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kimberlysteeleWhen I was a vegetarian in the 1990s, an ostensibly healthy restaurant opened in the mall. They had a breakfast sandwich that I think was meant to imitate sausage. It looked and tasted like cardboard. My boyfriend at the time (who later became my husband) was a lifelong vegetarian. He was raised Seventh Day Adventist, which meant he had lived through every attempt at soy and wheat analog meat in America. He commented that until there was a fake meat that tasted like the real thing, veggie fare like the restaurant’s broken attempt at a breakfast sandwich would continue to marginalize vegetarian food as weird and icky.
I went vegan after 20 years of vegetarianism and pescetarianism in 2010. The vegan movement was still obscure when I joined it.
Sun Tzu said that in military combat “if you make the enemy’s path circuitous and entice them with profit, although you set out after them, you will arrive before them.”
The enemy of the vegan movement was obscurity. Why the hell should anyone eat a bland, weird soy burger when they could chomp down on a tasty ground-up animal sandwich? The animal sandwich was cruel, sure, but it was also cheap, fatty, salty, and satisfying. Not everyone was like me, able to take the blinders off to see the blood of the slaughterhouse, to smell the feces and rot, to hear the anguished cries of the pig or the chicken with her beak cut off, to contemplate the staggering amount of waste that went into a slab of sausage. Vegans were not subtle in messaging: the reason I became vegetarian and not vegan in 1989 was because the only vegan I knew was the neighbor kid who was starving himself to death. The only group of vegans was PeTA, and they were psychotic.
The PeTA method, in Sun Tzu’s vernacular, is to “race forward day and night without encamping, covering two days normal distance at a time, marching forward a hundred li to contend for gain”. It is a failing strategy. PeTa has always loved to rush to the bottom line of YOU MEAT EATERS OUGHT TO FEEL ASHAMED instead of going the slow, circuitous route and showing people why they might want to become vegans. In the 80s, PeTA literally attacked those they disagreed with by pouring red paint on women wearing fur coats. If the vegan movement had never expanded beyond PeTA’s chokehold, the word vegan would not have become a household term. Luckily for me, PeTA fell into the irrelevance and disgrace it richly deserved shortly after I became vegan. Hopefully it won’t be back.
The vegan movement got exciting in the 2010s. We had our fearless leaders: Philip Wollen, Morrissey, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Doctors Esselstyn, McDougall, Barnard, Popper, and Williams. We had our generals: Colleen Patrick Goudreau, Ruby Roth, Patrik Baboumian, Emily the Bite Size Vegan, Gary Yourovsky, Melanie Joy, Joey Carbstrong, Earthling Ed, and James Aspey. We knew the terrain: we could argue from any point and win, and we could do it with humor and style, a la Vegan Sidekick. Our varied and myriad approaches to argument (with a great deal of persuasion) were so effective, industries started catering to us. Vegan became profitable. It was in the 2010s that we got Gardein, the world's first consistently tasty, non-weird tasting vegan meats.
The secret to the success of the vegan movement was its variety. We captured the Hollywood elites by giving them the health fad they craved with the virtue signaling they craved even more. We captured the middle classes by putting convenient vegan comfort foods in every grocery store. Plant milk was something you bought only in health food stores in the year 2000; by 2020 it became commonplace in all but the most rural of rural grocery stores. The vegan movement reached the inner cities where it was embraced with enthusiasm and passion, and people of all colors and ethnic origins delighted in bringing vibrant, nourishing meals to former food deserts.
When we “plundered a district” and gained ground, we shared the wealth. Vegans networked around the world to share recipes, to lend advocacy and words, and to relentlessly campaign for vegan options in restaurants.
We knew when to strike and how to do it. We figured out how to make Thanksgiving seem more appealing without the turkey. We knew when to get environmental (Cowspiracy) and when to appeal to vanity (The Game Changers). We knew how to wear the enemy down and strike when they were weak.
We were doing great. The tipping point had nearly been achieved. Unfortunately, the old saying came true: the larger they are, the harder they fall. Vegans everywhere fell for the oldest trick in the book: the infiltration of the movement by idiot co-opters who devoured it from the inside out. The race baiters, non-functioning autistics, and the gullible do-gooders metastasized, and former skeptics who had once worked overtime to disprove the average allopathic doctor’s insistence that eating animals is healthy and good lined up like lemmings to take an experimental MRNA shot. Greta Thunberg heralded the beginning of the end; the vegan movement now is a shadow of its former self.
That which was in order became disordered and that which was tranquil became clamorous. The vegan movement snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, proving that vegans were largely every bit as credulous as the meat-eaters they were trying to change. The same people who laughed at Dr. Robert Atkins and who would not eat the Impossible Burger because it used animal tests to get to FDA approval were perfectly willing to swallow (or inject) whatever animal-tested Pfizer and Moderna garbage Dr. Anthony Fauci shoved in their direction. Whether or not the vegan movement will return is anybody’s guess. For now, it has been vanquished. Looking on the bright side… at least we got a decent breakfast sandwich!
I went vegan after 20 years of vegetarianism and pescetarianism in 2010. The vegan movement was still obscure when I joined it.
Sun Tzu said that in military combat “if you make the enemy’s path circuitous and entice them with profit, although you set out after them, you will arrive before them.”
The enemy of the vegan movement was obscurity. Why the hell should anyone eat a bland, weird soy burger when they could chomp down on a tasty ground-up animal sandwich? The animal sandwich was cruel, sure, but it was also cheap, fatty, salty, and satisfying. Not everyone was like me, able to take the blinders off to see the blood of the slaughterhouse, to smell the feces and rot, to hear the anguished cries of the pig or the chicken with her beak cut off, to contemplate the staggering amount of waste that went into a slab of sausage. Vegans were not subtle in messaging: the reason I became vegetarian and not vegan in 1989 was because the only vegan I knew was the neighbor kid who was starving himself to death. The only group of vegans was PeTA, and they were psychotic.
The PeTA method, in Sun Tzu’s vernacular, is to “race forward day and night without encamping, covering two days normal distance at a time, marching forward a hundred li to contend for gain”. It is a failing strategy. PeTa has always loved to rush to the bottom line of YOU MEAT EATERS OUGHT TO FEEL ASHAMED instead of going the slow, circuitous route and showing people why they might want to become vegans. In the 80s, PeTA literally attacked those they disagreed with by pouring red paint on women wearing fur coats. If the vegan movement had never expanded beyond PeTA’s chokehold, the word vegan would not have become a household term. Luckily for me, PeTA fell into the irrelevance and disgrace it richly deserved shortly after I became vegan. Hopefully it won’t be back.
The vegan movement got exciting in the 2010s. We had our fearless leaders: Philip Wollen, Morrissey, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Doctors Esselstyn, McDougall, Barnard, Popper, and Williams. We had our generals: Colleen Patrick Goudreau, Ruby Roth, Patrik Baboumian, Emily the Bite Size Vegan, Gary Yourovsky, Melanie Joy, Joey Carbstrong, Earthling Ed, and James Aspey. We knew the terrain: we could argue from any point and win, and we could do it with humor and style, a la Vegan Sidekick. Our varied and myriad approaches to argument (with a great deal of persuasion) were so effective, industries started catering to us. Vegan became profitable. It was in the 2010s that we got Gardein, the world's first consistently tasty, non-weird tasting vegan meats.
The secret to the success of the vegan movement was its variety. We captured the Hollywood elites by giving them the health fad they craved with the virtue signaling they craved even more. We captured the middle classes by putting convenient vegan comfort foods in every grocery store. Plant milk was something you bought only in health food stores in the year 2000; by 2020 it became commonplace in all but the most rural of rural grocery stores. The vegan movement reached the inner cities where it was embraced with enthusiasm and passion, and people of all colors and ethnic origins delighted in bringing vibrant, nourishing meals to former food deserts.
When we “plundered a district” and gained ground, we shared the wealth. Vegans networked around the world to share recipes, to lend advocacy and words, and to relentlessly campaign for vegan options in restaurants.
We knew when to strike and how to do it. We figured out how to make Thanksgiving seem more appealing without the turkey. We knew when to get environmental (Cowspiracy) and when to appeal to vanity (The Game Changers). We knew how to wear the enemy down and strike when they were weak.
We were doing great. The tipping point had nearly been achieved. Unfortunately, the old saying came true: the larger they are, the harder they fall. Vegans everywhere fell for the oldest trick in the book: the infiltration of the movement by idiot co-opters who devoured it from the inside out. The race baiters, non-functioning autistics, and the gullible do-gooders metastasized, and former skeptics who had once worked overtime to disprove the average allopathic doctor’s insistence that eating animals is healthy and good lined up like lemmings to take an experimental MRNA shot. Greta Thunberg heralded the beginning of the end; the vegan movement now is a shadow of its former self.
That which was in order became disordered and that which was tranquil became clamorous. The vegan movement snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, proving that vegans were largely every bit as credulous as the meat-eaters they were trying to change. The same people who laughed at Dr. Robert Atkins and who would not eat the Impossible Burger because it used animal tests to get to FDA approval were perfectly willing to swallow (or inject) whatever animal-tested Pfizer and Moderna garbage Dr. Anthony Fauci shoved in their direction. Whether or not the vegan movement will return is anybody’s guess. For now, it has been vanquished. Looking on the bright side… at least we got a decent breakfast sandwich!
no subject
Date: 2021-10-13 02:05 pm (UTC)The lemming-like behavior towards getting the covid vaxxes, that seems to be so widespread it's just... really, truly head-shaking. It seems to me that behind it is this driving analogy, vax = modern = necessary = good, and that, should you express any doubts, then you're an uneducated kook. But I'd say, rat poison looks a lot like flour. Use it to bake your biscuits, you'll probably regret that.
Speaking of veggies, so glad it's pumpkin season again.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-14 03:01 am (UTC)My neighbor brought me some mini pumpkins today! Kawaii!!!
no subject
Date: 2021-10-13 04:05 pm (UTC)I note that the Malthusian branch of veganism pretty nearly died out in the eighties, and yet vegans lasted in various strains, long enough for the animal cruelty branch to come in. I suspect that the next branch would have been the health nuts: I have several friends in that group and they are pretty persuasive in their lived results (especially to their fellow sedentary PMC workers). But now instead it will be people whose only reason to be vegan is that it is what they can afford to eat. Dry beans, grains, and seeds, after all, are not very much harmed by a stall in shipping to the urban areas, and small veggies can be grown in the urban areas. Nuts are temperature and time sensitive and take a long time for a tree to grow so I suppose those who have the trees will have them, and those who don't, won't.
It occurs to me your cohort has an excellent chance to create or provide the recipes that will be comfort food to the next generation. Have fun and good luck!
BoysMom
no subject
Date: 2021-10-13 11:16 pm (UTC)It is funny, because I also go deliberately searching thrift stores for dishes and silverware from that time period: there's a whole genre of shades-of-tan Japanese stoneware that was pretty ubiquitous then, that (while somewhat homely) is quite lightweight for stoneware, has dessert/salad plates that are *just* the right shape and size (flat, not too large), and it's old enough that the bowls still stack nicely (have you noticed how fashionable bowls these days can't stack? So irritating!). The flatware that went with it is a better quality than anything made now-- thinner and lighter, but at the same time less bendy-- and the Japanese, for whatever reason, designed spoons really nicely. They're beautifully proportioned. And yet: it's not old enough or classy enough to get treated as "vintage" (yet) so you can still buy it for next to nothing.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-15 02:46 am (UTC)When my late sister-in-law got her first microwave the cookbook that came with it said you could zap a Thanksgiving turkey. Those lying [unDruidly word]s!
—Lady Cutekitten
no subject
Date: 2021-10-14 03:13 am (UTC)The health nut vegans had their day in the sun -- there was a whole Oil Free vegan movement that followed Forks Over Knives and its follow up documentaries. There was also a "healthy" fruitarian vegan named Freelee the Banana Girl who was straight up annoying. When I was doing vegan food advocacy, my main schtick was to give classes in making sushi and soup, basically proving that you could make lots of nice foods (without vegan convenience products) for pennies. Sushi is SO EXPENSIVE considering it is a seaweed burrito. I am actually the inventor the onion ring & spicy mayo roll and the jackfruit salad roll... there's a sushi restaurant in the town I work in that charges 14 dollars for onion ring maki that aren't as good as mine!
no subject
Date: 2021-10-14 02:40 am (UTC)Sybil, who unwittingly started the multiple personality movement, also grew up an Adventist.
—Lady Cutekitten
no subject
Date: 2021-10-14 03:14 am (UTC)Non sequirtor
Date: 2021-10-14 04:42 am (UTC)I did my best, I swear, but Aphrodite must be a very tolerant entity to accept my “Joyful noise”. I sang it to my best ability tonight.
I actually felt as though it had deeper devotion to it tonight in spite of my poor talent at singing.
That’s my report from Orygone.
So goes the Art of War
Annette
Re: Non sequirtor
Date: 2021-10-14 04:11 pm (UTC)