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recipe card

#curry #vegan #recipe #illustration

recipe card

#vegan #recipe #illustration

words we use to disguise violence to animals

abattoir = slaughterhouse

destroy (used in vivisection labs)/cull/harvest= kill/murder/slaughter

enclosure/pen = cage/larger cage

meat = butchered body

cooked meat = warmed up butchered body to make it edible for humans

milk/’normal milk’/dairy milk = cow’s milk or calf’s milk

#veganism #vegan #violence #animals

I’ll be going silent for a week in january to raise awareness about the animals who suffer and die at the hands of humans.

I’ll be communicating only through writing and drawing - and I will post my progress and images I make during that week on this blog.

www.silent-listen.tumblr.com

to kill kindness

The pigs were born onto concrete and lived from then on a lifetime of suffering - separation from family, sexual abuse, imprisonment, illness; slavery to the meat industry.

On the day they faced their death, they were frothing at the mouth from 52 hours worth of dehydration on a crowded lorry.

Anita Krajnc gave them some water.

It takes quite some imagination to make the conclusion that Anita is the criminal in this. If it wasn’t so outrageously unfair and despairing, i’d have a dark laugh at the ridiculousness.

in a world of pain and cruelty, being kind and compassionate is a form of protest

let’s talk meat

What would the words ‘cowmeat’, ‘pigmeat’, ‘sheepmeat’, ‘chickenmeat’ mean to you? ‘Pigmeat’ is the more correct term for bacon, ham, pork; it does what the other words don’t in acknowledging the animal who once lived and died for the meat.

But whereas these words seem alien, the words ‘horsemeat’ (as in, the horsemeat scandal) and ‘dogmeat’ (as in, ‘isn’t it absolutely immoral that they eat dogmeat in China whereas it’s absolutely fine that we eat cows, pigs and chickens’) are used in our language.

The difference? People don’t want to associate the animal whose body the meat belonged to with the meat that they eat.

Correspondingly, our language does not make this association either – the word ‘meat’ and all that we know it entails if we think about it – violence, death, suffering – is kept separate from the word of the particular animal whose ‘meat’ (flesh) it was. Some words for meat – mainly poultry and fish – are the same as the animal’s name. But for this the ‘a’ is dropped to become ‘turkey’, ‘chicken’ or ‘fish’ rather than ‘a turkey’. This strips the animal of any individuality. It is acceptable to us to associate the word ‘meat’ with animals who we in the West find it unacceptable to kill. Horses, dogs, cats – domesticated ‘pet’ animals. In fact, the words are used for precisely the reasons they are not used for animals who humans do consume – to draw attention to the violent and unethical treatment of the animals. There is a hypocrisy in the naming of different meats just as there is a hypocrisy in the animals humans do and do not choose to kill and consume.

The definition of the word ‘meat’ is “the flesh of any animal”. Why, therefore, is there a distinction made between ‘meat’ and ‘fish’? When people say ‘I’ve stopped eating meat, I only eat fish now’ what they mean is, ‘I eat fishmeat but not mammal meat’. Fishmeat is the flesh of fishes. Their suffering should not be considered less than other animals’ – in language or otherwise. They suffocate in order to arrive onto plates.

All animals suffer to be butchered into food. A process which turns a living being into a consumable product can only ever be violent. Begin to be less disconnected from the animals you eat by recognising who you are eating when consuming animals.

watching cute videos of animals on youtube and then consuming their corpses and secretions for your dinner is not being an animal lover, sorry to break it to you

“I recommend using [sic] when an animal is called “it” just as feminist critics have done when “he” is used generically.” - Carol J Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat

#liberateyourlanguage #feminism #veganism #sexualpoliticsofmeat #caroljadams

when did being kind become controversial?

#vegan #compassion

Fictionary Farming

We don’t want to admit what’s going on inside the farms that our animal products come from. To know would be to have to act upon it and that’s not something we want to do. It makes us feel so uncomfortable to think that what we eat comes from a lifetime of suffering from beginning to end; and the solution has become to not think about it. What I’ve come to notice having had many conversations with people about this is that the conversation usually takes a swing towards a strange hypothetical world. Instead of discussing how things really are, which is uncomfortable, I’ll be asked questions such as:

“but if you were on a desert island with only a chicken, you’d eat the chicken right?” “if the animals are treated nicely/die painlessly then I have no problem eating them” “if the eggs came from chickens down the road would you eat them?” “if we hunted them in the wild like cavepeople or lions that would be fine” Etc.

What I’ve realised people are desperately seeking out in these conversations is approval from a vegan to carry on eating animal products. Even if that approval must exist only in the conditions of a fictitious setup in their heads. These ideas were solidified when listening to a programme on BBC Radio 4 called “Can We Justify Killing Animals For Food” – most of the programme revolves around questioning philosophers about the ethics of eating animals in a non-existent world where animals wouldn’t feel pain or suffer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kbm04

It just became so clear to me listening to that that this was all part of the denial that goes on about farming. If an imaginary world has to be created to even discuss that it could be ethical to eat meat, does it not self-evidently show that it can never be ethical in the real world where animals suffer tremendously? In our society and certainly in advertising we are fed imagery and information about farming practises that simply aren’t true – farming is romanticised at best and bare-faced lied about at worst. We’re told we have high animal welfare standards and that animals are humanely slaughtered. When we see any of the real footage, this dispels the myth. So we don’t watch it. It’s comfortable in the imaginary world. I’d ask people to consider how they believe the food gets to their plates. And ask yourself, “do I justify consuming products made from the bodies of living beings because I believe it is right, or is it only through comfortable ignorance?”

I challenge anybody who isn’t vegan to see where their food really comes from. Both of these clips contain viewer warnings. They contain truly horrendous violence; the most unsettling thing of all is that it’s all real. Please, if you must look away then listen - and if you feel uncomfortable or upset, you have your answer to the above question.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECJwRKngYBs&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DECJwRKngYBs&has_verified=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrgJXcyYWQE

#vegan #compassion #factoryfarming #farming #animals

peaceful violence

the phrase “humane slaughter” is bandied around a lot in the animal rights discussion.

the definition of humane is “having or showing compassion or benevolence”

for slaughter it simply says “kill”

a kind death, a compassionate slaying, a nice murder, killed gently what that phrase is trying to make us believe is that this violence is peaceful

http://www.animalaid.org.uk/h/n/CAMPAIGNS/slaughter/ALL///

#slaughter #vegan #humaneslaughter

The Money Raised Will Go to Good Causes

“The money raised will go to good causes”. I heard this phrase on the radio every time they spoke about the new 5p plastic bag rule. It’s a fantastic rule – discourage people from using wasteful plastic bags, make some money for charity. Everybody wins. However I find the phrase ‘Good Causes’ such a strange, nonspecific term. It feels a bit strange for someone to dictate which causes are ‘good’ and to be expected to unchallengingly agree with them when morality is relative and different for everybody. The main problem I have with this is that many of the good causes they describe are health charities which fund animal experiments. I choose to boycott charities until they cease to fund animal experiments. I view vivisection as outrageously cruel, and based on the human assumption that have the right to do with animals what we wish. This assumption is based on many deeply speciesist beliefs (speciesism: viewing one species’ (human’s) needs or desires as superior to another species’) which commodify living beings who can and do suffer – and turn them into mere laboratory tools. We justify using and abusing animals as a means to our own blood-stained progression by believing that we are more intelligent, more important, that our suffering is more significant than that of other animals. I refuse to have my money used to torture other animals. This decision hasn’t been taken without consideration that many of the big health charities are doing fantastic work apart from animal experiment based research. It’s very important to note that by deciding not to fund animal experiment charities, I am not prioritising animals over humans. I am putting the suffering of animals on the same level as that of humans: suffering is suffering, whoever suffers it. The way the charities work forces me to boycott good work towards minimising human suffering because of their involvement in causing animal suffering. The British Heart Foundation and Cancer Research UK are two of the biggest funders of Animal Experiments – but a full list of which charities do and don’t fund or conduct animal experiments can be found on Animal Aid’s fantastic website, Victims of Charity.

http://www.victimsofcharity.org/which-charities-fund-vivisection/

For many reasons it’s quite a difficult thing to do, to stand up and say “I don’t want my money to go to this charity”. There is an assumption that all charities are GOOD and people who support them are GOOD and people who don’t support them are BAD and therefore if you say you don’t like this charity YOU ARE BAD. People quite often don’t give you the time to explain what I have explained above: that you are not misanthropic (human-hating) or wish for awful, destructive diseases like cancer to continue. Far from it. You just recognise that vivisection practices mostly involve giving these terrible diseases to animals - and them being subjected to cruel, often useless experiments is just widening the amount of suffering. In short, even if the practice of vivisection, with its often flawed practices, came to an answer it would arrive at this having caused as much or more suffering as it can hope to mend. More than 4 million in the UK and over 100 million animals in the US are systematically used and killed every year in experiments. If we are going along with the dominant belief system and saying, as some do, that the use of animals in experiments is based not on dogmatic speciesist justifications, but on the idea of ‘for the greater good’ – that is to say, causing suffering to some now in order to avoid suffering to others in the future – that’s a big suffering debt we’re building up. Also it is interesting to look at it from a utilitarian point of view – which philosopher Peter Singer ascribes to. Utilitarians like Singer argue that one should determine how to act by imagining a “happiness meter” that would measures the total, combined happiness of everyone before and after various events, and choose the course of action that yields the greatest sum of happiness. “Utilitarians emphasize that no one’s happiness can be considered especially—you can’t put any extra value on your own happiness”. Under this idea, the total combined happiness of all of us when we include all earthlings and not just putting emphasis on our own – human’s – happiness (or in this case, lack of suffering) animal experimentation is totally unjustifiable considering as we have the numbers of animals suffering compared to the numbers of humans benefitting (aka not suffering). Luckily there’s lots of charities which don’t fund animal experimentation (again, a list is available on the Victims of Charity website). There is also a fantastic charity called Dr Hadwen Trust which does ground-breaking, exciting work “funding research that is of high-quality, human-relevant and that develops approaches so that scientists will not default to using animals for biomedical research”. They appreciate that phasing out animal experiments “will not happen overnight” – but that there is not enough being done to work towards this end – so that is precisely what they are trying to do. If I am requested to sponsor somebody raising money for a charity which I find problematic to give my money to, I most often ask them if I could donate to Dr Hadwen instead. The last thing I want to do is discourage giving to charity – I hope that has been clear. By and large, of course, charities do wonderful, necessary work which so often just wouldn’t get done without contributions from the public. My message is just to think about what your money will be used for. This is a good practice with all charities - and all businesses; there have been a few charities in the spotlight in recent years for corrupt practices or account books which don’t add up. It’s also simply about making sure the money you give us used in the best way it can – there are websites which compare and assess charities for how much ‘change’ comes from the money they are given.The word “charity” is like a blockade to stop any further questioning or thinking that they might do things we don’t agree with: and the result of this is that we don’t know what many of them do with their money – so many people don’t know that CRUK or BHF fund animal experiments because they are not required to be as open about it as us animal rights activists would like. There exist many charities that I’m sure some of us would find questionable if only charities were more questioned on what they actually do. Only recently I’ve found out that Salvation Army holds some more-than-questionable homophobic views – one statement from their leadership was that “Christians whose sexual orientation is primarily or exclusively same-sex are called upon to embrace celibacy as a way of life”. They might well be going on my do not support list from now on. My view is simply that we should refrain from holding the word ‘charity’ as being something unchallengeable and inherently ‘good’ – there are charities made by all different people all with different views on how the world should be. You won’t agree with all of them. And that’s ok.

http://www.philanthropydaily.com/peter-singers-advice-no-charity-at-home/

this summer i’ve been into bowls of nondescript good stuff

this is leftover wild rice, broccoli cooked in a bowl with water and ginger in the microwave, sweetcorn, avocado, grated carrot, with a tahini and lemon sauce and sweet potato crisps.

the sweet potato crisps are just leftover sweet potato skins cooked either in the microwave or in the oven (in the oven they go crispier) with some spices and a little vegetable oil.

the tahini sauce is one and a half tablespoons of tahini, a big squeeze of lemon, black pepper and two to four tablespoons of water depending how runny you want it

the olives were a mistake and didn’t go - i had them as a starter instead!

#vegan #salad #foodbowl #tahini

NICE CREAM CHANGED MY LIFE

you just whizz frozen banana coins with a bit of milk and something else to make it taste nice and it makes really nice ice cream!!

I buy the reduced bananas in supermarkets in big bags, they end up about 18p for 12 or something ridiculous. chop them up and put them in a tupperware in the freezer. try not to pack them too tightly as then they freeze together and you have to wrestle them apart.

put about 10 banana coins (or as much as you want to make) in a food processor - I have quite a small one which isn’t great, a food processor would do a much better job - with two or three tablespoons of nondairy milk (coconut milk is yum) and your choice of flavouring - so far i’ve tried cinnamon, mango, nectarine, cocoa powder and dates, coconut, pear and apple spread (made from fruit concentrates - from healthfood shops). I think maple syrup would be amazing but haven’t tried it yet!

I find you have to blitz it in short bursts at the beginning with the whizzer so the milk doesn’t fly everywhere

#vegan #nicecream #icecream #pudding #bananas

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