Tiger kills 6-year-old at zoo

I read in the papers yesterday about a tiger which killed a little girl in a zoo in China. The incident occured while the girl and her relatives were standing behind the tiger waiting for a photo-shoot. When the cameras flashed in front of the tiger, it turned around suddenly and bit the girl in the head. Animal trainers hit the tiger repeatedly with sticks and wooden stools until it released the girl a minute later. The girl died in hospital later. The tiger was one of the six which performed at a circus in the zoo.

It is very unfortunate that the girl died. There had been many other cases similar to this. I wonder what made the tiger go berserk when the cameras flashed. Considering it being a circus tiger, and I have read about the cruelty to animals behind-the-scences in circuses, I thought perhaps it was reminded of the torture it endured (if any) when the cameras flashed. Zoos are places where people can observe the animals, but how natural can the behavior of the animals be when they are kept in the same enclosure for most or all their lives. Who wouldn't go mad if they sit in prison all day? Visitors to the zoo, however, are not shown this side of the story.

Bird-brained

We heard the term "bird-brained" used sometimes, which means "very stupid". Unfortunately, it's time the dictionary substitute the phrase "bird-brained", because birds aren't stupid. You will now see a video of a crow making a tool. Click here to view the video

Vegan sample meal plans

Nowadays, a lot of people are concern about getting enough nutrients in their diet. Many people considering the move to a vegetarian or vegan diet may not take the leap because they are afraid an unbalanced veg diet will cause them to suffer from nutrient deficiency. But at the same time, it will be a lot of trouble to try to plan your own balanced meals. As such, I have decided to put together all the FREE vegan meal plans found on the internet. I am not sure if the meal plans are balanced, but the key to eating a balanced veg diet is to eat a VARIETY of veg food and have a source of B12 supplement. Hope it will help you in your vegan diet plan.


4-week vegetarian (can be veganized) meal plan for Meals on Wheels by VRG
21-day meal plan by vegan kickstart PCRM (you can sign up for their next 21-day kickstart)
3-week vegan meal plan by Toronto Vegetarian Association (you could get the plan for the 1st week by signing up for their 1 week veg challenge)
3-week vegan meal plan by Kathy Freston
2-week sample vegan menus by PETA chefs
2-week vegan meal plan by Greg Lawson at notmilk.com
3-day vegan meal plan by Dina Aronson
1-week low sodium vegan meal plan by VRG
1-week vegan meal plan (v-plan diet) by Vegetarian and Vegan Foundation
1-week vegan meal plan from NutriBase
7-day meal plan by Vega
5-day meal plan from Vegan Society (UK)
3/4-day Low cost and easy to prepare vegan menu plan by VRG
2/3-day Low cost vegan meal plan by VRG

This list is updated as on 20 Aug 2011. I will continue to update this list when I find more meal plans. If you know of any not in the list, please let me know by adding a comment or sending me an email. Thank you.

Vegetable carvings

Like the Lambs carved from cauliflowers? Check out more carving pictures HERE

Zoo raising public awareness of pig's intelligence

Thanks to the approaching New Year (year of the Pig), Singapore has finally given some focus on how intelligent pigs are. 3 five-month-old pigs in the Singapore zoo will be featured in the Happy Hogs Shows. The pigs will move through an obstacle course twice a day. They will run under a log, pick up a Chinese scroll and unfurl it, and talk into a microphone. This show made me suspect whether or not there is any cruelty behind the three-month training. I certainly hope there isn't, and the training is hurt-free. Despite this concern, bringing awareness to the intelligence of pigs is a rare thing seen here (the only other publicity on pigs intelligence I can think of is that given by our local vegetarian society) and I applaud the zoo for creating this awareness. I am glad more people will be learn about the intelligence of pigs and how they are very much like dogs. Hopefully, while chewing on the chinese new year ba kwa, they will make the missing connection.

I wish you an early Happy Chinese New Year as I will be spending my new year in Malaysia, be back to post more next week :)

Valentine's day Salad

Happy Valentine's Day :) How about dishing up a lovely red-coloured salad? I got this recipe from my local paper, which was actually meant for the Chinese New Year, but since today is Valentine's day, might as well use it :)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup chinese black vinegar
1/2 cup of brown sugar
250g punnet of strawberries
1 head red lettuce
1/2 head red cabbage, shredded finely
Toasted sesame seeds and roasted almond silvers (optional) for garnish

Dressing:
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp sesame oil
1 tsp sugar
2 Tbs rice vinegar
1 tsp light soya sauce
1/4 tsp salt

Method:
Place black vinegar and sugar in a small pot and heat till mixture thickens into a treacle. Leave aside.

Wipe strawberrys with a cloth. Do not wash or the flavour will leach away. Slice strawberries lengthwise. Wash and dry lettuce leaves. Shred red cabbage finely. Leave all aside.

Make up dressing by placing ingredients in a bowl and whisk with a fork to emulsify the mixture.

Place shredded cabbage in a bowl and pour over dressing. Toss to ensure that the leaves are well-coated.

Place lettuce leaves on a plate. Lay sliced strawberries on top, overlapping in concentric rings. Place a mound of dressed cabbage leaves in the middle. Garnish with toasted sesame seeds and, if you like, some roasted almond silvers.

Using a spoon, drizzle black vinegar syrup over the lot and serve at once.

Source: Sylvia Tan; Mind your Body - Living Well; Red Cabbage and Strawberry Salad with Chinese Black Vinegar; The Straits Times MICA (P) 198/12/2006

Chinese New Year vegetarian greeting card

As Chinese New Year is approaching, there are many animals killed... Vegetarian Society Singapore has come up with an e-card for New Year to encourage people to go vegetarian. View the card here.

Why I became a vegan

I've been asked many times why I became a vegetarian, so I decide to make this post. I first went vegetarian on 26 November 2002. I actually wanted to become a vegetarian on the 25th (which was international meatless day), but I accidently ate some animal-based soup that day.

It was religion which first influenced me. I am a Buddhist, and believe in rebirth. I was reading a Buddhist book one day when it suddenly dawned on me that the meat I was eating could have been the flesh of parents in my previous lifetimes. From then onwards, I feel uncomfortable whenever I ate meat. I tried to order less meat in the dishes in school, but I did not order a completely vegetarian meal as I was afraid my classmates would jeer at me.

Every year on a certain week, my mum will go vegetarian. I decided to do what she did as well. It was a relieve when that time arrive, I could eat vegetarian meals at school and yet able to answer my friends the reason when questioned.

My cousin also influenced me to some extent. When she was studying in Australia, she became a vegan. Once, when paying us a visit, she talked about how the cows were treated and things like whether the cows feel pain. If you are not a vegetarian, I can understand if you find my cousin strange - it was also a completely new idea for me and it has not crossed my mind before to think that way, and of course, I found it a bit strange too :)

So eventually, under these circumstances, I decided to become a vegetarian. After around 1.5 or 2 years I gradually shifted to a vegan diet after further understanding of veganism.

Reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

Richard Branson is offering $25m to anyone who can come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years.

2 crazy ideas that came to my mind was: Can we pack all the carbon dioxide and sent them to outerspace? Probably not lest it affects the carbon cycle. Or, if technology allows, perhaps we can compress them into liquid and pack them off to a container and release them slowly overtime, but how will it affect the carbon cycle and how much energy will be needed to do all these?

A more practical way would be to reduce meat consumption or become a vegetarian/vegan so as to decrease the demand for live stock production. In one of my previous post, I mentioned how factory farming results in more demands for land usage and deforestation. Deforestation can also be due to extensive logging and burning of forests.

Burning of fossil fuels also release CO2 into the atmosphere, and this process can be slowed down by using alternative renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy.

Slowing down the above two processes reduces the release of carbon into the atmosphere, but what can we do about taking carbon back from the atmosphere? One way is to plant more trees. Trees use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis and reduce the amount present in the air.

Weighing the importance between our home and the economic benefits from environmentally unfriendly practices is a pressing issue. We are all interdependent on one another, being rich or poor is mere comparison, if everyone dies, what’s the use of having lots of money?

Alain Passard and his L'Arpege

In our local paper yesterday, there was an article featuring an interview with Alain Passard - a three-Michelin-starred chef who runs the L'Arpege restaurant in Paris. L'Arpege is one of the most famous restaurant in the world and dining there costs around 500 dollars per head, drinks excluded. Alain Passard is not a vegetarian, but he has a passion in cooking with fruits and vegetables. He said he has no creativity when it comes to cooking dead animals. Comparing beef with vegetables and fruit, beef is red, bloody and lifeless, and he prefers vegetables and fruits as they are alive and full of colour. With his passion for veggies, Passard has also removed red meat from his restaurant menu.

Meal Setting: Winter

Clockwise from back left:
Deep-fried waterchestnut and nori squares; Simmered burdock, parboiled snow peas, deep-fried millet fu, maple-leaf fu; Clear soup with sheet fu, snow peas, and yuzu citron garnish; Rice bales and shiba pickle

Source: Zen Vegetarian Cooking; Soei Yoneda, Koei Hoshino, Robert Farrar Capon; Kodansha International Ltd.

Meal Setting: Autumn

Clockwise from back left:
Pressed and vinegared cucumbers; Braised shiitake mushrooms, dried-frozen tofu tempura, simmered Japanese pumpkin, ginkgo nuts (skewered), sake-braised asparagus; chestnut rice; vinegared cucumbers

Source: Zen Vegetarian Cooking; Soei Yoneda, Koei Hoshino, Robert Farrar Capon; Kodansha International Ltd.

Meal Setting: Summer

Clockwise from back left:
Pickles: Cucumber in miso and Nara pickle; Pickled ginger shoots, braised shiitake mushrooms, and jade nuggets; Cold somen noodles and dipping sauce; Simmered Okra

Source: Zen Vegetarian Cooking; Soei Yoneda, Koei Hoshino, Robert Farrar Capon; Kodansha International Ltd.

Meal Setting: Spring

Clockwise from back left:
Vinegared sea greens and turnip; Fiddlehead ferns, simmered Fuki and simmered Ganmodoki; Clear soup with wheel gluten and parboiled greens; Herb rice

Source: Zen Vegetarian Cooking; Soei Yoneda, Koei Hoshino, Robert Farrar Capon; Kodansha International Ltd.

Book review: Zen vegetarian cooking

Shojin Ryori (精進料理 or しょうじんりょうり) is a vegetarian cuisine that is eaten at many Zen temples in Japan. Shojin Ryori is a low-calorie and low-fat diet when you compared it to western meals. The dishes are very simple and beautiful, and flavoured with ordinary ingredients such as miso, soy sauce, and vinegar. The Shojin Ryori cuisine does not use any dairy and honey products, so it’s a great option for vegans.

The interesting thing about this book is that it is not just your usual recipe cookbook, it also talks about the art of Shojin cooking – the attitude and spirit when preparing and eating the food, balance in the dishes (such as the 6 tastes, 3 virtues, 5 methods of cooking, and the 5 colors) and seasonal variation. The type of food used Shojin cooking varies for the different seasons. Even the rice used is different for every month. There are also certain dishes which can be used in all seasons.

The book also provides a section on the different ingredients used in Shojin cooking, with additional information for each ingredient. Another section provides information on the different equipment used in preparation. It also provides information on the tableware and food arrangement employed in the cuisine. The final part of that section is a list of the different menus for the 12 different months.

Another section of the book provides recipes on preparing the basic Japanese dishes: rice, miso soups, clear soups, and pickles according to the different seasons and months of the year. And finally, in the next section the rest of the different dishes are classified according to the different seasons of the year, as well as the type of vegetable used in preparing the dish. There is also a short explanation of each dish.

In the next few posts I will include a few beautiful pictures of the meals from the different seasons of the year found in the book.

You can purchase the book from amazon here if you like.

"Tofu" the Vegan Zombie

Tofu is a vegan zombie who doesn't eat any human flesh because of the tofu placed in his head. Read more about tofu HERE.
There's also a nice game on the website, click HERE to play.

Watch a fake movie trailer...


Watch the flash movie of the birth of Tofu...

VegSpace

If you are a vegetarian and you keep in touch with your friends with MySpace or friendster, you can do so now at VegSpace. VegSpace is a vegetarian community where you can share recipes, chat on the forum, keep in touch with veg news, post an ad in the classads, and shop. Check it out here.

Vegan food boring?

Today, I heard my collegues talked about vegetarianism. They didn't knew I was a vegan. One of them was saying he could go veg for a year, and another lady was saying that the maximum she could take was a week. It's very interesting listening to them talk. Perhaps the reason someone couldn't start a vegetarian diet was due to images of greens conjured in their minds. "How can I stand eating that my whole life?" Well, who could? A vegetarian diet does not consist only plates of sprouts, kale, spinach, etc. Vegans eat a lot of other things as well. In fact, after becoming a vegan, I realised I get to exercise more of my my creative power and became more interested in cooking. A vegan also gets to try new recipes and food combinations and learn to use substitutes in cooking. In Singapore, we have a kind of food call otak-otak. It is traditionally made from fish paste and grilled. As a vegan, we can substitute the fish paste with finely chopped abalone mushroom. I will try to get the recipe from my mum and share it.

Dietary patterns and environmental impact

It has often been discussed if changes in food consumption can help world sustainability. One Italian-based study compared the usual Italian diet, balanced omnivorous diets (organic and conventional) and balanced vegetarian/vegan diets (organic and conventional). The diets are accessed according to their damage to human health, ecosystems and resources using three perspectives: short-term, medium-term, and long-term adverse effects.

It was found that the normal unbalanced Italian diet had the greatest impact on the environment. Consumption of animal products within the same way of food production (either organic or conventional) also had a greater impact on the environment.

Analysis of a single type of food shows that Beef has the greatest impact on the environment, followed by fish, cheese and milk.

The different impacts of an omnivorous diet on the environment are recorded as follows:
3 to 4% of the impact on environment is due to eutrophication. Farm animals produce 19m tons of waste each year in Italy alone. The waste cannot be used as fertilizers due to their content. They enter water bodies and pollute them.

5 to 13% of the impact is due to land usage. Europe can produce enough vegetable proteins to feed its inhabitants, but not its livestock. 80% of vegetable proteins fed to European livestock come from other countries (including developing ones) and depletes their environmental resources. Growing of livestock feed meant for richer countries also aggravates desertification in Africa. Presently, 25% of the total land area in the world is undergoing desertification. The increase requirement for land use for animal husbandry is associated with deforestation. Most of the forest cleared from the Amazon (88%) is used for cattle grazing.

5 to 18% is of the impact is due to damage to respiration from inorganic compounds and 20 to 26% from fossil fuel consumption. When plants are fed to animals, much of the protein and energy content of the plants are wasted as animals make use of them for metabolism and build animal parts that are non-edible. It would thus be more efficient to consume plants directly. Animal husbandry also wastes a tremendous amount of fuel. One calorie of beef requires 40 calories of fuel and milk needs 14 calories. Grains, however, requires only 2.2 calories.

The greatest percentage of the total impact (41 to 46%) comes from water consumption. 70% of freshwater is used for agriculture and animal farming. A shift towards a more plant-based diet would help the present situation. This is because many plants, such as grains from agriculture are used as feed for grain-fed cattle. Even grazing cattle consume more water than that required for growing cereals. Water has to be used for cleaning livestock facilities as well.

Moreover, malnutrition and hunger have been linked to declining land, water, and energy resources per person. Hence, vegetarian and vegan diets help preserve environmental resources and reduce hunger and malnutrition problems in poorer nations.

Study source reference:
L Baroni, L Cenci, M Tettamanti and M Berati "Evaluating the environmental impact of various dietary patterns combined with different food production systems" European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2006), 1–8

What if the world is to go vegan?

I stumble across this article by Keith Farnish on "What if... We all became vegan?" Although a totally vegan world is probably unlikely, the idea of a vegan world is still very thought provoking. Do take a look at the article here.

Vegan Chamber of Commerce

This is really cool - a directory vegan owned businesses worldwide. There will soon be a vegan classifieds section, and a vegan employment board. If you own a vegan business, u would not want to miss it Check it out here.

Vegan company in top 10 favorites for the fashion and beauty business

Last year, the vegan business "Inky loves nature" was in the top 10 list for fashion and beauty ideas at springwise.com. Inky loves nature is based in New Jersey and was created by Leesah B - a long-time vegan. You can visit the business website here.