vegan columbus: vegan living in central ohio

I'm a little late to the game with this, but maybe someone will still find it useful. If you're planning a veg*an wedding, you might want to pick up June's issue of VegNews. It's got a 10-page feature on various couples' vegan weddings, including details of their reception menus, photos, and relevant highlights of their wedding experiences. These menus sound amazing, and there's tons of variety. (They do this feature every year, so you might also check out their back issues.)

(Also I personally was happy to read them because for some reason I'd been feeling like I need to keep everything somehow in a theme or matching. So I was pointlessly distressed about wanting pan-Asian finger food AND brunch-type food at my late morning wedding. Reading Marisa and David's (pp. 42) Asian-Mediterranean menu liberated me from the fear of culinary eclecticism!)

Here is a creepy PDF of a papercraft dinner. The meats, bowl, silverware, and carrots are all printed. Perhaps it would be a cute practical joke on someone that thinks vegetarians can't eat anything. The instructions are in Japanese, but you're smart; you can figure it out.

So everyone knows eBay is amazing. I just bought a wedding dress for $20 including shipping from eBay. But when I did a search for "vegan wedding shoe", it did that thing where it crossed out each word and said maybe if I tried without "vegan" or without "wedding" or without "shoe" in the search. Lame! Granted, you can always go to "normal" shoe stores and try to find labels and stuff. Which is fine for finding sneakers at Goodwill, but we're talking about flippin' weddings here! How hard can it be to find fancy-pants white shoes that necessitate no animal deaths?

Not that hard! Here are links to a few of the white/silver/otherwise vaguely wedding-ish in some way, vegan shoes I came across on the glorious Interwebz (click the image to go to each shoe's respective site):

Like alcohol distributors, perfumers are not required to list all their ingredients. Even if they do, it may be ambiguous and include undisclosed animal products. Many perfumes produced by big fashion houses and cosmetics companies are definitely tested on animals. In response to these concerns, the perfumistas at Basenotes recommended Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, an independent company based out of North Hollywood, CA with a unique Gothic aesthetic and a dedicated cult following. This is perhaps due to BPAL's charming melodramatic literary descriptions of each startlingly unique fragrance.

Self-description from their about section:

RANT!, a delicious anti-establishment feminist local 'zine edited by a good friend of the vegancolumbus team, and fabulous feminist vegetarian, Stephanie Diebold, is out now! It features a short story/random anecdote by yours truly, a vegan taco recipe, and some other good stuff like a review of the PStyle and some feminist poetry and illustrations. It's also funded by ads from none other than our own wonderful sponsor, local webdesign masters Kosada Inc. (full disclosure: I work there and designed the ads too.)

So for the last few months I was a poster over at veganfreaks. For those not familiar, it's the website of the authors of the book Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World. Which is kind of a mediocre book that doesn't contain much you haven't heard before, except maybe the author confessing to eating meat when he was a "vegetarian", and having made some really dumb excuses for not going vegan. Which a lot of us have done anyway, so maybe that isn't even interesting.

Am I the only one in the world that were duped by Quorn's packaging into thinking it was vegan when it wasn't? The letter I received in response to my complaint seemed so scripted and vaguely irrelevant to my claim that I can't help but wonder if this is a common complaint.

I got an email recently from Angela over at knitpicks.com. I wasn't familiar with her or her site before, but it sounds great from her email:

Hi,
I’m vegan, and I work at Knit Picks. Since our new warehouse is actually located in Columbus, OH, I thought you might be interested to know that we have 5 vegan yarns now-
With the addition of our newest cotton/acrylic blend, Comfy, Knit Picks now offers five cruelty free options for vegan knitters starting at only $1.99. CotLin is a DK weight, Tanguis Cotton/linen blend available in twelve colors for only $2.49. Our Pima cotton/modal blend, Shine, is available in sport and worsted weights. Modal is a bio-based fiber made by spinning reconstituted cellulose from beech trees into fiber, and it gives the Pima cotton a lustrous quality akin to silk. Shine sport is available in twenty luscious colors like Blush and Hydrangea, and Shine worsted comes in seventeen different hues. Both lines start at only 2.49 a ball.
Our fifth cruelty free yarn is our Crayon boucle; it’s 100 percent cotton, DK weight, and available in fourteen yummy colors making it the perfect yarn for kids’ projects or for drapey, soft summer knits.
On average our yarns are priced $4 to $7 lower than yarns with comparable fiber content sold by our competitors so they’re worth checking out.
The warehouse isn't open for retail purchases, but I could arrange a tour for you if you ever want to check it out. Just drop me a line at press@knitpicks.com
All the best, Angela

First of all, the title is a reference to this idiotic post on veganism from the "Stuff White People Like" blog. Summary: they think vegans are ineffectual people full of misguided liberal guilt, and they think it's hilarious. (whole separate rant could be written on how apathy is the only thing that isn't "lame" or "liberal" or whatever, but another time.)

So everyone knows that it takes so much more resources to produce the same amount of food when the "food" in question is animal-derived. Some huge percentage of the world's farmland is used to feed "food" animals instead of to feed people directly. It also wastes other resources like clean water and petroleum, since so much more transportation is required to get the grains made, and to get them to the animals, and to get the animals to the slaughter, and to get the meat to the stores, and then to get most of the meat back out of the stores because it goes bad so quickly. It would be much more efficient to use that farmland to feed humans directly.

But does veganism do anything for world hunger?

Naive answer: Yes, because if there's more food for humans then there won't be shortages.

"Educated" (read:hiply cynical) answer: No, because food shortages are caused by economic and geopolitical factors much more complex than simple net food resources on the planet.

No bullshit answer: Yes, because even though the economic and geopolitical factors involved are quite complicated in many individual cases, basic supply and demand economics still factor in significantly in the creation of this problem. When one considers world food shortages in terms of actual examples rather than just an abstract postmodern boogeyman, this becomes clear:

I'm making this tonight to reheat tomorrow for a delightfully lazy Sunday morning before the new quarter starts.

Julie Hasson with Everyday Dish (video after the break)