VegWorcester.com

Johnny Rockets and PETA are teaming up for a Buy One Get One Free veggie burger giveaway to celebrate World Vegetarian Week (May 19-25).

Johnny Rockets has been offering their Steamliner veggie burger for a couple of years now. They’re good! Unfortunately, there aren’t any Johnny Rockets in Worcester but there’s one in the Natick Mall, just off of Route 9. Johnny Rocket’s website also lists ones in the Boston Logan Airport, the Burlington Mall in Burlington and at the South Shore Plaza in Braintree. So if you’re planning to be in any of those places, you should stop by the Johnny Rockets with a friend and get a couple of Steamliners.

Johnny Rockets is cool and all, but Worcester is the home of the diner. We have a ton of diners in Worcester and there are a handful that stock veggie burger. Ralph’s Diner at 148 Grove Street is good choice. Ralph’s also hosts shows pretty regularly, so if you go at the right time you might get some music to go with your burger.

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Boston-based filmmaker and activist Eric Prescott is raising money for a new film called “I’m Vegan”. Maybe you know Eric from the Boston Vegan Association or his blog, An Animal-Friendly Life.

In any case, the film sounds like a neat idea. This is how he describes it in his own words:

“I’m Vegan” is a series of short documentary profiles featuring vegans from all walks of life, produced with an eye toward addressing preconceived notions about vegans and veganism.
…
The various profile subjects are followed by a camera as they go about their daily business, all of which is edited around the central narrative of an interview that provides the structure and the context to counter negative stereotypes of vegans and veganism, and to promote veganism by portraying it as healthy and positive.

To maximize variety and diversity, interviews will be conducted with vegans around the country to meet a goal of capturing a few dozen profiles. These profiles will stand alone on the internet, but the director and cinematographer will also capture “b roll” footage to add to a feature-length documentary that weaves all the profiles together as part of a road trip to meet vegans around the U.S. With contacts at PBS and other potential avenues for distribution, it makes sense to take the footage we have and try to reach a less web-focused audience as well.

I hope he can get the dough!

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The fine folks at Compassion Over Killing in Washington DC have successfully convinced 2 DC-area Dunkin Donuts to offer soymilk. Hooray!

Dunkin Donuts is the world’s largest coffee and baked good chain. Just imagine if they were to offer soymilk at each of their 5,500 stores. Actually, that’s exactly what Compassion Over Killing is trying to get DD to do. They’re calling on people across the country to meet with Dunkin Donuts store managers in their area to request soymilk at all of the 5,500 locations.

We definitely need to get some Worcester DD’s to sell soymilk. We have over a dozen in our little city.

Want to help get soymilk at a local Dunkin Donuts? Here are some tips from the COK feature:

• Contact your local Dunkin’ Donuts store. Click here for store locations and phone numbers. Or, better yet, stop in to your local Dunkin’ Donuts and ask to speak to the manager about adding soy milk. Be sure to let him or her know that there are other Dunkin’ Donuts stores already making this option available to customers.
• Email Dunkin Donuts’ Consumer Care Office and thank them for adding soy milk to two DC-area locations, and ask them to make soy milk available in all locations, like most national coffee chains already do.
• Call Dunkin’ Donuts’ Consumer Care hotline at 1-800-859-5339.
• Write to Dunkin’ Donuts. Express your concerns in a letter and send it to:
  Dunkin’ Donuts Consumer Care
  130 Royall Street
  Canton, MA 02021

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Ingrid Newkirk, the president and a co-founder of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is a big fan of lab-grown meat. She is such a big of a fan of it that she has convinced her organization to pledge one million dollars to the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

From the New York Times:

The idea of getting the next Chicken McNugget out of a test tube is not new. For several years, scientists have worked to develop technologies to grow tissue cultures that could be consumed like meat without the expense of land or feed and the disease potential of real meat. An international symposium on the topic was held this month in Norway. The tissue, once grown, could be shaped and given texture with the kinds of additives and structural agents that are now used to give products like soy burgers a more meaty texture.

Definitely read the whole New York Times article.

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Wired Magazine published an article on the possibility of growing meat in a lab. I’m skeptical that technology is going to solve all the social problems created by meat production. But lab-meat is an interesting idea.

Here’s an excerpt from Wired’s story:

In five to 10 years, supermarkets might have some new products in the meat counter: packs of vat-grown meat that are cheaper to produce than livestock and have less impact on the environment.

….

“To produce the meat we eat now, 75 to 95 percent of what we feed an animal is lost because of metabolism and inedible structures like skeleton or neurological tissue,” Jason Matheny, a researcher at Johns Hopkins and co-founder of New Harvest, a nonprofit that promotes research on in vitro meat, told Wired.com. “With cultured meat, there’s no body to support; you’re only building the meat that eventually gets eaten.”

read more…

While lab-meat addresses some of the ethical and environmental issues related to meat production, it does not address the health issues. The US has obesity epidemic, a problem that affects young people more than anyone else. Eating meat is terrible for you and growing it in a lab won’t fix that.

We’ll just have to see where this story goes. Maybe by 2030 we’ll have a new kind of faux meat.

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The Telegram & Gazette is reporting that the Super 88 that was planned for downtown Worcester is “no-go” on Go/No-Go test.

That’s too bad! The Super 88s in Boston are neat Asian markets with tons of mock meats and weird veg things. You can even get vegetarian duck in a can:

But lucky for you, there are already some quality Asian markets in Worcester. If weird mock-meats are your idea of a good time, check out Mekong Market at 747 Main Street in Worcester (map), where you can pick up a bag of frozen veg. shrimp complete with nice little soy-based eyes that look up at you.

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New research from researchers at the University of Illinois and the Instituto de Fermentaciones Industriales (CSIC) in Madrid, Spain suggests that allergen-free soy products could be nearer than previously thought, simply by fermenting the beans with a number of microorganisms.

Now, I think it’s silly that some people believe eating soy is such an important part of a healthy vegan diet. Soy is just one kind of bean. There are thousands of different varieties of grains, beans, fruits, vegetables, and legumes. There’s an infinite combination of those ingredients. If you’re allergic to soy you can definitely still be vegan. But it’s still good news that scientists are discovering that we can have allergen-free soy.

Actually for the seriously soy-allergic in Worcester who want to get some mock meat dishes, check out Red Lantern at 235 Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, phone number: 508-795-0500. They have an extensive vegetarian section on their menu that includes homemade red-bean veg chicken, made with not a single soy bean. Their General Tso’s Veg Chicken is fantastic! They even deliver.

[study via VegCast]

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If you get a chance, pick up a copy of the current issue of Worcester’s InCity times. They published Mike’s challenge to Worcester’s entire vegetarian community in this week’s edition.

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Check out this upbeat article in the Baltimore Sun about vegan women.

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In the style section of today’s New York Times there’s an article on Casa Diablo, a vegan strip club in Portland, Oregon: The Carrot Some Vegans Deplore. FYI there aren’t any nudie-pictures in the article but there are on their myspace page.

From the New York Times:

TWO things that you can find a lot of in Portland, Ore., are vegans and strip clubs. Johnny Diablo decided to open a business to combine both. At his Casa Diablo Gentlemen’s Club, soy protein replaces beef in the tacos and chimichangas; the dancers wear pleather, not leather. Many are vegans or vegetarians themselves.

read more…

via Boing-boing

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