Mrs B, Engaged Vegan

Dear Reader, 

I married him. 

(Not just yet, but I will). 

My absence from this blog recently has been in the most part due to my frenzy of organising after the lovely Buzz and I decided to get hitched. And the secrecy was because we were not yet engaged, and I wanted to be proposed to and he wanted to  propose, so we were keeping it all under wraps. Instead of blogging, I spent my time caressing my wedding folder, emailing vendors and whipping myself into increasing fervour about bombonniere. 

But now we’re official! He is my fiance and I am his fiancee. Without going into the teary details of the proposal, I will just say that it was perfect and meaningful and it rocked. And there is a rock. 

Buzz also gave me the best present he could have on my 30th birthday when he said that he wanted to have vegan food at our wedding. This had been a little sore point for me, as early on our relationship I had made some sort of thoughtless generalised sweeping comment about it, inadvertently putting the omni Buzz onto a knife edge and asking him to do something he wasn’t yet comfortable with. I’d come to terms slowly with a compromise in my own head, reluctantly accepting that it was his wedding too. But blammo! Out of the blue on my birthday he said he wanted all the meals to be vegan. My heart went all butterflyey and pitter patter. 

So as we embark on a planning a vegan wedding, I think this will become my fodder for the next year or so. There are of course a number of posts and blogs already which describe fantastic vegan weddings - not least of which is In The Mood For Noodles, when K and Toby had a potluck feast and hosted a truly brilliant reception - but as our wedding will be a bit more traditional, and really quite big at 150 guests, I think our trials and tribulations will be useful for any others planning an Offbeat Lite (as they say on Offbeatbride.com) wedding. 

And so, Item the First! 

The Grub & Booze

We were both on board with all vegan food, and as much of the alcohol as we could manage. Our first consideration was finding a venue that didn’t baulk at the idea of catering for 150 vegan meals, and more to the point, didn’t offer us a menu of salad - risotto - fruit salad. 

This actually proved to be one of the most heartening aspects of all the organisation we did. Every single venue we contacted was very open to vegan meals and one of them - The Centre Ivanhoe - even prepared us an excellent sample menu before we went to inspect the venue. They will be using this on their website as an example of what they can do, so any couples looking for an Art Deco masterpiece should definitely contact them. 

The other consideration was alcohol. We needed somewhere that could offer to either source vegan wine and beer for us from their own suppliers, or allow us to supply our own with minimal charge. The second option is much less desirable; the cost per head we were quoted to BYO was between $10 per bottle and $25 per head! 

I had to come to a compromise on champagne. The only vegan champagne is Moet et Chandon, and maybe Veuve Clicquot, and our budget simply can’t stretch that far - and if it did I’d feel terribly wasteful. Our bridal table will have Moet - a girl has to have champers on her wedding day! - but I’m comfortable with something else being served to our guests and I would not be comfortable with not offering them champagne at all. Considering I had originally come to terms with a half omni menu, I think this a place I’m happy to rest. 

In the end we inspected four venues whose capacity was adequate, and each of them was beautiful and extraordinarily accommodating about our needs. The Centre Ivanhoe, Quat Quatta and The Willows were all excellent and very helpful, and I would happily recommend them. 

But in the end we chose the first place we visited, which set the benchmark for everywhere else. The Treasury Restaurant at the Sebel Hotel really captured us - it is an old bank now operating as a restaurant under a hotel , and the architectural virtues and sense of history really sealed the deal. The building is immaculately restored - nothing less glamorous than peeling paint - and offers the right balance between a sense of both spaciousness and intimacy that we want for our guests. We can hold the ceremony there (indoors is very important given it will be winter and evening!), then guests can head up to the mezzanine level for drinks and canapes while we get our photies, and then the reception will be held downstairs again. A bit of a change of scenery and no one (except us!) has to brave the dark and cold! And the best bit is that when the night is over, shoes are kicked off and eyes are closing, we can simply head to the lifts and be carried up to our room. 

CheekySneakyPeekies: Hustle That Bustle

As you may recall from this post,  I highly endorse everyone and everyone they've ever met getting their sweaty mitts on a copy of the Veg Food Guide.

And this year it's supersized itself, morphing into the Aus Veg Food Guide - it's gone megasuperduperexplosive!

You - yes, the bow-legged one* - can get an advance cheeky-sneaky copy here: http://www.aduki.net.au/component/virtuemart/?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&product_id=48 

(and it's at a reduced price to boot). 

Most of all though - I am one of the reviewers! So bask in my reflected glory and Hustle And Bustle over to www.aduki.net.au Pronto.

*Shout out, Salt'n'Pepa. Shout.

Adorabubbles, or: just let us have one positive article

Well duh.

Yummy vegan cupcakes. 

And duh, there are comments about how lovely rich melty butter and yolky sunny eggs are underneath, and how healthful and not at all cruel they are. Can't the egg-and-dairy-country-farmyard apologists even let one article about vegan cupcakes- sweet, innocent, adorabubble cupcakes - slide without raising their fists in anger to tell us how much better theirs are ... even if they admit they've never tried a vegan cupcake? Can't we just have one article about cupcakes without being told we're all going to die of brittle bones, too weak and puny to get of bed to reach 'real' (ie: flesh and bodily emissions) sustenance?

Anyway, enjoy the cupcakes. Raspberries to them.

Eating Wilbur and Patting Rex, or: re-establising the Farm to Fork Continuum in the public mind

I suspect a zeitgeist. 

On Sunday, perusing as is my pretentious wont, the Weekend Australian Magazine (actually I never read the Australian; it was a one-off), I read a column that I can't locate online in my lunch hour, but which I assure you exists, about the break in the farm-to-fork continuum that allows self-proclaimed animal lovers to chow down on Daisy, Wilbur or Lambert whilst simultaneously petting Fido and stroking Fluffy. 

Today's Age contains this column, slightly more academic and pointed, but in the same vein. I hope that the 'conscious forgetting' of Jonathan Safran Foer that the author refers to is getting more and more forgotten itself, but it does at least seem that this issue is getting more media airtime. I hope that someone, reading the weekend paper with a cup of coffee on the couch (or beer if you're like me), glanced down at faithful Ralph or Rex or King or Duke or Bailey or Sam, and then reconsidered their plan for a pig sandwich for lunch and a baby sheep roast for dinner.

Cookering Bookering, or: I have purchased more instructional veganic literature

I've oohed and aahed before over the excellent vegan cookering bookering section at Dymocks in Collins St.  They seem to have more all the time, including Terry Romero's Viva Vegan for those who like Latinesque foodering (not enough pictures for me ... yet. But I do really like the cover and think it's a bit a la Nigella ... so therefore mainstreamish and more appealing to audiences. I rate that). 

Dymocks' psychic pull on me is intense, because recently I have bought:

• The Vegan Table by Collen Patrick-Goudreau (also of The Joy of Vegan Baking). We've made some verrry noice burgers from it. No pictures, breaking my usual rule, but beautifully laid out and fonted. (Fonted?).

• The Ultimate Vegan Cook Book (not Veganomicon ... I can't find a picture of it and it seems like a stock published book, but it was only $25 and it even has instructional pictures)

• Clean Food by Terry Walters. This book doesn't contain the word 'vegan'. But any book that uses agar agar in dessert recipes sure darn is. Quite American as its focus is seasonal ingredients, but still looking sensational and heeeeeps of recipes.

• Babycakes by Erin McKenna (even though I'm not really a bakerer, I loved the purdiness of the book and also the chance to cook something vegan and gluten free so I can share it with Buzz's mama)

• Easy Vegan (again, a publisher only book, but 'easy' rings bells in my soul)

• The 30 Minute Vegan by Mark Reinfeld and Jennifer Murray (like 'easy', 'quick' is like angel wings beating against my heart). 

My collection is growing ... soon to take over more shelves in the kitchen and colonise a cupboard. 

'The Animal Cruelty Syndrome', or: The NY Times follows up

**TRIGGER WARNING**: The article discussed here contains some graphic and heartbreaking descriptions of animal abuse. I found it hard to read. If you think this will trigger you, I advise you not to link to it. The extracts below do not contain these descriptions. 

In March the NY Times reported that an increasing number of US States were passing legislation to bar convicted animal abusers from owning or coming into contact with pets, and to mandate child or spousal abuse officers and animal control officers to share information and report to each other when they find something wrong.

Today the NY Times has published an extended piece titled 'The Animal Cruelty Syndrome', which discusses the growing recognition that animal cruelty is part of a constellation of behaviours endemic to abusive households, gang activity and the psychologically disturbed. 

The article is by Charles Siebert, a contributing writer, who is the author of “The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals.” The article is well-written, empathetic and unflinching - I think I'd like to read this book. 

I'll try to do a more in-depth discussion when I'm not, say, at work, but for now here are some extracts. 

Back in the early 1980s, Lockwood was asked to work on behalf of New Jersey’s Division of Youth and Family Services with a team of investigators looking into the treatment of animals in middle-class American households that had been identified as having issues of child abuse. They interviewed all the members of each family as well as the social workers who were assigned to them. The researchers’ expectation going in was that such families would have relatively few pets given their unstable and volatile environments. They found, however, not only that these families owned far more pets than other households in the same community but also that few of the animals were older than 2.

“There was a very high turnover of pets in these families,” Lockwood told me. “Pets dying or being discarded or running away. We discovered that in homes where there was domestic violence or physical abuse of children, the incidence of animal cruelty was close to 90 percent. The most common pattern was that the abusive parent had used animal cruelty as a way of controlling the behaviors of others in the home. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at what links things like animal cruelty and child abuse and domestic violence. And one of the things is the need for power and control. Animal abuse is basically a power-and-control crime.”

...

In a separate study, a quarter of battered women reported that they had delayed leaving abusive relationships for the shelter out of fear for the well-being of the family pet. In response, a number of shelters across the country have developed “safe haven” programs that offer refuges for abused pets as well as people, in order that both can be freed from the cycle of intimidation and violence. 

...

What cannot be so easily monitored or ameliorated, however, is the corrosive effect that witnessing such acts has on children and their development. More than 70 percent of U.S. households with young children have pets. In a study from the 1980s, 7-to-10-year-old children named on average two pets when listing the 10 most important individuals in their lives. When asked to “whom do you turn to when you are feeling sad, angry, happy or wanting to share a secret,” nearly half of 5-year-old children in another study mentioned their pets. One way to think of what animal abuse does to a child might simply be to consider all the positive associations and life lessons that come from a child’s closeness to a pet — right down to eventually receiving their first and perhaps most gentle experiences of death as a natural part of life — and then flipping them so that all those lessons and associations turn negative. 

...

To date, one of the most promising methods for healing those whose empathic pathways have been stunted by things like repeated exposure to animal cruelty is, poetically enough, having such victims work with animals. Kids who tend to be completely unresponsive to human counselors and who generally shun physical and emotional closeness with people often find themselves talking openly to, often crying in front of, a horse — a creature that can often be just as strong-willed and unpredictable as they are and yet in no way judgmental, except, of course, for a natural aversion to loud, aggressive human behaviors. 

A victory for Tasmania and pigs, or: a change for Australia

Well that's good news! I'd like to think it was my letter, but I assume it was a critical mass ...

Dear Rachel, Today marks an extraordinary day for pigs. It’s days like these that we are reminded that with hard work and persistence, comes results. In this case — the first state-based commitment to phase out one of the cruellest practices in Australia...

This historic development would never have been possible without the support of Animals Australia’s members. Thank You. Animals Australia relies entirely on public donations. Please give generously to support our ongoing efforts to free animals from needless cruelty. ABOVE: Animals Australia in conjunction with Brightside Farm Sanctuary recently placed a series of high impact print advertisements in three state-wide newspapers, bringing Minister Green face to face with the animals he had the opportunity to help. TIP: Visit AnimalsAustralia.org, or our Facebook page to see other recent campaign initiatives. Following a state-wide newspaper advertising blitz by Animals Australia and Brightside Farm Sanctuary, Tasmania's Primary Industries Minister Bryan Green announced in parliament today (June 10th 2010) that he will ban cruel sow stalls in the state! Pigs are among the most intelligent species on the planet, and yet have been subjected to one of the cruellest practices ever inflicted on animals in Australia. 'Sow stalls' are typically used in factory farming operations across the country to confine and isolate mother pigs during pregnancy. The national Code of Practice permits these animals to be confined in tiny crates, unable even to turn around for months on end, denying them exercise and any quality of life. As a result, pigs suffer painful physical ailments and even depression. Recently the Tasmanian Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (AWAC) recognised the unacceptable cruelty permitted by the flawed national code, and recommended to Primary Industries Minister Bryan Green that Tasmania take a leading role to become the first state to outlaw the cruel practice of confining sows in stalls. Animals Australia’s representative on the AWAC provided crucial input on the scientific and ethical arguments against confining sows in tiny stalls. Despite heavy lobbying from Australia's intensive pork industry, Minister Green has accepted this recommendation, encouraged by a flood of supportive letters and e-mails from thousands of caring Animals Australia supporters. This significant development, along with the recent announcement by Australia's largest piggery to voluntarily phase out sow stalls, could never have happened without Animals Australia's investigations, media exposés, and high profile public awareness campaigns. Consistent with international precedents, the Tasmanian government will implement a phase out of sow stalls with a total ban in 2017. Therefore it is crucial that Animals Australia continues to highlight to consumers in Tasmania and throughout Australia that they have the power to help these animals right now by refusing to purchase factory farmed products. In addition, we will be lobbying other state governments to follow the precedent established in Tasmania. Please help us maintain our high impact campaigns on behalf of animals. Hope is finally on the horizon for these intelligent animals thanks to the committed support of our members. You can help us bring about change even sooner by donating today. Thank you for being a voice for animals, Lyn White Animals Australia Communication Director P.S. If you have friends who love animals please tell them about Animals Australia. Our small team of campaigners ensure that animals in need get maximum value out of every precious dollar donated to us. With greater support, more important outcomes like this will become possible.