This season of peace and goodwill, in our special Christmas show, we ask whether there will ever be peace on Earth. Steven Pinker, author of “Better Angels of Our Nature”, says that human violence has decreased over the centuries, in some respects including violence to other animals. We talk to Professors Peter Singer and Gary Francione. more
At the end of our last episode, Kerry McCarthy MP said she’d asked for a debate in Parliament to mark World Vegan Day.
She was successful, and at the end of business on November 1st the House of Commons debated veganism. I was watching from the gallery.
In this episode, concluding our series of three about veganism in politics, we give our account of the debate. We explain what’s going on, who everyone is, and tell you which of the MPs who spoke against is officially the least sexy Member of Parliament. more
In our podcast about the vegan pledge we talked about reasons that people did or didn’t decide to remain vegan after the vegan pledge including the tricky issue of biased respondent samples. The followup questionnaire was given after a month of the vegan pledge and people who fell off the vegan wagon were unlikely to make it to that meeting. In this blog I’m going to talk about how reasons that people cite for going vegan might influence whether they are choose to continue after the pledge and the paradoxical effect of unsupportive friends and relatives.… more
The three vegan Members of the British Parliament (MPs) answer your questions. Are they afraid about how voters will react to their veganism? And what’s the food like at the House of Commons? more
You can watch the full 30 minute adjournment debate on World Vegan Day at BBC Democracy Live. Our next show will include our report on the debate, and answers from the vegan MPs to more of your questions.
We profile the handful of people who combine veganism with politics at their country’s national level. I went to the UK Parliament to meet Britain’s three vegan MPs. What was their path to politics? And I took with me questions from their counterparts in the rest of the world. more
Last week I was on 4thoughtTV for 1 minute and fifty seconds (sorry, embedding disabled). The topic: “What will happen when the world ends?” with interviews leading up to the 21st of October when Harold Camping predicted the rapture. My interview was supposed to air right before 8pm but I was bumped initially to 1:05 by a short documentary about a hippo carcass. Now, I don’t want to be speciesist but I fancied myself slightly more interesting than a dead hippo. Ultimately, the short documentary was replaced by breaking news about Gaddafi’s death, take that dead hippo! I’m not posting this just to expand my multimedia empire but also because the clip does in fact have relevance to the way I view the world, through a vegan philosophy about a world filled with minds. Not going to spoil my short appearance for those of you who decide to watch but suffice to say that I for one will welcome our octopus overlords.
In our last podcast I ran some analyses on the vegan pledge data that Chrissy from London Vegan Campaigns was so kind to give to us. To summarize, LVC has been running a pledge every year since 2008. Each year pledgers come to the first meeting and are introduced to vegan food and nutrition including health checkups and cookery lessons. You can see more about what the campaigns do for pledgers at the London Vegan Campaigns website. Pledgers are all assigned mentors who will help them during their month long pledge. Data is collected on pledgers during the first meeting, during the end of the month meeting and, for past pledges, one year after. I divided a lot of these analyses between 2009/10 and 2011 because the questionnaires changed quite a bit. The seduction of dairy Ever talked to someone about a vegan diet and they say “I could never give up cheese!”? Well, we found some longing for dairy in our data.… more
On Monday I head over to Westminster to meet the three vegan Members of the British Parliament. What do you think I should ask them? Say in replies to this post, or with the hashtag #VeganMPs on Twitter.
We start our show at the beginning – when folk choose the vegan option. In this case, for a month, challenged and supported by London Vegan Campaigns. I talk to mother Ananthi and middle-aged couple Bryan and Cliff. What challenges will they come across? And will they last the month? more