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| What is vegan? |
What is Vegan?
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Veganism is...
Good for you
Research on vegetarians (including vegans) shows them to have lower rates of heart disease, besity, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, and possibly some cancers. It also reduces the chance of food poisoning. And of course you avoid all the hormones and antibiotics that are pumped into animals raised for food. According to the American Dietetic Association, vegetarian and vegan diets are healthy and beneficial no matter what your age:
“Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Vegetarian diets offer a number of nutritional benefits, including lower levels of saturated fat, cholesterol, and animal protein as well as higher levels of carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, and antioxidants such as vitamins C and E and phytochemicals.”
American Dietetic Association; Dietitians of Canada. Position of the American Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada: Vegetarian diets. J Am Diet Assoc. 2003 Jun; 103(6):748-65.
Good for the animals
If you’re already a vegetarian you’ve undoubtedly helped reduce animal suffering, but the dairy and egg industries are no picnics for the animals involved. Cows must be repeatedly impregnated for the production of milk, and their offspring may be sent straight to the slaughterhouse or reared for veal or milk, or sold for their flesh. Calves are often taken from their mothers immediately after birth, leaving both cows and calves to mourn the broken maternal bond. Both male and female calves are kept in confinement, unable to move freely. If raised for veal, males will be slaughtered after only 4 months, while female calves will likewise be kept strictly confined until they are able to produce milk.
Then they are turned into milking machines. Cows’ udders are often infected and swollen from the abuse of growth hormones and multiple milkings every day. Dairy cows are killed at about five years of age and sold for ‘low grade’ products such as burgers, sausages and other processed foods. Their natural life span would be at least twenty years. And as for typical (battery cage) egg production, since only the females lay eggs, 100-150 million day-old male chicks are killed every year, many suffocated in garbage bags. The industry average is less than one-half square foot of space per bird — less space than a sheet of paper! They have the tips of their beaks cut off to prevent feather pulling caused by the intensive confinement.
These poor animals live with barely enough room to move for up to two years until their egg production goes down. Then they are either killed or forced into molting. To induce a molt, egg producers take away food and water from the birds, forcing them into another egg laying cycle. Chickens and turkeys raised for meat fare no better — they are crammed by the thousands in sheds, some with no windows. Breeding has caused them to grow at an incredible pace, one that their bodies have a hard time catching up to. Turkeys have the tips of their beaks and some toes cut off. Chickens have been known to be boiled alive during the slaughter process. And the label ‘free range’ does not mean cruelty-free; in fact, free range hens live in very crowded conditions, have the tips of their bills cut off, and are slaughtered no differently than conventionally raised animals.
Life for pigs on factory farms is dreadful too! Over 80% of pigs who are raised for food (like sausages, hot dogs, bacon and ham) live their lives in sheds thick with the overwhelming smell of urine and feces. A mother pig (sow) is forced to give birth in a tiny crate where she cannot walk or even turn around. This is also where she will spend her pregnancy. She moves between these two small crates for four to five years until she is killed. The piglets spend their lives in squalid conditions until at six months they are shackled by one leg and have their throats slit.
Billions of sea animals are caught each year. Those fish who are still alive by the time they make it to the decks of fishing boats have one of two fates. Either they are allowed to suffocate to death or they are disemboweled with a gutting knife. In addition to this, countless other sea creatures are caught in fishing nets and discarded as by-catch.
Good for the environment
Treating animals like food factories has a negative impact on our water and air. Vast expanses of wilderness are converted to pastureland, resulting in a loss of habitat for countless species. Commercial fishing of the oceans has decimated the aquatic environment. Shrimp nets, which are dragged through the water, catch everything in their path — thousands of sea turtles are killed this way every year.
A branch of the USDA kills wildlife, such as coyotes and bobcats, to protect farmers’ livestock. The factory farming industry is creating environmental problems of its own. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), dairy farms have created an environmental crisis in California, the number one dairy producing state. In fact, California alone produces an astounding 30 million tons of manure each year.
The EPA states that a single cow produces approximately 120 pounds of wet manure per day. Estimates equate the waste produced per day by one dairy cow to that of 20-40 humans per day. Manure lagoons designed to contain livestock waste can leak or spill over into waterways, contaminating our drinking water. Pig farms with 100,000 animals produce as much waste as a city of a quarter-million people; but the pig farms have no wastewater treatment system. Pig waste often spills into nearby rivers, sometimes killing many thousands of fish.
Good for the planet's people
Every day, 840 million people around the world, including 200 million children, go hungry. But much of the world’s grain harvest, 40%, is used to feed livestock, not people. U.S. livestock alone consumes about one-third of the world’s total grain harvest, as well as more than 70% of the grain grown in the United States. In fact, the more a cow is milked, the more grain concentrates she needs. High quality foods such as wheat and soy, which could be fed to humans, are being fed to animals. On average, you can get about five times as much biologically available protein from eating plant foods directly as you can from using them to produce meat.
A slaughterhouse may be the worst workplace in the U.S. The workers are poor and often illiterate or unable to speak English. They are treated almost as callously as the animals dying by the billions in those same facilities. The pay is low, turnover is high, and injuries and illnesses are frequent and often severe. Turnover rate at all processing plants runs close to 100% per year. Increasingly, both slaughterhouses and factory farms are located in poverty-stricken areas. Factory farms tend to be located in predominantly non-white, low-income areas.
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| Vegan food |
What is a Vegan anyway?
So, now that you’re convinced that veganism is a beneficial lifestyle, you’ll want to know what it involves, won’t you? One thing it doesn’t involve is deprivation and martyrdom — there really is no need to sit around munching your way through a head of lettuce and feeling sorry for yourself (unless, of course, you REALLY like lettuce). Ask any vegan what they eat and they will look at you in astonishment. The foods available are so varied, so tasty and so easy to prepare, it’s a miracle that we do anything other than eat! (Truth be told, some of us don’t!) Now we aren’t saying you won’t miss a few things at first - cheese and milk chocolate are always the hardest to kiss goodbye, but there are vegan alternatives available, so don’t despair.
What's the difference between a Vegetarian and a Vegan?
Well, a vegetarian simply does not eat any dead animals, or parts of them. So this means no meat, poultry (chickens, turkeys, ducks, etc.), fish or other watery creatures (like shrimp and crabs), or any by-products of these animals, like gelatin or animal fats. This also means eating only ‘vegetarian’ cheese, as some cheeses are made using rennet (taken from the stomachs of calves — yuck!).
A vegan will not eat any of these either but will also strive to avoid all animal products to avoid partaking in the exploitation, abuse, and slaughter of animals. This includes eggs, milk, cream, yogurt, cheese and anything that contains these products or derivatives of them. Vegans also avoid honey, because bees are frequently killed during its production, and finally, a vegan will not wear wool, leather or silk, or use personal care and household products that contain animal substances or are tested on animals. In fact, a vegan won’t eat, wear or use anything that comes from any animal, dead or alive. Cane sugar is sometimes processed through bone char so some vegans avoid eating it. If you’re interested in finding out which products definitely do not have bone char, please see www.VeganProducts.org/sugar.html.
Sounds like a lot to remember, huh? To begin with, you will feel like you need to be reading every label in the cupboard, looking up things like ‘lanolin’ in your dictionary and trying to remember why you decided to go vegan in the first place! But it does get easier — and no one will blame you if you make a mistake! We all do. Just take things at your own pace and remember why you’re doing this, for yourself, the planet, and animals.
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