Jane and I have reached a point in our lives where we no longer buy into the consumerist mentality that drives our economy. We often joke with each other that we are not the target demographic. We're not into fashion, we don't get a new car every two years, and we really try to live within our salary. Couple that with the fact that we're middle aged and have most of the stuff we already need, and you can see that we're not "shoppers." And we're really not into the $20 gift card swap. All of this makes us difficult to shop for, so last year we started asking for gifts to charities of our choice.

Today, I found out that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine also hosts a website that certifies charities which do not fund animal experiments with the Humane Charity Seal of Approval. The site is overseen by The Council on Humane Giving.

Member organizations of the Council on Humane Giving include:

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine
Medical Research Modernization Committee
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
American Anti-Vivisection Society
In Defense of Animals
National Anti-Vivisection Society
New England Anti-Vivisection Society
Last Chance for Animals
Beauty Without Cruelty

International member organizations:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in Europe
Humane Charities Australia

And while I'm hesitant to suggest any charity in particular, this site provides a good jumping off point if you're looking for charities which might appeal to vegans.

As a vegan, I know I have it good. I live in Los Angeles, which means I have access to a number of vegan options that other people in other areas don't have. I can go to a different farmers market almost every day of the week. There are vegan products in my supermarket. I have two health food stores fairly close to my home. I have restaurants that cater to my needs. So, relatively speaking, I'm a lot better off than many other vegans.

But I'm having a hard time these last few days. It's not that I'm craving animal products. I'm not. I can honestly say I have not had a craving for anything I used to eat as an omnivore in a really long time. Jane is feeling the same. But we're both struggling with the restaurant thing. We're really tired of having one option at most of the restaurants we frequent. We're bored with the restaurants readily available to us. If we lived in West Los Angeles or Silverlake, or Portland (see FoodEaters tantalizing descriptions of her travels), we'd have many more options. If gas wasn't $4/gallon.... or if we could stomach the idea of schlepping across LA at the end of the day... we'd have more options than we'd know what to do with, but neither of us relishes the idea of travelling more than 30 minutes for dinner. (Yes, I know, everything is 20 minutes away in LA.)

I want to go out to eat and not have to think about it. I want to go out to eat and not have to invent something to eat. I want to go out to eat and have more than one option (especially if it's a "veggie" burger). I want to be able to go out to eat with my friends, and not have to contemplate the menu first.

Sorry to be whining. I know there are worse problems in the world. I'm just frustrated today. I miss the days when I could say, "let's go out for dinner" and not have to give it some serious thought.

I love summer. There is such an abundance of wonderful, fresh food to eat. Shopping at the farmers market is a joy at this time of year. We often have to restrain ourselves from buying more food than we can possibly eat in a week. And the fruit...

We've had a few people write and ask us if we eat raw. For the most part, the answer to that question is no. From what we've read, there are nutritional reasons to eat both raw and cooked foods. And I don't think I'd want to give up lentil stew and freshly baked bread, and the many other yummy things Jane cooks for dinner. But we do eat raw sometimes too, especially in the summer when Jane makes all kind of delicious salads.

For dinner tonight we did have a raw meal. Jane made her hummus with carrots and persian cucumbers, red cabbage slaw, and our usual green salad. We also had sliced tomatoes from our garden. And for dessert, we had blueberries, strawberries, and white nectarines. Overall, a really delicious meal, and raw to boot.

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Note:  Thanks to Sparrow, who pointed out that our hummus isn't raw (who knew?).  Well,  I googled “raw hummus” and found that raw hummus recipes seem to include sprouted chickpeas, as opposed to canned chickpeas (which we assumed were simply picked, processed and put in a can with some water and salt (and preservatives in some).  But it appears that many raw vegans shoot for 75% raw, so if you go by that criteria, we still had a "raw" vegan meal.  Anyway, sorry for any confusion this may have caused!  Hopefully this clears up any confusion. -- Lane

Thanks to Nash Veggie for tweeting me this article on Slate entitled "The Great Vegan Honey Debate." I really enjoyed reading this. There are so many things to quote from this article, I don't know where to begin. Perhaps I should just say, read the article.

One of the things that hooked me right away was this:

Thirteen percent of U.S. adults are "semivegetarian," meaning they eat meat with fewer than half of all their meals. In comparison, true vegetarians—those who never, ever consume animal flesh—compose just 1 percent.

I thought vegans comprised somewhere around 3-4% of the US population these days, but it's pretty hard to get a real statistic. But what about the semi-vegetarian comment? Before we went vegan, Jane and I considered ourselves "semi-vegetarian." But to say we ate meat with less than half our meals would be a gross understatement of how much meat we ate. That holds true for the people we know who categorize their eating the same way, unless the statistics include snacks...

Then there was this comment:

You'll never find a self-respecting vegan downing a glass of milk or munching on a slice of buttered toast. But the modern adherent may be a little more accommodating when it comes to the dairy of the insect world: He may have relaxed his principles enough to enjoy a spoonful of honey.

Now, I'm a self-respecting vegan, and I fully expect to have a slice of pizza next time I'm in New York, deliberately. (BTW, pizza in NYC means a slice of cheese pizza, no other toppings.) Some people say it is this attitude specifically that excludes me from being a vegan, but I disagree. I consider myself to be a law-abiding citizen, but I occasionally exceed the posted speed limit (note: this is hard to do... I live in Los Angeles). One or two slices of pizza out of 1,095 meals (365 * 3) still makes me a vegan, in my book.

But let's get to the heart of the matter, or the article...

There is no more contentious question in the world of veganism than the one posed by honey. A fierce doctrinal debate over its status has raged for decades; it turns up on almost every community FAQ and remains so ubiquitous and unresolved that radio host Rachel Maddow proposed to ask celebrity vegan Dennis Kucinich about it during last year's CNN/YouTube presidential debate. Does honey qualify as a forbidden animal product since it's made by bees? Or is it OK since the bees don't seem too put out by making it?

Well, I've weighed in on this before... I am a vegan who eats honey. Again, a stance that has some of the vegan community pointing fingers and saying "You're not a real vegan." To that I say, you're entitled to your opinions. I consider myself a vegan. Yes, in the animal, vegetable, mineral categorization, bees are animals. However, they are insects. I would not hesitate to have my house tented or sprayed if I had termites; insects are killed collaterally in the harvesting of my produce... If I'm willing to kill insects in these instances, is it not hypocritical to forego eating honey? If my point of view isn't sufficient enough to sway you, here's what Vegan Action, has to say:

Many vegans, however, are not opposed to using insect products, because they do not believe insects are conscious of pain. Moreover, even if insects were conscious of pain, it’s not clear that the production of honey involves any more pain for insects than the production of most vegetables, since the harvesting and transportation of all vegetables involves many ‘collateral’ insect deaths.

(This group has been established for over 10 years; they are a vegan outreach group. They’re calling it an acceptable vegan behavior. This is the party line I choose to follow.)

It's also been pointed out to me that the original definition of vegan, according to the Vegan Society who coined the term back in 1944: ". . . eats a plant-based diet free from all animal products, including milk, eggs and honey." To this I reply, (unfortunately) language is organic. In the 1913 Merriam-Webster dictionary, the definition of "gay" was:

1. Excited with merriment; manifesting sportiveness or delight; inspiring delight; livery; merry.
2. Brilliant in colors; splendid; fine; richly dressed.
3. Loose; dissipated; lewd. [Colloq.] Syn. -- Merry; gleeful; blithe; airy; lively; sprightly, sportive; light-hearted; frolicsome; jolly; jovial; joyous; joyful; glad; showy; splendid; vivacious.

Today, Merriam-Webster defines "gay" as:

1 a: happily excited : merry b: keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits
2 a: bright, lively b: brilliant in color
3: given to social pleasures; also : licentious
4 a: homosexual b: of, relating to, or used by homosexuals

But if you use the word "gay" in conversation today, it will be understood to be definition #4. Language is organic; definitions change.

Some people complain that the fact that some vegans eat honey, while others don't (refined sugar too), causes confusion in the non-vegan sector. Perhaps it does. But "vegan" is confusing for most non-vegans anyway. Do you eat eggs, milk, fish? What do you eat anyway? Before you condemn those of us who eat honey, remember, there are no perfect vegans out there.

Reading the Slate article further, the author, Daniel Engber, points out:

...you can't worry over the ethics of honey production without worrying over the entire beekeeping industry. Honey accounts for only a small percentage of the total honeybee economy in the United States; most comes from the use of rental hives to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. According to food journalist Rowan Jacobson, whose book Fruitless Fall comes out this September, commercial bees are used in the production of about 100 foods, including almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes. Even the clover and alfalfa crops we feed to dairy cows are sometimes pollinated by bees.

Life for these rental bees may be far worse than it is for the ones producing honey. The industrial pollinators face all the same hardships, plus a few more: They spend much of their lives sealed in the back of 18-wheelers, subsisting on a diet of high-fructose corn syrup as they're shipped back and forth across the country. Husbandry and breeding practices have reduced their genetic diversity and left them particularly susceptible to large-scale die-offs.

So, are you vegan if you exploit insects in this way? Would this treatment of mammals be acceptable?

Mr. Engber ends with this:

According to Matthew Ball, the executive director of Vegan Outreach, the desire for clear dietary rules and restrictions makes little difference in the grand calculus of animal suffering: "What vegans do personally matters little," he says. "If we present veganism as being about the exploitation of honeybees, it makes it easier to ignore the real, noncontroversial suffering" of everything else. Ball doesn't eat honey himself, but he'd sooner recruit five vegans who remain ambivalent about insect rights than one zealot who follows every last Vegan Society rule.

That may be the most important lesson to come out of this debate: You'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

Which brings me to my final point. I've said it before, and I'll say it again... There is a small, but vocal, minority of vegans out there who think that if you eschew animal products for any reason other than animal welfare, then you are not a vegan. Or that if you’re not being vegan to the extreme (by this I mean scrutinizing the ingredients and processing of every food item you’re going to ingest) then you may as well eat meat. We emphatically disagree. Every little bit helps, and if that means embracing the omnivores who choose to “eat vegan” one or two days a week, I say welcome to the fold! Yes, you can be vegan one day per week. If you choose to eat honey, I believe you are not "throwing the baby out with the bathwater." And I have to ask the less flexible members of the vegan community, what exactly is the goal here? Because it seems to me, if you are coming at veganism from an animal rights or environmental perspective, every little bit helps.

Jane and I had the day off today. Instead of hopping in the car we did the environmentally friendly (and money saving) thing and took the train in to China Town. It was a fun expedition and we discovered the local Asian market. It's not that we haven't been there before, but we never really looked around. Who needs Whole Foods... we found packages of asceptic tofu for $0.79 That's almost half of what we pay at Whole Foods! And check out this package of dried soybeans. We paid $2.09 for over three pounds!!!

I'm not sure how these merchants are able to do this. I was taught that the larger stores get better prices because they buy in larger volume. Since their cost base is lower they can charge less to the consumer, hence the success of stores like Costco and Sam's Club. But however they do it, the price is right!

So if money is an issue these days, or even if it isn't, you may want to check out your local ethnic grocery stores (if you're fortunate enough to live nearby). Besides having interesting and unusual offerings, you can often find great bargains.