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Posts Tagged ‘Vegetarian’

World Go Vegan Week (Oct. 24 – 31) was a delicious success with dozens of pizza restaurants participating by offering a vegan pizza for the week featuring Daiya cheese, a vegan cheese that melts, stretches and tastes like traditional dairy-based cheese. IDA volunteers worked hard to get restaurants to participate in our campaign Vegan Pizza Takes Over the World! We had 73 volunteers reach out to 142 pizza restaurants in the U.S. and Canada asking them to participate in our week of celebration of the vegan lifestyle.

Offering motivation and to make things even more interesting, we had a contest!  Daiya generously offered a month’s supply of its delicious vegan cheese to a random participant who was successful in getting a pizza place to offer a vegan pizza. We are excited to announce that the winner of our contest is Gina Stuessy of Madison, Wisconsin. Gina got two restaurants in Madison to participate, The Glass Nickel and Ian’s Pizza. Let’s hope they will keep the vegan options on the menu beyond World Go Vegan Week.

Congratulations, Gina! We hope you enjoy your month’s supply of Daiya cheese!

Pizza wasn’t the only thing on our minds this World Go Vegan Week. Other volunteers participated in various creative ways beyond the vegan pizza project. At a church in Burnaby, British Columbia, eight families took on the challenge of eating vegan for the entire week of World Go Vegan Week and, in Sri Lanka, activists held an event with a film on veganism, speakers, and vegan food to sample. These are just a few examples of the wide reach of this important week of education. This was truly an international outreach experience!

Thank you for celebrating World Go Vegan Week with us. The animals, the environment, and your health thank you for your compassionate choices. Click here for more information on the vegan lifestyle.

New to veganism? Click here to order a free Vegan Starter Kit.

The IDA San Rafael office had some fun this Halloween teaming up with the San Francisco Vegetarian Society to hand out vegan Halloween sweet treats and our Reason for Vegan Brochures to passers-by on Haight St. in San Francisco! Volunteers made frightening yummy treats like maple cookies and cinnamon chocolate chip bars to show everyone how delicious vegan sweets can be. We also had lots of donated Halloween dark chocolate peanut and almond butter bites form Shjakk’s chocolate. Yum!

Dressed in costumes, we handed out the treats and leafleted vegan materials, asking San Franciscans to help end the horrors of factory farming and try a vegan treat for Halloween. The responses were wildly enthusiastic—in fact, people were shocked that vegan treats and chocolate were so scary delicious! It was a gratifying day of outreach with lots of people discovering just how satisfying vegan sweet treats really are.

I love Halloween. The coming darkness of autumn, the creepy, smiling jack-o-lanterns, and pumpkin-flavored everything. At what other time of the year do you get to dress up in wacky, sexy, or superhero costumes and eat yourself sick with candy? What a great holiday!

But Halloween can also be a nightmare for vegans—seems like non-vegan sweets are everywhere. Yet the true nightmare is what happens to animals on factory farms.

Vegan treats can be found at the witching hour, and you wouldn’t have guessed that some old favorites are actually vegan. Our friends at VegNews have compiled a deliciously comprehensive list of vegan candy. Can you imagine that Dots, Pez, and Dum-Dum Pops are vegan? You can also indulge in candies that are a bit healthier, support fair trade practices, and encourage sustainable agriculture like Sjaak’s Organic Chocolates  or Let’s Do Organic Gummy Bears.

So when the little monsters come to your door, you don’t necessarily have to contribute to the sugar fest. Stickers are a great surprise for the vampires, Freddy Kruegers, and Lady Gagas. Kids love stickers, and yours will be the coolest house on the block! Colored pencils or erasers can be fun, too.

Let’s make this a safe and compassionate holiday for everyone, including farmed animals.

New to veganism? Click here to order a Vegan Starter Kit.

World Go Vegan Week is Oct. 24 – 31, and IDA volunteers have been hard at work getting pizza restaurants to participate in our Vegan Pizza Takes Over the World campaign! We’ve had 73 volunteers reach out to 142 pizza restaurants in the U.S. and Canada, asking them to participate in our week of celebration of the vegan lifestyle.

Click here to see a list of participating restaurants offering a vegan pizza featuring Daiya cheese (pronounced DAY-aa), a vegan cheese that melts, stretches, and tastes like traditional dairy-based cheese. If a restaurant is participating in your area, grab your friends and family and show support with a vegan pizza party!

The vegan lifestyle is picking up steam; celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres, Alicia Silverstone, Lea Michele, Carrie Underwood, Emily Deschanel, Tobey Maguire, and Bill Clinton, among many others, have all made this compassionate and healthy lifestyle choice. While the number of vegetarians is growing every year, the number of non-vegetarians who often order vegan meals at restaurants is also increasing dramatically. The National Restaurant Association named vegan entrées a “hot trend” for 2011. Many people are looking for ways to eat healthier, while at the same time, helping to reduce animal suffering and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Ordering a vegan pizza is a great way to accomplish all three!

The dairy industry is pure hell for cows. To make just a pound of cheese, which is loaded with saturated fat, 12 pounds of milk are needed for this extremely wasteful and energy-intensive process. Like all mammals, female cows only lactate after giving birth. To maximize milk production, cows are constantly kept pregnant during their entire short and miserable lives until sent to slaughter. Each year, she will be artificially inseminated, and within hours of giving birth, the calf will be ripped from her side. Males will be fattened for veal or beef, while the females will endure the same dismal fate as their mothers. The stress on the mother’s body will diminish her milk output after about 3 or 4 years. She is then what the industry calls “dried up” or “spent,” and even though her natural life span is 20 years, it is more lucrative to send her to slaughter and replace her. Her body will be sold as ground beef.

But there is a way to reduce all of this suffering—Celebrate World Go Vegan Week and GO VEGAN! Give it a try for at least one week. The animals, the environment, and your health can only benefit from your compassionate choice. Click here for more information on the vegan lifestyle.

Do you wear your veganism on your sleeve?   It’s great to lead by quiet example, but consider making an even stronger impact by speaking up about your reasons for going vegan.  Remember, the animals don’t have a voice, so now is the time to amp up your game to the next level.    

Okay, so you’re a 49ers fan?  Add a little dash of vegan to your red and gold.  You’ll be surprised at the impression you’ll make.  Be prepared by having a few of “The Reason For Vegan: Compassion In Action” flyers and “Vegan Starter Kits” with you.  Click here to order them.  While you’re at the game be sure to support the stadium’s vegan menu.  These days virtually all professional level ballparks have a vegan dog or a vegan burger.

If you’re going to a dinner party or pot luck, instead of bringing a bottle of wine, bring a vegan dish or dessert.

Other ways you can make a difference for animals, for the health of people and the environment:

• Wear a vegan t-shirt, hoody, necklace or pin (click here to order IDA vegan merchandise)
• Get a personalized license plate or license plate frame
• Put bumper stickers on your car, laptop and notebooks
• Use an animal rights quote in your email signature and include the link to our vegan campaign (http://www.idausa.org/campaigns/vegan/vegan.html)
• Use Facebook and Twitter to politely promote the benefits of a vegan diet
• Set a goal to speak to at least one person each day about veganism
• Feed your dogs a healthy vegan dog food
• Show someone a video about the horrors of factory farming or about the health and environmental benefits of living a vegan lifestyle
• Cook or buy a non-vegan a vegan meal

It’s up to us to try to enlighten others and do all we can to help animals.

So keep your eye on the tofu and take it one person at a time.  Let’s do this!  Go Team Vegan!

Click here to support IDA’s Vegan Campaign

Work every day of your life to right what is wrong.

On September 27, 2011, the Richmond, California City Council voted to end live bird sales at its farmers’ market, effective November 1, 2011. In Defense of Animals partnered with LGBT Compassion to organize weekly protests, petitions, action alerts and other pressures to convince the city to end the cruel practice of selling live chickens at the Richmond Farmers’ Market.

The Richmond mayor received over 1,000 e-mails from local IDA supporters, and she acknowledged these e-mails at the meeting. Nineteen passionate animal advocates spoke in support of the ban and only two people spoke in opposition. All our efforts paid off with a 4 – 2 vote, with the mayor voting for the ban. Supportive Council Member Jeff Ritterman did a celebratory chair spin and fist pump in the air as the room full of animal advocates gave a standing ovation!

The vendor, Raymond Young, has a history of well-documented and shocking mistreatment of the spent egg-laying hens he sells at market. In 2009, San Francisco’s Animal Care and Control cited Mr. Young for 795 cruelty violations, including overcrowding, injuries, and failure to provide water. This was after he ignored requests for corrections.

At the weekly protests, IDA activists repeatedly witnessed the disturbing procedure of two birds being forcefully yanked from their tiny cage and stuffed upside-down into one paper bag with little ventilation. Most of the birds go immediate into a silent shock, but others loudly squawk and scream in fear and struggle in vain to free themselves. We have video of customers putting the birds in their car trunks and then returning to shop at the market. We witnessed children kicking and violently picking up and dropping the bags on the concrete. If there was a dog or a cat in the bag, these customers could be arrested for animal cruelty – a chicken has the same capacity to suffer as a dog or a cat.

There is no regulation or supervision of what happens when these chickens reach the customer’s house. They could be starved, terrorized by pets or children, and a careless or just unknowledgeable slaughter could cause prolonged and immense suffering. Self-slaughter violates California’s humane poultry slaughter laws, which require poultry to be killed by specific methods at licensed facilities – and for good reasons.

Two years ago, live birds were being sold at four Bay Area farmers’ markets. As of this week, they are sold at none, Richmond was the last to finally ban this practice, thanks to the tireless efforts of many animal advocates.

For more ideas – check out the cookbook Vegan Lunch Box!

It’s back-to-school time and parents all over the country are looking over hot lunch menus and shaking their heads in disbelief. Today’s school lunches are notoriously unhealthy and if you are raising your children in a vegan home… well, all those hamburgers and “fish nuggets” will make you shudder. That means sending your littlest loved ones to school with lunches that they will actually want to eat and won’t trade away. Kids raised on a vegetarian diet have an amazing advantage: a lower risk of the obesity, cancer, heart disease, and other health problems that will plague their meat and dairy-eating peers as they grow older. These days it is easier than ever to raise kids who are healthy and care about animals.

With vegan alternatives to deli slices and cheese available in most grocery stores, it doesn’t take much to recreate the classic sandwiches. Let’s not forget that the most beloved of childhood sandwiches, Peanut Butter and Jelly, is already vegan. Here are just a few products to check out:

• Torfurky Deli Slices
• Lightlife Deli Slices
• Lightlife Smart Bacon and Smoked Tempeh (makes great BLTs)
• Baked Tofu
• Sheese (it’s a hard vegan cheese you can pack with crackers)
• Eco-Planet Non-Dairy Cheese Crackers (they’re like a vegan version of those cheddar goldfish crackers)
• Late July Organic Peanut Butter Bite Size Sandwich Crackers
• Granola or Snack Bars
• Tofutti Slices
• Pretzels (many of the brands out there are vegan – as always you might just need read a few labels)

Don’t forget all those fresh fruits and veggies that nature has already made sweet like apples and pineapple slices or ‘kid-sized’ like cherry tomatoes and baby carrots. Healthy and happy kids need those more than anything!

Of course, you can always get vegan options in your school cafeteria using these 4 easy steps!

Don’t forget World Go Vegan Week is right around the corner! This year IDA is helping Vegan Pizza Take Over the World! To find out more click here.

New to veganism? Click here to order a Vegan Starter Kit.

World Go Vegan Week (October 24th through 31st) is a celebration of compassion and a time to take action for animals, the environment, world hunger, and everyone’s well-being. This year is going to be extra special… and extra cheesy! We want to help make it even easier to be vegan and what better way than being able to order a quick and easy pizza- with delicious vegan Daiya cheese.

Our goal is to make eating vegan simple, fun, and accessible to every community. You can help with just a few minutes of your time by reaching out to your local pizzeria and asking them to offer a vegan pizza. One of the best aspects of restaurant outreach is that a single person can make a direct and lasting difference for animals.
We want you to go to your local pizza shop and ask if they would offer a vegan pizza for the week of World Go Vegan Week. We are partnering with Daiya cheese and they have offered to provide a free sample of their cheese for the pizza shop to try. Daiya cheese melts, stretches, and tastes just like traditional dairy based cheese. We will provide you with a letter and tips on how to approach the pizzerias. Remember, all it takes is one person to make a major difference in changing everyday restaurants into vegan-friendly havens.

If you would like to be part of spreading the pizza love in your community, please contact Hope Bohanec: hope@idausa.org 415-448-0058 or 707-540-1760.

Vegan pizza outreach not your cup of tea? There are many other ways to celebrate with us! Click here for other ideas to promote World Go Vegan Week.

New to veganism? Click here to order a Vegan Starter Kit.

Due to an oversupply brought on by low demand, chicken (or broiler) meat slaughter is expected to slow dramatically in the second half of 2011. According to the United States Department of Agriculture’s latest report, third quarter production is estimated to be 1.3% lower than the third quarter of 2010.

Lower production is expected to continue in the fourth quarter of 2011, with production expected to decrease 2% from the same period in 2010.

An earlier study from the Daily Livestock Report found that U.S. meat, poultry, and fish consumption declined by one pound per person in 2010. Per capita pork consumption fell by 2.2 pounds per person in 2010, and beef consumption was at its lowest level in 2010 since the Daily Livestock Report started keeping records in 1955! This is the fourth year in a row that meat consumption has declined in the United States and the fifth decline within a six-year period.

The economy could be a factor in this trend, but studies are finding that a recent increased awareness about farm animal issues is also likely to be a contributing factor. If you would like to take action to help further this trend, join us for World Go Vegan Week and help spread healthy vegan eating.

Order your own FREE Vegan Starter Kit by clicking here!

Get fancy with a Double Taco Burger! Photo Credit : MeetTheShannons.com

We’re in prime BBQ and potluck season right now and it seems like every night someone somewhere is lighting up their grills. For many of us this a great opportunity to experiment with a new recipe or better yet introduce our friends and family to how delicious and easy it is to be vegan. Food is a great form of outreach for the animals. There are a lot of folks that don’t want to hear about the suffering that is inherent to the meat industry but are intrigued by trying out new foods. Bringing a cruelty-free dish to a get together is lighthearted way to change hearts and minds and can even invite questions on how someone can lead a more compassionate lifestyle.

If you’re looking for some new recipes for classic favorites, here’s some of my favorite summery favorites. Don’t worry – these vegan recipes are BBQ and Potluck Tested and Approved.

Beer Can Tofurky
Caesar Salad Burger
Macaroni Salad with Peppered Tofu
Pink Lemonade Cupcakes
Crab Cakes with Tartar Sauce
Tuscan Lemon Cake
Spare Ribs with 3 Different Types of Glazes
Coleslaw
Three Beans Salad
Creamsicle Cupcakes
Mojito Bars
Antipasto Pasta Salad

If you’re looking for something even simpler, you can always just throw some veggie burgers, Portabella mushrooms and vegan sausages on the grill. There are so many great vegan product out there right now from Gardein Vegan Burgers, Tofurky Beer Brats and Field Roast Chipotle Sausages, it’s a great time to really bring the shock and awe. In case you’ve never tried to grill mock meat or veggies before, here are some of the tricks we’ve picked up over the years :

• Lightly brush your grill with olive oil before putting your mock meat or veggies on the grill to keep them from sticking. If you want to skip cleaning your grill, you can always lay down some aluminum foil and brush that with olive oil. You’ll get a little less smokiness in the flavor and those famous grill lines but it can save you time later.

• Make sure your mock meat is defrosted before putting it on the grill to make sure it cooks evenly.

• Mock meat and veggies cook a lot faster than meat so keep an eye on them and brush them with a mixture of equal parts tamari and olive oil to keep you food from drying out. You can always add some Jerk seasoning to your oil to add a little bit of a kick. Here’s a recipe for a Southwestern Rub you can use with any mock meat or vegetables :

1 Tablespoon chili powder
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon agave nectar
2 teaspoons green chilies (diced)
¼ teaspoon Bragg Liquid Amino Acids
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
2 cloves of garlic (minced)

Mix all these goodie together in a small bowl. Nothing tricky here, just blend it all up. Then brush it on to your mock meat or Portabella mushrooms. Wrap in foil and chill for 1 hour before grilling. Keep any extra to brush on your food when it’s on the grill.

So start your grills and let’s make this summer fun for everyone… including the animals!

For more information on how to go vegan and vegan outreach check out our vegan campaign and order a vegan starter kit!