The girls’ objections to eating meat may be related to their dislike of the idea of eating animals. Further she talks about how artistic men and women can have difficulty with meat eating.

• Vegetarianism acts as a sign of disease with patriarchal culture, page 217, which she says has three facets: the revelation of the nothingness of meat, the naming of relationships, and the rebuking of a patriarchal and meat-eating world. The nothingness of meat arises because one sees it has come from something (someone) and has been made into no-thing, no-body. “In experiencing the nothingness of meat, one realized that one is not eating food but dead bodies,” page 227, and on page 229 “it brings about a detachment from the desire to eat meat.” Adams says the second step in what she calls the vegetarian quest is naming the relationship: between the animal and the food on the plate, between ourselves and the other animals, and between our ethics and our diet. Adams calls the final stage “rebuking a meat-eating world,” and says that meat boycotts after World War II and in the 1970s were accomplished by individuals doing something together (“it is of interest that women were more likely to observe the boycott than their husbands were”).

I’d like to finish the formal discussion with a quote from Adams in the epilogue.

“The codes of the texts of meat must be broken down. They cannot be broken down while meat is present for it reifies all of the old codes. We must admit that there will be a destruction of the pleasure of meals as we now know it. But what awaits us is the discover of the pleasure of vegan meals.

“To forget the meat we begin by naming and claiming the absent referent, restoring to animals their individual beings. We must consider our own appetites and whether we wish to be dependent on them; we place the importance of acceding to these appetites within the symbolic patriarchal order that they will either accept or challenge.”

Thank you everyone for participation, and please feel free to start new discussion threads on this book or any other literature, and come back often to view and participate in the discussions.

The next book to be discussed is We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, which is slated for discussion Sept. 11.

Part II of Carol Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat “provides the beginnings of a feminist history of vegetarianism … by freeing vegetarian meaning from the sexual politics of meat and by freeing women’s voices from patriarchal interpretation.”

She states that the focus of this middle section is literary texts and their vegetarian influences. At the end of this post, I have compiled a list of the resources she mentions.

Here are several observations and talking points I've jotted down while going through Part II. Please feel free to introduce other ideas and quotations, and to comment on these if there's something you would like to talk about.

• In the beginning (of Part II), Adams mentions the fall in Genesis and the Prometheus myth on page 149, and the idea that certain Romantic-era thinkers had of Adam and Eve’s apple as “consuming meat” is really interesting. Dispelling or at least strongly disputing women’s so-called “blame” in the eating of meat, since hunting etc. is seen as a primarily masculine activity, and so killing could be the reason for man’s fall from grace.

• There were additional physiological observations made in Part II as well, with Adams specifically mentioning our flat teeth and our intestines that aren’t like the intestines of a carnivore (page 158). This ties in to discussion on pages 77 and 96 in Part I.

• The talk of World War I bringing vegetarianism to the forefront of certain discussions back home, throughout pages 163 to 169 (and mentioned beyond)

• Page 169, where Adams talks about a vegetarian diet improving mortality rates in Denmark. This would be a fascinating study to learn more about

• A lot of discussion throughout the chapters about Isabel Cogates The Shooting Party, and how specifically it was an opportunity to redefine where the war’s “front” is (from the trenches to the dinner table), and from page 180 about how women still have the potential for violence against each other if they leave their diet uncontrolled. Page 186, “Vegetarianism becomes, then, a necessary accompaniment to pacifism.” Adams further mentions in a few other places, including page 177, that other authors have come to the conclusion that if people were to renounce violence against animals, they may also renounce violence against animals.

• Has anyone else had a personal rejection of meat or other animal products after going vegan? Adams references a character who was written to experience this on page 175. I’m not sure that I have, but I am sure that if someone tricked me into eating a hamburger of flesh that when I found out, I would likely retch if I was chewing it.

• The idea of interruption in text, to talk about vegetarianism, as referenced on pages 163 and 181 - 182. The idea that a writer in a work of fiction will “break up” the narrative as a way of introducing important concepts that can previously be outside the story or only referenced earlier.

Resources mentioned in Part II

I got as many as I could find, though a few may have been missed while compiling this list:

• Ritson, Joseph, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty

• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein

• Shelly, Percy, A Vindication of Natural Diet, and On the Vegetable System of Diet

• Newton, John Frank, The Return to Nature; or, Defence of Vegetable Regimen

• Plato, The Republic (specific reference, when Socrates tells Glaucon that meat production necessitates large amounts of pasture

• Paley, William, *The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy

• Mare, Walter de la, Dry August Burned

• Christian, Eugene, Meatless and Wheatless Menus

• Colegate, Isabel, The Shooting Party

• Piercy, Marge, Small Changes

• Stevens, Henry Bailey, The Recovery of Culture

• Brophy, Brigid, An Anecdote of the Golden Age (Homage to Back to Methuselah)

• Brindel, June, Ariadne: A Novel of Ancient Crete, and Phaedre: A novel of Ancient Athens

• Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, Herland

• Bryant, Dorothy, The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You

• McCarthy, Mary, Birds of America

• Atwood, Margaret, The Edible Woman, Surfacing

We will be discussing Part III on Aug 22. Thanks for any and all participation!

With this thread, we will be beginning discussion Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat.

If you haven’t finished the book or the section, please feel welcome to participate in these discussions. Following are some topics that I would be interested in discussing further, with page numbers referenced.

• The racial politics of meat, pages 51 through 54

The racism of George Beard’s evolutionary analysis, as characterized by the quote she brings out from him: “In proportion as man grows sensitive through civilization or through disease, he should diminish the quantity of cereals and fruits, which are far below him on the scale of evolution, and increase the quantity of animal food, which is nearly related to him in the scale of evolution, and therefore more easily assimilated.”

This is fascinating argument that I think might be used effectively in a discussion or essay about this topic. If we want to be eating evolutionarily “higher” food (and that that’s better, in some definable way), maybe the most advanced people should eat people? Maybe we should eat carnivores? Maybe we should eat exclusively ape meat?

• Ursula Hamdress, page 65

The idea of an animal as the absent referent, page 66

I personally found that the idea of animals being “transformed” into food quite interesting, how we have animals, a factory of some sort, and then steaks. This is probably the unconscious view animal ag would want us to have, and the arguments that we can come up with are first designed to point out the cracks in this view. Adams says on page 96 that “Part of the battle of being heard as a vegetarian is being hear about literal matters in a society that favors symbolic thinking.”

And from later on, page 73, Adams raises the point that we all consume images of women all the time. They are the absent referent in pornography, etc.

• Biological discussions, historical and current; pages 77 & 158

Starting with Plutarch, who brings up the point that we need implements to kill animals since we aren’t equipped with claws or other bodily weapons, and going through the observations of current biologists who have found that our teeth are flat like those of herbivores (canines tho?) and that our intestines don’t resemble those of carnivores.

On page 96, a reference to Peter Singer: “The most direct form of animal contact for people is at supper: we eat them.”

Such a strong quote, and Adams emphasizes that meat eating signals the primary oppression of animals (page 94). “On an emotional level, everyone has some discomfort with eating animals,” she says on page 94.

Is this one of our most effective paths to help people see that animal agriculture needs to change and be eliminated? Appeals to emotion? Personally, I think so. I think compassion is what is going to bring people to us, and I’m not sure that Adams feels the same way, which I will bring up as a discussion point during the conversation about Part II next week.

• Stages of meat eating, page 91

First stage, practically none. Second, eating the meat of free (hunted) animals. Third, eating domesticated animals, and fourth, factory farming.

I feel like factory farming does deserve a separation from the third stage, due to its horrifyingness and fundamental difference from the earliest domestication techniques. Also, it being separated does possibly provide a wedge that can be used to help convert people who are compassionate but still on the fence: “Of course I would oppose factory farming, conditions are terrible, etc.”

And as factory farming dies off, so too will the demand for increasingly expensive and uncommon animal flesh. I’m being optimistic here.

• Dilution of violence through misdirecting adjectives

The use of terms like “humane slaughter” and “forcible rape” turn the focus away from the important words and add elements of what can be perceived as subjectivity. It’s sneaky and dirty. Adams says specifically it “promotes conecptual mis-focusing that relativizes these acts of violence.”

“We do not consume people. We consume animals.” (Page 100)

This also ties in a bit to the page 108 assertion that animals and vegetarians have muted voices, and then on page 109 how vegetarians are seen as picky, particular, embittered, self-righteous, confrontative, and overly sentimental when bringing up topics of vegetarianism. And on page 125, Adams asserts that feminists and vegetarians are called aggressive because things that they think of as important, others only think of as passing entertainment. “The attack on vegetarians for being emotional demonstrates how the dominant culture attempts to deflect critical discourse,” from page 109.

And in several places of the book, Adams mentions that because of meat’s status as absent referent, and because of the natural human tendency of assigning narrative to things, it’s ineffective and counterproductive to talk about vegetarianism at the table when a meal is being served.

• “Female animals become oppressed by their femaleness, and become essentially surrogate wet nurses.”

• The word vegan, coined in 1944 by Donald Watson, overcomes the dilution of the word “vegetarian” by the dominant culture, page 112. And how about on page 113, where Adams said the term was generated by starting with vegetarianism, and carrying it through to its logical conclusions?

• Sixty percent of the food Americans now eat is provided by the meat, dairy, and egg industries

• Non-animal protein as unusual, page 115

• Animals have no fore-knowledge of death, so it’s okay to kill them, page 123

• The reduction of vegetarianism to “being moralistic,” page 126

This is one of the most frustrating stances people can take in discussions with me, that I’m trying to impose some sort of arbitrary moral rules on their lives, and who am I to talk anyway? I’m not great at keeping my cool in those sorts of discussions, and would love to hear if anyone is better at it than I am or have strategies and arguments they can rely on.

• Meat eating gives meaning to animals’ existence, and therefore killing animals is a necessary tragedy, page 128.

These were some of my observations throughout Part I. Discussion for Part II starts Aug. 15.

I'm not sure what everyone else has for bookstores around the world, but my small local bookstore happened to have copies of We Are All Completely by Ourselves in hardcover for ten bucks.

I'm looking forward to reading it.