Laura Eats Food: Red Bamboo is Delicious!

My second guest post for Vegansaurus is up. Read it!

Guest post: Vegansaurus NYC: Red Bamboo is Delicious!
Just for the record, I think that Vegansaurus is a hilarious and awesome website and you should be reading it already. If you don't want to, just read my posts! I'm so flattered that they like me! 

Love, Laura

All About Samantha

Hey everyone!

June is "Adopt a Shelter Cat Month" and I thought I'd go ahead and tell my cat's story in honor of this awesome month. (It's also dairy month or something-BOO)

I have lived in Brooklyn for about 5 out of the 7 years I've been in NYC and one thing that you can't miss about this borough is all the stray cats. It breaks my heart and thank god I don't live alone or I would probably take all of them in. Thankfully there are lots of shelters in NYC doing this for me. I think cat adoption is a cool thing to promote.

This is Samantha

I know! She's such a pretty girl. She's also a total slut which begins our tale. (tail? yes, no? too much?)

Samantha was a pregnant alley cat who rubbed up on a pair of legs belonging to the right person. A friend of my friend felt her little kitties moving around inside her and just couldn't leave her on the street. He and his girlfriend took her in and waited for the cuties to be born. After finding homes for the kittens they wanted to also find a home for mom. I volunteered and shortly later she moved in.

We became fast friends.

Samantha is brave, weird, and lazy. She is super friendly, loves to rub on your legs, demands that the bathroom door always be open, and will not tolerate me hitting the snooze button repeatedly She has a low grumbly purr, hogs the bed, and likes to sit on my lap when I'm trying to write. She's also super talkative and is responsive to conversation directed at her. It's very cute.

One of the things I noticed about Samantha when her kitties were around was that she seemed like she did not want to be a mom. Obviously she hooked up with some male alley cat while she was in heat and was not intending to get pregnant. (as if cats EVER intend to get pregnant) Her foster parents said she was very loving and protective when her kittens were helpless and new but as soon as they were exploring and eating dry food she was over it. You could tell she did not want to be a mom and was bummed out about the whole thing.


Ok I feel like this got a little heavy just now. Cute picture of the cat!

Anyway. Bottom line. Samantha is awesome. You should adopt a cat too! Think you hate cats? You've never had a cat. They are such great pets. (I am sad if you have allergies)

Check out Clyde. He is an orange tabby in Queens looking for a home. I had an orange tabby in college and he was so loving. Orange tabbies are shy so you have to be patient but once they open up they are amazing.

How are you celebrating Adopt a Shelter Cat month? I'm feeding Samantha baby food. I've never seen a cat look so happy. It's like cat crack.

Hope you're all well out there. Until next time, I'll be sleeping on the floor until I can figure out how to get this one to share the bed with me.

All the best!
Love, Laura

My Thoughts on Honey and Kathy Freston

Hey everyone,

The other day on the Twitter Kathy Freston posted a link to this article and said she agrees with the author's stance. Not to give anything away but it's called Why Honey is Vegan by Michael Greger. Go ahead, click it. (you don't have to if you don't want to, I'm about to summarize the contents)

The article talks about animal suffering and food production that causes animals to die. In this instance he discusses bugs, and says that the production of honey doesn't really cause much bee suffering nor does it cause much bee death. He argues that if we are vegan because we are concerned about animals suffering and death that it is just silly to avoid honey because it does not cause much bee suffering or bee death and that avoiding it makes vegans look bad (or like "crazy wackos") and ultimately is hurting the movement.

Okay. Excuse me while I unruffle my feathers here. Whether or not this is true I feel that it is sort of NOT THE POINT.

I do agree that once the average person finds out that vegans don't eat honey they often react as "you people are CRAZY!" But I also think the choice to avoid honey is totally justified.

When people ask me if I eat honey, I say no, because I don't. Or I haven't eaten any (at least not intentionally) since January when I went totally vegan. I don't choose to avoid honey because I feel like the bees are suffering, that actually never even occurred to me, but I choose to avoid honey because I choose to avoid animal products in general.

One of the main reasons I like being a vegan and decided to take this action myself is because it's more than just a diet or skipping meat it's a lifestyle. It's an animal product free lifestyle. It truly makes a "Look, see? I can easily live without this stuff." statement.

In my opinion I think it is totally lame for someone to say vegans should eat honey simply because it makes us look "nuts" otherwise. You are lame Michael Greger and I do not agree with you! SNAP.

Now. Let's discuss this Kathy Freston person.

Okay, so, I don't necessarily DISLIKE Kathy Freston. I know very little about her but I have seen many clips of her on the internet with Oprah, Martha, and Ellen doing "veganizing" episodes. I am interested in reading her book, and I absolutely love how mainstream she is, I feel like she gets press all the time while talking about being vegan.

However, I read up on her a little more just for this blog post and I can't lie, I found out she wrote a book called The One: Discovering the Secrets of Soul Mate Love and my opinion of her totally plummeted.

The main reason I'm connecting these two topics (besides the obvious one, her tweeting a link to said honey article) is that one of the things that originally made me wrinkle my nose at her was when she used honey in a recipe on her appearance on Martha Stewart's vegan episode. This clip is her entire appearance, it's about 10 minutes.

Truly, I think she seems like a nice, smart, earnest person who is doing her best so spread the vegan word. She focuses on health benefits a lot because but I think that's because it's a major concern our country currently has. I also appreciate that in this appearance she mentions loving her dog and loving animals in general, in some of her other appearances the animal part is glossed over which is something I've read other bloggers complaining about. She's always like "you'll lose weight!" (and  that's totally not necessarily true because not everyone who goes vegan loses weight and I eat crap constantly. delicious crap to be specific.)

I'm having trouble being clear here. On one hand I just want to be like, "Rock it out Kathy Freston! You spread that good word!" but on the other hand I'm like "Stop talking about honey woman! Bleh! Can't you just avoid this topic? Stop making such a big deal about it!"

This is what I think. I think that I don't want to eat honey. Would I call someone who eats honey a 'bad' vegan or 'not a vegan'? No. But I would silently judge them. And I am silently judging Kathy Freston. That is my conflict. I want to avoid animals products and I want Kathy Freston to avoid them too.

However she is very pretty and seems like a nice person so I hope that she continues to be on TV and keeps feeding people delicious meat substitutes while talking about how awesome her vegan life is. (just please stop talking about honey! it's bothering me!)

That's all.

Thanks readers! I love ya!