From the monthly archives:

January 2009

Coffee plus cancer equals crap science

by Jason on January 26, 2009

So I was reading this story about a scientific study and it made me so frigging angry, but I’m not going to tell you why, because:

a) I want to take 3 minutes and 19 seconds of your time,

b) I’m still frigging angry, and

c) I didn’t write this one ahead of time. Just went and did it. See, earlier ones I wrote and then read, but I didn’t like the way my eyes tracked the page. So this time I spoke freestyle, which was always the plan once I got better at speaking, but wow, my eyes are all over the place on this one. Watch and have a laugh…

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Maybe the next great vegan book should be called Staying Vegan

by Jason on January 5, 2009

Erik Marcus has a new book out! It’s called The Ultimate Vegan Guide: Compassionate Living Without Sacrifice, and as far as I know It’s only available on amazon.com. I haven’t read it yet, but it looks to be a great book on how to go vegan.

I don’t if we’ll ever see a book that’s the last word on how and why to go vegan. A lot of the basics stay unchanged but just like you can guess the year a book was published by its cover design, I think the sales copy inside (trust me, if you’re trying to persuade someone, it’s sales copy) needs to be updated to fit each generation of prospective readers. This looks like it could be a good one for the next few years, more if it gets updated.

Veganism has pretty good coverage for “going vegan” books. But here’s the thing: we’ve got books like Becoming Vegan: The Complete Guide to Adopting a Healthy Plant-Based Diet, but where’s Staying Vegan? Sometimes it seems like once you’ve got the basics down all you’ve got left are cookbooks. Do we need more than that? I don’t know. Maybe all we need are reminders of the key animal rights, health, environment, etc arguments from time to time, and a guide to going vegan probably has all of that. Then again, if we’re doing all this work to transition people to veganism and the overall numbers are staying pretty much the same, it seems like there’s a market out there to keep people on the path for more than a few months.

I don’t have any immediate answers, and I don’t feel like I’m about to eat a steak anytime soon, but if a book called Staying Vegan came out, I’d buy it in a heartbeat just to see some new ideas.

Update: Lots of great ideas in the comments, but looks like someone’s (independently of anything in this post) going ahead with something interesting: http://stayvegan.blogspot.com/

{ Comments on this entry are closed }