Happy Thanksliving 2020
Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle From All-Creatures.org

Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.

FROM Victoria Moran, MainStreetVegan.net
November 2020

We vegans are still a small minority, but we're a vibrant, vocal, noticeable minority. And we're back by both science and morality. For that, and for you, I am thankful.

There are people in our circles who will be like I was then: having meat for the last time, or almost the last time, tomorrow. Something in them will awaken, as it awakened in us. And it won't take them years to get from vegetarian to vegan, the way it did for me.

Main Street Vegan

Thanksgiving greetings ...

This is the strangest holiday for vegans. We're as grateful as anybody else, and yet we know that this day means that millions of bright, curious, affectionate birds have been slaughtered for the sake of "tradition." We deal with this dichotomy in our individual ways, but we're all dealing with it some way.

And this year, with its pandemic oddity, smaller family gatherings and none at all, can add stress to our annual run-in with cognitive dissonance and the utter cluelessness of our fellow humans, even those who "love animals." It helps me to remember when I was one of them.

I last ate meat on Thanksgiving. It was 1968 and I'd been back in Kansas City only a few days after eight months in London. I'd stayed for every minute my student visa allowed and returned desolate from that city across the Atlantic that held for me every romantic dream and magical notion. This was where, a year and half earlier at a crowded club called Bag o' Nails, Paul McCartney had called me by name, bought me a drink, and sang a poignant little ditty: "I wish I weren't a Beatle, because maybe then I could have some fun." It was where I'd taken yoga classes with a real teacher, joined Weight Watchers and lost 30 pounds, and started on the road to vegetarianism: still eating fish (it was a Weight Watchers rule: 5 times a week) but no land animals.

And I found myself back in KC with Thanksgiving upon me. I was living with my erstwhile nanny, Dede, in a studio apartment in the Art Institute neighborhood replete with old houses and young hippies. Dede, in her mid-seventies, had a weekend job as a caregiver for a more senior senior, so any Thanksgiving feasting was up to me. I invited five friends who all said yes, and it seemed obvious that there had to be a turkey or something like it. I didn't know any vegetarians except my yoga teacher, and she was over 4,000 miles away, but surely even vegetarians took the day off for Thanksgiving.

I'd never cooked a turkey and the apartment's small oven may not have even held one, so I bought six rock Cornish game hens. That seemed manageable and the "Cornish" part hearkened back to England. I cleaned and decorated and made stuffing and sweet potatoes. The apple pies had been purchased frozen, but they'd be hot from the oven, with ice cream on the side. I felt proud, and grown up at 18.

There wasn't room on the dinette table for serving dishes, so we sat down to plates filled restaurant-style. I looked at the seasonally dressed table, taking a long, slow snapshot that's etched in my brain to this day: six little corpses. Six precious lives. Serving turkey would have been one murder; this was half a dozen.

I ate the meal, laughed with my friends, and accepted their compliments about the "great food" and "pretty table." Then I was done. I became firmly pescatarian in 1968, vegetarian in 1969. Vegan would take longer, but that Thanksgiving was a turning point.

There are people in our circles who will be like I was then: having meat for the last time, or almost the last time, tomorrow. Something in them will awaken, as it awakened in us. And it won't take them years to get from vegetarian to vegan, the way it did for me.

Tofurky reported selling six million holiday roasts this year, more than ever in company history, despite large numbers of competing brands and plenty of people making their own meatless entrees from scratch. We're still a small minority, but we're a vibrant, vocal, noticeable minority. And we're back by both science and morality. For that, and for you, I am thankful.

Love,
Victoria


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