If you live in Marin County or the greater San Francisco Bay Area, chances are you’ve already heard the news that Marin officials have confessed to breaking their own pesticide laws an estimated 90 times over the past decade by spraying public areas with forbidden carcinogenic herbicides. Citizens are frightened and outraged regarding the unlawful exposure they have suffered in their parks and public places. Marin County is waking up to a new day - a day in which toxic trespass has become a reality to confront, in all its forms. But do you know how to recognize herbicide use where you live? This article will teach you.

The above image was captured from a Google Maps’ streetview shot of Hwy 101 near Novato in Marin County. Take a close look at the margin of the road and you will see the telltale strip of dead and dying plants right next to living green plants. This is the result of spray trucks, primarily driven by CalTrans, driving along the freeway spraying herbicides. They do so on both sides of the freeway and in medians as well.

It may be that you’ve never really noticed the sickly brown strip. Or if you have, maybe you’ve absently wondered if the absence of green growth on the road margins might be caused by cars straying outside the lines and running over the plants. Or, maybe some type of giant weedwhacker was keeping the plants short?

Now you know the truth. The dying strip is caused by poisons being sprayed. These poisons are extremely dangerous to humans and animals. To see CalTrans trucks spraying Bay Area roads you drive, look at these photographs.

As I understand it, CalTrans sprays the roads every year with a pre-emergent herbicide and then continues spraying with RoundUp once weeds emerge. Yes, I know…why would they need to spray RoundUp if they have already sprayed a pre-emergent chemical that is supposed to prevent plants from growing? Doesn’t make sense, right? But, as you can imagine, it makes plenty of money for CalTrans and the herbicide manufacturers.

Nature’s rules are that grasses and other plants sprout at different times and grow to their full heights on their own schedules. By spraying over and over again, herbicide users are attempting to combat what nature intends as the various plants we often generically term ‘weeds’ spring to life. It’s not only a losing battle for herbicide users, it’s a self-defeating one. Spraying a patch of mixed greens with an herbicide will generally work for a given amount of time until Nature rushes to defend its dictates that we live on a green planet and enables the plants that are under attack to develop resistance to the chemicals. When herbicide-resistant plants emerge, the herbicide manufacturers respond by creating new herbicides. It’s a never-ending, unsustainable struggle against our planet’s natural laws, and in the undereducated process of attempting to control the lives of plants, Marin County is endangering the lives of its citizens.

Are Herbicides Dangerous To You?
In a word, yes. The various herbicides in use in California, and around the world, cause damage to the nervous system and major organs. Whether it’s your son’s asthma or your mother’s cancer, herbicides may be the well-hidden culprit that is robbing you and your loved ones of health and life. The page of photos I’ve linked to of CalTrans workers spraying offers several toxicology sheets on commonly-used herbicides and they represent a start to your education about the toxins your city managers, state agencies and so-called integrated pest management organizations are polluting your body and environment with.

And it isn’t just officials that are subjecting you to this unwanted barrage of carcinogens, endocrine disruptors and mutagens. It’s your neighbors. Maybe it’s even you! Monsanto and their toxic cohorts have marketed both herbicides and pesticides as safe for home use aggressively enough that Americans believe it and chances are, even if you don’t have a bottle of RoundUp in your garage, one of your neighbors does.

Just as our Google Maps image from Hwy 101 illustrates, dead patches in winter and springtime in your neighborhood are generally an indication that Roundup or another herbicide has been used. Look in parks, shopping center parking lots and around public buildings. Like me, once you know what the signs are, you will begin to see them everywhere.

Is Your City Trying To Kill You?
I don’t blame you if you wonder this, but the sad fact of the matter is, your city and state officials have likely been duped, just as many Americans have, into believing that chemicals are the solution to plants and bugs we’re not happy with. Pesticide and herbicide manufacturers spend billions of dollars in marketing themselves every year and the sole point of that marketing is to persuade individuals and organizations to buy their products. They will lie to achieve this aim and they will take the chance of lawsuits because they can afford them, win or lose. While the recent news about Marin violating its own pesticide/herbicide laws is a case of officials doing exactly what they’ve been told not to, most cases of pesticide/herbicide use are the result of workers simply carrying out the tasks they have been told to do.

The families of Marin officials have been damaged by the massive use of both allowed and prohibited toxic sprays just as have the families of private citizens. CalTrans workers have been horrifically sickened and come forward to talk about the permanent harms they’ve suffered as a result of being ordered to spray chemicals for a living. Countless workers in California’s alcohol fields are sickened every year from being ordered to spray herbicides and pesticides. The epidemics or autoimmune disease, mutliple chemical sensitivites, autism and other destructive malfunctions of the human body’s normal processes that we are witnessing in California may be traced back to the ingredients in the chemicals we are spraying every day, across our state, as being known to cause these exact types of physical and psychological damage. And in Marin County, with it’s #1 cancer rate in the nation, we may look for our hidden enemy in the tons of carcinogenic chemicals that are being poured on the lands and on the people.

Blood money and corruption of politicians most certainly do play a role in America’s current chemical addiction, but I see lack of education as the key culprit, creating a situation in which local city officials step into office and are told that, “In Marin, we control weeds with herbicides,” and those officials do not have the superior education to realize that statement equates with, “In Marin, we are sickening and killing our people.”

Officials are in desperate need of this education, as are citizens.

We’re Dying Because Of Our Chemicals, But Can We Live Without Them?

The chief reason given by city officials for herbicide use along roadsides is, somewhat ironically, protecting public safety. It is certainly true that some plants can grow tall enough to obstruct views and make driving conditions hazardous. But, in the light of the dawning 21st century, educated people are realizing that trading off one hazard for another is not a sustainable approach to problem solving. In the case of our major roads, we must demand a non-toxic solution that will make driving safer on our thousands of miles of highways. Here are three completely sensible options:

1. Get Planting. Marin County, and any other county in the state, could take the vast sums of money they have previously invested in herbicides and spray trucks and invest it in landscapers who could plant our highway margins with dense growing native groundcover plants that, with some periodic maintenance, would choke out the taller, unwanted plants. Lush borders of low-growing plants would not only make our highways more beautiful, they would decrease pollution and fight global warming. These native green borders would, of course, need to be smog-tolerant, drought-tolerant and organically grown. Imagine if each county got to pick its own area-appropriate groundcover and a drive on the highways from Northern to Southern California was transformed into a proud display of each region’s finest native groundcover plant. It would put our state on the map as truly forward-thinking and green-minded. This is my favorite solution.

2. Take that herbicide money and put it toward a ready-made manufactured product like Universal Weed Cover - a man-made, non-toxic weed barrier that is already in use along hundreds of miles of US highways. If other regions are using it, why not Marin County? A one time investment in this would save the county from those costly annual herbicide fees for a long, long time.

3. Keep the same workers in business who have been paid to spray Marin County, but instead of spray trucks give them Highway Weed Mowers. It looks like there are plenty of them to choose from.

All three of these choices would put a powerful end to the use of deadly herbicides on Marin’s roadways, and similar solutions are within easy reach for all other situations in which herbicides are currently being used. Money taken away from herbicide manufacturers and granted to public education programs that retrain the dangerous, unnatural learned aesthetics of a society which has come to view dandelions in a lawn as a threat would be money well spent. And, where plant control or removal is a must, manual labor is at all of our fingertips. City workers will experience far better health pulling weeds instead of being engulfed in poison while spraying them. Manual labor of this kind will offer fresh air and exercise to the worker rather than dooming him to chronic disease.

We Can Learn New Behaviors
This article has taught you how to recognize the visual signs of herbicide use where you live. You now have this knowledge, and there is one fact of life that I would like you to take along with it.

When you begin to notice and reflect on the brown dying strip along the roads you drive, remember that it is not merely an image of dead weeds. It is the visible sign of a poisoned environment - an environment in which you live - just like the grasses and plants that have been overpowered with chemicals. Life is life, whether it is in plants or people, and where life cannot exist for plants, the environment is also unfit for humans.

In our chemical addiction, we have created a place that is unfit for us to inhabit in good health. It is unfit for us, for the birds, the mammals, the amphibians and fish. The dying weeds on the highway are bold road signs reading Danger. Look at the signs and determine within yourself what you want to do about them.

We have the power to learn new behaviors. Perhaps the discovery of the illegal spraying of Marin will be the horrific event that causes Marin’s people to decide that they have had enough of lies, enough of irresponsibility, enough of cancer and disease. I cannot imagine anything more important for local people to be thinking of right now. What do you say?

Do you grow or eat organic food? Do you want your county to be able to forbid the GMO mongers from setting up camp in your backyard? Do you want to stop mad scientists from putting deadly drugs into food plants? Then you’re the right person to say ‘no’ to Obama’s choice of Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture.

Help the Organic Consumers Association send 100,000 signatures to President Elect Obama urging him NOT to appoint Tom Vilsack. Click Here To Sign The Petition.

Obama promised change. Monsanto and its ilk have been in charge of all things related to our food supply for far too long now, and with devastating consequences for your family and the world. Appointing a Monsanto supporter as Secretary of Agriculture is not change. It is more of the same and is repugnant to all Americans who want safe food for their families.

Please, consider signing this important petition. It’s your chance to give Obama a chance to keep his promise to us of real change in government.

Some vegans can be a bit preachy. Like Louisa May Alcott, they’ve hit on something good and they’re not going to miss a single chance to talk to you about it. While I’m all for evangelizing for a good cause, I’ve never been comfortable with the concept of converting people. I think each of us has the responsibility of finding a path in life that’s truly authentic to us. This is why, in my private life, I seldom talk to the people I meet about the way I eat. I wouldn’t be the vegan who interrupts Thanksgiving dinner to talk about the terrifying bacteria in a dead turkey. Someone else will have to do that. I value the gift of free will, belonging to each human being, too much to try to sway other people to my own way of thinking.

It had to be irony I was feeling, then, driving home from the surgical center with a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease on a piece of paper in my purse. Scar tissue in my ileocecal valve had become so inflamed that it obstructed my small intestine, sending me straight from a doctor’s office to a hospital, feeling pain so intense, I thought I might die. That was round one. 30 days later, it happened again, and I ended up spending this year’s Thanksgiving holiday being poked, prodded, drugged and scanned into a listless stupor in a hospital bed. My frantic husband spent the night at my side, on a cot so old it groaned every time he exhaled. It was a wretched time, and it led to the trip to a surgical center, where I got my diagnosis, and a picture of my future filled with IVs, pills and surgeries. Crohn’s Disease is the 3rd autoimmune condition I have been diagnosed with in the past decade, and in order to explain to you the irony in this, I have to sound a bit like a vegan who is bragging about the superiority of their lifestyle. Follow me.

Pick up just about any health-related book or magazine today and the general advice given for either protecting yourself from disease or helping to get well from disease will read something like the following:

- Get plenty of exercise
- Decrease or eliminate meat and dairy
- Eat mostly whole grains, fruits and vegetables
- Don’t eat processed foods
- Find healthy ways to manage stress

Whether the condition being discussed is acne or cancer, you are almost sure to find some version of the above list being given as your guide to preventing and overcoming ill-health. And, the most enlightened authors, doctors and researchers are taking this advice a step further by warning you to throw out all of the toxic cleaning and cosmetic products in your house. Sticking with vinegar and wiping all that goop off your skin will certainly decrease your exposure to an entire directory of toxins that should never have been invented in the first place, let alone wiped across your kitchen counter or into your face. Over the past couple of decades, people who write about health have caught onto the idea that a plant-based diet and a chem-free body and home are smart choices for pretty much all people. By leaps and bounds, the public is making efforts to catch on, too.

Well, I’m sorry to say that it may be too late. I offer myself and the past 20 years of my life as an object lesson.

How I Live

For the past 20 years:
I have followed an organic, whole foods vegan diet
This means I eat no animal products of any kind
I prepare all of my meals at home, from scratch
I do not eat refined sugar, junk food or restaurant food of any kind
I even bake my own bread
I am product-phobic; we buy the fewest manufactured items for our home we can
There is no cleaning substance in my house stronger than vinegar
I do not use cosmetics apart from a plant-based liquid soap
I have many enjoyable, simple hobbies and spiritual pursuits to help me keep stress levels low
I spend as much time outdoors and in nature as I possibly can
I have an organic microfarm which my family is working in an effort to become self-sustaining

This isn’t meant to sound boastful, but when presented as a list like this, I hope it gives a pretty clear picture of the natural life I’ve tried to pursue. Basically, my goal with my life has been to live as much like a natural human animal as I possibly could. I’ve watched all of the other kinds of animals in my environment, going about the business of being themselves so simply and humbly, and I’ve tried to figure out how a human could do that - live like the earthly sorts of animals we are. Getting rid of all the ‘products’ has been an important part of that. And choosing to live with compassion, trying not to harm the other animals, has been a choice open to me because I’m lucky enough to live in a part of the world with a long growing season that can provide a delicious and nutritious diet without any need to rely on animal-derived foods. I’ve used the gift of free will in a way that seemed authentic to me and in a way I thought wouldn’t cause any suffering to others.

It’s an interesting choice, ‘going’ vegan. This was long before the Internet, long before Whole Foods, long before the doctors were really saying vegetarians were likely to avoid diseases. I picked up a simple paperback book somewhere as a girl - Diet for a New America by John Robbins. Other than the Bible, I can’t think of another book that’s had so profound an effect on my path in life. I was young, but even then, rather painfully distressed by needless suffering, and it was the story John told of the true lives of farm animals that presented me with a choice to either participate in the suffering or withdraw my support from it. I chose to withdraw, ‘go vegan’ as they say these days, and I’ve never regretted it…not for a minute.

The animal stories were the things that stood out to me then. Yes, there was a big section about the health benefits of a vegan diet, but what kid is really going to be attentive to a discussion of cholesterol and high blood pressure? Kids are invincible. No, I stopped eating, wearing and using animal products because I just couldn’t see how my life could be judged to be more important than the life of an animal, in the grand scheme of things, and I didn’t think anyone had given me the right to benefit at the expense of others. And really, I didn’t want to have to go to heaven one day and explain to God that I’d found out I was hurting someone, but kept on doing it anyway. I could almost see that conversation playing out, and I didn’t want to have to have it! This was one of the first real ethical debates I’d ever held with myself. It was an important decision for a young person to make, and I’m still proud of my kid self for choosing what felt right to me.

Many Years Later

It wasn’t until many years later that I came back to the ‘uninteresting’ section about the vegan diet and health in John’s book. I was in my early 20s then, and in the midst of trying to make a life for myself, I was stricken with a strange abdominal illness. The day before, I was as healthy as anyone else. Overnight, that all changed. I lost my job and began the visiting-doctors ritual that was to continue for many years. I was given a blanket diagnosis of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (doctor-ese for ‘I have no idea what is wrong with your guts’) and told to stop eating so much meat and dairy! When I explained my squeaky clean diet to doctors, they were even more eager to see me go because then they really had nothing to tell me to do.

I had already been living a greatly diminished life when weird illness number 2 struck like a thief in the night. Endometriosis left me more or less bed-ridden for a couple of years, in between more rounds of visiting clueless and even dangerous doctors. They wanted to cut out my organs. They wanted to dope me with hormones. One of them gave me a shot called Depo-Provera which gave me sickness number 3 - Fibromyalgia. That drug became the subject of a class action lawsuit as thousands of women fell ill with Fibromyalgia from it. I didn’t join the suit…I was sick in bed, with my 20s passing by somewhere outside the window.

Endometriosis was my first autoimmune disease. I hardly knew what that meant at the time, and I certainly didn’t guess that it was part of a pattern that would continue on, leading up to this year, and the newest diagnosis of Crohn’s. Living now, with 3 autoimmune diseases, each one of them enough to destroy what anyone thinks of as ‘normal’ life, the portrait of my health centers on the angry, red word: inflammation. My body reacts with inflammation to the normal functions of being alive. It’s not just one organ that behaves this way. It’s whole systems of digestive, reproductive and muscular function. What the misguided doctors told me was Irritable Bowel Syndrome 12 years ago was likely my body’s first declaration that, from then on, anything going on inside would be met with an indignant response of inflammation.

When your body loses its ability to distinguish between its own cells and invading foreign organisms, you’ve pretty much ceased to function as you’ve been designed to. Life always tries to support itself. But with autoimmune disease, life tries to commit suicide.

Again, I had to think back to John’s book that had been so pivotal in my life, and its thoroughly sound and excellently researched proofs of hope for the very best of health with a whole-foods, plant-based diet. I’ve been blessed with the pleasure of communicating with John, and he is a wise and loving person. His facts aren’t flawed. Eating an animal-based diet is fraught with health hazards. You’ll be hard pressed to find any doctor now who will disagree with that. But a picture has emerged for me regarding the efforts people can make to eat right, rid their habits and homes of poisons and manage their stress in creative and healthy ways, and it’s a very bleak scene.

Autogens not Carcinogens

What can you expect for yourself if, today, you start eating an organic, whole-foods diet, free of toxic animal products? What can you expect if you throw out your makeup and take your commercial household cleaners to a toxic waste dump? What can you expect if you do yoga, meditate, jog, swim, bike? I can only offer my 20 years of healthy living in our land of America as an answer. If someone like me makes a consistent effort to make all the right choices when it comes to health, and she winds up with 3 debilitating diseases by her mid-thirties, what does this mean for you and for all of the people who have spent their lives trying to promote an enlightened approach to wise and loving care of the human body?

It means that your freedom is disappearing. It means that your choice to be healthy is being taken from you.

Consider these facts:

• 23.5 million Americans have autoimmune diseases now
• That means 1 in 12 Americans
• 75% of these people are women
• The incidence of many autoimmune diseases has doubled in the past 30 years
• 80,000 chemicals have been approved for use in our environment
• An average of 5 new chemicals are approved for use every day
• Autoimmune diseases are called the ‘Western Disease’ because they predominantly occur in industrial, chemical-laden countries
• The rise of the autoimmune epidemic has gone hand in hand with the rise of chemical manufacture

It is the chemicals pouring out of factories, industrial agriculture, pharmaceutical laboratories and the products and plastics we are surrounded with that are triggering the rewiring of the human body, turning it from an elegant, life-supporting machine into a self-destructing mess. The toxic output of ‘industry’ is what is robbing us of the choice to pursue a healthy lifestyle. You can choose to go vegan, go organic, go jogging, but if industry chooses to pump your air, water and soil full of autogens, you are swimming against a tide as large as your whole environment, with nowhere to turn for the basic needs of life.

Donna Jackson Nakazawa is another gifted, wise and delightful author with whom I’ve had the pleasure of communicating, and her tremendous book, The Autoimmune Epidemic, meticulously chronicles the dual risings of pollution and autoimmune disease. Stricken with an autoimmune disease which left her temporarily paralyzed, Donna’s investigative reporting of this crisis in human health has won praise from the likes of Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health. I have nothing but praise for this landmark publication, but as with Diet for a New America, it strives to offer the choice for better health through diet and conscientious shopping. Even as I applaud the author’s insistence that people must only eat organically-grown food, the vegan organic farmer in me heaves a very heavy sigh. And looks at the irony of my life.

Even as a child, I was able to see that it isn’t right to make choices that hurt others. If that meant giving up ice cream and fancy leather boots, I could make that sacrifice. Because it wasn’t really a sacrifice, once I knew I was getting to do something helpful and kind in the world. If a little girl can meet, weigh and make a moral choice on this issue of doing-unto-others, how can it be that the head of a multi-billion dollar corporation or the man in the White House cannot bring himself to do the same? How can it be that after being offered abundant proofs of causing debilitating illness and death, the pesticide planes continue to fly, the factories continue to fill our water and air with poisons and we the people keep handing over our paychecks to keep the system that is killing us going?

When will enough be enough? When the average American woman realizes that her SUV, her hair dye and her microwave dinner may actually be the cause of her Lupus and her children’s asthma and autism? When the average American man realizes there will be no one left for him to marry because all of the women have quietly faded away from multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivities, endometriosis and Crohn’s disease? When the health magazine writers are all out of work because everyone realizes there is no point anymore in trying to make a tofu sandwich when you’re living in an autogenic world?

Healthy living has been a matter of choice for all modern people with the ability to be self-supporting. You could choose to eat the cheese burger or go to the health club instead. Some people made a ritual out of procrastinating about it, waiting until some better time to really get serious about living more healthily. Others went at it whole hog.

At this point, the weaker ones like me, the ones with the genetic predisposition to have our systems be triggered by autogens into a state of self-destruct, are already seeing that our efforts have won us nothing but a growing list of chronic illnesses. We are the canaries in the autogenic coalmine and the pollution is getting us first. Consider the fact that cancer, treated as the great and peerless killer, is less likely to be a woman’s fate now than the acquisition of an autoimmune disease. If someone told you that by giving up meat and dairy today, by paying extra for organic, by growing your own food, you could hope that in 20 years….a doctor would tell you that you had Crohn’s disease, would you even bother to try?

I think we are coming to a time when people will look back to the granola they ate in the 60’s, the headbands they bought for exercising in the 80’s and the organics they paid an arm and a leg for at the turn-of-the-century and wish with all their souls that they could get back to those days when pursuing health was a free choice almost anyone could make. I think my own life is a herald of that time that will come to all people, no matter what their genetics or mode of living. I think that they will look around at the GMOs, the SUVs, the plastics and the filthy air and see that these were their enemies, mute and innocuous-seeming though they were. I think that ‘progress’ is about to becoming the most obscene word in the English language.

What The Autoimmune Epidemic Means For You

I honestly don’t know the answer. I’m not a psychic and I’m certainly not the Creator of this beautiful but toxic planet. I remind myself that the choice to go vegan, live naturally, become an organic farmer was made primarily out of compassion for others, not out of some hope of health for myself. I didn’t want to harm animals or people, ruin their water supply or fill their air with poisons to put food on my table. So, I’ll never regret the choices I’ve made and I will always be thankful for the wisdom of others who inspired me to make authentic and compassionate choices when I was young and everything seemed like a free choice.

We ought to love freedom better than this. We ought to love life too much to sell it out for a tank of gas and a new brand of noxious shampoo. Oh, yes, maybe you still can be better off by making healthy choices. Maybe if I hadn’t made the choices I have to live so naturally, I’d be dead by now. I’ve had that thought many times over the past few weeks. Maybe it’s still bright to make yourself as resistant to disease as you can by pursuing health as though the choice were still as free and real as it once was on our blue and green Earth, before the chemicals began to seep from the halls of industry. Despair is an evil and we humans seem duty-bound to look for hope in the most profoundly black days, if we are to show our appreciation of the gift of life.

But my looks are all dark for the people of industry who have taken away my choice to be healthy, because we *must* have progress, or nail polish, or hamburgers…or whatever they’re selling today. Even as the women fall ill, one by one on the home planet, the people of industry continue to sell us the very things that are killing the mothers, sisters, wives, daughters. The people of industry keep selling. And we keep buying. And one day, that conversation I imagined as a girl will be happening in the next world, and the Great Spirit will be asking us what we did with the beautiful, life-sustaining planet He created just for us, and the wonderful, elegant bodies he gave us to walk about in amongst the oxygen-giving trees. What will we have to say for ourselves?

Local news gives you a strong feeling about a town and its people. When you read that a small town like Bolinas, California feeds its homeless neighbors out of its own pockets, rather than through an agency, you figure their must be some very nice folks living there. But when you read about another town - South Whitehall Township, PA - complaining about the ugliness of a shed while one of their neighbor’s lives is at stake, you wonder what is wrong with the people living there.

This afternoon, a friend of mine sent me an ABC feature on a South Whitehall Township woman, Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes, who has been ordered to take down the shelter her husband built to protect her from chemical assault. Feudale-Bowes suffers from Environmental Illness.

Both the title of the article and many of the comments left after it show the problems a woman like Feudale-Bowes faces the moment anyone hears she has this type of disorder. ABC’s subheading puts single quotes around the words environmental illness, suggesting that this kind of ailment is dubious, so-called, not-to-be-believed. They show ignorance of the matter in doing this - a lack of research into the reality of this severe affliction. Comments like this one follow suit:

Just another hypochondriac that expects the rest of us to confirm their fears.

Chilling.

Feudale-Bowes’ neighbors have complained that the environmental safety shelter doesn’t conform to zoning laws, is unsightly and will bring down their property values, and when Judge Carol McGinley ruled that it had to be taken down, she allowed the people of South Whitehall Township to continue living in the grip of amazingly selfish values. What do you think about a town where a pretty yard is more important than the health, potentially the life, of a severely ill woman? What do you think about that town?

I’m sure there must be many good people in South Whitehall Township, PA. but the ones who have brought this disaster down on a woman whose sufferings include migraines, joint pain, bladder inflammation, seizures and temporary paralysis should take a good long look at themselves, the health they are lucky enough to enjoy, and their personal moral codes that have revealed them talking about yard decor while their neighbor is in debilitating agony.

Where are the good people in South Whitehall Township who will hold a fund raiser, volunteer labor hours, go to the city zoning commission, in defense of their ailing neighbor? Who will offer to bring Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes’ safety shelter up to code? Who will visit her, console her and her family, lend a hand in helping her cope with a life of such challenging pain? Who will confront this family’s neighbors and reveal to them that a light has been shone on their selfishness and that this is giving the town a very poor name in the public eye.

Every major world religion embraces the values of charity, care of the poor, help for the sick and love of neighbor. What religion, what system of ethics is being practiced in the neighborhoods and courtrooms of South Whitehall Township, Pennsylvania? Who can look this woman’s suffering in the eye and put single quotes around her pain, quickly moving on to talk about zoning laws and property values? Those meddlesome, self-centered neighbors should be hanging their heads in shame right now and asking the Feudale-Bowes family to forgive them for this totally needless infliction of misery brought on by a distorted sense of values. I sincerely hope that the national news coverage of this story will make those neighbors take a long look at themselves and what has been revealed about the size of their hearts.

And, I sincerely hope that the good people living near this family will react with the outrage and active response this situation calls for. I pray that caring people will give the Feudale-Bowes family whatever assistance they need in order to provide Elizabeth with the safety shelter her illness decrees as a necessity for her.

As I write this, it’s not hard for me to get into Feudale-Bowes’ shoes. Everyone in my family caught a flu two months ago. Nothing to make a big deal out of and my husband, my parents, my siblings and their kids have all recovered. But, because of my own Environmental Illness, I am still sick with it. I’ve been in continuous pain for weeks…the pain Feudale-Bowes described as feeling like, “fire with ground glass in it.” My damaged autoimmune system is taking its own sweet time to recover from a sickness that everyone else shook off after a week or so.

Does the fact that I don’t look too bad mean this isn’t happening to me? Does the fact that I’m writing this article mean that I’m really okay? Or does it simply mean that I’ve learned to live with a level of discomfort and pain that would have most people rushing off to an ER if they experienced it? Like most people with autoimmune diseases, multiple chemical sensitivities or environmental illnesses, I’m a master at coping and I do what I can.

Elizabeth Feudale-Bowes was just doing what she could when suddenly her own neighbors turned on her and brought the law down on her. On top of all of her own sufferings, she has been forced to deal with this stress and humiliation. My cheeks burn with shame for the people who brought this on her. And I cringe to think of the so-called doctors, the judges, the citizens who have forced her to hear, probably for the millionth time in her life, that her sickness is probably all in her head. One of the most damaging things about these kinds of incurable, chronic illnesses is being called a crazy or a fibber, while the pain continues on in mind and body.

Does anyone, these days, anyone at all actually NOT know at least one person with an environmentally-related illness? Has anyone not know someone who died of cancer due to pesticide exposure? Been born with autism because of chemical pollution? Gotten sick at Macy’s from the perfume? Had migraines from commuting through smog? Been bedridden from ‘unknown’ causes? Visited doctor after doctor, looking for a root, a diagnosis, a solution, a cure to a host of environmentally-related illnesses for which modern medicine has no real answer? It’s hard for me to believe that anyone in America these days doesn’t know someone who is suffering from Fibromyalgia, Endometriosis, MCS, Chronic Fatigue and so on…

And if that sufferer is your mother, your brother, your child, your neighbor…what do your ethics call you to do?

As I see it, the people of South Whitehall township owe Mrs. Feudale-Bowes a sincere apology and the offer of their hands, their money and their time to make this situation right.

The USDA and Big Ag (the people who brought California the plan of spraying pesticide on human beings in the 2007 LBAM debacle) have conspired in order to pour millions of dollars in funding into blocking California Proposition 2, up for the vote in November 2008. What is it that Prop 2 proposes that factory farmers object to? Here is a summary of the proposition:

The California Secretary of State’s summary from the Official Voter Information Guide of Proposition 2 is as follows:[1]
“STANDARDS FOR CONFINING FARM ANIMALS. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Requires that certain farm animals be allowed, for the majority of every day, to fully extend their limbs or wings, lie down, stand up and turn around.

Yes, opponents of Prop 2 do not want farm animals to be able to move around and are going so far as to claim that enabling animals to perform simple functions such as standing up, sitting down, lifting a wing or stretching a leg will endanger public health and put the ‘industry’ out of business.

Anyone who was sprayed with Checkmate in 2007, or lived under the threat of being sprayed with Checkmate, already has a good acquaintance with the way Big Ag operates and will likely be unsurprised to learn that they would be opposed to more humane treatment for farm animals. After all, they couldn’t even manage to understand that human beings deserve humane treatment when they exposed thousands of Central Coast families to an aerial pesticide assault which left hundreds of innocent people gravely ill and nearly killed two small children. You know how these people operate. You know the money deals and the lies and the robotic response to all requests for humane treatment of fellow beings. You aren’t really surprised.

What May Surprise You
Trillions have been spent in ad campaigns over the years which have left the American public with the vague and comfortable idea that meat, milk and eggs come from ‘happy cows’ and chickens living on ’sunshine farms’. This pretty picture is in contrast to the real lives of today’s farm animals, and in the spirit of telling the truth which we have always upheld here at Vegan Reader, I present these facts for you about the real lives of some of California’s most innocent and voiceless creatures.

Where Do My Eggs and Chicken Meat Come From?

-99% of the eggs eaten by Americans come from caged chickens.

-7-8 hens are typically crammed into 18″x20″ wire cages

-The birds cannot lift even one wing at a time in these conditions. The normal wingspan of a single chicken is 30 inches

-Cages are stacked layer upon layer to the ceiling of warehouses holding tens of thousands of birds. Droppings from the birds fall on the birds below, with each successive lower layer of birds becoming more encrusted with filth than the layer above it.

-Their claws often grow fast to the wires beneath them - the Big Ag solution to this is to cut off their feet

- They never see actual daylight but are kept for prolonged periods in total darkness or relentless bright lights in order to disrupt their normal hormonal patterns and induce them to shed their feathers

- Because these conditions drive the birds mad, they begin to peck one another in their insanity

- In order to prevent pecking, female chicks are forced through an assembly line where machines cut off their beaks (a process called de-beaking)

- Because male chicks are seen as valueless to egg farmers, when the babies emerge from their shells they are tossed into a plastic bag in heaps where they suffocate or are thrown live into a huge meat grinder. The number of baby male chicks killed in this way every year is greater than the number of human beings living in the United States. The remains of the dead baby chicks are then fed back to their mothers as ‘feed’.

- The terms ‘free range’, ‘natural’ and other happy euphemisms are not regulated in any way. They are advertising terms created to deceive the public. Again, if you eat eggs, there is a 99% chance that they were taken from chickens kept in this way.

- Chickens raised for their meat endure the same conditions from day one of their lives.

- Chicken manure is one of the main components of the feed given to chickens. Other components include factory wastes and euthanized pets obtained from kill-policy animal shelters and vivisection labs

- At the time they are slaughtered, 90% of chickens in the U.S. are infected with Leukosis (chicken cancer)

- Estimates for the number of US chickens contaminated with salmonella range from 20%-80%

- At slaughter, chickens are gutted with hooks which often break the linings of their intestines, contaminating the carcasses with fecal matter. At this point, the carcass is placed in a tub of water for an hour where it basically stews in the fecal matter and takes on water weight to bring higher market prices. The chicken is then packaged for sale.

Where Does My Beef and Milk Come From?

- Milk cows are kept in a permanent state of milk production by being constantly, artificially forced to bear children they are never allowed to care for

- Within 24 hours of being born, baby calves are taken from their mothers and confined in crates that do not allow them to move their limbs, stand up, or lie down in a natural manner. This is done to keep them from forming muscles so that their flesh can be sold as ‘veal’

- Calves are not given their mother’s milk. It is taken away from them to be given to the offspring of another species - human beings. Calves are, instead, fed a powdered formula. The truth on the other side of every glass of milk is a veal calf, kept immobile, and slaughtered without having ever known its mother or the natural light of day.

- Dairy cows are fed a constant diet of antibiotics and other drugs. These drugs are present in the milk they produce.

- At the end of her life, spent providing milk to humans, the humans respond to this relationship by slaughtering the dairy cow

- Most Americans assume that there is a law enforcing that cows must be dead before being cut into pieces in slaughterhouses. There is no such law. Fully conscious cows are routinely hung upside down, skinned and dismembered by slaughterhouse workers as has been documented by films aired on NBC News and Dateline.

- Ground beef is the #1 source of E. Coli infections, with some 200 people being diagnosed with the often-fatal pathogen every single day in the U.S.

Where Does My Pork Come From?

- Mother pigs are confined in cages little bigger than their bodies. Throughout their pregnancies they are not allowed to freely stand up, lie down, turn their heads or stretch their limbs. They are kept by the thousands in warehouses, much like chickens

- They are immediately deprived of their children which drives them insane, causing them to scream, groan and bite other pigs. Often, they are driven to cannibalism. Big Ag’s solution to this is to break their teeth.

- Baby piglets tails are cut off without any type of anaesthetic to prevent them from biting one another’s tails in the madness that ensues when they are confined in dark, factory warehouses, without any room to turn or move about - by the thousands.

- Pigs, whose sense of smell is so keen that they can detect the presence of edible roots under the earth, are forced to stand in their own fecal matter, day after day, week after week, until they are hauled out for slaughter

- Because they have been bred for obesity, many pigs have deformed spines and broken legs. If they are unable to walk in line to the slaughter house conveyer belts, the accepted method of killing them is to beat them to death with lead pipes or to hoist them up and smash their heads off the concrete floors. There is no law which requires pigs to be dead before they are dismembered, thus, many of them are cut up while still awake and alive.

- At slaughter, 75% of the pigs eaten by Americans have pneumonia. As with cows and chickens, the flesh of pigs is contaminated with pathogens and fecal matter when it is processed and packaged for sale

No One Likes To Think Of These Things
There have been times in my life when I have felt overwhelmed by the suffering of these trusting and totally defenseless animals who are owned, tortured and then slaughtered by Big Ag farmers by the millions every day. Who would want to think about this?

But, of course, it’s because we don’t want to think about it, and because such truths and sights are kept carefully hidden from the public by skilled marketers, that these horrific actions are allowed to take place, every day.

Humans have long kept and slaughtered domesticated animals, it’s true. But never before, in the history of man, has a system been created like the one currently operating across California and across the United States. This is a systematic process for confining, abusing and killing innocent creatures who live without ever knowing the earth. They know only the stench of the factory warehouse buildings, pain, terror, sorrow and death. Never before in history has such a shameful situation existed on such a scale, and anyone choosing to purchase the products of this industry is, sadly, supporting its continuance.

What Will California Proposition 2 Do?
You can read the full text of Prop 2 here. To my understanding, Prop 2 is simply asking for slightly larger confinement devices for chickens, pigs and veal calves. It doesn’t put an end to any of the other facts mentioned above, but it has some potential to slightly lessen the misery of these helpless animals by giving them the ability to stand up, sit down and extend their limbs. It does something for the animals.

Big Ag is pouring in their millions to stop the Proposition from passing, not because they can’t afford to buy larger confining devices, but because, I believe, the very existence of such a proposition might be the beginning of Californians learning the truth about the suffering of the animals who are ‘processed’ so that meat and dairy products can appear on the American table. Any proposition which suggests that farm animals might be deserved of humane treatment is a major threat to an industry which depends upon society viewing living creatures as mere objects.

Big Ag has come up with all kinds of absurd claims that treating animals humanely will destroy their industry, and has even gone so far as to threaten public health hazards if, for example, chickens were allowed to live outside. They warn that by being outside, chickens might contract avian flu from wild birds. They are very careful not to state that factory farms are the actual health hazard. By confining thousands of animals in overcrowded enclosures where they are forced to stand in their own excrement and where every natural need is neglected, factory farms are breeding grounds for the very diseases which causes literally millions of cases of human illness every year. The arguments being put forth by Big Ag are self-serving, manipulative and unworthy of consideration.

Yes On Prop 2 is the citizen group spearheading the pro-vote for this proposition. You might like to visit their website to learn more about why so many people think this vote will be so important.

But, I would like to make a suggestion beyond simply voting Yes on Prop 2. I would encourage you to think about the fact that, living in California, not one of us needs to be dependent upon the torment and death of animals in order to find nourishment. We are not a small tribe of peoples living in the desert or near the north pole, reliant upon animal flesh as our only available means of sustenance. It just isn’t that way here any more.

It has been nearly 20 years now since I learned the truth about Big Ag and vowed I would never again derive sustenance from such needless misery. Yes, for nearly 2 decades now, I have lived by eating a plant-based diet, and I have eaten very, very well. If you could see the delicious, fragrant, colorful, nutrient-packed dishes I will be eating for dinner tonight, you would have no worry that I am living a deprived life because there is no meat, no milk, no eggs on my table. The only thing absent from my family’s table is the support of an industry that is willing to torture living animals with one hand while it is pouring pesticides on human children with the other. That is not something I can, in good conscience, give my money to. It is not something that most Californians would choose to support, if they only knew the truth about the lives of today’s farm animals and the true behavior of the modern agricultural industry.

It can take real courage to face hard truths like the ones I’ve listed for you in this article. Like most American children, I was raised by a loving mother who felt that animal products were essential to human health, and that she was taking good care of me by feeding me the output of this dreadful industry. Most people, especially parents, sincerely believe they are doing the very best for their children by feeding them meat and dairy products because they have been skillfully lead by the Meat and Dairy industries to believe in this firmly. No humane person would blame people for their loving attempts to nourish themselves and their loved ones well.

The blame, in my opinion, all belongs on the shoulders of an industry which makes righteous-sounding proclamations about dedication to humane treatment of animals while stealing newborns from mothers who are indentured to a life of producing milk for a completely different species while trillions of dollars are made. And, it only adds to the real evil of the situation when these ‘farmers’ hire PR experts to aid them in deceiving a trusting public who is looking for good answers to good nutrition.

The truth is that factory farming is robbing us of our health, destroying the natural resources of our endangered planet and engaging our participation in acts which are baldly inhumane. I know it does not deserve my family’s support and I am sharing these thoughts with you in hopes that you can take a serious look at whether it deserves yours.

So, while I believe that Proposition 2 is a step in the right direction in that it recognizes that living beings have an inherent right to be able to use their limbs, it is only a very tiny first step, and I am hoping, for the sake of your own respect for the gift of life, you may wish to take some further steps along that road.

If you would like to learn more about the hidden truth of the factory farm and its toll on America’s health and habitat, I highly recommend reading The Food Revolution by John Robbins.

John’s first book, Diet For A New America was pivotal in my decision to adopt a plant-based diet, and I would like to add for the benefit of all the LBAM veterans, John was deeply concerned about the spraying that happened last year in California. If you’ve lost your patience with CDFA after dealing with their tactics, you’re really going to ‘get’ John Robbins’ books. For so many Californians, the LBAM disaster was an introduction to the behind-the-scenes operations of our nation’s most powerful industries. I guarantee, if you read The Food Revoltion the whole situation of what’s going on in our country is going to become a whole lot clearer.

I hope that reading this article was worthy of your time.

Sometimes, life is poetic in its demonstrations of simple lessons.

Every summer and winter, our home is visited by ants. They come in two varieties, for which we have common names.

1) Sugar ants - these are the larger, common ants you likely know best.
2) Oil ants - these are the tiny, tiny ants that may be less common where you live.

Here I was, today, thinking about the LBAM spray poisoning and how it will devastate our health and environment, and while my thoughts were thus occupied, a fair-sized swarm of oil ants came in my kitchen screen window above my sink. This is an experience we’ve gotten used to over the years, and my husband and I got right to work.

The oil ants need to be gotten out of the house for 2 reasons:

1) They would be injured and killed in the kitchen, falling into water, onto hot burners, etc. The house is not a proper environment for them - they belong outside.
2) Oil ants do bite people. Their bites are rather painful.

Why not reach for a can of Raid?
It’s true, like so many Americans, we could reach for a can of insecticide and blast away the oil ants, but in so doing, we would not only be killing innocent little critters who, after all, are just trying to go about their day, but we would also be poisoning our own home and ourselves. The fumes of the Raid would also drift out to our neighbors, possibly sickening them. The poisoned ants might stagger back outside and be eaten by birds or my neighbor’s kitty cat, thus poisoning further innocent bystanders.

Raid is the dangerous choice. It is also the lazy choice when, with a little work, it is possible to send the ants about their business without a drop of poison.

Today, we began by carefully sliding a piece of printer paper under the ants to pick them up and transport them outside. This works well with Sugar Ants, but I was having trouble with the miniscule oil ants so we switched tools. I got a remnant of porous linen from my fabric scrap box and very gently swished up the ants with it, taking care to be as soft in my movements as possible so as not to damage the ants’ tiny, fragile antennae and legs, which are so important to them. Once outside, they can go rejoin their colony again and start making other plans for finding a summer home.

In twenty minutes of relays from the sink to the kitchen door, my husband and I had transported the swarm outside. It is my observation that when ants stop returning to their home base, the ants at home realize something is wrong and pause in sending new ants. So, once you’ve got the ants outside, you can take step two.

With a clean sponge, carefully wipe down all of the areas where the ants were walking with vinegar and non-toxic liquid soap. We like Avalon Organics peppermint. We have observed that this appears to remove the ants’ scent trails and discourages them from thinking they’ve claimed the kitchen as belonging to them.

Lastly, locate the point of entry for the ants and make a barrier around it with non-toxic liquid soap. No new ants will be able to cross over it if you carefully surround the entry area. Thus, your little problem is solved.

If you’ve got the larger Sugar Ants, the solution is often even easier. If you can pound on the counter and wall where they are walking and speak in a low, loud voice, telling them to go away, they turn and run back to their entry point 9 times out of 10. They do not like that awesome, massive voice warning them and they don’t like the vibrations. You can also blow gently on them. They don’t seem to like the smell of human breath or the gust of wind.

If this doesn’t work, you can use the printer paper or soft cloth technique. Always follow up by washing away the scent trail and creating the barrier around the entry point.

What It Takes
What it takes is time. It took us about 25 minutes from start to finish to deal with this visitation of oil ants. Apart from the soap, which we already have on-hand as a household staple, this solution costs nothing. But the real savings is so much more far-reaching than that. We aren’t poisoning nature’s important creatures, we aren’t poisoning our neighbors and we aren’t poisoning ourselves. In today’s toxic world, you can’t overstate the value of that.

Insecticides and pesticides have been created and marketed to the laziness of people. The proposition made is that you can either put in a few minutes of your time or your can poison yourself. Amazingly, Americans so often choose poisoning themselves because they are obsessed with ’saving time’, or, sadly, because they don’t realize what their non-toxic options are for dealing with small inconveniences in daily life.

We Are Like The Ants
Agribusiness and CDFA are the epitome of the lazy approach to living in this world. Rather than working hard to create a good, and vibrant Earth with healthy ecosystems where good farming practices and diversity keep all populations in a correct balance, farmers have been marketed the lazy, ‘time-saving’ poison approach. Thousands of years of indigenous agriculture say that poly-culture (growing lots of kinds of plants together in the same place) keeps soils healthy and foods nutritious. But farmers have been sold the non-sustainable approach of growing vast acreages of a single crop (monoculture) and covering the land in poisons because the other organisms get so out of balance in so artificial a setting.

Rather than teaching farmers to grow abundant food with organic polyculture, CDFA intends to blanket 7 million human beings, all lands, all wildlife with carcinogenic, deadly poisons because of the presence of a single kind of bug. It would be like dropping a nuclear bomb on your house because you found a ladybug in your bathroom. It might be a quick way to get rid of the lady bug, but then, you’d end up with no place to live.

And that’s what Agribusiness and profit-driven, shamefully lazy entities like California Department of Food and Agriculture are doing. Blowing up the house because of a ladybug.

We are like the ants that visited my kitchen today. Innocent, hardworking beings, just trying to go about our business, meaning no harm to anyone. My respect for nature and myself made the scene in my home play out so that no toxins were inflicted on anyone, and the one chance to live life was honored for all beings. But CDFA claims that California is their house, and they refuse to deal with us respectfully. Their fingers are on the triggers of the vast pesticide bottles and they have no compunction about poisoning us all. Because they are allowed to neglect the wisdom and necessity of sustainable polyculture that makes NO insect a major threat when the environment is so diverse. Because they are after the instant answer and the easy money. Because they are so lazy.

Gandhi said you must be the change you want to see in the world. I want to see people finally reach the consciousness that a little ant’s life is as much to him as my life is to me. In vain, have countless people tried to win this recognition of our own value, our own hopes, dreams, lives, from CDFA so that they will realize the evil of poisoning us. I believe in doing unto others as we would be done by.

So, there is no Raid in my cabinet. There is no devilish Round-Up in my tool shed. And I can’t stop working until I am secure in the knowledge that there will be no deadly Checkmate in my body.

Greetings Readers!

On the vegan forums and blogs I visit, I see three things that concern me.

1) Parents who are scared about their kids going vegan. Understandably, they are concerned about proper nutrition. I applaud that and certainly share their worries of a child being malnourished by adopting an animal-product-free diet that consists mainly of meat substitutes and potato chips.

2) New adult vegans who get into eating habits that rely mainly on packaged, processed foods because they are still craving meat and dairy products. While this is understandable for brand new vegans, in the long term, adopting a diet that focuses on substitutes instead of whole foods is not the best choice for human health or planet health.

3) Well-funded advertising campaigns trying to grab the vegan dollar in exchange for foods with little nutritional value. A box of white rice with a packet of seasoning may not contain animal products, but it also doesn’t contain real food. Marketing executives have realized that it can be profitable to cater to vegans, but they are often unscrupulous as to what they are advertising under the dubious umbrella label of ‘natural’.

Isn’t it enough if I’ve stopped eating animal products?

So you’ve gone vegan, and instead of the hot dogs and macaroni & cheese of yesteryear, your fridge is stocked with soy dogs and imitation cheese macaroni. Let me be the first to thank you for adopting this compassionate lifestyle. Vegan kitchens have a kind and wholesome atmosphere you will not find elsewhere. I hope you are feeling really positive and joyful about the new choices you are making at the market.

But, this is the Hard Truths category of Vegan Reader, so I’m going to take a closer look at what’s going into your shopping cart.

Over the past decade, the meat and cheese substitute offerings have truly skyrocketed. When I went vegan some 17 years ago, there simply was not the array of commercial products available that there are today. Now, we have a choice of brands, just like real Americans. We have Gimme Lean, Smart Dogs, Yves, Fantastic Foods, Boca…the list goes on and on.

On the one hand, it’s nice to have options. It’s nice to know that corporations realize there are vegans sitting at the table.

On the other hand, these pre-prepared, heavily processed foods have the power to turn vegans away from the simple, whole foods diet that is actually best for them and for the world. I see Americans as being particularly in danger of getting sucked in by clever marketing. Remember, we were raised by our society to be obedient consumers, freely giving our time and attention to the demands of corporations who served up the ads and TV commercials that told us what to eat, wear, and buy. Manufacturers of vegan products want your money, too, and that is why vegans need to keep exercising the discernment that helped them to see beyond the typical American lifestyle in the first place.

Which of the following sounds best for you and your planet?

Meal One:

• Brown rice and red beans bought in bulk and cooked at home
• Tomatoes and lettuce from the farmer’s market
• Homemade hummus as a nice sauce
• Homemade spice cookies for dessert

Meal Two:

• Road’s End Packaged Penne and Chreese
• Gimme Lean Textured Vegetable Protein Sausage
• Cascadian Farm Frozen Hash Browns
• Tofutti Cuties for dessert

No animals were harmed or killed in the making of either meal, thank goodness, but the similarities end there. Meal #1 is accomplished with a minimum of factory processing, and the purchase of local vegetables, where possible, further cuts down on fuel emissions.

Meal #2, by contrast, is an extravaganza of factory processing and not one of the items on the menu are whole or fresh. Optimum nutrition for this planet’s animals (including we humans) comes from eating foods that are as close to their natural form as possible. If the contents of your shopping cart are predominantly processed foods, the amount of energy being consumed to put dinner on your table is as wasteful as if you were eating a Hungry Man dinner. And, because so many vegan products are so heavily processed, the resultant nutrition is quite dubious, despite vitamin or mineral additives.

The Big Lie

One of the American food industry’s most clever and successful pitches to the public is that modern people don’t have time to cook. Since the 1930’s, so-called convenience foods have been billed as saviors for the overworked homemaker. Inventions from Bisquick to Jiffy Pop have promised to save us hours of time in the kitchen.

The truth is, this is a big lie.

I urge you to stop listening to any marketing firm that tells you you are benefiting from the swap of their prepared 10 minute white rice for your 20 minute bulk brown rice. You are winding up with poor nutrition and a house cluttered with fancy recycling materials. During the extra 10 minutes it takes for your brown rice to cook, make a salad, talk to your dear ones, step outside for a last look at the setting sun. Don’t listen to Uncle Ben.

When I met my husband, he was subsisting on microwave vegetarian foods in plastic trays. No one had taught him how to cook, and he didn’t think he would have time to prepare a home cooked meal. My feeling was that he simply didn’t love himself enough to take proper care of his need to eat. Fast forward years into the future and you will find my husband concocting fabulous from-scratch soups, burritos, salads, pies, pizzas and casseroles. He loves cooking for us. I consider it one of the most loving things he does for me. And we love spending time together in our kitchen.

Our pantry is stocked with basic staple whole foods, and from these things, we can make an almost endless number of healthy, tasty meals. We work long days and lead a busy life together, but we are not willing to do a deal with any society that tells us there is no time for us to feed ourselves. That is a mindset that speaks of unfeeling neglect.

Finding The Middle Ground

Going vegan is easier for some people than others. The last thing I want to do is discourage you from making this important change in your life. If that means you need to begin with packaged foods that mimic typical American products, go for it. I would ask only that you make these crossover eating habits temporary.

The core of the vegan heart is love and compassion for one’s self, one’s fellow earthlings, and the environment. In becoming vegan, strive to develop habits that improve the way you care for yourself while at the same time cutting down on the energy and pollution involved in others providing for you. Processed foods are not optimal for your body or the Earth.

Does this mean you can never buy anything that comes in a box, can, or container? Wouldn’t I love to be able to say ‘yes’ to that, but the fact is, few of us have the luxury of living on self-sufficient farms where we can grow everything we need. Because of that, we’re going to have to buy our rice, our flour, our rice milk, our maple syrup from someone else. And, once in a while, we may simply feel like trying out a package of vegan raviolis or vegan Polish sausages, just to see how they taste. If you are eating a diet that is predominantly made up of whole foods, don’t worry about buying a couple of containers of vegan ice cream in the summertime. Variety is important.

My hope is that in reading Vegan Reader, you will discover new ways in which you can cook most of what you eat from scratch. I know that the fake meat/dairy appeal is huge, but if I show you how to make convincing ‘ham’, ‘hot dogs’, ‘chicken’, and ’steak’ out of simple tofu, will you give it a try? My goal is to see you feeling skilled and powerful when it comes to nourishing yourself in a way that is truly loving.