cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11847612

Why Do We Love Birds, But Slaughter Chickens?

The first time I met him, the stranger didn’t have a name—he was “the zebra-stripey one.” A notch above “anonymous brown blob,” the species all unmet birds fall into. All I knew was that he was elusive. I chased him and ten of his closest friends down a San Diego hiking trail for 30 minutes trying for an ID. It was on the 61st branch that I managed a clear enough picture, shaken through my binoculars.

We had no relationship then. He was, to me, as unique as a default profile photo. A grey silhouette on a greyer background.

Seven months later, I moved out of downtown into a more suburban area—a home with a garden, space for my arms and legs to stretch, and far more flowers for inquisitive birds. That’s where zebra stripes found me again.

I thought him shy, at first. I’d only spotted him once in the first three months, but then I learned I’d been looking for him outside his social hours. How conceitedly human of me! Like insisting the world banks on my hours.

Before long, I had dug through the grey and found contours of an expansive inner world. The bird—the white-crowned sparrow—has favorite seeds, tones of voice, enemies, friends. I catalog intuitively, give him a nod of the head. I see him now. It took time, but I do.

This is how it goes with every bird I meet: a devotional practice. It starts with learning the species’ name, and the rest slots into place. I can tell you about the blue jay in upstate New York who threw tantrums whenever he didn’t get his way. Or the Anna’s hummingbird with such a strong preference for curled-petal flowers he’d chirp at the sight of one. Or the juvenile starling whose subtle hunger tell was putting his mother’s whole face in his beak.

But what can I tell you about the bird I see most often? Ah… nothing. I can’t tell you her likes, dislikes, or quirks, even if I squinted through binoculars. And it’s not by choice, it’s because the system is designed so I could never stand at a feeder long enough to find out without the cops being called. It is, yes, the bird on the plates of everyone I love, whose dismembered legs and wings I’ve seen far more often than her feathered face: an ordinary chicken. Before we can ask who she is, the meat industry has already ensured we can’t find out.

Her life begins as one of 600 million chicks hatched annually in the U.S. egg industry. Half of these chicks—her sisters and female cousins—will live the same short life as her. The other 300 million males are considered useless to both the egg industry, since they can’t lay, and the meat industry, since they are leaner and unsuitable for efficient meat production. Instead, they are routinely ground up or gassed alive within their first day of life. On average, male chicks live to be one day old, and what’s left on the other side of the macerator gets turned into animal food, fertilizer, or biofuel.

Narrowly avoiding this fate, she is transported from hatchery to factory farm. In the 67 or so square inches she’s afforded—an area smaller than a sheet of printer paper—the only natural behavior left to her beak is pecking, and the only thing it can reach is other birds. So she pecks at them, and the industry reads it as damage to the product. Before she can grow into herself, a hot knife takes one third of her beak—her instrument of recognition and means of language—searing through a thin layer of highly sensitive soft tissue, similar to the quick of the human nail. In one slice, she is marooned from everything her Red Junglefowl ancestors passed on to her: the dust baths, the foraging, the full use of herself. No housing system—free-range, cage-free, or battery cage—meets all of her needs, so the industry manages a symptom of confinement, not the confinement itself.

There is a body she should have had, and a body she is given. The body she should have had lays 10-15 eggs per year. The body she is given lays around 300, far beyond what is biologically healthy. The body she should have had naturally tapers egg production as she ages. The body she is given is force-molted: starved for weeks until she loses a quarter of her body weight, then returned to a normal diet to rejuvenate egg production at the first sight of egg decline.

Or maybe she is a chicken raised for meat, in which case the body she is given grows 300 percent faster than the body she should have had. Genetic manipulation and breeding favor rapid weight gain and disproportionately large breasts. Though her body is adult-sized within weeks, her organs and bones cannot keep pace with muscles, so her heart strains, her lungs fall short of breath, her legs twist and buckle under her weight. Weak and heavy, she spends long hours lying on shed floors covered in her own waste, developing painful lesions that make movement even harder. She is, perpetually, starving. Her appetite regulation system is re-engineered so she cannot feel full. Stomach fullness is a hindrance to the machine. She must ravenously hunger to ensure fullness of “chicken breast,” instead.

The body she should have had could sustain her for up to 15 years. The body she is given is taken again at six weeks. It is held upside down by the feet, shackled to a conveyor line, run through an electrified bath to stun, slit at the throat, and immersed in scalding water to loosen feathers. Line speeds reach up to three birds every two seconds, which means stunning and slaughter are not always completed before the water. Around a million birds a year are boiled alive. A 2017 USDA inspector account at Southern Hens reads: “While performing a 500 bird count, I saw a live, non-stunned bird enter the scalder. The bird was flapping and attempting to right itself. As it entered and traveled half the length of the first scalder, the bird jerked violently while lifting itself until it was no longer in my immediate sight.”

If I could bring my binoculars to a factory farm, I would not see her. I would see the capitalism-perfected, efficiency-optimized machine of her. I couldn’t see her because even she couldn’t see herself. There is a witness problem here. And to witness that, you’d need a special lens that so-called “ag-gag” laws, a new class of legislation that has sprung up across the Midwest of the United States in the last decade, work hard to ensure you never look through.

In 2011, a Mercy for Animals activist known as “Scott” went undercover at Sparboe farms, the fifth-largest egg producer in the US supplying all McDonald’s eggs west of the Mississippi. His mission as an activist was similar to mine as a birder, though the tools were different: to see up close what’s far away. He spent months wearing a hidden camera in facilities across Iowa, Minnesota, and Colorado. Sparboe marketed its eggs as humane, claiming hens had “freedom from fear and distress” and “freedom to express normal behavior.” Scott found that this freedom looked like hens crammed in crowded cages, workers grabbing birds by the neck, slamming them in and out of cages, shoving them in pockets “apparently for fun,” pressing thumbs into the back of chicks’ necks until they broke.

The footage aired on ABC. McDonald’s announced it would no longer accept Sparboe eggs before the broadcast finished. Target pulled their eggs within hours. Then most grocery chains followed suit. In response, Sparboe fired employees and blamed everything on a few bad actors. The president and owner claimed to be “shocked and deeply disturbed.”

Within months, Iowa’s governor passed what would become the model for a new generation of ag-gag laws. It was not a response to the cruelty, but a response to the proof of it.

Agricultural gag—“ag-gag”—laws are a series of anti-whistleblower laws that make it nearly impossible to see inside a factory farm or slaughterhouse. Civil liberties lawyers fight them in court and often win. The industry adjusts the wording and passes them again. In Iowa, the whack-a-mole has lasted over four rounds:

• 2012: Ag-gag 1.0 passes—criminalizes lying about being an animal rights member on a farm application. Struck down as unconstitutional, 2019.
• 2019: Ag-gag 2.0—criminalizes using deception to gain access to an agricultural facility with intent to harm the business. Struck down, 2020.
• 2021: Ag-gag 3.0—criminalizes the use of cameras on farms entirely. Struck down, 2022.
• 2024: a federal appeals court reverses the lower courts. Iowa’s ag-gag laws are, for now, constitutional, a first offense carrying up to two years in prison and an $8,500 fine.

The same pattern is repeated across many states—Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming among them. The industry doesn’t change its practices, only what is legal to document.

We know what the government’s own inspectors saw because someone had to sue to make it public. The USDA settled a Freedom of Information Act violation lawsuit in 2021, agreeing to publish inspection reports. Those reports described birds with heads engorged with blood, skin torn from their bodies, and live animals lying among carcasses on blood-soaked floors. All of it was on the government’s record the whole time; it was just hidden from public view

Sparboe’s farm was not especially cruel, just especially documented. Consumer ignorance is not a byproduct of the industry. It is the product—actively manufactured and legally enforced so the public never gets to meet her: the bird on the plates of everyone I love.

I still take a seat at the table. I see the plates and make no scene. The entire architecture—legal, cultural, linguistic—exists so that she stays invisible and we stay comfortable. The fortress of ignorance is so sturdy I don’t even try when I face it in the eyes of my brother or my best friend. How do I go against an almost universal silencing? Often, I don’t. I’m silent, too. I save my strongest attacks for when I’m safe behind a phone. Am I not, then, complicit too?

Across the table, sometimes, I think to ask: do you know what species you’re eating for lunch? Not “chicken”—which chicken? What kind? Did you know there are dozens of breeds, each with different temperaments? Four different species? Was she ever a stranger to you, or was she always a product? In another world, could she have been a visitor? A regular? A friend?

The anonymous brown lumps our forks interact with contain nothing to recognize. Bodies are drained bloodless, cut to the uniform shape of plastic containers, and stripped of anything that could rouse curiosity. We are organ-carrying, hot-blooded creatures with legs and hearts. She is caloric, inanimate flesh.

But it stays a thought. I reach for words, but the reason I’m so drawn to birding is I’ve always been more fluent in observation than speech.

I’ll tell you, then, what I’ve observed: the white crowned sparrow’s favorite perch is the second branch to the left. When he visits my feeder, he loves to shuffle his feet in the seeds before picking the first. Doesn't scurry when a towhee or finch lingers on the trellis. Prefers the early sunset hour. Has something to say about every other bird's song.

I can tell you nothing about the bird you ate for dinner. Maybe she would have loved the color yellow, if she were allowed to have eyes. Maybe she would have followed every bee to its flower, if she were allowed to have legs.

Manar Naboulsi is a creator, activist, and serial-hobbyist who can’t shut up about human and animal rights. You can find her on Instagram at @earth.to.manar.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11575812

Amsterdam bans public adverts for meat and fossil fuels

BBC

Advertisements for meat products, such as beef burgers, have disappeared from Amsterdam's streets

Amsterdam has become the world's first capital city to ban public advertisements for both meat and fossil fuel products. Since 1 May, adverts for burgers, petrol cars and airlines have been stripped from billboards, tram shelters, and metro stations.

At one of the city's busiest tram stops, adjacent to a grassy roundabout bursting with vibrant yellow daffodils and orange tulips, the poster advertising landscape has changed.

They now promote the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, and a piano concert. Until last week it was chicken nuggets, SUVs and low-budget holidays.

Politicians in the city say the move is about bringing Amsterdam's streetscape into line with the local government's own environmental targets.

These aim for the Dutch capital to become carbon neutral by 2050, and for local people to halve their meat consumption over the same period.

"The climate crisis is very urgent," says Anneke Veenhoff from the GreenLeft Party. "I mean, if you want to be leading in climate policies and you rent out your walls to exactly the opposite, then what are you doing?

"Most people don't understand why the municipality should make money out of renting our public space with something that we are actively having policies against."

This view is echoed by Anke Bakker, who is Amsterdam group leader for a Dutch political party that focuses on animal rights – Party for the Animals.

She instigated the new restrictions, and rejects accusations of them being nanny state.

"Everybody can just make their own decisions, but actually we are trying to get the big companies not to tell us all the time what we need to eat and buy," says Bakker.

"In a way, we're giving people more freedom because they can make their own choice, right?"

Removing that constant visual nudge, she says, both reduces impulse buying, and signals that cheap meat and fossil heavy travel are no longer aspirational lifestyle choices.

Meat was a relatively small slice of Amsterdam's outdoor advertising market – accounting for an estimated 0.1% of ad spend, compared with roughly 4% for fossil related products.

The advertising was instead dominated by the likes of clothing brands, movie posters, and mobile phones.

But politically the ban sends a message. Grouping meat with flights, cruises and petrol and diesel cars reframes it from a purely private dietary choice to a climate issue.

Local politicians Anneke Veenhoff (left) and Anke Bakker say the ban was needed

Unsurprisingly, the Dutch Meat Association, which represents the industry, is unhappy at the move, which it calls "an undesirable way to influence consumer behaviour". It adds that meat "delivers essential nutrients and should remain visible and accessible to consumers".

Meanwhile, the Dutch Association of Travel Agents and Tour Operators says that the ban on advertising holidays that include air travel is a disproportionate curb on companies' commercial freedom.

For activists like lawyer Hannah Prins and her environmental organisation Advocates for the Future, which worked closely with campaign group Fossil-Free Advertising, the ban on meat advertising is a deliberate attempt to create a "tobacco moment" for high carbon food.

"Because if I look now back at like old pictures, you have Johan Cruyff," says Prins. "The famous Dutch footballer.

"He would be in advertisements for tobacco. That used to be normal. He died of lung cancer.

"That you were allowed to smoke on the train, on restaurants. For me, that's like, whoa, why did people do that? You know, that feels so weird.

"So it really is like what we see in our public space is what we find normal in our society. And I don't think it's normal to see murdered animals on billboards. So I think it's very good that that's going to change."

Lawyer Hannah Prins wants people to view meat in the same way as they do smoking

The Dutch capital is not starting from scratch.

Haarlem, 18km (11 miles) to its west, was in 2022 the first city in the world to announce a broad ban on most meat advertising in public spaces. It came into force in 2024, together with a prohibition on fossil fuel adverts.

Utrecht and Nijmegen have since followed with their own measures that explicitly restrict meat (and in Nijmegen's case also dairy) advertising on municipal billboards, on top of existing bans on adverts for fossil fuels, petrol cars and flying.

Globally, dozens of cities have, or are moving to, ban fossil-fuel advertising. Such as Edinburgh, Sheffield, Stockholm and Florence. France even has a nationwide ban.

Campaigners hope that the Dutch approach - linking meat and fossil fuels - will act as a legal and political blueprint others can copy.

Stand at a tram stop in Amsterdam and you might no longer see a juicy burger or a 19 euro ($18.70; £14.90) flight to Berlin on the shelter.

Yet the same eye-catching offers can still pop up in your social media algorithm. And, let's face it, many of us would be looking down at our screens until the tram trundles along.

If municipal bans leave digital platforms untouched, how much real world impact can they have on our habits or are they purely symbolic virtue-signalling?

Getty Images

Is the ban on outdoor adverts worthwhile if people can still see promotions for meat and fossil fuel online?

So far, there is no direct evidence that removing meat advertising from public spaces leads to a shift toward more plant-based societies.

However, some researchers are cautiously optimistic, such as Prof Joreintje Mackenbach who is an epidemiologist - a medical professional who investigates health patterns within populations.

She describes Amsterdam's move as "a fantastic natural experiment to see".

"If we see advertisements for fast food everywhere, it normalizes the consumption of behaviour of fast consumption," says Mackenbach, who is from the Department of Epidemiology and Data Science at hospital Amsterdam University Medical Center.

"So if we take away those types of cues in our public living environments, then that is also going to have an impact on those social norms."

She points to a study which claims that London Underground's 2019 ban on junk food adverts led to less people buying such products in the UK capital.

Smiling on the banks of a canal in the centre of Amsterdam, Prins is adamant smaller specialist tradespeople in Amsterdam will benefit from the new advertising ban.

"Because like everything we love, festivals, nice cheese, a flower shop around the corner. All the stuff that we love, we don't hear from through ads," she says.

"It's usually through people that we know, or we walk past the building. So I think local businesses will be able to thrive because of this.

"I think and I hope that big polluting companies will be extra scared. And maybe will rethink the kind of products they are selling. I think you can really see that change is possible."

https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/wsx2q/comment/c5g8v4d/

I was curious about why honey is considered non-vegan and found this post. If any of this information is outdated then I’m happy to hear more about this

Ok, beekeeper, non-vegan here. I've got no horse in the vegan race, but I do know my bees and here is the sad truth: beekeeping is responsible for the decline of world-wide bee population for the last (roughly) 150 years, and for the precipitous decline since 1947.

Beekeeping as it has been done since the widespread adoption of the Langstroth hive has been bad for bees. This is mostly because the hive design has movable frames and opens from the top. These innovations led to highly interventionist beekeeping, and copious fucking with the bees.

The movable frame allows the beekeeper to easily remove, inspect, replace, and swap comb, and led to migratory beekeeping. Bees are now trucked by the tens of thousands of hives across the country with the seasons for the pollination business (which is a bigger than the honey business). The results is that diseases and bee pests move too. The biggest colony killer in the US right now is the Varroa mite, introduced from Asia by humans in 1988, and spread by humans to hives across the country.

The opening from the top destroys the bees' carefully maintained nestduftwarmebingdung, the nest atmosphere. Bees maintain an anti-microbial sauna inside the hive, at a contant tempurature with a complex scent. They can go into fever-mode, raising the temp to kill off infection. The scent helps maintain communication and defenses. Opening the hive destroys the atmosphere. It takes the bees days to reestablish, and is a costly expense of energy they need for foraging, building, and preparing for winter. This weakens the bees, compromising their immune system and leaving them susceptible to infection and invaders.

Then there's honey. Bees spend all season making honey stores so that they can survive the winter. The beekeeper comes along and takes it, then feeds the bees sugar syrup in the winter. This also weakens the bees. Honey is a complex, nutritious bee food. Sugar water is a simple, inadequate food. This is something like you farming all season and stocking up for the winter. You've canned and preserved your veg, and filled your freezer with meat, ready for the hard, unproductive winter. Then someone comes along, takes all your food, and replaces it with Twinkies. You'll survive the winter on Twinkies, but you'll be in pretty bad health come spring. (Although, like the bees with sugar, you'll happily eat the Twinkies, because, yum.)

In the pursuit of larger honey harvest, beekeepers have been artificially increasing the size if the bee's comb cell for about 100 years, by using comb foundation. Bigger cells is thought to mean more honey. So the bees you see today (with some exceptions) are "large-cell" bees, bigger than nature made them. Bigger cells means the workers are too big and the drones are too small (bees left on their own will make different sized cells for each type of bee). This weakens the bees. Some bees bred generations on foundation have lost their ability to create comb on their own.

These weak, immuno-compromised bees are then protected by the beekeepers with pesticides and anti-biotics placed in the hive to deal with the disease and pests that the bees can no longer fight off. This poisons the honey (yum!) and the bees, and breeds resistant pests.

Beekeeping is also dominated by artificial breeding of queens, which eliminates the Darwinian battle of the queens which nature uses to find the strongest queen. This weakens the genetics of the bees, for thousands of generations.

Most, in fact almost all, beekeeping is industrial farming, equivalent to factory farming chickens or cattle. And it has devastated the bees.

There are exceptions: look into vertical top bar hives (which open from the bottom except once a year); chemical-free beekeeping; and spring-harvest honey (taken from the surplus after winter is over).

A note about honey: most of the honey you buy at the grocery store is not. It is heated and filtered and pollen-free, removing the extraordinary health benefits of honey, cut eith corn syrup, beet syrup or other sweeteners, and laced with pesticides and anti-biotics. If you want honey, buy unfiltered, unheated honey, from a beekeeper you know. If you want honey and are concerned about the bees, buy from a beekeeper using Warré topbar hives, doing a surplus harvest.

A note about Colony Collapse Disorder: CCD is not a mystery, as is often reported. CCD is caused by industrial farming pesticides, which destroy bees' navigational abilities, and they can't find their way back to the hive. The whole "it's mysterious" thing is a lie promoted by the chemical companies, primarily Bayer. But in the context of bees weakened by generations of industrial beekeeping, trying to forage on thousands of acres of monoculture crops, having been trucked thousands of miles from their home territory, it is an easy lie to sell.

that's it that's the post

Just finished reading Abbate’s 2020 essay, “Animal Rights and the Duty to Harm: When to be a Harm Causing Deontologist, and since I’ve also been thinking a lot about the de-sexing of animals (dogs and cats in specific; humans and all other animals in general), I read Abbate’s essay with that subject on my mind.

Anyways, I’m really not certain where I land on this subject, despite having read a number of arguments from all sides. I’m interested in hearing where members of this community stand (I’m aware that many, if not most, vegans are advocates for the sterilization of NHA), especially those members who have relationships with companion animals for which de-sexing is a common, socially acceptable and/or recommended practice.

Also, I know this can be a contentious subject, so I feel I should say I am approaching this in good faith, and I ask that anyone who contributes to this conversation does the same. I have no agenda other than genuinely trying to learn. If there is a better community for this question, I will gladly ask there. Thanks!

On the porch of the Chilmark General Store and at sunset-watching parties on Menemsha Beach, conversations circle ineluctably to the lone star tick, which after a single bite can leave people with a life-threatening allergy to most meat and dairy.

Known as alpha-gal syndrome, the condition is changing the way many people shop, cook and eat in a place long known as a food-lover’s retreat for its thriving independent farms and restaurants.

These new habits may prove to be lasting, as some islanders who initially avoided beef and cheese temporarily, out of necessity, later give them up for good out of preference.

“It’s sort of supersized vegetarianism,” said Rebecca Miller, a farm owner who has the syndrome herself.

Last year, out of 1,254 tests for the allergy, 523 came back positive, according to laboratory data from Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. This was a stunningly fast rise from 2020, when only two out of nine tests were positive.

Sometimes I eat a bowl of roasted chickpeas and its pretty good. I've been noticing that a lot of my protein options like tofu and seitan aren't super high in calories. I'm trying to gain weight rn and it has been difficult as I have a very high metabolism and a small stomach. I eat beans and nuts because they fill that niche somewhat but I was curious if y'all had and recipes or advice. Thanks :D

Do you eat enough protein in a day? Don’t even bother answering, because I know the answer is no. But don’t worry, I’m kind of a protein guy. I can give you all the guidance you need so you can stop being such a weak little _____. I eat three hundred times my recommended daily allowance of protein. So as you can imagine, my life is perfect. I can crush a fifteen-gallon stainless-steel trash can with my thighs. I could lift your sofa above my head and throw it so far you’ll never see it again. And that’s what I’ll do if you don’t start eating enough protein. So you’d better listen up.

Let’s start with the basics. According to my nutritionist, a guy named the Beef Man, you should be getting at least 30,000 grams of protein at each meal. You’re probably clocking in at a cool fifteen grams or less, which, quite frankly, makes me want to punch a wall. How many chicken breasts have you even eaten so far today? Four? Five? Don’t make me laugh.

By the way, you could be slamming legumes right now while I’m telling you this. Every second of the day is an opportunity for protein, and you’re wasting it. What’s that sound? All I hear is the sound of you not eating a bucket of eggs. That eggless silence is the worst sound in the world. I listen to a recording of myself eating a bucket of eggs to help me fall asleep at night. It brings me a peace you’ll never understand.

But don’t think I have no sympathy for sad little failures. I know reaching your daily protein goals can be a challenge. Sometimes you have to get creative. Do you drink coffee in the morning? Try swapping it out for ground turkey. (Do not talk to me until I’ve had my ground turkey.) If you’re still brushing your teeth with toothpaste (zero protein), you’re a stupid idiot. Start brushing with Greek yogurt. Do you take medicine? Of course you do, because you’re a sick freak who doesn’t get enough protein. Try cottage cheese instead.

I can tell you’re still a little skeptical. Why do you even need all that protein anyway? I’ll tell you why, you piece of shit. You need protein for muscle growth. You’re probably saying, “I don’t care about muscle growth. I like being an adult with the body of a little baby.” And of course, that’s your choice. But you also need protein for maintaining blood, skin, and bones. Ever heard of them? You think you’re too good for bones, buddy? If you don’t eat enough protein, you’re basically saying you’re cool with being a disgusting pile of goo. Ever seen a pile of goo before, tough guy? It ain’t pretty.

And look, I get it. Eating a nutritious diet is about balance. Of course you can still eat other things you enjoy like fruits, pastas, and even brownies. As long as those fruits, pastas, and brownies are made from a slurry of broken-down animal parts and molded into the shapes of those respective foods. I know not everyone enjoys animal slurry. As a vegetarian alternative, put a bunch of chickpeas in a blender and sculpt that goop into the shape of any food you’d normally enjoy. Pretend you’re Demi Moore in Ghost while you’re doing it. I don’t care.

At the end of the day, I’m tired of your excuses. You can’t spend all day cooking lentils? Fine. Don’t tell me you don’t have thirty seconds on your morning commute to snack on some unseasoned ground beef. I don’t leave the house without my five-pound canister of chocolate banana cinnamon roll whey protein powder that I snort when there’s a lull in conversations. I can already hear you whining, “The protein powder burns when I snort it.” Okay, well, nothing is stopping you from administering it rectally, except for your bad attitude.

Ultimately, I can’t force you to eat the correct amount of protein for your body weight. But the next time you try to crush a fifteen-gallon stainless-steel trash can with your thighs, don’t come crying to me when you look like a fool because you only dented it a little bit.

Edit: that's me removing the slur, it did not trigger the slur filter at all BTW

The entire breakdown of why I almost boycotted NARD 15 Chennai even though I was one of the organisers.

My NARD 15 speech: "We've Failed the Animals" from an event that I almost boycotted.

So as you can see this yields a pretty pleasantly jiggly jelly. Unfortunately I haven't been able to get reliable layer adhesion which you can also see.

This is 0.25% agar and 0.2% guar the latter helps make the gel elastic and reduce weaping, agar alone tends to be brittle. The rest is ~~druid~~ fruit syrup, just boil for a couple of minutes to fully hydrate the agar :)

• no druids were harmed in the making of this

It's badly formed because I had to make it in a cake tin lined with paper due to lack or other moulds that would fit in my steaming baskets.

This has been my white whale as it were. I have it on good authority that agar and locust bean gum works but I am not a millionaire and can't afford locust bean gum.

Here are the directions: A base recipe as an idea for ratios, 30g sucrose, 49g water, 20g tapioca starch, 1g agar agar.

Mix sugar, agar, and water. Heat to ~90 degrees and mix thoroughly to ensure good agar dissolution. Allow to cool in a water bath at ~40 degrees, keep above agar setting temp and below tapioca gelatinisation temp (~60 degrees).

slowly add tapioca starch (alternative reserve some water initially to make a slurry, you'll need about 4/5ths the mass of starch, and heat that in the bath to avoid solidifying the agar solution when mixing) stirring well to evenly mix.

Decant into a form, and steam gently over a barely simmering pot for 20 minutes. A vigorous boil will lead to bubbles in the gel.

To achieve layers just steam a layer for ~3 minutes keeping everything to go later in the temp range of 40-60 degrees.

many such cases

wtffffff

they are so yummy and actually pretty nutritionally good, fucking israeli scum

anyone got good boxed mac and cheese recommendations?

Veganism seems to fall so obviously out of leftist beliefs, there are definitely other ways to get there but even if you are a speciest animal ag is so wantonly destructive, intensive, exploitative, colonial, and abusive to human workers not being against it is a big question mark.

I want to be charitable to people, I understand that deprogramming yourself can take a while, but when people have been aware that veganism is an option for months/years without taking any material steps... I dunno, are you just a treatlerite mad you don't have enough treats?

Has anyone had any real progress making other leftists they meet vegan? I've only managed to get three people to permanently adopt the philosophy in my life. None of those were particularly leftist, just justice sympathetic.

edit: I actually want to hear from other vegans in the vegan comm. Shocking I know.