I have been enjoying reading other people's blogs about being vegan as well as looking at some failures. Naturally the successful vegans whether they are artists or athletes are the independent blogs that I have to search the internet for. The failures however, always show up on the pages of national newspapers. Parents stupidly starving their kids with misinformed diets, raw vegan getting dumped together with vegan, and a normally functioning vegans with famous blogs who decide to eat meat is big news.
No one seems to care about well functioning vegan athletes or just normal people. I really want to blame the meat industry or the news industry but then again... will you read an article forwarded by a friend about a family starving their kids first or the one about a healthy happy vegan athlete who is doing just fine? Be honest....
What I find annoying about the articles, as well as the comments that are usually posted after the articles online, is that usually the diet they follow is ridiculous and completely insane.
Another issue seems to be how vegan is vegan enough and which label exactly one has to use to describe oneself. I guess people spend a lot of time on this. One article claims that bananas are no longer vegan because there is a spray containing shellfish residue that prevents ripening.
http://blisstree.com/eat/bananas-may-not-be-vegan-anymore-707/
Ummm... Ok... But no one eats the skin of the banana and every farm uses some sort of pest control so there is always some animal life lost unless you grew and supervises it yourself.
If the point is to avoid all animal deaths in the production of food - good luck with that. Animals ran over when the food was being delivered, pest control in every stage of food preparation, and probably some accidents along the way. If the focus becomes no animal injured rather than no animal consumed - how far is it going to go?
Another thing that seemed to be either not mentioned too often or not mentioned at all is the environmental impact of the vegan diet. Does it really take less land and resources to feed vegans than to feed carnivores? Or omnivores? My fake cheese has palm oil and it seems there is no sustainable way of getting it. Another type of fake cheese has cashews in it - pretty sure they don't grow in Chicago. Is it really better than getting some cheese from a family farm in Wisconsin?
I am still trying to find a way to quantize the effects.
