Welcome to the Vegan Recipe Club newsletter! We’ve got a new sweet/savoury crêpe recipe for you, perfect for all the March celebrations! Enjoy our new super-quick ramen dish which works in every season. We’re delighted to welcome our friends at The Word Forest Organisation who are doing some amazing work and have provided us with their favourite recipes!
‘Ham’ & ‘Cheese’ Crêpes
Fill your savoury crêpe with lovely melty ‘cheese’ and ‘ham’ for the ultimate quick comfort meal.
This crêpe batter is extremely plain and simple so it can be used to make sweet or savoury pancakes! We’ve got lots of filling ideas for you so pick your favourites and enjoy 🙂
This is one of Tracey’s favourite bread recipes to teach. It looks complicated but it’s dead easy and it pulls all sorts of colourful seasonal veg into play!
Ever wondered what a week of vegan food looks like for us at Viva!’s Vegan Recipe Club? Our social media coordinator, Pia, is lifting the lid on her foodie-habits and offering some fabulous tips to make every day filled with delicious plant-based delights!
I always find it revealing how videos demonstrating the violent death required of ALL exploited animals, are typically restricted, labeled graphic, and warning of disturbing images, completely opposite to what the agriculture adverts and propaganda deceptively promote, but you’ll NEVER get an agriculture industry employee, supporter, representative, or apologist (ie, all who comprise >90% of the human population) provide the truth of the suffering and violence necessary of animals, who are denied all opportunity to defend their bodies, their children, their lives. Conversely, nobody-in-the-history-of-ever has restricted footage or images of crop harvesting or apple picking.
Don’t let the explicit content that you so effortlessly inflict on vulnerable, defenseless animals prevent your education and hypocritically challenge your ethics.
And for all the radical cat-and-dog extremists who vilify the cat-and-dog-meat trades and relentlessly share the graphic footage of dogs being butchered alive and cats being boiled while conscious: why are you so happy to participate in the same torture, torment, and cruelties inflicted on other animals?
The USA routinely boils chickens alive, as well as other animals including lobsters and crabs and pigs, whose flesh and body parts you piously pass around on your nice dinnerware; I think people spend so much time picking out china patterns because pretty plates and other weapons of destruction deflect from the required violence and suffering of those on them.
And before you virtuously scream about “quick, ethical killing”: killing is inherently unethical, regardless of method or place, you don’t kill animals because you actually believe NOT killing animals is UNETHICAL, there is NO form of killing that is more humane than NOT killing. All killing causes suffering and destroys life, which can NEVER be “ethical”. Why you think that your transient taste preference validates the END OF LIFE is the epitome of privilege, arrogance, hubris, and selfishness. It’s not like you have to literally hold yourself back from eating your dog or cat or rabbit or whatever-animal-you-claim-to-like, if you can prevent killing your dog as “food”, you can prevent killing pigs.
There are those who ask, “Why should I listen to vegans?” … Which makes me wonder if you also ask, “Why should I listen to people opposed to child exploitation?” Really? This SHOULD be a no-brainer: Less harm is ALWAYS better. But for the GOP-ers and apologists who simultaneously cause and dismiss the suffering of others (I have no room to unpack the screaming hypocrisy of leftists who also ignore the suffering of others), you’d perhaps be more interested in the financial aspect: Me? I make NO money advocating on behalf of animals, I actually spend money on this blog. But, for the people who relentlessly oppose using gas “euthanasia” on cats and dogs, but who consume pigs who are predominantly slaughtered using gas, the former CEO and president of Smithfield Foods (that kills and profits from the suffering of pigs, in case you missed the association, because nonvegans are often naive and willfully ignorant about the animals they inflict with pain and fear and the entities they pay to cause such), which is actually owned by a Hong Kong, China-based company (the irony), earned $14,000,000.00 in approximately 5 years ……………………………
Who’s fooling whom? Why do you listen to the ones who depend on your complacency and conformity to take your money to kill? (Not to mention the subsidies used to prop up the death industry, if it wasn’t subsidized, a pound of “ground beef” would be about $35.) This also should be a no-brainer.
We are ALL animals who have the capacity to experience emotions and pain, if you enjoy “bacon” but condemn cat and dog flesh, guess what? You enable others to consume cats and dogs by your very support of animal exploitation of other animals: it’s all related, you just define the suffering of some animals in ways that provides you comfort causing it. To care for one species requires you reject the exploitation of all.
Don’t like facts? Too bad, you must not actually like cats or dogs either, then. Was that offensive? Too bad again, the violent torment forcibly endured by animals is what is ACTUALLY “offensive”. Have you ever seen the morally outraged masses absolutely verbally eviscerate and threaten with actual harm, others who kill cats and dogs? If your immediate reaction to my words is, “iF VEgaNs wERe mOrE NiCE I’d Be vEgAn…”: Cry more, who do you normally blame for your inability to be a decent human animal since you either don’t actually know any vegans, or you ignore the super nice ones? I posted a video just last week of nice, respectful Ed Winters encouraging veganism while destroying carnist arguments, if you won’t be vegan for the actual animals, be vegan for Ed.
And, too, what other social justice issues do you require personal benefit and niceties to support? Veganism is for animals, not your ego, you ignore the trillions of “nice” animals whose throats are stabbed and are therefore incapable of respectfully asking for your support, so don’t pretend reading a 5-minute vegan plea or watching a 30-second video had such a negative influence on you that you feel forced to continue greedily supporting the death industry, which includes dogs and cats. SL
A controversial vegan advertisement debuted on UK television channels over the weekend. Tom Bursnall, director of plant-based food company Miami Burger and producer of the advert, expects it will spark conversation and backlash. Bursnall created the 30-second ad in collaboration with the charity Vegan Friendly
Take PETA’s Cruelty-Free Shopping Guide along with you next time you head to the store! The handy guide will help you find humane products at a glance. Order a FREE copyHERE
Searching for Cruelty-Free Cosmetics, Personal-Care Products, Vegan Products, or more? Click HERE to search.
Free PDF of Vegan & Cruelty-Free Products/Companies HERE
Want to do more than go vegan? Help others to do so! Click below for nominal, or no, fees to vegan literature that you can use to convince others that veganism is the only compassionate route to being an animal friend:
The impetus for the EU to develop and adopt the Farm to Fork strategy was the necessity of making the food system resilient, by adopting healthier and more environmentally sustainable practices, including improved animal welfare and a shift to healthy, sustainable diets.
The crisis in Ukraine has made large agri-businesses cry foul, claiming that without access to Ukrainian and Russian fertilisers, cereals, gas and oil, it is necessary to u-turn on the EU’s objectives and roll back policies that will make its food system more resilient.
The Farm to Fork strategy shows, on the contrary, foresight. Its roll-out will streamline and ensure food security by making the EU less permeable to volatility and constraints in international markets. By moving away from the most industrial and intensive forms of animal agriculture and promoting a shift to more plant-based diets, more people can be fed using less land and resources.
The outcry is about feed, not food
Agri-businesses cynically claim that the war in Ukraine will cause a food crisis, whereas the stress is on feed. The EU wastes 20% of its food, and exports more agri-food than it imports, with a positive trade balance worth €4bn to €6bn each month.
Access to cheap feed for animals and chemicals for intensive feed-crops is under stress because of the war. The Farm to Fork strategy aims at avoiding that intensive animal farming and its supply chains come into competition with food for people.
The EU produces over 290 million tonnes of cereals, 32 million more tonnes than are used domestically. Yet only 20% goes directly to feed people. The lion’s share is for feed (56%) and almost as much cereal is exported (45 million tonnes) than is destined as food for Europeans.
A resilient food system to weather this and future crises
A resilient food system will ensure that domestically produced food-crop is primarily used as food for people, while farm animals feeding themselves primarily by grazing. Agricultural production is, currently, mostly diverted to intensive animal farming. Apart from its detrimental impact on billions of animals it sustains an – economically and medically – unhealthy overconsumption of animal products and reliance on imported feed.
The Farm to Fork strategy will contribute towards cutting the EU’s reliance on the production and import of industrial feeds and allowing the EU’s agricultural sector to increase its production of food for people. The strategy’s objectives of moving towards a greater plant-based diet, reducing the consumption of red meat and improving the well-being of farmed animals will help the EU weather international crises like the deplorable war unfolding at its borders. Overall, the consumption of animal products would need to be reduced by around 70% in the EU in order to stay within the planetary boundaries.
With the war in Ukraine bringing the limits of the EU’s food system, heavy in animal protein, to light, the Commission should accelerate the roll-out of the Farm to Fork strategy: reduce the EU’s reliance on meat production that diverts home-grown food crops for people to feed for animals and requires significant imports of both feed-crop and fertilisers.
As Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans said on 8 march 2022, “Farm to Fork is part of the answer, not part of the problem”.
Together with 85+ NGOs we sent a letter to Ms Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission; Mr Frans Timmermans, Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal; Ms Stella Kyriakides, Commissioner for Health and Food Safety; Mr Janusz Wojciechowski, Commissioner for Agriculture; and Mr Virginijus Sinkevičius, Commissioner for Environment, Oceans and Fisheries, asking them to defend the Farm to Fork strategy.
The joint statement, released on 7 March, by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and World Health Organisation (WHO) reinforces that farmed mink have been shown to be capable of infecting humans with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It recommends prioritisation of monitoring SARS-CoV-2 infection in wildlife and preventing the formation of animal reservoirs.
Three years into the pandemic, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants continues as the virus evolves.
In a new statement from the major global health bodies WHO, FAO and OIE, the risks associated with potential animal reservoirs are laid out, including the risks from both domestic and wild animal populations. The infection and spread of the virus in animal populations could lead to the emergence of new SARS-CoV-2 variants that are then passed back to humans.
In addition to domestic animals, free-ranging, captive or farmed wild animals such as big cats, minks, ferrets, North American white-tailed deer and great apes have thus far been observed to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.
In 2021, Eurogroup for Animals and the Fur Free Alliance released a scientific statement on public health risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 and intensive mink production, signed by numerous scientists from the fields of virology, infectious diseases, clinical microbiology, veterinary medicine and environmental health.
Mink farms, where thousands of mink are housed together in high density, constitute high risk potential reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2 as well as for associated mutations.
FAO, OIE and WHO are calling on all countries to take steps to reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission between humans and wildlife with the aim of reducing the risk of variant emergence and for protecting both humans and wildlife.
Although EfA welcomes the above mentioned recommendations, it has been shown that monitoring measures haven’t been enough to contain the spread of the virus in fur farms in the EU. In a letter sent to the Commission in June 2021, EfA and FFA expressed their concern about how fur farmers have been systematically breaching the biosecurity rules recommended by the OIE4 in some Member States. After the implementation of new EU rules to ensure harmonised monitoring activities, new outbreaks of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were detected in European fur farms.
Future spillover between animals and humans can thwart the efforts to eliminate or control the disease. EU mink farms must not become a reservoir for future spillback of SARS-CoV-2 from animals to humans.
Another recent study has found SARS-CoV-2 related viruses in trade-confiscated pangolins in Vietnam. It shows just how much a reform of wildlife policy is required to control the risks of future pandemics, and how wildlife trade risks spillover from viruses that are not detected with current screening methods.
World Animals Voice 