Veganism in Politics: Netherlands and Australia
This week, Resonance 104.4FM broadcast my interviews with the UK’s 3 vegan MPs. In the broadcast, I mentioned two vegan lawmakers who were missed out in the original internet radio shows: Marianne Thieme and Lee Rhiannon.
Representative Marianne Thieme, Netherlands
Marianne leads the Partij voor de Dieren (“Party for the Animals”) and its group of two representatives and one senator as they push the larger parties to take animal issues more seriously.
Senator Lee Rhiannon, Australia
Lee Rhiannon has been an Australian Federal Senator since 2010; born into a cold-war communist family and a lifelong activist, she represents the Greens.
- LeeRhiannon.org.au
- Lee_Rhiannon on Wikipedia
Others
See the original Vegan Politicans show post for the low-down on:
- Kerry McCarthy, UK
- Chris Williamson, UK
- Cathy Jamieson, UK
- Maneka Gandhi, India
But we no longer have have:
- Denis Kucinich, who lost his seat in the US House of Representatives through boundary changes. As far as I’m aware, the United States congress has no vegans.
For completeness, I’ll note Carl Scully, who was active in Australian provincial politics until 2007 but still labelled the “vegan cyclist” by critics of his time as New South Wales transport minister, and Stockholm MEP Jens Holm who lapsed from veganism to vegetarianism after a year as the only vegan in the European Parliament.
Lower Cancer Risk in Vegans
Maneka Gandhi asked the UK’s vegan MPs why meat doesn’t carry health warnings; and in 2011 I gave her claims a skeptical reception. In 2013, a new paper from the Seventh Day Adventist Study-2 suggested that vegans do indeed have a 15% lower cancer risk. So noted in my analysis for the 2014 edit that, though her desire for health warnings is still rather polemical, health claims have more evidence for them than they did a couple of years ago. Jack Norris RD has blogged about this study.
Hi Ian. How do we listen to the podcasts now if it’s tied to Resonance? I live outside London so can’t tune in. Do they archive online? Thanks.
You can listen online – either on Radio Player or on their online stream – if you tune in at the right time of day. At the moment, they’re not putting The Vegan Option in their on-demand stream.
But they’re transmitting episodes based on what’s already available in the archive – and in the case of the two shows that have already gone out, that means editing them *down* to thirty minutes. So you’re not missing much.
I’m looking forward to looking at some new ways that getting online has changed the vegan movement – including (obviously) crowdfunding. It’ll go into a short episode of The Vegan Option for the podcast listeners, as well as putting the new content into the broadcast edit of “Digital Vegans”.