Someone commented on the Aboot section of the blog, but in order to stop that thread from growing into some silly and long thing I thought I would post and reply to the comment here.

Comment:
I agree about many of your views…on animal exploitation and such but I have a bit of a difference on your view on it being limited to animals (I might have misunderstood however) and I will try to explain it as best as I can:

I’m thinking purely from a biological perspective: humans have evolved to be omnivorous (from tooth structure, digestive enzymes etc); that definitely does not give us/them the “right” to unnecessarily kill anything – but gives us the option of obtaining our nutritional needs from a variety of other living things be they plants or animals. I suppose you could refer to this as “selfish”, evolution in itself is selfish and the mechanism by which we exist in our current form. We can’t tell a lion/or other carnivorous animal that they are being morally wrong; they evolved to survive off the flesh of other animals.

I would argue that every organism…from plant to bacteria to animal has no interest in being caused harm and no interest in being killed. Several plants too have defense mechanisms which help protect them from being eaten, and there are recent reviews and papers out on neural networks in plants. While it is true that we are in the same evolutionary branch as animals (as opposed to plants), we have evolved to have the capacity of consuming other animals.

I’m by no means advocating animal killing, but I would like to point out that the same logic applies to all living organisms. This doesn’t imply that one should starve– that is counterproductive — what it does imply is that we as responsible creatures should not take more than which we need to live a healthy life. My main issue with society is the method by which they go about doing things; the way animals are treated is horrific and the commercialization of slaughter is also horrific.

I really hope you don’t take this as a defense of eating meat in our society. I don’t eat meat (anymore) because I don’t approve of the way animals are treated. However, if I was to be stranded away from civilization and had no other means of obtaining a source of protein except from animals I would not be against the ’sacrifice’ of an animal provided it was not wasted.

Plants are not conscious, and as such they can not have interests. A plant can not prefer something or have a desire. This is the difference between plants and non-human animals that matters. Saying that a plant has an interest in not being caused harm is like saying that a rock has an interest in not being thrown off a cliff. It’s true that plants are biological organisms – they grow and have cells and can react to their environment in ways that rocks cannot, however plants, like rocks, are not conscious.

Even if we assume plants are capable of having interests (which is incorrect), a vegan lifestyle uses far less plants than an omnivourous one. The non-humans we breed and slaughter consume plants. Each kilogram of beef protein requires 6 kilograms of plant protein to be consumed by the cow. So if you want to minimize your impact on plants+animals you ought to go vegan.

You should look at the FAQ section of Gary Francione’s blog, which might help address some of the other issues you raised.

Jen and I are having a delicious thanksgiving all by ourselves this year. We’ve enjoyed a romantic day of cleaning the house, doing dishes and cooking various tasty foods :) Although the day was largely an exercise in domestic co-habitation, we made a huge and delicious dinner, which is being digested slowly with sparkling wine and the T.V. premiere of the first Futurama movie.

The spread included mashed potatoes with chickpea gravy (vegan with a vengeance), corn bread (joy of vegan baking), baked tofu and herbs (la dolce vegan), roasted brussels sprouts and steamed broccoli. We had a pumpkin pie for dessert with So Good caramel ripple ice cream.

The recipe for the pie is in the Joy of Vegan Baking, and it was super satisfying. I especially liked the roasted pecans on top… also the crust had pecans in it… yummmy!

This is one of my very favorite recipes from Vegan With a Vengeance (VWAV). There are several good reasons for this, not the least of which is it’s delicious peanut and lime flavour explosion. It also happens to contain one of my favorite vegetables… bean sprouts! It’s also a lot of food for the price, we get 7 meals when we make this and it costs approximately 7 dollars. On the last iteration, which was Monday night, we both had dinner (I had seconds) and we still had 5 lunches worth of food… yowzas! It’s also very straight forward to make, you only spend about 4 minutes frying things once you have the prep work done.

Here’s our creation:

You should be able to discern the following ingredients, in order of glaring visibility (with ties going in favour of vibrant colours): lime wedge, cilantro, rice noodles, green onion, red onion, bean sprouts, peanuts and tofu. There’s also some garlic and lemon grass kicking around in there somewhere. The sauce is rice vinegar, tamari, hot sauce, sugar and tomato paste.

There are a lot of pictures of this dish on flickr, a search for ‘Brooklyn Pad Thai vegan’ yeilds a list of 31 photos. Here’s one of the better composed ones:

I have no idea how this compares to authentic pad thai purchased in Brooklyn, but here’s a shot of what I can only assume the real thing looks like:

I wonder where the cilantro is? If crushed peanuts, rice noodles, bean sprouts and a slice of lime define Brooklyn pad thai then I think ours is a shining example.

Summer time means BBQ season, which means convenient food like burgers and sausages. When it comes to veggie products there are a lot of choices; veggie patties that taste like veggies, mock burgers that sometimes taste good and sometimes taste like nothing at all and seasoned patties that usually taste like delicious seasoning. Burgers can be based on a lot of different ingredients; tofu, lentils, beans, gluten and tempeh are typical. Of the different types I’ve tried, and I haven’t tried a great many, my personal favorite is the Green Cuisine Tempeh Burger. I think I prefer the BBQ flavored variety, but if I do it isn’t a large a preference over the original flavor. Here’s a shot of our delicious burger and crisps combo:

Another burger we both enjoy a lot is the (nearly organic) Mountain Veggie Burger which is made primarily with lentils and is wheat and soy free (I’m pretty sure it is anyway). In fact I have some of these burgers to have at a BBQ today which will hopefully be enjoyed after my team’s victory in a softball match. I’ve also got some Yves Sausages to chow down on, perhaps you recall the Yves Sausage Sandwich I posted about last year.

If you want a lazy dinner in the summer, or something to eat at the next BBQ you get invited to, get your hands on some of these products… or make your own… maybe we should try that… hmmmm

I was always under the impression that making sushi was difficult, that it required a lot of prep time and skill in assembly. I was happy to discover that it is, in fact, extraordinarily easy to make. The essentials include rolling mats, sushi rice and nori sheets. You should also find some pickled ginger and wasabi; we have a wasabi powder that mixes with water. The filling can be anything you want, from the ubiquitous avocado to the too often overlooked oshinko.

We used a recipe from Veganomicon for a spicy tempeh filling, but you certainly don’t need to be that fancy. We also had some beets, green onions, pan fried asparagus, avocado and pickled daikon (which is a Japanese root vegetable, the aforementioned oshinko). We ‘topped’ them off with some sesame seeds.

If you’re worried about rolling them up then poke around the interwebs, there are lots of sites that offer instructions, just don’t expect to be as fast and precise as this person (and ignore that they’re using crab meat).

We’ve also been making quite a bit of raw sushi lately. There’s a recipe in Ani’s Raw Food Kitchen for a walnut based spread to use instead of rice, we like it a lot! Though you would be well advised to ignore her instructions to add soy sauce to the walnut paste, it overwhelms the flavor, especially if you’re going to dip the sushi in soy sauce. You can replace it with water to avoid taste bud overload.

We added bean sprouts, carrots and zucchini… yum!! As you can see our rolling skillz need a little work still, but they are perfectly edible, even if they look a little sad.

We made the chow mein again with one important alteration, we used the Asian Style Tofu recipe from Vegan With a Vengeance instead of the store bought stuff. It makes a substantial difference to bite into a deliciously marinated and freshly broiled chunk of tofu… yumm!!

The marinade is pretty simple, and the tofu can be used with loads of different recipes so whip up a batch and throw it into whatever you have planned for dinner tonight… what could go wrong :)

1 package tofu (some where between 350 and 454 grams), drained and cut into cute triangles
1/2 c. mirin
3 Tbsp tamari
2 Tbsp rice wine vinegar (or rice vinegar)
1 Tbsp sesame oil
2 tsp. Asian chile sauce (or hot sauce)
1 inch ginger, peeled and coarsely chopped
2 cloves garlic, smashed

Combine the ingredients in a large shallow container (loaf pans tend to work well) add the tofu and marinate for an hour flipping after 30 minutes. Place the tofu on a baking sheet and bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees, flip the tofu and bake for another 10 minutes. Finally broil until the tofu browns, it only takes a couple of minutes, then flip and brown the other side.

Note that the temp and times are different from Isa’s recipe since we found 30 minutes at 400 degrees left the tofu very dry. Also note that mirin is an asian cooking wine, I accidentally bought a sweet, mirin-like, cooking wine and so we used a lot less of it and added water to make up the difference, it still turned out great so if you happen to have the same problem reading labels as I do, no worries it will work out… as long as someone notices you bought the wrong bottle :)

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We recently bought a Chinese cabbage and decided to make a green heavy version of chow mein. We added the entire head of lettuce and a little chopped kale. The only other veggie was onion. When the onions are translucent, add the greens with about 1/3 cup of water then mix and cover. Let things steam for 3-5 minutes stirring once or twice and making sure there’s at least a little water. When the greens are cooked (which you can test by eating a little bit of the cabbage, it should be crispy-tender) add the noodles (see the original chow mein post) and some splashes of braggs (or tamari) sesame seed oil and rice vinegar.

It’s nice to eat a lot of greens, especially in the summer when they are so plentiful and cheap. We had never tried Chinese cabbage before and I really liked it, I want to cook with it again… soon.

I have quickly learned, in our very limited dabbling with raw food, that zucchinis are delicious raw! This recipe uses them as noodles, with the aid of a spiral slicer. Slicing spirals is hard… I’m not sure how long it will take to get the hang of it, but currently I am able to produce some kind of segmented helix structure. If you don’t have a spiral slicer then I suggest either grating the zucchini or cutting thin slices with a vegetable peeler.

You can find the recipe at gone raw dot com. We made some modifications, some accidental and some necessary. For starters young coconut is a particular type of coconut, it is not a small full grown coconut. This mini-disaster meant that we didn’t have coconut water, which is inside young coconuts, and in fact we didn’t even have coconut milk because our developmentally challenged nut ended up being empty. So we substituted rice milk for coconut water… which I guess means it wasn’t technically raw.

Jen had bought an avocado not knowing that we didn’t need it, so we decided to put in half of it anyway. This was almost certainly a subconscious stroke of genius, and may have helped us overcome our lack of fatty goodness considering the coconut was missing. Obviously, we also substituted sugar for the raw honey.

The result was pretty damn tasty! It’s a bit of a high effort meal due to the coconut, which we had a hard time breaking into… but apparently young coconuts are a easier to get open. The coconut didn’t really seem necessary anyway so I would suggest using an avocado like we did. Apparently coconut water is extremely good for you due to its perfect electrolytic balance or some such thing, but unless you’re a health freak, regular water or some other liquid is fine!

This post is very long, but I agreed to comment on this chapter and when the dust settled I was left with a rather long response. It’s not necessary to have read the chapter to take something away from this discussion, but it would obviously help. I posted a ’sight un-seen’ response in the comment section of the aboot page, and I think what I wrote there is a perfectly valid –though shorter and less specific– response.

I want to make a few things clear, Pollan never talks about animal rights or veganism in any real or accurate way. He never considers that animals have an interest in living, though he does consider their interest in not being caused overt physical harm, at least the kind one might classify as gratuitous. That is, his arguments are inherently concerned with the welfare of animals and at no point is the morality of taking an animal’s life considered. Pollan seems to think that it is possible to treat animals ‘well’, where such treatment includes confinement and slaughter. I have no idea how anyone can seriously argue that this treatment is compassionate or humane!

From a philosophical point of view the chapter is extremely confusing since he claims Peter Singer is an animal rights thinker despite being an act Utilitarian. Utilitarianism is a school of philosophy that supposes that the most ethical action is the one that results in the most net happiness. It is completely inconsistent with the notion of rights, which supposes that beings have an untradable set of rights that must be observed; regardless of the consequences. It isn’t hard to understand why Utilitarianism is incompatible with the notion of rights, or how a Utilitarian could frame an ethical argument for performing medical research on mentally challenged humans.

The Steakhouse Dialogues:
Pollan begins the chapter by noting the cognitive dissonance he felt while reading Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation while eating a steak and contemplating the fate of his own steer (number 534) which, we learn later, would be slaughtered in a Kansas slaughter house while Pollan flew overhead. He later describes, or rather has Temple Grandin describe, how exactly his steer was slaughtered. If you want even more profound cognitive dissonance I suggest replacing all occurrences of the word steer with kitten. Here’s an example:

“The cat-rump dinner in question took place on the evening before kitten number 534’s slaughter, the one event in his life I was not allowed to witness or even learn anything about, save its likely date.”

“Does the kitten know it’s going to get slaughtered? I used to wonder that. So I watched them going into the squeeze chutes on the feed lot, getting their shots, and going up the ramp at a slaughter plant.”

It is much more disturbing to read when you imagine this happening to a kitten! Of course we have emotional relationships with cats and dogs. We understand them in a way that we don’t understand cows, pigs, chickens, etc… We know that they feel pain, and understand (at least on an emotional level) that killing them is wrong. Of course this a because our culture has not stripped us of this knowledge, we have not grown up eating these animals and in fact have grown up learning to respect and love them. My point is that there is no moral difference between a cat and a steer. There is no reason to accept the killing and eating of one, yet be repulsed by the killing and eating of another. You can shrug it off and say we should be eating cats, but if you’re honest with yourself I think you’ll at least appreciate the hypocrisy and inconsistency present in our relationship with animals.

Pollan also comments on this schizophrenic relationship, but goes on to describe that our lack of contact with the animals we slaughter has eroded our understanding of the relationship between humans and the animals we kill. He offers the following insight:

“That eye contact [with the animals we kill], always slightly uncanny, had brought the vivid daily reminder that animals were both crucially like and unlike us; in their eyes we glimpsed something unmistakably familiar (pain, fear, courage) but also something irretrievably other (!?). Upon this paradox people built a relationship in which they felt they could both honor and eat animals without looking away.”

So animals are like us in many ways, they feel pain and emotions, yet they are unlike us and it is this difference that justifies our killing them. He admits it’s a paradox, yet offers no justification for our killing them except that in some significant way animals are other. This plays directly into our sense of worth as a species, that we humans are exclusively of value, and that the suffering of other animals is justified by our most frivolous whims.

There is a lot more text in this section but I simply can’t comment on everything Pollan says. He does offer a good description of what speciesism is, and discusses what might make someone morally significant. I will touch on a few things he brings up here in later sections.

The Vegetarian’s Dilemma:
Pollan criticizes vegetarianism on the grounds that it disrupts the host-guest relationship, by having a guest with ’special’ needs. This is absurd for several reasons. All hosts, by virtue of hosting, are going out of their way to be accommodating. No host would be upset at a guest who is allergic to peanuts asking to not eat any; similarly, a guest who is vegetarian (or vegan) need not be ashamed of their choice not to consume animals. Any self respecting host would think nothing of accommodating the interests of a guest.

Why bring this up at all? Because it’s a perfect example of Pollan playing on the social conformity built into people: their knee jerk reaction to be alike and not question truly meaningful issues for fear of being different. Apparently not causing social waves is reason enough to engage in unethical behavior. The slave owner didn’t want to enslave other humans, they were simply victim to the tradition of slavery in their society. If confronted by the possibility that slaves are worthy of moral consideration, the slave owner could take refuge in asserting that humanity has a long and ingrained history of slavery, that we have many rituals surrounding slaves and that it isn’t as simple as just ending slavery because we would be ending this part of our cultural histories and surrendering a part of ourselves. This is the exact argument Pollan makes, claiming that his desire for a ballpark frank is a rich part of his cultural heritage, one that makes vegetarianism unappealing because he must forfeit a part of his traditional sensibilities.

I have very little sympathy for Pollan on this issue. He is pandering to people’s fear and is acting to alienate vegans further by trivializing the importance of the ethical choices they make. He also makes a suite of unsubstantiated claims concerning pre-historic humans, including the evolutionary function of our teeth as well as our intestinal tract, and sources of the vitamin B12. Each of these issues concerns an active field of academic research and claiming them to be one way or another is dishonest. One can find ample citations claiming that our teeth and intestinal tract have developed from the plant based diets of our ancestors, and that humans developed primarily as gatherers, not hunters. The paleolithic diet is a very active field of research and we quite frankly have no real answers at this point. As for B12, no one knows where it comes from exactly or what foods it’s in, and to what amounts, since we can’t detect it directly (here is an extensive essay on B12 http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Library/Article/Food/b12.txt).

Pollan ends the section by equating our desire for sex and our desire to eat meat. I would argue that our desire for sex is a fundamental human urge that would be present independently of any cultural dogma. That’s not to say that culture doesn’t play an important role in how we behave sexually; indeed culture is extremely influential in our development as sexual beings. However these influences generally inform us on what is taboo, who is a suitable partner, etc… the urge to have sex –the basic desire– will be present regardless of cultural influence. This isn’t the case for eating meat. It is not a basic human urge, but a desire that is formed completely from cultural dogma. This is clear in which animals people consider to be food. In North America pigs, chickens and cows are happily lusted after. If you suggest someone eat kangaroo, groundhog or dog they’ll almost certainly be disgusted at the idea… which is quite an odd reaction if eating meat is a basic human desire…

Animal Suffering:
Let me start by saying that Pollan is very effective at displaying the mindless cruelty in factory farming, and he even mentions the capitalist machine, that values profit over all else and will never stop to consider the lives it destroys. This applies equally well to humans and nonhumans, though there is some disparity between the type and severity of pain and suffering imposed upon nonhumans.

Which leads to his opening discussion of animal cognition. He gracefully admits that animals are not Descartian machines, mere robots acting on nothing but impulse and instinct. This should be amply apparent to a child, let alone anyone with even a passing knowledge of evolutionary biology. His argument is then that animals don’t feel pain in the same way we do. He admits that he cannot substantiate that claim, and then continues to argue for its validity. I find this very troubling, and this is an obvious incarnation of the ‘humans are better than animals’ school of thought. The premise of the claim is that we know our suffering to be suffering, and animals do not, which should only appear obviously true if you have already assumed that it is.

Again, we don’t really know the mental landscape experienced by animals, and their lack of language (as we know it) is hardly reason to think that they don’t fear death. Animals certainly experience the world. They are self-aware and they form relationships with one another, they have memories and are informed by a subjective sense of the world they experience. It ought to be obvious that they have emotions as well, if only from an evolutionary point of view. How these emotions manifest themselves in animals is sometimes obvious and sometimes not and it’s hard to argue what exactly it’s like for a deer to be shot down, or for a pig to go to slaughter. Even if we accept the claim that the suffering experienced by animals is somehow less than that experienced by humans it does not imply that we are morally justified to impose suffering on animals.

Animal Happiness
In the previous section Pollan touches on the physical horrors of the factory farm, and it certainly suggests that Pollan is placing himself in the camp of an animal welfarist. He does not consider that animals have rights, but they suffer, and that makes him uncomfortable, so if we could remove all the visual signs of suffering (save of course their slaughter, which we aren’t allowed to witness anyway), then he can be a happy meat eater. In other words, the only thing that constitutes suffering is physical pain, and an animal loses nothing in death except if that death is too painful.

This argument misses a fundamental truth, that animals have lives which are of value, that they are not machines acting on instinct alone with no inner selves. Captivity seriously affects the mental state of animals (human or not) and to make the captivity such that no physical distress is immediately apparent does not make that captivity humane, nor does it mean that those captive are truly happy. At the very least taking the lives of those animals is not in accordance with their interests.

This is a sticky spot for welfarists, who admit that animals have interests that are morally significant, but maintain that the one interest that humans consider the most vital, the interest in continued existence, is somehow non-existent in other animals. I find this an appallingly illogical train of thought and blatantly contradictory. To admit that these animals have a need for social organization, that they have relationships that are emotionally meaningful to them and contribute to their well-being, but do not have an interest in continuing to live is absurd. Pollan wants me to believe that we owe animals a happy existence, but we don’t owe them an existence. That is, if they do exist we should treat them well, but treating them well includes killing them whenever we see fit.

If this logic makes any sense to you then I urge you to join PeTA. There you will find many other people who lack an ability to think critically, act consistently and treat animals ethically.

An equally troubling argument is made in this section, that our domestication of animals has been a resounding evolutionary success for the animals. Clearly Pollan understands very little about how one measures success. Is a number count of a species an indication of how well it is doing evolutionarily speaking? What does it even mean to say a species has done well? Is it a race, is there a victory point track, are the ladybugs still three points behind the hummingbirds?

The number of a given species does not indicate success, evolution is about the proliferation of genetic mutations, those that benefit thrive and a species takes shape by encountering many competing genetic alterations that get selected based on usefulness. Domesticated animals are bred by humans, and we select which animals are bred, so domesticated animals are no longer under the supervision of Darwinian evolution. However, in recent years, they are falling prey to the genetic manipulation of humans, who have bred/altered/drugged them to grow as large as possible in as short a time as possible. These modifications have not been to their benefit. In fact, they often sacrifice the health of the animal whose limbs cannot support their engorged bodies and whose lives are ended prematurely.

To say that our manipulation and confinement of animals is to their benefit is ludicrous! If an alien race enslaved humanity and bred billions of us and gave us a happy confinement (perhaps like in the Matrix movies, except with aliens instead of robots) would this be a healthy and beneficial relationship? Would the human race claim this to be an evolutionary success!? Perhaps the aliens would claim that for us, and they would note that there are no visible signs of distress, we humans seem to be happy, so the treatment is clearly ethical.

The Vegan Utopia
Pollan offers the idea that veganism can only make sense in an urban environment, where conflicts between humans and nonhumans are minimized. He does not define what veganism is, or describe the goals of veganism at all. Veganism seeks to reduce harm to animals, which necessarily includes the complete abolition of all forms of exploitation, since these forms of harm are trivially ended. So the vegan utopia would mean that we honestly balance the interests of humans and nonhumans, keeping in mind that we all have an interest in not suffering and thus we should all be considered equally when the moral question at hand is “should I make a sentient being suffer”. There are practical limitations to the extent that one can eradicate their effect on other beings on this planet, but one very easy and reasonable form of suffering that can be eliminated is our commodified use of animals for food, sport, entertainment, product testing, clothing and experiments.

Pollan notes that animals are killed during agricultural production, for example by wheat thrashers. There is no reason why we couldn’t amend the current forms of agriculture to reduce our impact on these animals. Furthermore raising animals for our consumption requires that we grow much more plant crops than would be needed to feed people on vegan diets, therefore any harm done to animals due to agriculture will be drastically reduced if we stop raising animals for consumption. Pollan seems to be arguing that because practices currently harm animals they must necessarily harm animals, which makes no sense because current practices have not been designed with the interest of animals in mind. Therefore it isn’t clear at all the extent to which animals would be impacted if we tried to reduce our impact on them!

Pollan also seems to think that a diet of vegetables will require more fossil fuels, land and resources in general. I have no idea where he gets this idea, but it is completely without merit. A vegan diet requires roughly one twentieth the amount of land as an omnivorous diet. For every kilogram of animal protein produced, animals consume almost 6 kilograms of plant protein. It takes more than 100 000 liters of water to produce a kilogram of beef, and about 900 liters to produce a kilogram of wheat (these figures are cited in Gary Francione’s ‘Animals as Persons’). I can’t imagine the contrived situation that Pollan imagines where a vegan diet would be worse on the environment than that of an omnivore. For example it would require –at a minimum– that we only raise cattle on grass, since humans can’t eat grass this is a useful form of protein conversion. Basically it would be a world of the small farm that Pollan discusses throughout the Chapter, even though he admits that this type of farm is wholly inadequate as a means to produce the amount of animals currently consumed. So that in order for animal production to come even remotely close to veganism in terms of environmental impact people would have to basically stop eating animals so that the little they do eat can be produced on such farms. If you ask me this section should have been named ‘The Omnivore’s Utopia’.

As a final note on this section I want to mention Pollan’s continued confusion about philosophy. He notes that utilitarian thinkers, such as Peter Singer, have no problem with the act of eating animals. This is not a revelation, and it certainly does nothing to address the very real concern of people who take moral issue with our eating of animals, and our use of them in general. At the very end of the section he notes that utilitarians can justify killing retarded orphans, so that killing isn’t the issue for them as it is for others, such as himself. So he admits that killing is, as a rule, a moral wrong, yet he fails to mention why it is okay to differentiate between the killing of a human animal and the killing of a nonhuman animal. He never offers a reason to exclude animals from moral consideration except that they may experience pain and suffering in a different way than humans (as expressed in the section ‘Animal Suffering’).

Concluding Remarks
The chapter on a whole probably makes omnivores more comfortable with eating meat, after all they might feel slightly guilty about harming animals and Pollan tells them that it’s okay. What he doesn’t do is properly frame the moral argument for veganism, and therefore he never actually refutes the position of veganism. When he does approach philosophical questions, he tends to use utilitarian philosophy and reaches conclusions consistent with animal welfare. Let me briefly pose the moral quandary he should have addressed.

As a general rule we agree that animals should not be made to suffer unnecessarily. The basic underpinnings of this morality is our shared sentience. All animals (human and otherwise) feel pain and can suffer, and since we share this interest we are obliged to apply the rule of equal consideration. That is, since we all suffer and have an interest in not suffering we must respect that interest in all beings that share it. To exclude animals from moral consideration requires that we have a morally justified reason to exclude them from consideration. Any characteristic that you can think of for differentiation, such as intelligence, appears in humans to varying degrees. There are smart humans and very very stupid ones too, so if you differentiate animals because of their minds you are saying that intelligence is a morally relevant characteristic and that smart humans are more morally relevant than very very stupid ones, which almost no one would agree with. There are also characteristics that animals have that humans do not, for example the ability to breath under water, or fly. We don’t consider these abilities morally relevant, a bird’s ability to fly is no more morally relevant than a person’s height or annual income.

What Pollan needs to do –what any omnivore needs to do– is ask themselves what makes the suffering they experience more morally relevant than the suffering experienced by other animals. Why are humans with far less physical and mental abilities than some animals included in the moral community and animals not? Dividing the moral relevance based on species is not a morally defensible thing to do. It is equally indefensible to exclude moral consideration from a human based on race or gender.

Suggested Reading
Anyone who seriously wants to consider animal rights should read Gary Francione’s ‘An Introduction to Animal Rights’. He also has a new book of essays entitled ‘Animals as Persons’ which (at the time of writing) can be found at a very reasonable price at chapters, $27 for a hard cover! If you want to understand the philosophy behind veganism then you have to read Francione, there are no comparable texts! Reading poorly framed and sparsely argued defenses of meat eating is not very meaningful if you don’t yet understand what it is you are defending your actions against.

I also stumbled on an article written about Pollan’s book you can read it online. I particularly like how the author describes Pollan’s tactics when it comes to discussing moral issues:

“[Pollan's] spurious show of open-mindedness recalls Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian who uses a comparable technique when defending Christianity against secular critics. The similarity is not surprising, considering that our dietary and religious habits are both acquired in early childhood, which makes them hard to break no matter what we learn in later life. The Pollan-Küng Technique goes like this: One debates the other side in a rational manner until pushed into a corner. Then one simply drops the argument and slips away, pretending that one has not fallen short of reason but instead transcended it. The irreconcilability of one’s belief with reason is then held up as a great mystery, the humble readiness to live with which puts one above lesser minds and their cheap certainties.”

This recipe, from Veganomicon, combines the savory warmth of mashed potatoes with the spicy infusion of everyone’s favorite Indian snack, the samosa. We just moved a block away from a pizza/Indian place that makes amazing samosas… they are laden with oil, which I suspect adds to their deliciousness… but it causes us to stay away from them as much as possible. This dish is a great alternative offering the same yummy spices with a lot less fat.

It’s pretty simple to put them together without a detailed recipe. Bake some potatoes, cut them in half and scoop out the insides leaving enough potato to hold the shell together. Mash them up with some non-dairy milk, and maybe a little Earth Balance margarine if you’re feeling naughty. Fry up some onion and carrots, when the onion has browned add some turmeric, salt, cumin powder, coriander powder, chili powder, minced garlic, minced ginger and a splash of water. Also add some peas, or whatever other little veggies you want… maybe some corn. When you’ve stirred the spices through remove from heat add the mashed potato and mix everything together, the potato should turn a nice golden yellow from the turmeric. Now all you have to do is stuff the shells and bake them for 20 minutes at 400.

Also in the photo is mushroom curry, a toasted roti, and kale chips. The Kale chips are from vegweb, and although being extremely intriguing I thought they were better as an idea than they were in practice. However, we did make them with rather limp kale which had seen better days, so I think we have to give the chips a second try because they seem to have potential.

The frittata recipe is from Vegan with a Vengeance, but since we don’t own an oven-safe 8 inch skillet we used a muffin tin instead and made mini versions. It’s important to reduce the cooking time; we had them in for 12 minutes instead of 20. They still turned out slightly dry so perhaps we should have reduced the cooking time a bit more or added more lemon juice. I think the recipe could use a little more lemon flavor anyway so I think we’ll try adding more next time, maybe even a bit of lemon zest.

They were certainly very delicious despite being slightly dry. We made the broccoli and olive variant, the original calls for asparagus and sun dried tomatoes. I want to try that version too… I suppose you could try adding a little fresh tomato to the recipe to make it more moist… that seems like a reasonable idea.

Also in the photo are potato fires that are very similar to the yam fries we blogged about a few months ago, and a raw salad that we also paired with the walnut stuffed peppers in the previous post. I guess salads are normally raw, this one had broccoli, cashews, sunflower seeds and tomato, the vinaigrette consisted of apple cider vinegar, a little whole seed mustard and other ingredients that Jen might remember.

We were having these for dinner but they’re meant to be a breakfast/brunch item. We later had the leftovers with toast for breakfast and that seemed like a more canonical fittata experience :)