Eat

“Less meat, less junk, more plants. Eat food, eat real food.” – Mark Bittman, during his talk, What’s wrong with what we eat. Mark Bittman is the New York Times food columnist of The Minimalist.

Egg

Rescued hens enjoying a dust bath at Farm Sanctuary in upstate NY; August 2005.

I sometimes joke with my friends that if I ever started eating animal products again, it would be Popeye’s chicken. However, I’m quite sure I will never go back to eating animals again because the pleasure of being vegetarian is far greater than the immediate pleasure such a thing could ever provide.

For people looking to go vegetarian, Erik Marcus believes that the first food to give up should be eggs. A strange choice to many as cows, pigs, chickens, fish, etc. require the killing of these animals to be turned into food. However, many do not know certain types of chickens are bred specifically to produce large number of eggs; unfortunately a byproduct of this process are male chickens. They grow too slowly to be profitable to raise for meat so they are immediately put to death. In the US, I estimate the number of male chicks killed each year is pegged at 300 200 million male chicks and 50 million in the UK.

If they are lucky enough to be female chicks, they can endure the following injustices in their life:

• Beak searing or debeaking – removing part of the beak to prevent birds from pecking each other – something that happens in confined conditions;
• Confinement – they are confied to a battery cage and get about get about 67 square inches of floor space (that’s about 8×8 inches/20cm square) – less than the size of a sheet of paper;
• Forced molting – a process to increase egg production; hens have their food taken away for seven to fourteen days, lighting is dimmed to mimic winter conditions stressing the body in anticipation of spring. This kills the weaker birds.

Most grocery store eggs come from such practices. Free-range eggs are usually derived from chicks obtained from the same source as where the factory farms obtain their chicks. Free-range chickens are usually without a battery cage, but not excluded from over-crowding in a big pen, called yarding. The conditions in Canada aren’t much different that in the US or elsewhere in the world. Food for thought.

Update (6.2.08): Jamie Oliver shows an audience what happens to the male chicks.

Vegan.com

I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to have Erik Marcus blog about one of my food photos of vegetable rolls on his website Vegan.com. Erik is an author and advocate of vegetarianism and animal rights. I read his first book, Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating, when I first went vegetarian. In Vegan, he writes about the three pillars of vegetarianism, health, animal welfare and the environment and the importance of each and how inter-related they are. This was a good foundation and reinforced my decision to become vegetarian and remain vegetarian.

The foreword in the book was by Howard Lyman, a former cattle rancher turned vegetarian. Most know Howard as the person that appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and caused her to renounce beef. In the book, Howard also wrote about pesticides and chemicals in farming that caused him to become paralyzed (he eventually recovered). This caused me to read another book, Silent Spring that investigated pesticides and the effect on health, life and the environment of plants, animals and the planet.

Years later, when I became interested in animal advocacy, I read Erik’s second book, Meat Market: Animals, Ethics and Money. He wrote about the animal agriculture industry and the negative treatment of animals in factory farms as well as the peripheral industries such as slaughterhouses. He wrote that all people have compassion for animals and that education about their condition was the key to the reduction of consumption of animal products and the dismantling of the factory farms.

For me, any one of the reasons on their own are compelling enough for an individual to become vegetarian, however, when one thinks of the combination of all three, it is staggering to me why someone continues to consume animal products. By doing so, they advocate the harsh treatment of animals in factory farms, the overuse of resources to feed animals destined for slaughter and the negative effects animal products have on their health. When one goes vegetarian, everybody wins.

Below, the video, Meet Your Meat.

Wallis

Most people marry for love, correct? I’m not sure because I’ve never been married and I’m not sure about the love part. A friend told me a good analogy about love and life – to love someone, one should be willing to give up their life for that person. An example would be the love between a mother and child. That was the case with singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl who gave up her life for her son in a boating accident in Mexico.

Edward VIII was King of Great Britain, Ireland, the British Dominions beyond the Seas, and Emperor of India from January 1936 until his abdication on 11 December 1936. He did so in order to marry the woman that he loved, Wallis Simpson. The Prime Minister at the time told him that the people would deem the marriage morally unacceptable, largely because remarriage after divorce was opposed by the Church of England, and the people would not tolerate Wallis as Queen. Had he not done that, he would have lived a distinguished life as the King.

I do not think that money was ever an issue in his life, however, at his stature it is all about appearances. He gave up his royal life for the woman he loved.

My neighbour’s signed copy of The Heart Has Its Reasons by The Duchess of Windsor.

Free

Today we were free of the TTC – but inundated with cars. It wasn’t a big deal to me because I don’t really need transit where I live. I cycled to the beach via the dedicated lanes on Spadina and Queens Quay. I showed Melissa the way back via the dedicated lanes and she enjoyed it also! I think I’m not going to like it when the TTC goes back to work.

Shed

Crystals are supposed to be shiny and sparkle. However the Royal Ontario Museum Michael Lee-Chin Crystal does neither. Rather it is dull and grey or brown depending upon the light. This week, Condé Nast Traveler magazine named it one of the “new seven wonders of the world.” I’ve been calling it the tool shed because of the aluminum-plank exterior and the lack of glass; a friend calls it petrified dog-doo. The Globe and Mail’s architecture critic Lisa Rochon named it as, “the building most likely to come down in the next 20 years.” She also wrote,

“…it rages at the world” and, “Had it been clad in glass with the cacophony of steel beams exposed to the public, the museum would clearly represent an astonishing triumph.”

I couldn’t agree more. Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

I think Frank Ghery’s AGO, seen below under construction, will stand the test of time much longer.

Sacrifice

Yesterday, I walked by a luxury car dealership that was providing a discount because of currency fluctuations. Today, I read about Richard Branson‘s newest venture, an online charter airplane booking service, Virgin Charter. It is basically a service to purchase travel on a private jet for a discount*. I assume it’s geared towards cost conscious billionaires. He and his business partner claims that it is a green service because these planes fly empty 40-50% of the time. I’m not sure if that is true or not; I’ll be he isn’t sure either; but he’s probably right – which he is most of the time.

He seems so distant from his original days of selling discount records. Virgin’s brand now seems like it is in decline for the average person and is doing the job of helping the wealthy, which he is, save money. He was probably correct when he stated,

There aren’t very many virgins left…

*It may be at a discount, but it’s not cheap. One example was a seven passenger plane from Boca Raton, FL to Vail, CO (one way) for about US$12,000.

Camera-phone

The mobile phone is still a year or two away from replacing even a compact digital camera. They’ve come a long way since my first mobile with a camera in 2004. North Americans are notoriously slow at adopting new technology—mainly because it is expensive. North Americans are addicted to slick marketing, poorly functioning and cheap (read: bad) technology.

In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, a popular mobile company had introduced mobile phones with data capability in 1999 that included Internet browsing capability (i-Mode)—not WAP browsers which are text-based-which North Amerian carriers adopted. When I got my first cameraphone, the Palm Treo 600, in 2004, DoCoMo already had over 40 million subscribers; this on only one network in Japan.

It’s been getting better in North America recently. My friend Stef has a cooler phone than I do; and she uses it more than I use mine too. Her phone takes better photos than my existing Palm Treo 650 too.

Personally, the Apple iPhone was a disappointment. I’m waiting for the second generation of Apple iPhone which is rumoured to be out sometime in 2008.

One of my first camera phone images from 2004, a self-portrait, with a Treo 600.

A recent image of Stef with my Treo 650.

An image from Stef’s Samsung cameraphone:

My flickr set of mobile phones; click on the large image to advance to the next image.

Hillarious

Jack Nicholson, as The Joker, Col. Jessup (A Few Good Men), Jake Gittes (Chinatown) and himself in an ad for the Hillary Clinton Campaign.

I decided whether I should post this or not; but I don’t think it matters because I’m not American and have no say because I cannot vote in the US. Plus I do not really care who the next US president is—as long as it’s not George Bush! Yay!

I posted this for the entertainment value and Jack Nicholson is always good value.

Fire

Yesterday was a very busy, fun and a somewhat surreal day. My neighbour called me at 7:30am to tell me about a fire that razed a small block on Queen Street West in Toronto. She wanted me to take some photos of it. However, at the time, I was in Whistler – where it was 4:30am. I went back to sleep, but then I went skiing and then flew back to Toronto on the red-eye and then had a full day at work.

Last April when I was also in Whistler, she called me and told me that there was a fire at the restaurant on the corner of our street. It seems that many times when I’m away, a building seems to burn in the neighbourhood. There was a third fire at a grow-op in the Market when I was away last September. Below left is the result of the fire in April and on the right is the billowing clouds from the fire on Queen Street West.

Here are some equally memorable images – for different reasons. Captured yesterday at Seventh Heaven on Blackcomb mountain.