JavaJennifer

I haven’t been able to get my act together today.  Everything started off fine- and still is- I’m just thoroughly unmotivated.   My laptop faces a courtyard and it’s a windy, blustery day getting colder but with a bright blue sky.  The wind will no doubt make the news tonight as some poor cameraman shoots stock footage of tumbling trash cans and women walking with their hands pressed against their skirts to prevent them from blowing up.

I’ve had a big giggle reading the comments regarding my decision to go vegan and in part to dispel any rumors that I’m wearing  hemp clothing, Birkenstocks and have stopped bathing or shaving, I thought I’d provide an update of my gastronomical endeavors.

Will my cat be vegan?

There is a pro-feed pet store in my neighborhood and I spent some time looking at pet-food ingredients.   She eats IAMS now, and has since her kittenhood some 10 years ago.   There are vegan products on the market for pets and from a cost perspective, there isn’t any difference.  I’m going to try to mix in the new vegan food with what’s left in her IAMS bag until she either barfs or starts meowing “Free to Be, You and Me.”

Leather

I love my car and since I tend to keep cars for a while, the only thing I can say for certain is that my next car will either have cloth or leatherette.  Ironically, the Mini had leatherette.  I hated that car though.  Shoes/Belts/Coats:  My goal here is to keep what I have and enjoy them but I think I’ll be wearing a lot of man-made ugly from Pay-less.

Cosmetics

Why, I am so lovely that just my fresh-from-the shower face is all I need to go out into the world. I was already using make-up that hadn’t been tested on animals and recently added organic skin care.  Skin is the largest organ (heh, heh, organ) and it makes sense that whatever you put on it should be good/pure.   Sunscreen is a problem.  Filled with icky chemicals.  Not sure I have a solution there because I don’t want to switch to this healthy living only to succumb to skin cancer. 

Chicken and the Egg

So, when Dip-Dong left me, I went through this thing where I wouldn’t animal “parts”.  So, I would eat chicken but only if it was a baked whole chicken.   Chicken have two breasts.  But the grocery stores only sold them in packs of 3.  Hmmmm.  And don’t get me stared on chicken strips!  20 strips in a package probably came from 20 different chickens.  And eggs??? A dozen eggs? 12 different hens!

Problem is this.  I LOVE chicken.  God help me, I do.   There used to be a joke in our family about an aunt (the other one who isn’t really- this is the one not speaking to me) who only made recipes with chicken in them.  Dip-Dong would never eat chicken because he thought I was purposefully trying to kill him with Teflon and salmonella which frankly in retrospect wouldn’t have been a bad thing.

When I was living vegetarian from 1998-2001, I caved over a Hooter’s Chicken Wing.  I remember what I was wearing.  Mostly because now, it would fit on my forearm.

Milk

I have the same basic issue with milk as I do with chicken, eggs and beef which is that when you open a carton of half-n-half, it isn’t product from just one cow; is from perhaps tens of cows.  Think of it like this:  if a baby is nursing, you would only expect and want it to drink it’s own mother’s milk.  Now picture if 20 lactating women stood side by side and expressed breast milk into a big trough that was later pasteurized, blah, blah, blah so that by the time your baby is drinking breast milk, it’s the milk from 20 different women.   The ick factor is huge (at least for me it is). 

I’m not nearly as knowledgeable on these subjects as I want to be or what I should be but the reason why we think that “milk builds strong bones”, “milk does a body good”, “milk your diet, lose weight” is because our dairy industry has a vested interest in making sure that their product is sold.  I get that.  And while there may be health benefits as it relates to calcium, the vegan argument is that there are other ways to satisfy your calcium needs.  I’m learning what they are and along the way am learning that dairy sneaks its way into things that you wouldn’t expect.

In the short time I’ve been doing this, I know I feel better and I also know that I haven’t been perfect.  I had the episode with the chicken wing over the weekend and today I had what I thought was vegan meal only to learn that it had cheese in it.   That the cheese was organic only means that it met USDA standards. 

I know everyone reading this is really excited to share a meal with me, right?  I may not have the flexibility to be 100% vegan 100% of the time.  But if I’m going to have dairy, it had better be one heck of a good meal!

Tags:

This entry was posted by javajennifer admins on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Blog Blend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.