Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Delicious Meat Free Meat

Amid a long day of studying for what quite possibly is the world's most boring exam (Series 6), I made plans to meet up with an old friend from the Boston days. He is vegan, which I can't help but to give him a hard time about, and likes to do vegan things. So we went to Moo Shoes, which is a vegan shoe store so that he could buy some crunchy shoes for his new job. Then we went to Red Bamboo, a store specializing in turning things that are decidedly not meat (soy) into things that taste like meat. It was surprisingly delicious. It really tastes and has the consistency of chicken. Crazy Asians! (My only complaint is that they didn't have a single spicy dish in a 4-page menu)

I have a few questions from my experience:

  1. Wasn't McDonald's the master of the meatless patty? What was so bad about that?
  2. Are plastic/rubber shoes any more sustainable than leather ones?
    1. Cow herding generally means colossally bad land management practices (water, rainforest, to name a few)
    2. The methane that bovine produce is pretty toxic to the environment
    3. Some find it inhumane to kill animals
    4. If they're being killed for food, isn't it better to at least use all parts? Do we do that?
    5. (Yes I understand that if you don't kill for food, then you don't have that problem, but damn cows taste good)
    6. The rubber industry is riddled with problems ranging from child labor to deforestation to toxic dumping and other environmental degradation
    7. Plastic is made out of oil. Need I say more?
Those are the things I can think of to at least start. Anyone have evidence one way or the other? It's definitely partially up to your personal preference on the meat eating issue. I used to be a vegetarian -- for 5 years. And then I went to college, decided I needed to try new things, and gained 20 pounds. Maybe that vegetarian thing was a good idea after all.

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Something Else

Madame or Monsieur Anonymous is ready for me to post something else. I've been debating lately whether this is still the right thing to do. It has come to the point where this blog comes up in google searches when you put in all or part of my name and while I was kind of keen on that idea at first, it poses a privacy issue. I (used to) tend to write much more personally here, but I can't be quite so candid any more. Also, I can't write about work at all because I work in a highly regulated industry that would frown on that kind of activity. And since I haven't been any more creative than that, I haven't posted anything decent in a long time.

I have posted some stuff to flickr lately. Well, more lately than this.

Anyway, Anonymous, point taken. I'll try to be more creative.