Since we are forced to hold Vegan Drinks one week early because of the Thanksgiving holiday, we hope that you will join us this Thursday, November 19, at Angels & Kings bar for some drinking and turkey adopting. David from Farm Sanctuary will begin accepting your Adopt-A-Turkey sponsorships ($25 cash or check only) at 7:30pm.

DJ Lil Ray will be there to help us get rid of our tired iPod playlist.

As always, the drinks are cheap ($3 domestics, $4 imports and $1 off well drinks) and the crowd is rad. Plus, we will give away some items of nominal value. Just in time for the winter holiday season!



We'll turn down the music around 8pm and encourage people to promote themselves, their groups and/or causes for 30 seconds. If you represent a veg*n or animal rights group, come prepared with your (very short!) spiel and literature.

Check out our map of restaurants near Angels & Kings where you can grab a bite after the event. And if you haven't already, link up with Vegan Drinks on Facebook and MySpace.

Vegan Drinks is held from 7pm-9pm at Angels & Kings, 500 East 11th Street (btw Ave A & Ave B), New York, NY 10009.

The last Vegan Drinks for 2009 will be on Thursday, December 17. (Please note: This is not the last Thursday of the month; some major holiday got in the way).

The Long Island Food Not Bombs (L.I. F.N.B.) chapter gets sh*t done. They coordinate three food shares (Hempstead, Huntington and Farmingville) each week; redistribute clothes, toys and books; and many L.I. F.N.B. activists also carve out time in their busy schedules to volunteer with the Food Not Bombs chapters (Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and Manhattan) in New York City.

Naturally, L.I. F.N.B. did not balk at the prospect of redistributing a 2,000 pound donation from Soyatoo. So, if you want to see what 2,000 pounds of vegan whipped cream looks like, get thee to Long Island this weekend for the start of "Long Island Food Not Bombs Thanksgiving Bonanza"!

The third installment of Veggie Conquest took place this past weekend and it was another smashing success.

In case you missed the introductory blog post, Veggie Conquest is an amateur cooking competition similar to Top Chef... except that it's not televised. Oh yeah, and it's ENTIRELY VEGAN! The event is held monthly, and you can buy a chef ticket in order to be part of the competition or a taster ticket for an excuse to stuff your face. There are generally about six chefs participating and sixty-five tasters in attendance. One week prior all ticket holders are notified of the "secret ingredient" and course to be prepared so that menus and taste buds can be primed.

This time around it was cranberry dessert and the submissions were incredible. Though not normally a big fan of cranberries, I was surprised to find how sweet and delicious they were incorporated into such delights as "Double Cranberry Cinnamon Oatmeal Nut Bar," "Almond Crusted Chocolate Cranberry Mousse," "Cran Velvet Cake," and the inventive (and winning) "Rice Crepe with Cran-Ginger Sauce." I was not as much of a fan of the raw submission, "Cranbanapple Parfait"; the texture was too much like a runny pudding for my taste. Neither was I impressed by the "Swedish-Style Charoset," submitted more as comedic performance art than recipe contender.

As most vegans know, the biggest thing to hit our culinary universe this year is Daiya. It's a totally yummy vegan cheese that melts and shreds just like dairy cheese. (Check out SuperVegan's love-letter, er, review.)

We thought we'd take a look behind the curtain and find out more about the wizards behind this new Canada-based cheesy phenomenon. Here they are, the Daiya Dudes. Andre Kroecher is the mad-scientist inventor of Daiya, and co-founder of the company with business-savvy Greg Blake.

SuperVegan: Why did you set out to create vegan cheese and what were your main criteria?

Andre Kroecher: I have always really loved dishes such as pizza, lasagna, quesadillas, burritos, which typically have cheese in them. Being a vegan though, I found that simply removing the cheese from these left me terribly disappointed. I tried replacing the cheese with extra salt and olive oil, but to me the taste and texture is just not nearly as satisfying.

Having a background of more than 10 years experience as a product developer, I had a real passion for trying to invent a vegan cheese that might actually have the properties of real cheese. I also love imported exotic cheeses and other European cheeses like havarti, so I decided to just start experimenting to see if I could make something that would satisfy me more than the other [products] out there. I tend to naturally approach things in an unconventional way and this yielded some unexpected results. Eventually, I developed a block of something quite like a soft havarti style cheese.

Greg Blake: When I tried the havarti style cheese Andre made I was convinced that it had commercial potential, but what would be even better would be to create a cheddar and mozzarella style vegan cheese that actually tasted, shredded, sliced and melted like dairy-based cheese.

The latest episode of the popular mainstream Fox TV show "Bones" featured an animal rights/veg story line. Entitled "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken," it's surprisingly jam-packed with info and intelligent discussion. Centered on a murder at a poultry processing plant, footage and info on how chickens are treated were shown, including video of the debeaking of newborn chicks. It isn't all blood 'n' guts (they show those images only briefly), there is an emotional discussion between characters on the ethics of saving one pig from slaughter. Animal activists are also part of the story line. But that's enough. I won't spoil it...



I suspect the star (and a producer) of the show, Emily Deschanel, an ethical vegan, had something to do with it. Go "Bones"!

You can watch the episode on Hulu for free or click on the image above.

Writer Jonathan Safran Foer's been getting a lot of media attention lately for the just published Eating Animals, his first book-length piece of nonfiction, which is very much against the eponymous activity. I haven't read it, and I don't expect that I (or most SuperVegan readers) will learn much from it that we don't already know about what's wrong with eating animals. This is not a book written for vegans. But it's a book that vegans ought to have some understanding of.

For better or worse, an established literary novelist like Foer can get people to pay attention to what's wrong with factory farming in a way that more academic or of-the-movement authors such as Peter Singer or Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson cannot. And Foer is relatively folksy and accessible (if not artless) compared to someone like J.M. Coetzee, whose arguments in defense of animals are unapologetically over most people's heads, and who isn't about to do a bunch of press interviews.

Foer finds lots of problems with industrial animal agriculture, and with eating meat in a general ethical sense, but he does not come down against non-meat or non-food animal products. This is a book about meat. That's got a lot of vegans understandably perturbed--an influential guy sets up a strong argument for many tenets of veganism, yet fails to go there. Mainstream media may not care, but it's important for us vegans to understand why Foer isn't vegan, and how he feels about veganism.

Josh Hooten of Herbivore attended a talk by Foer last night at Powell's Books in Portland, OR. Hooten is the right kind of vegan, and he wrote a great report/defense on the talk (which he posted on Facebook, and graciously allowed me to republish here.) Here's the first and last sentences, and you can read the whole thing below.

Foer isn't an animal rights person, he is coming from outside our community and perhaps that is why he is getting the attention he's getting for his new book Eating Animals.
...
As a messenger getting people to think about this stuff for the first time, I think he's amazing.

This weekend was the 14th Annual Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. I was so there dude - here are my top 10 observations.

10. Investment Firms will always seem out of place at events like this. I rarely go to food based events with financial planning on the brain.

9. Some people in the crowd have no idea that they're at a vegetarian food festival as exhibited by comments like "Wait. This is ALL vegetarian. UGH!"

8. Renewing your subscription to VegNews is best done at the BVFF because not only is the timing perfect but they give you free stuff too.

7. Sooner or later the organizers are going to have to move this event to a bigger space. Seriously, sometimes you have to swim through people like some kind of vegan Michael Phelps.

6. The BVFF is better when Isa Chandra Moskowitz is in attendance, because, y'know she's the bomb and I was hoping to get a signed cookie book.

5. The sheer sight of the Vegan Treats table may make you weep bulbous tears of joy.

4. Just because something is vegan does not mean it will taste good.

3. It's best to starve yourself before the event because there is a good chance that if you don't your stomach might explode.

2. Samples are really the life blood of this event. Without samples, the squished feet, the random nefarious odor combination and line-cutters might supersede the event's worth.

1. Old ladies with Farm Sanctuary shirts will sucker punch you in the ribs to get the last Cedar's Hummus snack pack. Seriously.

As readers know, October was the third annual Vegan Month of Food. Started by celebrity chef Isa Chandra Moskowitz, vegan mofos everywhere posted daily blogs in celebration of our favorite subject — food! Vegan Month of Food kicked off with World Vegetarian Day and ends with a bang tomorrow at the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. In addition to this sandwich of events, here is a completely subjective roundup of things that made October one mofo of a month!

In the Mainstream

Vegan for the Animals
Author Jonathan Safran Foer made a big splash with a taster from his new book Eating Animals, published as a feature article in the NY Times Magazine's Food issue. After reading Eating Animals, actress Natalie Portman went vegan and announced her reasons in her essay "Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals Turned Me Vegan" for the Huffington Post (that counts as a MoFo blog, right?). Blink 182 drummer (and rehabilitated puppy-juicer) Travis Barker has once again seen the light. He says he's back to being vegetarian and "almost full blown vegan now."

Vegan for the Environment
We've been saying it all along but it looks like we may finally be arriving at a tipping point. Even mainstream sources and enviro orgs are agreeing that eating meat causes global warming and going veg reduces your carbon footprint. Omnivore's Dilemma author and foodie darling Michael Pollan stuck his foot in it by stating: "A vegan in a Hummer has a lighter carbon footprint than a beef eater in a Prius." Then retracted the statement the next day. I thought it was fuzzy math to begin with (here's an interview with one of the original researchers and number crunchers), but I hope his blunder doesn't cloud the issue, which is that vegans have a substantially lighter overall effect on the environment than meat-eaters. Duh. Joining the bandwagon, the WorldWatch Institute's latest magazine asks the question, "Carnivorism and climate change: Is it worse than we thought?"

People in this town are convinced they are bagel experts. They know the best shop, the appropriate hour to stop in and what combination of toppings rounds it all out. What makes a NYC bagel better than the ones in other cities? It's not the water, it's the attitude.

The gluten-tolerant SuperVegan staff members want to help you locate the best bagels in the bagel capital of the world:

Deborah Diamant insists that Bergen Bagels (473 Bergen St., Brooklyn) toasts her whole wheat everything bagel before applying a liberal layer of scallion tofu.

Jason Das can be found eating a whole wheat sesame bagel with scallion tofu, cucumber and tomato at Bagel Bob's (51 University Pl., Manhattan).

Olivia Lane, who buys her bagels at Earthmatters (177 Ludlow St., Manhattan), thinks bagels are best nude, like all great things.

Patrick Kwan loves Bagels On the Square (7 Carmine St., Manhattan) where he orders a toasted sun-dried tomato bagel with sun-dried tomato tofu for an über tomato kick.

Tod Emko keeps it simple at Bagels & More (331 Lexington Ave., Manhattan) with plain tofu on a whole wheat bagel.

Our vegan accountant, Kim, is a fan of Terrace Bagels (224 Prospect Park West, Brooklyn) and thinks toasted plain bagels with sliced tomatoes is a tasty, economically sound meal.

What's your favorite bagel, Dear Reader?

This is one of Supervegan's posts for Vegan MoFo 2009.

Preheat your Broiler. Cut heads of broccoli in half and blanch in boiling water for 4 minutes. Dry on Paper towels and place on a greased cookie sheet (Figure A.) Rub each floret with Veganaise and sprinkle with salt, pepper and nutritional yeast (Figure B). Place under Broiler for 10 minutes or until blackened.(Figure C) Serve as a delicious side dish to your meal (Figure D).

I didn't invent this recipe, but I'd be hard pressed to tell you where it originated from. I know it was in a Men's magazine; this is my veganized version of that recipe.

This is one of Supervegan's posts for Vegan MoFo 2009.