Also in Baltimore, home of Vegan SoulFest!

Food is culture 💚 and the vegan food here feels like Baltimore. It’s awesome that other cities are doing the same.

Mr. Trash Wheel is pretty cool:

https://www.mrtrashwheel.com/technology

Around here, it’s spotted lanternflies. The almost glee some have for squashing them is disheartening. I get why they do it, believe me, but I’ve encountered little to no zoomed out perspective that these little dudes didn’t choose to be here.

To really go off the deep end… the spotted lanternfly’s favorite tree, Ailanthus altissima, is just trying to do what its ancestors have done for millennia. Not saying these trees shouldn’t be removed, but they also didn’t choose to be here.

Of these things we speak venom and deem trash. Though, this attitude seems pervasive in how western culture treats the other in general.

Do you mean the fun stuff like soy curls and doing lines of nooch? Mimicking the gluttonous delights of Thee Burger Dude?

Closing a herbarium during the sixth mass extinction 🤡

If you’re referring to the abstract, unfortunately that’s how they’re normally written.

Hail Seitan!

If nobody got me, I know Chesapeake Bay Watershed got me 🙏 Can I get an amen?

I listened to the audiobook and it felt bogged down at times. But the argument for claiming and using fictional stories to promote leftist ideas is interesting, especially framed around such a large pop culture phenomenon.

The blog posts condense Harris’ arguments pretty well. They joke around a lot in the TIR interview, which is how I was introduced to the book.

Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:

“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”

“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”

The above map doesn’t include fishing, it’s showing land use. This shows fishing:

Here is another one about land animals:

Interactive map

Honey bees were domesticated, selectively bred like all other livestock, to be more docile and dependent. The relationship you describe was created by humans for the benefit of humans.