IVU Online News
2013-11 IVU News
on 16 October 2013. Posted in IVU Online NewsTable of Contents
Highlights of the 2013 IVU World Vegfest
Random Memories from Malaysia and the 2013 IVU World Vegfest
News from the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
Change Is Coming, Slowly But Surely
Visual of the MonthThis Month’s HCYKTASEM
What Do You Think?
Book News 1 - Pig 05049
Book News 2 - Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook
Book News 3 - Raw Food for Dummies
Upcoming Events
Other Online Sources of Veg News
Please Send News to IVU Online News
Highlights of the 2013 IVU World Vegfest
The 41st IVU World Vegfest, 4-6 October, 2013, held in Malaysia in conjunction with the 6th Asian Vegetarian Congress, is now history, and it was indeed historic in several ways. For a slide show of photos from the event and for speakers’ presentations, please visit http://mvs.my/2013.
For a general overview of the event see: /malaysia-2013/overview
Primarily, this year’s Vegfest stands out for the large scale and whole hearted participation of Malaysia’s Ministry of Health (MOH), which is headed by a vegetarian, Dr S. Subramaniami. The Minister was unable to attend, but the Deputy Minister, Dr Hilmi bin Haji Yahaya, gave an opening address covering the many reasons to be vegetarian and talked about starting a meatless day in Malaysia, inspired in part by his conversation with IVU International Council Chair, Marly Winckler, who told him about the meatless day that she helps to organize in Brazil.
MOH Malaysia was also represented by Dr Rokiah Don (pictured here), Director of MOH’s Nutrition Division, who spoke on nutrition interventions to boost Malaysians’ intake of plant foods, and by Dr Professor Dr Lekhraj Rampal of the Department of Community Health, Universiti Putra Malaysia, who reviewed interventions by MOH in other areas, such as tobacco, and talked about lessons to be learned for increasing plant consumption.
Last but not least, 200 MOH staff attended and took part in many of the sessions, as well as enjoying the vegan food during tea breaks, lunches and the gala dinner. Hot on the heels of the event, Malaysia Vegetarian Society (MVS), an IVU member, has already received email from MOH saying they want to work with MVS to develop Nutritional Guidelines for Vegetarians in Malaysia, and another government agency has contacted MVS about veg food in schools.
A big Thank You and congratulations to MVS! They estimate that more than 1000 people attended the first two days of talk, workshops and forums on Friday and Saturday, with more than 10,000 at the food fair on Sunday.
Now, it’s on to Ghana in 2014! Stay tuned to IVU Online News for more on what is sure to be another historic event - and let us know if you're going at: facebook.com/events/595768793773435/
Random Memories from Malaysia and the 41st IVU World Vegfest
Here are selections from one person’s memories of the 2013 IVU World Vegfest and Asia Vegetarian Union (now the Asia Pacific Vegetarian Union) Congress.
1. Lots of diverse delegates as illustrated in the above photo showing, left to right, delegates from Korea, Thailand and Iran.
2. The huge food fair at Lake Titiwangsa, featuring more than 100 stalls, including one offering delicious West African vegan food, a good omen for the food we’ll enjoy at the 2014 IVU World Vegfest in Ghana, West Africa. Details in the next issue of IVU Online News.
3. Raw food demos by Cherie Soria and Man Kei Cheah.
4. An entertaining and insightful talk by Hetal Doshi - Suhana Daswani on how she happily co-exists with her non-veg husband.
5. Illuminating talks by Joyce D’Silva of Compassion in World Farming and Melanie Joy of the Carnism Awareness and Action Network.
6. Hiren N. Kara, former IVU Secretary and currently Director, PETA India, gave a presentation on ”Living a Life that Helps, not Harms”. The presentation contained clips of animal cruelty in the form of food, entertainment, experiments and several other forms of cruelty. Alternatives were also suggested. At the end of the presentation, out of about 40 delegates in attendance, 21 took a 30-day pledge to go vegan.
7. A forum on Sports and Vegetarianism which featured a three-time Olympic swimmer, Desmond Koh, of Singapore; Singapore’s marathon record holder, M Rameshon; a two-time British gymnastics champ, Mark Skipper; and two senior Malaysian athletics officials.
News from the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
The Reverend Professor Andrew Linzey, Director of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, sends these updates.
The Centre has launched the Religion and Animals Research Project to examine the positive and negative ways in which religious beliefs affect our treatment of animals. Professor Linzey’s Huffington Post article, ‘Is Religion Bad for Animals?’ has already aroused much interest.
The Centre will be holding an annual Oxford Summer School on Animal Ethics. The first will be on the topic of Religion and Animal Protection and will be held at St Stephen’s House, Oxford, from July 21-23, 2014.
The long awaited The Global Guide to Animal Protection will be published in December 2013 by the University of Illinois Press. Over 300 pages with 180 contributions, it is the first work to offer a truly global perspective on animal protection, and is destined to become a classic. “This Global Guide reflects a growing worldwide sensitivity to animals and a developing sense that--as a matter of justice--they deserve our compassion and respect. It has my warm support”.--Archbishop Desmond Tutu, from the book's foreword.
The book series on Animal Ethics published in partnership with Palgrave Macmillan continues apace with more than 12 published volumes. The latest in Alastair Harden’s Animals in the Classical World: Ethical Perspectives from Greek and Roman Texts which is published this month. It breaks new ground in providing an ethical analysis of classic texts.
Fellows of the Centre are now working on the first Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.
Change Is Coming, Slowly But Surely
Here is an article by Doug Lisle, PhD, staff psychologist for TrueNorth Health Center and psychologist for the McDougall Wellness Program. He is co-author of The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force that Undermines Health & Happiness.
Once you know the connection between dietary choices and health, watching other people eat can be a gruesome sight. It can seem like you are watching a train wreck in slow motion. I was once in a restaurant and observed a woman in her 60s on oxygen eating a burger and fries. This can make you shake your head and wonder: “Are they ever going to get it?”
As someone who has been watching this cultural process for thirty years, my guess is yeah - they are going to get it … but it will be a slow dance. Don’t hold your breath about what you are likely to see in your lifetime. Think in terms of the march of human enlightenment, and it can help you relax. A hundred years ago, women weren’t allowed to vote. We are only about fifty years since the civil rights movement. Today, we look back in amazement at the primitive thinking of the average citizen in previous eras. Cultural perceptions can change - and usually in the right direction.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” While many people are now confused by the overwhelming sources of health information and oftentimes opposite recommendations from medical experts, this is a battle that will eventually be won. The plant-based program, I believe, will win out in the end because it yields consistent, positive results.
I see an open-mindedness among physicians that was nowhere to be seen thirty years ago. The collective mind is being stretched by these powerful new ideas, and the collective consciousness is not going to shrink.
But we need to be patient with other people and their processes. There will be a lot more slow train wrecks. We will all witness them, even within our families and friends. But with every mind touched by this knowledge, people are finding their way. At some point, what we know here will become common knowledge, and the benefits to people and to the planet will be immense.
Visual of the Month
This person is a former IVU president.
This Month’s HCYKTASEM
This month’s How Can You Know This And Still Eat Meat (HCYKTASEM) piece continues from the HCYKTASEM of last month’s IVU Online News. Part of the frustration that many vegetarians feel, part of the reason we sometimes feel like shouting at meat eaters, “Hey - What’s the matter with you? Isn’t it _____ obvious that eating meat is wrong for so many reasons, altruistic as well as selfish reasons?” is that the evidence just seems to scream from the rooftops that meat is bad.
Last month, we talked about the obligation that adults have to safeguard children and how adults violate that obligation when they encourage children to eat meat. We seldom see children with heart disease or other deadly diseases; so, people may take the attitude, “We’ll worry about the kids’ diet when they are adults”.
However, Dr Michael Greger recently compiled evidence that diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes. start in childhood: nutritionfacts.org/video/heart-disease-starts-in-childhood/. Here’s the opening to Dr Greger’s blog: By age 10, nearly all kids have fatty streaks in their arteries. This is the first sign of atherosclerosis, the leading cause of death in the United States.
The newest volume of Dr Greger’s Latest in Clinical Nutrition DVD series has arrived! (order here -- all proceeds go to keeping NutritionFacts.org alive and kicking - but free for IVU member organisations). If you'd like Dr Greger’s complete works--more than 30 hours of video(!)--he has a special on the entire NutritionFacts video collection: www.drgreger.org/DVDs.
What Do You Think?
Two recent pieces in the weekly e-newsletter of IVU member Vegan Outreach offer points to ponder for veg activists. Here are the urls for the two pieces followed by some quotes that you might wish to consider and to discuss with fellow activists.
whyveganoutreach.blogspot.sg/2013/09/greatest-hits-more-on-being-vegan.html
Every time we make the issue about our current personal definition of "vegan" -- for example, a real "vegan" shouldn't take medicine because it has been tested on animals and/or contains an "animal product" -- we reinforce the stereotype of vegans as fanatics and veganism as dogma. This actively hurts animals.
We may sincerely believe our current personal level of purity to be the only honorable and coherent position. But the animals suffering today don't need consistent principles or unadulterated products. They don't need us to avoid every minor ingredient or promote a "perfect" philosophy.
whyveganoutreach.blogspot.sg/2013/09/having-impact-you-are-not-your-audience.html
Equally important is YANYA -- You are not your audience. What we, as advocates, present to the public shouldn't be what appeals to us / matches with what we currently believe. In fact, if our advocacy materials makes us, as vegans, feel good, then they probably aren't the best for reaching our target audience -- those whose choices currently are hurting animals.
Book News 1 - Pig 05049
Pig 05049 by Christien Meindertsma, ISBN: 978-90-812413-1-1
English, 416 pages
Factory farming isn’t just for meat and other types of food. The animals whose short, horrific lives are spent on factory farms are also used in many other ways. This book is about the more than 100 ways that pigs are used - even in bullets.
The use in bullets is ironic. Eating pigs damages human health and so do bullets. You can watch the author explain the book in this 9 minute video.
Book News 2 – Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook
Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook, by Joe Yonan, published by Ten Speed Press, ISBN: 9781607744429.
In our September 2013 issue, we talked about Joe Yonan - www.joeyonan.com - the vegetarian who is the food editor for the Washington Post newspaper. Joe has a new cookbook, and here is how he describes it:
My latest cookbook, "Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook", is a collection of eclectic vegetarian and vegan recipes for singles as well as lone vegetarians in meat-eating households (or even couples who are looking for downscaled recipes).
Book News 3 – Raw Food for Dummies
Raw Food for Dummies, by Cherie Soria and Dan E Laderman, published by Wiley, ISBN: 9780471770114
Here are excerpts from the publisher:
As the demand for raw foods increases, so does the demand for informative and supportive facts about this way of life. Raw Food For Dummies shares reasons for incorporating raw food into your diet and life, tips on how to do it, and includes nearly 100 recipes.Main areas of coverage include the benefits of eating raw foods, tips for avoiding undernourishment and hunger, information on transitioning to the raw food lifestyle (including where to buy and how to store raw foods), along with coverage of the popular methods of preparing meals, including sprouting, dehydrating, juicing, and greening.
Vegfest Latin America & Argentina – 7th Latin America Vegetarian Congress and 9th Argentina Vegetarian Congress – 1-3 November, 2013 - Buenos Aires, Argentina - www.vegfest.org.ar / www.facebook.com/events/652010881490094/
Why Do Animal Studies? - 3-4 April, 2014 - Chicago, USA - animalstudiesgroup.wordpress.com
Reading Animals: An International English Studies Conference - 17-20 July, 2014, School of English, University of Sheffield, UK.
The Oxford Summer School on Animal Ethics - 121-23 July, 2014 - Oxford, England - www.oxfordanimalethics.com/what-we-do/summer-school-2014/
Peace as a Global Language conference [includes a talk+ on veg] - 16-17 November, 2013 - Tokyo, Japan - http://pgljapan.org
College Art Association conference - Theme: Unbecoming Animals – 12-15 February, 2014, Chicago, USA - www.collegeart.org/conference
The Science of Animal Thinking and Emotion – 17-18 March, 2014 - Washington, DC, USA -
Other Online Sources of Veg News
In addition to IVU Online News, there are many other places to go online for general veg-related news, rather than news mostly about one country or one organisation. Here are some.
1. European Vegetarian Union www.evana.org
2. Meatout Mondays www.meatoutmondays.org
3. Vegan Outreach www.veganoutreach.org/enewsletter
4. VegE-News www.vege-news.com
5. VegNews www.vegnews.com
6. VegSource www.vegsource.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi
7. AnimalConcerns.org doesn't have a newsletter, but they post stories daily at www.animalconcerns.org/categories.html?do=shownews
8. Vegan.com www.vegan.com
9. IVU-Veg-News E-Mail List www.ivu.org/news/veg-news
10. Vegetarianism in the News www.vegsoc.org/page.aspx?pid=928
Please Send News to IVU Online News
Dear Veg Activist
Please use this newsletter as a way to share your knowledge, ideas and experiences with fellow veg activists.
Thx. -–george jacobs,
IVU Online News is non-copyright. Readers are encouraged to share the contents elsewhere. If you do so, please consider including a link to www.ivu.org/news as others may wish to subscribe to this free publication.
Read back issues of IVU Online News at www.ivu.org/news/online/index.html