bodhi tree swaying

An extract from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s editorial notebook in the New York Times:

…this is where the logic of industrial farming gets us. Instead of people on the land, committed to the welfare of the agricultural enterprise and the resources that make it possible, there was this horror — a place where millions of chickens are crowded in tiny cages and hundreds of laborers work in dire conditions.

It takes only a little investigation to learn how bad things have been inside those buildings. The list of offenses for which the DeCosters and their farms have been fined in Iowa and Maine only begins with hiring children and illegal immigrants.

In 2000, Jack DeCoster, the operations’ founder, was named a “habitual violator” of Iowa’s environmental laws. His egg factories have been cited by OSHA for deplorable working conditions. In 2003, Mr. DeCoster paid more than $1.5 million to settle an employment discrimination suit

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This is straight from an article by Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today:

An article appeared in PLoS one this May which describes brain differences between Vegetarians, Vegans and Omnivores in the way they process pictures of animal suffering.

The study in question is a neuroimaging study intent on investigating whether

“the neural representation of conditions of abuse and suffering might be different among subjects who made different feeding choice due to ethical reasons, and thus result in the engagement of different components of the brain networks associated with empathy and social cognition”

The hypothesis behind this study is based on the observation that Vegetarians and Vegans tend to base their decision to avoid animal products on ethical grounds. Assuming that Vegetarians and Vegans – because of their underlying moral philosophies – show greater empathy towards animal suffering, it is very well possible that these differences in empathy extend beyond the animal domain

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The venerable Dayamati, aka Professor Richard Hayes, has a provocative post (“How to feed an ego“) about the tendency for vegans (and to a lesser extent vegetarians) to cling to a notion of “us versus them” purity that reinforces a sense of identity rather than weakens it.

After mentioning a radio program discussing factory farming, he goes on to say:

One of the observations that most caught my attention in these discussions was made by a woman who was a vegan for 20–30 years and eventually changed her diet to include some animal products. She observed that being a vegan is much more than deciding what to eat and what not to eat. It is also taking on an identity. It is carrying all the baggage of a persona that must be defended almost every time one picks up

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This is very encouraging. Eventually we have to face the reality of how insane the meat industry is.

A global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change, a UN report said today.

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

It says: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Professor Edgar Hertwich, the lead

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Whether you can be a vegan and eat animals seems like a bizarre question, like asking if you can be celibate and still have sex. The definition of a vegan is “a person who does not use or eat animal products,” after all. But Christopher Cox makes a good case in a recent Slate article for regarding oysters as compatible with a vegan diet.

Now of course oysters are animals. And vegans don’t eat animals. But why don’t vegans eat animals? The main point of veganism is to avoid causing suffering to sentient beings. A related reason is environmental reasons, since meat-eating is environmentally disastrous, but in a way that’s the same reason — avoiding causing harm. (Some people are vegan for health reasons, although those are not central to veganism, in my opinion — many people would still be …

From a book review in the Financial Times, covering “Eating Animals,” by Jonathan Safran Foer, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of our Insatiable Appetite,” by David A Kessler, and “An Edible History of Humanity,” by Tom Standage.

Suppose that you and your partner go out for dinner tonight. You order steak and salad while your partner has chicken with rice. Now inspect your plates. Your cow spent almost all its life in a shed, burping methane that heats the planet. It was then slaughtered, often incompetently: it may have been still alive when its head was skinned and its legs cut off. Your “salad”, doused in dressing, is really “fat with a little lettuce”.

Your partner’s chicken lived for six weeks, diseased and crammed so closely with other birds that it cracked several bones. After torture, came slaughter: the bird was shoved into a truck, taken to the slaughterhouse, and shackled

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A BBC article reveals that the price of fish includes the mass slaughter of endangered turtles.

Millions of marine turtles have been killed over the past two decades through entrapment in fishing gear, according to a global survey.

Described as the first global synthesis of existing data, the study found especially high rates of "bycatch" in the Mediterranean and eastern Pacific.

Six of the seven sea turtle types are on the Red List of Threatened Species.

If I were a person who ate fish, and who had a conscience, I’d be asking myself whether pleasing my tastebuds was worth this level of destruction.

This rather mind-blowing infographic was on Consumerist.com.

Eating vegetables in the US is expensive!

Welcome to the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View. All today I’ll be online, doing various things connected with the book and its subject. Do feel free to drop in and say “hi” or “congratulations” or anything else you feel inspired to utter (using the comment form, naturally; you can talk to your computer if you want but I probably won’t hear you!).

As well as the welcome video I’ll be adding new material to the blog all day, and I’ll add links on this post. So this is the “home page” for the party, with different “rooms” where you can mingle.

First you have to dodge the author touting his wares in the hall and spouting his opinions:

• Here’s a list of places

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[Part of my book-launch party offerings.]

Dirk Johnson, a friend from Twitter, wrote a poem a while back about Buddhists who justify their meat-eating on the grounds that “it’s ok to eat animals because everything is empty.”

Here’s a link to the poem. Please do go read it in its entirety. It wags a finger, but in a playful way.

And here’s an extract:

Oh, you Buddhist, so far along the path
That you’ve realized
Your own inseparability from emptiness,
That your own pain is without essence,
That your own suffering is an illusion,
That your imputed self is a mirage,
You, who realize this so deeply
That you even experience
This emptiness in the minds of other beings,
The bliss that they think is their pain,
So that you can see them killed and eat them
Without the slightest perturbation of regret.

[Part of my book-launch party offerings]

Potatoes roasted in olive oil with thyme from the garden.

Tofu, deep-fried, and then stirred into an orange/ginger sauce with garlic and chili.

And of course salad with a home-made balsamic vinaigrette.

Lots of protein, and in fact lots of everything good. The photograph doesn’t do it justice.

This post is one in a series connected with the launch of my book, “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View,” and with my book launch party. It’s a brief extract from my book.

The notion that vegetarians are being inconsistent in eating plants because plants are living things is very common: there can scarcely be a vegetarian who hasn’t heard this argument several times. It is hard, however, to see how plants can suffer. They have nothing corresponding to a central nervous system or even to nerves. While it’s of considerable evolutionary benefit for animals to have a sense of pain so that they can escape danger, why should plants, which are by nature static, have evolved such a sense? I believe that we instinctively recognize that plants are of a different order from animals. I doubt if many who employ the above argument would really feel the same seeing a carrot

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This Just came in from my old friend Roger as a contribution to the the launch of my book, “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View,” and with my book launch party. I swear he hasn’t aged in ten years.

This video is one in a series connected with the launch of my book, “Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View,” and with my book launch party. Here I read a page from my book, detailing some of the ecological problems of meat-eating and the benefits of moving (even partially) to a vegetarian diet.

This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

In my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View, I argue that although the Buddha ate meat, that was because he lived by begging for food. Those of us who shop for food are in a different situation and we should follow his advice “not to kill, or cause to kill, or to approve of others killing.” In other words, to live a compassionate life, don’t eat meat.

A nice little trailer pointing out some of the carbon-related benefits of reducing or eliminating meat from our diet. This is one of the posts that’s part of my book launch party.

This is a response to a question raised by Dharmasuri of Nagaloka Buddhist Center in Portland, Maine, in response to the concerns of one of her sangha members.

This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

This is from my favorite Indian vegetarian recipe book, Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Vegetarian Cooking.

BANARASI ARHAR DAL

Banaras arhar dal, a dish reminiscent of the north Indian countryside mango groves, coriander patches, and fields of lentils stretching to the horizon – is in fact a simple, humble dish and quite easy to make. The lentils are first cooked to a smooth, creamy consistency. Then the mango slices, spiced with cayenne, cumin, and garam masala, are folded into the dal. Finally fresh coriander is added to perfume and mix the flavours.

In my mother’s home, as a child, I ate this dal with a simple baked bread or a bowl of fluffy plain rice and a vegetable side dish, the most memorable being Bitter Gourd with Spicy Onion Stuffing and with Fragrant Potato Stuffing (pp. 238 and 239).

FOR 6–8

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This post is connected with the launch of my book, Vegetarianism: A Buddhist View.

I haven’t watched all of this video. I’ve seen this stuff in real life on farms and don’t really need to go there again. It’s a PETA presentation explaining how modern farming works and what you make yourself a part of when you choose to eat meat. If you’re a vegetarian already, this might push you towards veganism.