I sent the following to our ENAW listserv & others, including a couple of environmentalists last night, after spending an hour by candlelight with my pets. [I think it was a joke that Michael Bluejay posted something on his bio page about the people who love him. I'm guessing it has to do with people trying to raise the search engine rankings on their own sites. Nevertheless, after looking at his sites, I can honestly say "I love Michael Bluejay", because I was happy to find his sites, and especially surprised to find his vegan pages that were an added bonus to the topics I was originally looking for.]

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In the spirit of tonight’s “Earth Hour”, somehow I found this site, looking at how much energy/cost various appliances use, originally wondering if it is worthwhile to turn off my computer when I’m not using it. After looking around at the various appliance pages (and it’s amazing how much energy is saved by washing clothes in cold water compared to hot http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/laundry.html !) I found a little blurb on the refrigerator page, which linked to another section of his site….
http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/refrigerators.html

“Don’t put hot foods in the fridge? Food safety experts say you should refrigerate hot food to prevent
contamination. But that doesn’t mean you have to refrigerate them immediately. The USDA says to refrigerate within
two hours of preparation (or one hour if the room temp is above 90∞). One to two hours of cooling off time will
definitely make your refrigerator work less. It’s a tradeoff — the sooner you refrigerate the safer the food, but the
more energy you use. Of course, meat and dairy foods are most susceptible to contamination, which is yet another
reason to not eat meat and dairy in the first place. Vegan foods are much safer.”

“Vegan” in that last sentence links to:
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/eat.html
And then, that site has many pages. The “Why Veg?” page
http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/why.html starts out with this:

Why be vegetarian?

There are so many good reasons for being vegetarian (health, animals, the environment) that a better question might be, “Why NOT be vegetarian?” When you can easily…

ï significantly improve your health,
ï dramatically [reduce?] your environmental footprint,
ï and greatly reduce the suffering of animals

…we might ask instead, “What’s stopping you?”

Of course, the decision about whether to become a vegetarian is a matter of personal choice. But we think that if more peope [sic] really knew how bad meat is (for them, the planet, and the animals), more people would make the choice to go meatless. This page is a starting point is [sic] seeing if this is a choice you agree with. Below are some details about the main reasons people go veg.

That page goes on to discuss many advantages for improving your health, saving the environment & preventing cruelty to animals. And this page http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/environment.html has a lot of info on the impact of animal agriculture on the environment — energy use & Global Warming, water & land issues. I’ve seen some of this before, but maybe seeing the graphs made it easier to visualize.

Enjoy both sites. I found them to be very informative.

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P.S. This morning I was happy to see that the Green Lent blog featured the Beef and the environment post with a graph & link to Michael’s ‘Why going meatless saves the planet’ page.

I found this site after looking at the Holy Orders site. The Sisters make homemade soaps, soy candles, lotions & salves, bath salts & sugar creme scrubs (among other things). I can’t tell, but they seem to be cruelty-free. They also seem to be made from basic, natural ingredients without the use of chemicals or preservatives — better than a lot of things I’ve seen for sale at the local health food store. I wrote tonight to see if any of their products contain animal ingredients. and will let people know once I find out. I did confirm that the natural soaps do not contain any animal products (and, of course, weren’t tested on animals). Check out all that they have to offer.

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Click on the picture to listen to a surprising message from the Easter Bunny.

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“We are not respecting the dignity of our fellow creatures if our sewage or garbage fouls their living space.
When atmospheric warming, due in part to the methane output of the millions of cows we raise each year to produce hamburger, begins to slowly drown the island homes of our neighbors in the South Pacific,
are we truly sharing good news?

“The food we eat, the energy we use, the goods and foods we buy, the ways in which we travel,
are all opportunities — choices and decisions — to be for others, both human and other.
Our Christian commitment is for this — that we might live that more abundant life,
and that we might do it in a way that is for the whole world.”

excerpt from the
Presiding Bishop’s Message for Easter 2008

(This picture links to a n old news article from New Zealand.)
See Green Lent for a graph that shows the amount of fossil fuel needed to raise meat compared to other foods.

I noticed (checking my site stats a while ago) that at this late date, people are still searching the Internet for information about “Episcopal Lent”, and things pertaining to giving up meat eggs & dairy.

Here is a list of sites that came up on one search.

I see that PETA has a page called ‘Give Up Cruelty for Lent’, and quotes St. Gregory’s admonition to St. Augustine, which I also have posted on mine.

I’m all in favor of giving up cruelty for Lent, in all seriousness. So many of the sites that talk about how people used to give up meat in the past, include other ideas of what people can give up now, as if their lists are more relevant to our time. I get the impression that maybe they think giving up meat as a sign of self-denial was relatively meaningless compared to something else people could be doing instead. So if people actually thought about the inherent cruelty of animal agriculture and the slaughtering of animals (and abuses that are caught whenever undercover investigators bring in their concealed cameras as the HSUS had done recently that caused the largest beef recall in this country’s history), maybe it would be perceived differently — again, whether a person “gives up” something, or “takes on” something. In any case, it’s a shame that so few even mention it.

I thought the following article was particularly interesting, because this is what shows up on the benifitbar.com synopsis:

6. Lent
You could have no meat, eggs, or dairy. There was no restriction on fish, wine or beer. …
decreed a fine for butchers who slaughtered meat during Lent. …
www.practicallyedible.com

I didn’t know that butchers were fined. (It was only last year that I heard people in the Western Church observed a vegan Lent at one time, hence the need for what is now a vestigial Shrove Tuesday.) Of course, this site also mentions how the cost of fish skyrocketted, too, because of the profiteers, including the Church. Kind of like OPEC, with people stuck “over a barrel”….

Read it here: ‘Lent’

What was new to me (this year), was that 1) eating fish was meant to support the fishing industry, and that 2):

“In 1560, Queen Elizabeth decreed a fine for butchers who slaughtered meat during Lent.

“In 1563, Sir William Cecil forced a (Protestant) Parliament to pass a fine of either 3 pounds or 3 months in jail for people eating meat during Lent. His reason is that he felt fishermen, with no trade, were turning to piracy. He added a handwritten codicil to the act assuring the parliamentarians that it was not for religious reasons, but for economic ones. “

Wow. It would seem that Lent was more politically/economically-motivated, than spiritually-motivated.

This is also an interesting observation:

“The only mercy was that Lent came at a time of year when there wasn’t much food to be abstaining from, anyway. There wasn’t much milk, because the cows had birthed calves that needed it, and not much meat, because the meat that had been preserved last fall was mostly gone, and what animals that were still alive were needed to give birth to new ones.”

That they allowed the calves to drink their mothers’ milk, instead of taking it for human use, shows that “veal calves” had not been “invented” yet. This paragraph answers things I’ve read on similar sites, where comments pertained to what readers perceived as a waste of milk and eggs over the Lenten season. I see it as a brief annual moratorium to allow “food” animals to raise their young as they should be able to do, and this makes perfect sense to me to have a moratorium not only on the killing, but on taking the calves milk or the (fertilized?) chickens’ eggs, as a more “sustainable” form of animal agriculture. (Kind of like the times of the year when hunters aren’t allowed to hunt.)

I guess we don’t have to worry about fishermen turning to piracy anymore, although we know that the ones in Newfoundland and environs use this time to supplement their income and while away their down time with their annual government-subsidized seal blood-bath. We also don’t have to worry about preserving breeding animals to replace those we kill, since they are mass-produced on factory farms. There will never be a shortage of “food” animals until consumer demand decreases — unless, of course, we start using their feed to fuel our cars.

(Good Friday was just like Ash Wednesday this year, with 10-12 inches of snow.)

In an attempt to cut down on plastic this Lent, and to gravitate toward more organic foods, whenever possible (mainly with the ‘Dirty Dozen’ in mind), I’ve decided to list some of my preferred products. These do not include all of my favorite brands or varieties of vegan food. But I’m trying to concentrate on things that don’t use any (or much) plastic, are organic, and, where possible, are grown in the USA, or at least, the companies are based here.

Organic fruit & veggies: In general, I prefer Whole Foods‘ organic produce, because a lot of it can be picked up off the display, and many aren’t wrapped in plastic or in plastic containers. Whole Foods also identifies the country (or state) of origin on the price tags. And they are the only store close to work or home that seems to sell a wide variety of organic apples & pears.

Organic fruit & veggies: Sandhill Farm, the local organic CSA, has a weekly Farmers Market (actually, two — one in Grayslake, and one at Prairie Crossing), where I can know the food is grown within a few hours away, and I can bring my own bag. They do use things like fishmeal as fertilizer, so I’m not sure I would consider their veggies vegan. But I wonder which organic brands don’t use animal-based fertilizers. This is closer to home, and a place to pick up a few things, at least on a Saturday morning during the growing season. (CSA members have a different day for picking up their weekly share of food.)

Fruit juice: Lakewood is organic, 100% juice, fresh pressed “not from concentrate”, in glass bottles. The company is based in Florida, but I don’t know where the fruit comes from. (10 % of their proceeds goes to Helping Hands, which covers charities I might or might not want to support. But I’ll live with that.)

Non-dairy frozen dessert: So Delicious: vegan & diabetic-friendly, nice variety of flavors, organic, regular “ice cream” (at least) is sold in recyclable cardboard containers. Turtle Mountain, the company that makes it, is a sponsor of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project.

Chocolate sauce & natural sweetener: Wax Orchards makes a healthy, yet decadent chocolate sauce for ice cream, which is diabetic-friendly. Their Fruit Sweet can be used as a substitute for honey, or sugar, and reminds me of Birnel(sp?) which the family I lived with in Switzerland in 1974-5 used to use. Not organic, but comes in glass, and is made in the USA. I’ve noticed that I can get my “chocolate fix” without binging, and suspect it might be because it doesn’t contain sugar.

Non-dairy beverages: I buy the non-refrigerated shelf-stable cardboard cartons. I used to tend toward soy milk because it’s higher in protein, and would buy whichever brand was on sale. But now I gravitate toward the large size Rice Dream organic, because the price is comparable to the on-sale soy varieties, and it’s white, and I don’t mind drinking it plain.

Peanut butter: Maranatha peanut butter is organic and comes in glass jars.