The restaurant news you/I’ve been waiting for: Teanyreopened this week, after many many missed teanychinos.
Aaaand, ‘sNice Soho opened at 150 Sullivan St. between Prince and Houston streets.
Vegan food truck The Cinnamon Snail will leave its usual parking spot in Jersey to find a temporary home in Hell’s Kitchen Sunday 11 a.m.-4 p.m. at W. 39th Street and 9th Avenue. Amazing vegan doughnuts, people!
Passout Records in Williamsburg will reopen this summer as a 24-hour vegetarian burger joint. And bring on the vegan shakes, please!
And finally, I encourage you to date Julie! As one astute commentator notes, she is pretty.
Babeland’s Jaguar Harness is now vegan, according to Shewired. No leather necessary for super good times!
The insanely timely hilarious geniuses at Vegansaurus gave us a recipe for a vegan version of KFC’s heart-clogging, rotting body parts, media darling sandwich, the Double Down. Oh my god, Rudy, get your deep fryer.
As of this week, Mondays are vegetarian days in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors declared in a resolution Tuesday. Yaaaayyyy! Whatever it means in practice, we like the theory and hope it means more delicious veggies for all.
Since life isn’t all fried seitan and Meatless Mondays, and because you need something to show your friend who doesn’t understand that egg farming causes suffering, we give you the Humane Society of the United States’s latest undercover investigation, released Wednesday. Warning: you might puke.
In restaurant news, Souen on 13th Street will close for several months starting next week to renovate, so if you like your hippie food served in a hippie restaurant, go eat there right now, hippie.
‘sNice Soho will open NEXT WEEK so get in a sandwich-y, coffee-y mood with me!
Oh, and in other ‘sNice news! Two of their employees were stabbed last month (shocking and horrible, i know!), so ‘sNice in the West Village is having a benefit to support them on Sunday, April 11, 6-9 p.m. $10 at the door. There will be vegan pigs in a blanket! And me! I will be there!
A nice-looking wild oyster bed on the Cape Fear River in Wilmington, North Carolina. (Photo by Joe Brent on Flickr). By contrast, many commercial beds are just acre after acre of metal cages.
There’s a lot of noise on the internet today about Christopher Cox’s “Consider the Oyster” which carries the slug/page title “It’s OK for vegans to eat oysters” and the subhead “Why even strict vegans should feel comfortable eating oysters by the boatload.”
Cox’s basic thesis is that oysters don’t feel pain and that commercial oyster production/harvesting is far more ecologically friendly than most other industrial food production. He goes out of his way to say that oysters are sustainable for food use in a way that clams and mussels are not. He gets a qualified endorsement from Peter Singer. One can certainly argue with these things, but he’s basically done his homework. Except for seeming to have no clue what it means to be vegan.
When I became a vegan, I didn’t draw an X through everything marked “Animalia” on the tree of life. And when I pick out my dinner, I don’t ask myself: What do I have to do to remain a vegan? I ask myself: What is the right choice in this situation? Eating ethically is not a purity pissing contest, and the more vegans or vegetarians pretend that it is, the more their diets start to resemble mere fashion—and thus risk being dismissed as such. Emerson wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
The only way for me to read this is that Cox doesn’t know what “vegan” means. He never became a vegan, and needn’t worry himself over remaining a vegan. Because of our very consistency (foolish or not) there’s no gray area for vegans when it comes to eating animals. Cox is trying to be ethical about his consumerism, and that’s great. I just don’t understand how the hell anyone thinks the way he’s going about it can be described as any form of veganism. It isn’t.
Vegans do not knowingly/willingly/actively consume or purchase any part or bodily product of an animal that was taken from a living animal or for which an animal was killed. (I know that’s a lot to pack into a sentence, but there it is. End of story.) You can argue that this isn’t the most constructive approach to ethical consumerism, as Peter Singer does. But Peter Singer does not claim to be vegan, nor does he endorse the point of view that eating oysters can ever be vegan. Continue Reading…
Work that floral blouse! H&M launched a line of organic and recycled clothes called the Garden Collection (sending you to the Swedish site so you can see all the rainbow-colored garments). They’re priced like the non-organic stuff so no excuse not to, unless you only wear gray or something INSANE like that.
The NYC Animal Advocacy meetup is heading to Columbus Circle-area restaurant Telepan Saturday to protest its use of foie gras, and the owner is getting ready by preparing some bullshit spiel about how he’s a beacon of awareness who champions hormone-free milk in schools, serves grass-fed cows, and “won a merit batdge from Animal Welfare Approved.” Congratulations, Bill Telepan, for caring about what affects your bottom-line. That’s capitalism, not compassion. Go to the protest tomorrow, Saturday, March 27, 7-9 p.m.
HEY YOU GUYS OUT IN BAY RIDGE, CAN YOU HEAR ME? The Village Voice tells us there’s this delish vegan sandwich at Casa Calamari in your ‘hood — puffy hero bread overstuffed with loads of sauteed broccoli rabe. Yum!
For the first time in possibly forever, no dogs were killed in the Iditarod this year. Racers chock it up to the cold. I get that many of the racers love their dogs, but somehow not enough to NOT put them in harm’s way? I really just want to see the dogs mushing their humans. MUSH, MUSH, ASSHOLE. Update!: Commenter Lucy reminds us we can write to the Iditarod sponsors and politely ask them to stop using dogs to pull sleds at Helpsleddogs.org.
