The Republic of T.

OK. It’s too late for Thanksgiving, but there’s at least one other somewhat turkey-centric holiday coming down the pike. (In the gastronomic sense, at least.) So, I gotta do this.

I’m not sure why this article, which is over a year old, showed up in my RSS reader today, but what kind of vegetarian would I be if I didn’t remind people that eating your veggies is good for you and the planet?
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I haven’t commented on the biggest meat recall ever, but this caught my eye. The USDA wants to put cameras in slaughterhouses.

Cameras could be placed in about 800 U.S. slaughterhouses to watch for improper procedures and inhumane handling of cattle, a federal official said Thursday.

A Senate committee recommended installing the cameras three years ago, but the proposal is getting new consideration in the wake of a massive recall of beef last month, Agriculture Undersecretary Richard Raymond told a House committee Thursday.

“It is really the inhumane handling issue,” Raymond told CNN. “I can’t see putting these in a plant that makes jerky, in a processing plant.”

Raymond said that logistical issues still exist, including figuring out who would watch the cameras and how they would be controlled.

“Those are the considerations we would have to take under advisement before we make a decision up or down on the camera issue,” he said.

Oh boy. Wasn’t it video that made this whole story explode?

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Kip has posed an interesting question, and since he noted me as one of two vegetarians among his readership, I thought ought to join the discussion.

So I was sitting in my undisclosed location a few days ago, cleaning out my aggregator and listening to the radio, when I heard a commercial — for what I cannot recall — that contained, give or take a word or two, the following pronouncement:

I’m a vegetarian. A man once offered me $50 to eat a buffalo wing. I decided that my morality was worth more than that.

It seems to me that this woman, by refusing to take the money, is actually declaring that her morality is worth less than $50, and indeed worth zero.

Interesting question. Of course, Kip has more.

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Normally, I’d stick this in asides, but I just upgraded Wordpress and my asides are not working. It looks like more meat-eaters are ordering Tofurky this year.

Tofurky hit store shelves in 1995, and the meatless dish has become a cultural phenomenon, even showing up on the TV shows ” Jeopardy” and “The O.C.” Tibbott’s company, Turtle Island Foods of Hood, Ore., has annual revenue of $11 million. Tofurky sales have grown 37 percent this year from 2006. He expects to sell 270,000 Tofurkys by the end of the holiday season, which translates to 438,000 pounds of tofu, wheat protein, canola oil and spices.
The concept was born of Tibbott’s vegetarian frustrations. After attending Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, he left for college in Ohio in 1969 and returned home having sworn off meat. Thanksgiving was particularly tough, he said, recalling a nasty bout with a stuffed pumpkin and a rock-hard gluten roast.

“We were looking for something for an answer and we figured there’s probably other people out there,” he said.

A 2006 poll conducted by Harris Interactive for the nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group found that about 2 percent of adults are vegetarian, meaning they do not eat meat, poultry or seafood. The total was up from about 1 percent from a similar study the group conducted in 1994. The percentage of adults who do not eat poultry in particular grew to 6 percent from 3 percent.

The market, meanwhile, has been helped by omnivores who seek alternatives to meat for health reasons. They helped turn vegetarian foods into a $1.2 billion industry last year, up 44 percent from 2001, the consumer research firm Mintel said. The report found that 23 percent of non-vegetarians eat meat alternatives, though consumers still say the products cannot match the real thing.

Well, there might be one more health-related reason to lay off the meat this year. There’s a new additive that’s apparently all the rage. Carbon monoxide.

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People are always asking me about where to find vegetarian food in the metro D.C. area, and back in March I posted a review of several vegetarian or veg-friendly eateries in the area. Well I have another to add after this weekend, thanks to my ever-so-thoughtful non-vegetarian husband who — even though he’s so not a vegetarian — always keeps an eye out for vegetarian restaurants we haven’t been to yet. That’s the kind of guy he is, even though I like to joke that he was on the Atkin’s Diet before there was an Atkin’s Diet.

So I wasn’t surprised when he told me about Sunflower Restaurant, which was totally vegetarian and has locations in Falls Church and Vienna, VA. Initially, I thought maybe Cafe Sunflower, where Katharine and I had dinner once, had branched out of Atlanta. That would have been fine by me, but when I checked out the menu online I was even more intrigued. We made plans to visit for dinner
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Normally, as a vegetarian and someone concerned about animal welfare, PETA’s activities make me cringe. (My favorite group as far as vegetarian activism goes is Compassion Over Killing.) So I don’t may much attention to PETA. That’s too bad, because I end up missing things like their contest to pick the Sexiest Vegetarian Alive.

Now, that’s something I can get behind. It’s particularly cool that the contestants are everyday people, rather than celebrities. I’ve already case my vote, but here are my picks from among the guys. (Sorry, I didn’t cast a vote for any of the women. I can appreciate a beautiful women, of course, but sexiness isn’t something I think about when it comes to women.)

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After grinding away most of the week on a project at work, I’ve fallen behind in my blogging and my blog reading. I’m just about through digging through my RSS feeds. (I know, there’s this handy function called “mark all read” that I should probably learn how to use, but then I’d miss something) That’s just marking the stuff I want to read. Actually reading it comes later.

Being in the habit of posting regularly is a hard habit to break. Half the time, as is the case now, I’ve got four or five posts in mind that I want to write at some point, and I spend a good bit of time thinking about what I want to write while actually doing something else. I won’t have time to write the posts that are percolating in my brain until sometime later. But in the interest of not letting things lie fallow for too long here. I thought I’d post something I’ve been meaning to write for a while.

It’s the answer to a question I often get from people who are about to visit the area. Where are the best places to go for vegetarian food in D.C.?

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Never mind that business that soy products my might make your kid gay. If junior’s chowing down on tofu and turning up his nose at meat, it might just mean you’ve got a bright kid on your hands, according to a study suggesting that bright children are more likely to become vegetarians.

It’s official – vegetarians really are smarter. But it is not because of what they eat. Bright children are more likely to reject meat and opt to become vegetarians when they grow up, a study has shown. Clever veggies are born not made.

The finding helps explain how a team of vegetarians won the BBC Test the Nation competition in September, when they beat off competition from six other teams including butchers, public school pupils and footballers’ wives to achieve the highest overall IQ score.

… Researchers from the University of Southampton who conducted the study agree. They suggest that vegetarians are more thoughtful about what they eat. But they say it is unclear whether bright children choose to become vegetarians for the health benefits or for other reasons, such as a concern for animals, or as a lifestyle choice.

The scientists began investigating the link between IQ and vegetarianism because people with higher intelligence have a lower risk of heart disease, which has long puzzled doctors.

There are a few other interesting bits of information, including a finding that vegetarians are likely to be better educated and of “higher social class.” If you ask me, I think that makes sense in part because those two factors make more likely to be able to spend much time thinking about what you eat, and to put more effort in buying particular kinds of foods. You probably have a grocery store in your neighborhood, maybe even a Whole Foods, and/or transportation to get you there and back home.

But, it’s easier to eat healthy if you live in the suburbs, where there are grocery stores and health food stores, and have the money to spend. In other words, it’s easier to make healthier choices when healthier choices are readily available. When they’re not, it’s not.

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Per my comment on the previous post — concerning claims of a connection between soy, homosexuality and penis size — it turns out that science bears out my personal experience.

The relation between sexual orientation and penile dimensions in a large sample of men was studied. Subjects were 5,122 men interviewed by the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction from 1938 to 1963. They were dichotomously classified as either homosexual (n = 935) or heterosexual (n = 4187). Penile dimensions were assessed using five measures of penile length and circumference from Kinsey’s original protocol. On all five measures, homosexual men reported larger penises than did heterosexual men. Explanations for these differences are discussed, including the possibility that these findings provide additional evidence that variations in prenatal hormonal levels (or other biological mechanisms affecting reproductive structures) affect sexual orientation development.

Proving once again that with guys it all comes down to “Who’s Got the Biggest.” Or at least thinks he does. Maybe that’s the root of the concern expressed by the WorldNetDaily columnist. In which case I suggest he try the tofu hot dog challenge.

It’s from Alfred Kinsey, though. So the nutters will disregard it anyway.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

So, I don't really have much to say about the latest bit of wingnutia to hit the blogs; namely, the notion that too much tofu can make you gay. Two reasons. One, I kinda covered it last year, when I spotted it on the LIA/R website. Two, I was gay long before I was a vegetarian, and never touched tofu until I was in college. The site LIA/R linked to is no longer live, but here it is as I saw it, via the Wayback machine, and  "The Debate" about soy and homosexuality. My advice? If you want to worry about food, worry about factory farming, food regulations, working conditions, and what's going to to give your kid e.coli.

Not to spoil anyone’s appetite, but I found this picture here via this Alternet article, and had to share. If that’s who I think it is on the table — that is, if it’s who it looks like — I wouldn’t recommend him to the diners. My guess is he’s gonna be tough, stringy, and more than a little bitter.

Speaking of tough and bitter — again, not to ruin anyone’s appetite — the Alternet article offer a rather interesting look at turkeys from someone who developed a kind of bond with them, after meeting a few at an animal sanctuary and discovering alternatives to traditional Thanksgiving fare. There’s a video too, after the jump, but I’d recommend waiting until well after dinner to watch it.

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I was impressed with Abigail Garner’s blog, Damn Straight, after reading it for a while, so it was inevitable that I’d pick up her book Families Like Mine: Children of Gay Parents Tell It Like It Is. Plus, as Parker approaches birthday number four, I want to try and understand as much as I can about what he’s going to face, and how I can help him deal with it. Two chapters in, and I’m already underlining significant passages for future reference.

But one passage that jumped out at me was this reaction to a reporter defining gay families having “made it onto the front page of the newspaper” as “success.”

Being profiled in the paper simply because I was from one of those famiiles is progress, but not success. Success will be when a child with LGBT parents can be profiled for some other reason, and the mention of his or her family can be referenced without sexual orientation becoming the main focus.

Sometime yesterday, after reading that passage, I returned to this Washignton Post article about teenage vegetarians, that I’d bookmarked for later reading. I actually ha to go back to the beginning and read it again before I thought of what Abigail had written about progress vs. success.

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Not that I ever need an excuse to eat Ben & Jerry's ice cream, but I have one now that they've switched to cage free eggs.