Letters to the Editor
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Jettisoned
But it was a photograph of pop star Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice, holding a copy of the 2005 title "Skinny Bitch" that jettisoned the book sales to bestseller status.
Perhaps "jetted" is the word you intended.
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Another nail in the coffin, Salon...
It's articles like this that are why I won't be renewing my subscription when it runs out.
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Sort of an anti-article, right?
Okay, my wife bought this book, enjoyed it, and changed some things about her lifestyle and eating style that were completely positive. She is a vegan and I am a vegan with occasional pizza lapses. I'm pretty sure that a) women understand that a book with the title "Skinny Bitch" might be a little sarcastic/unconventional and b) people who develop an eating disorder from reading this book are probably not really reading it.
So, speaking as a person who had a positive experience correlative to the book, I can definitely say this: Julie Klausner wants you to know that she is a New York City writer and performer. She recently made a video about "Skinny Bitch" and other diet fads for the Huffington Post.
Here are those Rice Dream (orange vanilla swirl flavor, yum) ingredients that are sooooo scary:
Filtered water, brown rice (partially milled), orange vanilla flavor with other natural flavors, expeller pressed high oleic safflower oil, tapioca starch, natural vanilla flavor, annatto extract (for color), guar gum, sea salt, carrageenan.
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Note the title
It's "Skinny Bitch", not "Healthy Bitch".
Kinda let's you know where the "authors'" sentiments lie.
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Deceptive? Why not use the word fraud?
If a store advertises one product but substitutes it for something else, it commits the fraud of bait and switch.
A crime.
At the very least, these authors are dishonest and not to be trusted.
At the worst, they are confessed criminals.
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Dumber and Dumber
[ .... But it was a photograph of pop star Victoria Beckham, aka Posh Spice, holding a copy of the 2005 title "Skinny Bitch" that jettisoned the book sales to bestseller status. There's no proof that Posh, who's admitted to never having read a book in her life . . . ]
Less and less on this site that's worth the time it takes to read. I stopped reading right there. There is so much that needs to be written about, but this is all you come up with.
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Not surprising
As a long time vegan, this book doesn't surprise me. Becoming a vegan is hard. There is a good minority of us who, having accomplished it, feel is necessary to tout their moral and ethical superiority over the rest of barbaric humanity. You normally have to go to certain churches to find an equal level of unbridled sanctimony.
Like most good causes, the best vegans (aka, the majority of us) don't make headlines. We try to encourage our beliefs by example and when in doubt, err on the side of respect. Bottom line, most vegans are not going to go around calling strangers names, that would be moderated out of this blog if I tried to write them.
But on the other hand I can't help thinking that anyone willing to buy a book that calls people "skinny bi***es", and then promises to make you one, is quite literally asking to be abused in one way or another. Ultimately one's self-respect cannot be taken. It has to be given away.
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what's wrong with a vegan manifesto?
I've been vegetarian since 1982. The Nuclear Freeze movement was happening at the time, and by becoming a vegetarian, I felt I was making a statement about peace and nonviolence. I attended my first anti-vivisection protest in the spring of 1985. It was outside the biology building at UC San Diego, when anti-apartheid demonstrations were taking place. I first got interested in promoting vegetarianism in mainstream society after reading John Robbins' Diet for a New America (1987). Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, it makes veganism seem as reasonable and mainstream as recycling.
For example, half the water consumed in the U.S. goes to irrigate land growing feed and fodder for livestock. Huge amounts of water are also used to wash away their excrement. U.S. livestock produce twenty times as much excrement as does the entire human population; creating sewage which is ten to several hundred times more concentrated than raw domestic sewage. Animal wastes cause ten times as much water pollution than does the U.S. human population; the meat industry causes three times as much harmful organic water pollution than the rest of the nation's industries combined. Meat producers are the number one industrial polluters in our nation, contributing to half the water pollution in the United States.
Joanna Macy, author of Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age, depicts the advantages of America moving towards a vegan diet in her foreword to Diet for a New America:
"The effects on our physical health are immediate. The incidence of cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, drops precipitously. So do many other diseases now demonstrably and causally linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis...
"The social, ecological, and economic consequences, as we Americans turn away from animal food products, are equally remarkable. We find that the grain we previously fed to fatten livestock can now feed five times the U.S. population; so we have become able to alleviate malnutrition and hunger on a worldwide scale...
"The great forests of the world, that we had been decimating for grazing purposes, begin to grow again. Oxygen-producing trees are no longer sacrificed for cholesterol-producing steaks.
"The water crisis eases. As we stop raising and grinding up cattle for hamburgers, we discover that ranching and farm factories had been the major drain on our water resources. The amount now available for irrigation and hydroelectric power doubles. Meanwhile, the change in diet frees over 90% of the fossil fuel previously used to produce food. With this liberation of water energy and fossil fuel energy, our reliance on oil imports declines, as does the rationale for building nuclear power plants..."
Joanna Macy admits, "This scenario is wildly, absurdly utopian. It is also clearly the way we are meant to live, built to live." What could possibly make it a reality? "It is this very book!"
Paul McCartney says, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty. Let's do it! Linda was right. Going veggie is the single best idea for the new century."
Roberta Kalechofsky of Jews for Animal Rights similarly says:
"Merely by ceasing to eat meat
Merely by practicing restraint
We have the power to end a painful industry
We do not have to bear arms to end this evil
We do not have to contribute money
We do not have to sit in jail or go to
meetings or demonstrations or
engage in acts of civil disobedience
Most often, the act of repairing the world,
of healing mortal wounds,
is left to heroes and tzaddikim (holy people)
Saints and people of unusual discipline
But here is an action every mortal can
perform--surely it is not too difficult!"
The number of animals killed for food in the United States is 70 times larger than the number of animals killed in laboratories, 30 times larger than the number killed by hunters and trappers, and 500 times larger than the number of animals killed in pounds.
In writing his expose on the meat industry, John Robbins has been compared to Rachel Carson, Ralph Nader and other whistleblowers. I had the opportunity to meet John Robbins in September 1988.
He was heir to the Baskin-Robbins fortune. He renounced it at a young age. He traveled to India, opened a yoga ashram in Canada, etc. He spoke of Gandhi and nonviolence. His son Ocean Robbins founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES!) and is also dedicated to promoting veganism. I asked John if he would try and get the American Left to support animal rights. He told me that he had sent a copy of his book to Mother Jones, a left-liberal periodical published in San Francisco.
Many on the Left are beginning to take a stand in favor of animal rights. Joanna Macy spoke at the San Francisco Green Festival, in November 2005. In his 1990 updated and revised edition of Animal Liberation, Australian philosopher Peter Singer writes that many of the political parties leaning towards the "Green" end of the political spectrum in Europe were beginning to oppose animal experimentation.
John Robbins elaborated further on the economic waste of raising animals for food in May All Be Fed. Oxfam, the international charity, reports that in Mexico, 80 percent of the children in rural areas are undernourished, yet the livestock are fed more grain than the human population eats! Meat consumption in Taiwan increased 600 percent between 1950 and 1990. In 1950, Taiwan was a grain exporter; in 1990 the nation imported, mostly for feed, 74 percent of the grain it used. Twenty-five years ago, Syria was a barley exporter. But in the intervening years, livestock have consumed increasing amounts of the country's grain. Now, despite a phenomenal 1000 percent increase in the land area devoted to producing barley, Syria must import the cereal.
John Robbins spoke before the United Nations in 1994, where he received a standing ovation.