December 2009 Archives

Ben and I share the duties of answering emails sent to info@exploreveg.org. This is CAA's main contact address, so it gets all sorts of questions. Most of them are pretty simple, like "how can I volunteer?"

From time to time, we get one that requires a more involved answer. I thought I'd share a question we got recently, and the answer I sent.

I am not prepared to become a vegetarian or vegan because I honestly do not care for many vegetables. However, I am very prepared to eat less meat - and ... more so - to ONLY purchase it from organic farms - or whatever they are called .. farms that do not abuse animals.

I believe animals can be raised outside, allowed to live a decent life, and be humanely killed for food. I realize it would be better not to eat them at all - but the least I can do is NOT support factory raised animals ... that is the most appalling thing I have ever seen.

Do you have ANY info on where I can purchase non-factory raised meat? I looked up Omaha Steaks and they look like a big giant factory!!

This is pretty timely, given that the board just discussed the idea of a campaign to promote the use of Certified Humane products. Here's the reponse I sent ...

Hi, XXXX,

Thanks for contacting us.

This is a tough question. CAA doesn't really support any use of animals, and as such we're not comfortable endorsing any particular supplier of animal products.

While a "free-range" supplier may better than modern factory farms, they are still extremely cruel. For example, a cage-free egg facility still keeps thousands of hens in crowded, uncomfortable conditions. Those conditions are certainly better than battery cages, but they're still pretty horrible.

When it comes time for slaughter, there are, to the best of my knowledge, no certification programs for any sort of humane slaughter. These animals will go through the same horrendous slaughterhouses as every other animal.

There is a program that has been endorsed by the Humane Society of the United States called Certified Humane (http://www.certifiedhumane.org/), that has at least some minimal certification standards for animal ag facilities.

But Certified Humane is very far from the image I think you may have, of animals running around freely, living naturally until they're humanely slaughtered.

The only way you're going to find that is by visiting individual suppliers and assuring yourself of the conditions. If you do find a supplier like this, it will probably be quite expensive. Factory farming greatly reduces costs, and I suspect at least part of the reason what you want is hard to find is that no one is really willing to spend that much money on meat.

Also, be aware that there are a lot of other "standards", many of which are created by the producers themselves. Certified Humane is the only standard I know of with independent inspections, which is crucial in maintaining any sort of integrity. HSUS has some information about egg labeling on their website at http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/confinement_farm/facts/guide_egg_labels.html

You say you don't like vegetables, which is funny, because I was the same way before I first went vegetarian. I was a picky eater, and mostly preferred to eat beef and chicken. I found that once I stopped eating meat, I was forced to explore new foods, and I even enjoyed some of them!

As part of your effort to reduce your meat consumption, maybe you could make a point of trying out some new vegetarian food once a week. That could be a new vegetable, a new recipe, or maybe even tofu or a mock meat product. There are a lot of great mock meat products out there. My current favorite is anything from Gardein (http://www.gardein.com/). It's pretty amazing stuff. Of course, it's also expensive.

We have some recipes on our website at http://www.exploreveg.org/resources/recipes. Also check out http://www.vegweb.com/, which has a huge selection of recipes to browse.

One more thing ... often, when people reduce, the first thing they eliminate is beef and pork, and they compensate by eating more chicken. This is unfortunate, because birds are the worst treated animals in our factory farming system, and being smaller, more of them need to be killed to produce the same amount of meat.

Thanks, and good luck,

Dave Rolsky

The final board meeting of 2009 dealt with some big topics, including whether or not to give Ben and Unny salary increases. Ben and Unny used Republican tactics to delay the measure, but the board prevailed and voted in favor of raises.

We further discussed the outlines of a more active, focused student group on campus, and what their work would entail.

We finalized some details on the summer food giveaway internship. Ben, Suzy and Kedar will be on the hiring committee.

The board discussed the topic of the Humane Farming Association and whether or not it fits with CAA's mission. The consensus was that it does not. However, this does not preclude CAA from working on other "welfare" initiatives in the future.

As many volunteers may have seen, at CAA we use our wiki a lot. I'm sure some of you find the wiki annoying, and might wonder why we don't use something else. Well, here's why ...

First, we need to understand what makes a wiki a wiki, as opposed to a word processor or chat room, etc.

There are several factors that make a wiki what it is. At its heart, a wiki is a website that's made up of a bunch of pages linked together. In that respect, it's like any non-wiki website.

Wikis are designed to make editing as easy as possible. You don't need special software, you don't need to pick fonts, you just click the "edit" button and start typing.

Wikis are also designed to make linking pages together easy. A good wiki is well-linked, so that you can start from top page and easily find areas of interest. CAA's wiki does reasonably well in this regard.

Finally, a wiki makes editing safe. When you save a page, the wiki keeps all the previous versions around, so we can compare them, and revert changes if necessary.

The particular wiki software we use (as of this writing) is pretty bad. It's not that easy to use, and it's implementation of certain features (like viewing past versions of a page) is downright terrible. That's unfortunate, and I'm hoping to move us to new wiki software in the future.

But the overall wiki concept is a good one. The wiki makes it (relatively) easy for new volunteers to contribute. Unlike Word documents, you don't need any specific software to edit wiki pages. Everyone has a web browser. Also unlike Word documents, you can't accidentally save the document on your own computer. Since the wiki is a web site, it's always available to everyone.

Because pages are linked together, it's easy to organize related documents. By comparison, organizing word documents is harder, as the documents themselves cannot easily link to other documents.

The wiki is also searchable. Again, our particular wiki software does this badly, but there is a search feature, and because wikis are basically just plain text, they're easier to search.

At CAA, we use the wiki as our collective memory. If you're involved in planning the 2010 fundraising banquet, you'll find that we have wiki pages for every banquet we've done so far, for the past five years. If you want to know who was invited, who donated food, or what the evening's program was, that information is all there.

We don't want to see this knowledge fragmented. This is why it's important to keep as much knowledge as possible in the wiki.

Of course, the wiki isn't right for everything. Some things need layout, like mailings or newsletters. In that case, the wiki should be used for creating the content. Once the content is finalized, we can move to a Word document or graphic design program for the layout.

Does this answer the question of why we use the wiki? If you have more questions, please leave a comment here, and I'll address it in a future blog post.