Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Save the beef, skip a shower.

The vegan boyfriend and I were checking out a new vegetarian restaurant in the lovely Milpitas Square yesterday, one affiliated with the downtown San Jose institution Vegetarian House and the cult-y Supreme Master Ching Hai. You can always tell a Supreme Master restaurant by the ubiquitous flatscreen TV playing only Supreme Master TV, and we are both amused and distracted by its 20-language subtitling and save-the-world rhetoric every time.

I mean, you guys know me: vegetarian for environmental reasons, pretty staunch about it but not to the point of being an asshole. Kevin: basically the same, but with more of an issue with harming animals. (Except insects. Insects can suck it because honey tastes good!) And on that level, we are pretty pro-Supreme Master peeps, with their new "Be Green, Go Veg" campaign. And if not go veg, well, eat veg more often. Y'all know; I don't have to preach.

But really. There's no need to fiddle with funny statistics to make your point.

One of the SMTV stories the other day regarded water consumption and raising cattle. According to a very amusing animated infographic, four Quarter Pounders use the same amount of water to produce as you would use in half a year's showers. Well, we don't eat Quarter Pounders, but we do shower. Every day.

We have to save the ground beef, Kevin said to me. Let's stop taking showers.

People already think we're dirty hippies anyway.

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P.S. Already can't wait to see what kind of Supreme Master comment spambot I'll attract with this post.

3 comments:

Julie said...

regarding bees...R and I were talking about it the other day, and bees pollinate a lot of plants that we end up eating. So, one way or another, bees end up doing work for us! I'm all for honey enjoyment.

emily said...

totally. you can't avoid bees, we need them for all the delicious plants. i think the idea behind many vegans' rejection of honey is that honeybees are kept in a way that isn't completely "free," which is therefore cruel. the article linked in this post argues, however, that some bees are kept on trucks that cross the country to pollinate farms where colony collapse has ravaged the local bee populations, and that's pretty cruel, too. so what can you do? (skip the honey, i guess--it's easier than skipping veggies.)

i learned some stuff about bees from my CSA farm, too. they have a lot of bee-friendly space on that farm, and a bee expert who works with them. but you can't get absolutely all of your food from places like that and it's ridiculous to try.

Paul Cannon said...

"Four Quarter Pounders use the same amount of water to produce as you would use in half a year's showers."

Of course, the average hippie only showers about 2.8 times a year. Your triple-percolated waterfall bong doesn't count as a bath, by the way. God damn hippies.