PETA sent letters to a number of celebrities who have worn Armani in the past urging them to boycott the designer. In the letter to Tom Cruise, PETA’s Vice President made particular note of Cruise’s daughter, Suri, saying:

“Please be vigilant about any packages that Armani sends for Suri, as they could include bunny fur from his toddler lines.”

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This week on ZapRoot: KFC Canada tries to do chickens right with their new animal welfare plan. China’s air control results. Check out new Alternative Autos: Chevy Volt, Shelby Supercars, Prius, and more.

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Natalie Portman Has Our Unabashed Support

While we’re on the topic of ethical footwear this week, Natalie Portman has recently designed a line of vegan shoes for Té Casan, and she is having a sale.

In between being a superstar, a main feature in Elle and speaking out for PETA, she has also found the time to design darling animal-free footwear. Her designs are cute, classic and sophisticated. I dig the Potok and the Pixie (shown below), both on sale.

Natalie has been a vegetarian since age 8, and always noticed the lack of animal-friendly footwear in the luxury designer marketplace. “Té Casan, well-versed in recognizing and developing new talent, collaborated with Portman for her 100% vegan collection.”

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So I suppose it’s not surprising that some people are looking for meat alternatives, and I’m not talking about Tofurkey. I’m talking about real meat, but minus the animal.

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Now you may be shocked by this question. I was. I mean, if you can’t see the fun in trying to save the world from global warming and mass species extinction you, er… and then I started to see her point.

You may notice that not a lot of people consider environmental issues a laughing matter. Crack a joke too close to hot environmental issues and you’ll receive stern glances from all corners of the room, as Jon Stewart can attest. In an interview with Bill Moyers, he laments hearing back from viewers, "your show is so funny, until you made a joke about global warming, which is a serious issue, and I can’t believe you did that!"

On the one hand, environmental issues are serious and they require a concerted effort to address. But the environmental movement also risks alienating people with its stern demeanor. Think PETA and the EPA are cuddly? Historically, PETA, with its dour streams of abused animal images, has about as much popular sex appeal as a horny toad (nothing against the Phrynosomatidae family). Sure, the nude vegan ad campaign and the glam vegan celeb videos help to soften the organization’s edge a little. Still, not too many of us would associate the organization with a sense of mirth. The EPA as well—aside from its starring role as the unlikely villain in this summer’s Simpsons Movie—doesn’t yet have what it takes to make people smile.

People respond well to a good-humored attitude. In a decidedly un-environmental example, the box store corporation, Target, benefited from a popular laugh at its own image as a purveyor of cheap goods with the tongue-in-cheek French pronunciation, Targé. The environmental movement could use a similar sense of good humor.

So how do we as environmentalists stop and smell the flowers that we’re trying to save? On Tuesday, we’ll start with a look at ways to save the planet while at the same time not missing the chance to cut loose, laugh, dance, joke and live it up!

References and Resources:

EPA Home

PETA Home

Bill Moyers talks with Jon Stewart | PBS

Photo Source:

Laugh Out Loud | Flickr

However, I don’t like the use of these terms when referring to non-animal-based foods for a number of reasons. By all calculations, meat, dairy, and eggs are superior in no way – not in terms of health, not in terms of taste, and certainly not in terms of ethics. And if we step back for a moment, we’d see that animal foods are actually the alternatives to plant foods, and we’d remember that cow’s milk is actually a substitute for human milk.

ANIMAL PRODUCTS REPLACE PLANT FOODS

When animals were first herded and domesticated for human consumption, about 9,000-10,000 years ago, they essentially became the alternatives to plant foods. Plant foods were the foundation of the human diet for a long, long time - long before people started domesticating non-human animals. (READ: Plant foods were the foundation. I’m not saying humans didn’t eat "meat" at all.) Fast forward thousands of years to our own "modern" culture. With millions of dollars, the animal exploitation industries convinced people they need to consume the flesh and secretions of animals, and fruits, vegetables, beans, mushrooms, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices were pushed off to the sidelines and sold as garnish, and meat, dairy, and eggs, with their powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, enjoyed government support, subsidies, and protection.

Thanks to the dairy industry, whose government-sponsored advertisements pose as public service announcements, humans are continually sold the idea that we need cows’ milk to be healthy. This stuff is sold as if it contains some magical formula designed just for human bodies. The truth is it is a perfect formula, designed just for growing babies — bovine babies, that is.

HERDING ANIMALS - DUPING HUMANS

Cattle are herd animals, which means they are easy to control because they move together and stay together. In other words, "cattle" meet certain requirements that make it easy for humans to contain them. Let’s not kid ourselves into believing that humans struck nutritional gold when they started drinking cows’ milk. Cows’ milk — just like soda — is a commercial product that is sold to the public by the dairy industry that has billions of dollars behind it in advertising and enjoys government protection from false advertising laws.* Whether it’s cow’s milk, goat’s milk, sheep’s milk, buffalo’s milk, rat’s milk, or dog’s milk, it is totally unnecessary for human survival and health.

Not only are we the only animal that drinks another animal’s milk, we are the only animal that drinks it into adulthood. All female mammals produce milk for the same reason: to feed and nourish their offspring. At a certain age, depending on the mammal, the infant is able to move onto solid food and is weaned off of the mother’s milk — every mammal, that is, except humans.

Despite the fact that humans don’t continue drinking human milk after being weaned, we’re told we have to drink cows’ milk. And despite the fact that calves naturally stop drinking cows’ milk after they’re weaned, humans have been duped into believing that they must drink it as adults. Our own physiology supports the cessation of milk-drinking in that - at about time time when we should be weaned off of breast milk - our bodies stop producing lactase, the enzyme that enables us to digest lactose, the sugar that’s in mammalian milk. One of the reasons the majority of the world population suffers from lactose intolerance is because we’re not able to digest it. Drinking milk - human or otherwise - into adulthood makes absolutely no sense, but it makes really good business and very good money.

TAKING BACK THE WORD

The dairy industry has made attempts to own the word "milk" and stop non-dairy milk companies from using the word; they loathe the use of the word "milk" in any other context outside of that which refers to the stuff they take from cows and sell to humans. (Perhaps they would prefer human women to say "breast beverage" instead of "breast milk.") Besides referring to the fluid that a female produces when she is lactating, the word "milk" also refers to the liquid extracted from various plants, whether they are nuts, grains, seeds, or fruits. Many of these milks have been around for thousands of years in different parts of the world. The milk from these plants are hardly "alternatives." Rather, they stand on their own as delicious and much healthier choices for human consumption.

SOY
Soy milk originated in China, a region where the soybean was native and used as food long before the existence of written records. Later on, the soybean and soybean foods were transplanted to Japan. Soy milk is reputed to have been discovered and developed in the Han Dynasty in China about 164 B.C. Cow’s milk is definitely the "alternative" to soy milk, particularly in the East. Sadly and ironically, however, the consuption of cow’s milk now exceeds that of soy milk in Japan. The advertising arms of the North American dairy industry reach far and wide.

RICE
If you’ve ever been to a traditional Mexican restaurant, you’ve had the pleasure of imbibing Horchata, a delicious sweet beverage made primarily of rice, sugar, and cinnamon – and often almonds. The Mexican Horchata is based on the Spanish Horchata de Chufa, which was traditionally made from a grassy plant called the Chufa or tiger nut and has its origin in ancient Egypt and Sudan.

NUT
Almond milk – by far my favorite! – was used widely in the Middle Ages in regions stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to East Asia. It was prized for its high protein content and its ability to keep better than milk from animals, which soured if it wasn’t used right away. Milk derived from other nuts also has a long history, including that of walnut, cashews, peanuts, macadamia, and hazelnuts.

COCONUT
The milk of the young coconut is referred to as coconut water or coconut juice and is absolutely delicious and drunk as a beverage. It’s been a popular drink in the tropics since the discovery of the coconut palm tree! (Early Sanskrit writings reveal that the people of India were using coconuts as a staple for food.) It’s naturally fat-free and low in calories with high nutrition content. (Coconut milk is the thick sweet, milky white substance derived from the meat of a mature coconut and is often used for cooking and not for drinking.)

FOLLOWING THE COWS’ LEAD

The bottom line is we have no nutritional requirement for the milk of another animal. Though we have nutritional requirements for nutrients such as calcium, we can do what the cows do and get our minerals from the green leafy stuff that grows in the ground. That news, however, hasn’t quite made its way to our living rooms and classrooms. The kale growers don’t seem to have the money for multi-million-dollar ad campaigns (got kale?); the chard lobby has yet to be formed; and the broccoli farmers just haven’t gotten around to producing glossy marketing materials (I mean - "educational" materials) for young children in school to compete with those that the dairy industry have been supplying to teachers for decades. Get them while they’re young, and you’ve got them for life.

Though humans have been drinking the milk of animals for thousands of years, there is enough evidence now to support the detrimental effects it has on our bodies. Just because we’re in the habit of doing something doesn’t mean we should continue. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.

(*The California Milk Advisory Board was sued by animal advocates and organizations for falsely representing the condition and treatment of dairy cows in the state. Because the California Milk Advistory Board is the marketing arm of the California Department of Agriculture and thus a government agency, it is exempt from false-advertising laws. The case was thrown out, but not before the judge acknowledged that California cows "probably aren’t happy and that if the ads implying that they were happy had been made by a private individual, false-advertising laws might apply.")

*Listen to my podcast episode on my favorite non-dairy milks

Shirley: Fake blood tossed onto socialites wearing fur coats. Late-night liberation of laboratory animals. Wholesale destruction of Hummers and gas-guzzlers in California parking lots. The lists of exploits by some radical animal-rights and extreme environmental groups reads more like rap sheets than a honorable curriculum vitae. For reasonable stewards of the Earth, breaking and entry, theft, destruction of physical property and other mayhem serve no purpose.

Or do they? I don't condone violence or criminal acts as a means of conveying a message, however well-intended the message might be. But I have to admit that, sometimes — just sometimes — a crazy or even slightly illegal (as if there is such a thing in the eyes of the law) act by a group like, say, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) brings to light a practice that's been kept in the dark largely because it's unpleasant, harmful or cruel. The act of sneaking hidden cameras into poultry processing plants, for example, opened a lot of people's eyes to just how unnecessarily inhumane the methods of turning chickens into wings and nuggets actually are. So is there an argument to be made that maybe, just maybe, the occasional whack attack by radical vegans or Luddites is a justifiable act of civil disobedience? I'd have to say, cautiously, yes.