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Deep Vegan Thoughts

Recently some people have been really annoying me about veganism.

I messaged someone on okcupid and he was like:

“I have to be honest. I don’t think I can date a vegan. Sorry.”

Ha.

Hope he thinks back on that when his kids are in history class one day studying animal exploitation as a shameful and horrifying piece of world history and everyone is vegan by law.

Sometimes it feels I have created a little bubble for myself on the internet. I subscribe to so many awesome vegan people. But the outside world still acts shocked when you say you are vegan. It’s sort of offputting. I feel like…doesn’t everybody get it by now?

No they don’t. There are still so many people to convince.

So many people who think they NEED meat to thrive.

I took a class the other day with one of my pole dance heroes.

She was like, You have lost weight.  I told her excitedly I had changed my diet. I was like “It’s called fruitarianism. Have you heard of it?”

She hadn’t, and when I told her it was only fruit and vegetables, she started telling me how bad that was and how I would never put on muscle and I needed protein.

I got kind of flustered, because I didn’t want to argue with her, yet I was annoyed. I was way stronger than before and yet she was telling me it was a terrible diet.

What should I do? Go back to my old diet and be stuck in my progress like I was?

She told me she used to be vegan too but once she needed to become a professional athlete she stopped and started eating meat again…for protein.

Protein.

The protein myth is so huge.

The problem is she IS the professional, incredibly fit athlete and I’m not. But I know there are a lot of incredible fruitarian and vegan athletes out there who made incredible progress in their fitness goals once they became vegan and then fruitarian. For example, Mike Arnstein, the Fruitarian who started WINNING marathons (like first place) once he became fruitarian. Serena Williams hasn’t lost a major tournament since she became a raw vegan.

Mike Arnstein, The Fruitarian

I’ve read so many articles and books explaining the research about protein, which shows we need far less than most people have been led to believe we do. But of course everyone knows we need protein.

Good job, marketers!

I know eating fresh fruits and vegetables has made the biggest improvements in my health so far over anything I have tried. I was eating a ton of cheese and yogurt and beans and common “protein” sources for years.

I’m getting so much stronger.

It is frustrating though when everyone tells you it’s terrible, even though it’s working.

I think it’s one of those things where nobody cares about your diet until you start winning marathons like Mike Arnstein, The Fruitarian on youtube, or looking like Freelea the Banana Girl or losing 100 pounds like Melissa, Get Your Fruit On.

This is working for me like nothing else ever has.

As for ethical veganism, sometimes I feel I have lost  touch with normal life. Is there really an animal holocaust going on?

Sometimes I need to double check that what I’ve seen is real.

I go to Toronto Pig Save’s Facebook and look at their photographs of pigs in the trucks and look into their eyes.

Those pigs are all dead now. Murdered. Cattle cars…still in use. It’s the holocaust out there for animals. It’s a war against them that they can’t fight.

If people would simply look at a Toronto Pig Save video, those same meat eaters would be shaking in their boots.

The problem is no one wants to look. I couldn’t even look at their last video which went viral. The caption said the pigs were screaming in the trucks.

I have heard pigs screaming once, and it was enough. It shakes you. It reminded me of a part in one of my favorite book’s The Princess Bride where the count says “Do you hear that? That is the sound of ultimate suffering.”

It’s in the movie too. But of course the scream although haunting is not the sound of ultimate suffering. That sound is something you could only hear if you listened to someone actually, in real life, experiencing ultimate suffering.

The pigs who were witnessing, hearing and smelling their friends be murdered and boiled alive….they understood ultimate suffering.

this was the mildest of pig slaughterhouse images I could find. Google image pig slaughterhouse.

Veganism is so not what people think it is.

It saddens me that people don’t truly get it.

WHY?

I think it is because they haven’t seen it with their own eyes.

But further, that they don’t understand that animals are like them in that they are conscious, have lives and families, suffer, understand, have personalities, and feel horror at being murdered.

I have heard there is this island in the bahamas where pigs live free. It’s called Pig Island.

They swim in the clear blue waters and hang out on the beach.

They have big ears that look like wings. They chill with their families. It’s an uninhabited island so no one bothers them. But I think you can visit.

Paradise.

The lucky ones.

 

 

Was Da Vinci a Fruitarian? Beautiful quotes about Da Vinci’s Love of Animals and Incredible Genuis

Guys,

I had heard Leonardo da Vinci was a vegetarian, but would you believe he was a raw foodist???

“It appears from Corsali’s letter [Andrea Corsali’s letter to Giuliano de’ Medici] that Leonardo ate no meat, but lived entirely on vegetables, thus forestalling modern vegetarians by several centuries.”

-Eugene Muntz, Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Thinker, and Man of Science, 1898

How amazing is that?

Also how incredibly beautiful is this quote about Da Vinci :

The mere idea of permitting the existence of unnecessary suffering, still more that of taking life, was abhorrent to Da Vinci. Vasari tells, as an instance of his love of animals, how when in Florence he passed places where birds were sold he would frequently take them from their cages with his own hand, and having paid the sellers the price that was asked would let them fly away in the air, thus giving them back their liberty.

-Edward MacCurdy, The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci, 1928

I feel like that is every vegetarian and vegans dream. To be able to open the cages and free the animals.

(I found these quotes on this interesting article about famous vegetarian writers and artists)

In case you are in doubt of the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, I have never forgotten this letter I read by him that I found on one of my favorite blogs “Letters of Note” (the blogger is now preparing his book so isn’t posting as much)

This is a letter you won’t soon forget:

Letters of Note writes:

 

Some time in the 1480s (experts tend to agree with 1483/84, at which point he was approximately 32-years-old) Leonardo da Vinci applied for a job at the court of Ludovico Sforza, the then de facto ruler of Milan. He did so by way of the following application letter — essentially a fascinating CV which, in an effort to appeal to Sforza’s needs at the time, is dominated by his undeniably impressive military engineering skills and doesn’t even hint at his artistic genius until the end.

Da Vinci’s efforts paid off, and he was eventually employed. A decade later, it was Sforza who commissioned him to paint The Last Supper.

(Source: Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career; Image: Leonardo da Vinci, a self-portrait, via.)

The Letter:
My Most Illustrious Lord,

Having now sufficiently seen and considered the achievements of all those who count themselves masters and artificers of instruments of war, and having noted that the invention and performance of the said instruments is in no way different from that in common usage, I shall endeavour, while intending no discredit to anyone else, to make myself understood to Your Excellency for the purpose of unfolding to you my secrets, and thereafter offering them at your complete disposal, and when the time is right bringing into effective operation all those things which are in part briefly listed below:

1. I have plans for very light, strong and easily portable bridges with which to pursue and, on some occasions, flee the enemy, and others, sturdy and indestructible either by fire or in battle, easy and convenient to lift and place in position. Also means of burning and destroying those of the enemy.

2. I know how, in the course of the siege of a terrain, to remove water from the moats and how to make an infinite number of bridges, mantlets and scaling ladders and other instruments necessary to such an enterprise.

3. Also, if one cannot, when besieging a terrain, proceed by bombardment either because of the height of the glacis or the strength of its situation and location, I have methods for destroying every fortress or other stranglehold unless it has been founded upon a rock or so forth.

4. I have also types of cannon, most convenient and easily portable, with which to hurl small stones almost like a hail-storm; and the smoke from the cannon will instil a great fear in the enemy on account of the grave damage and confusion.

5. Also, I have means of arriving at a designated spot through mines and secret winding passages constructed completely without noise, even if it should be necessary to pass underneath moats or any river.

6. Also, I will make covered vehicles, safe and unassailable, which will penetrate the enemy and their artillery, and there is no host of armed men so great that they would not break through it. And behind these the infantry will be able to follow, quite uninjured and unimpeded.

7. Also, should the need arise, I will make cannon, mortar and light ordnance of very beautiful and functional design that are quite out of the ordinary.

8. Where the use of cannon is impracticable, I will assemble catapults, mangonels, trebuckets and other instruments of wonderful efficiency not in general use. In short, as the variety of circumstances dictate, I will make an infinite number of items for attack and defence.

9. And should a sea battle be occasioned, I have examples of many instruments which are highly suitable either in attack or defence, and craft which will resist the fire of all the heaviest cannon and powder and smoke.

10. In time of peace I believe I can give as complete satisfaction as any other in the field of architecture, and the construction of both public and private buildings, and in conducting water from one place to another.

Also I can execute sculpture in marble, bronze and clay. Likewise in painting, I can do everything possible as well as any other, whosoever he may be.

Moreover, work could be undertaken on the bronze horse which will be to the immortal glory and eternal honour of the auspicious memory of His Lordship your father, and of the illustrious house of Sforza.

And if any of the above-mentioned things seem impossible or impracticable to anyone, I am most readily disposed to demonstrate them in your park or in whatsoever place shall please Your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.

 Now THAT is a cover letter!!! Am I right??