Vegan on the Cheap

I’m sorry for the unannounced hiatus. Again.

This time, I at least have a reasonable excuse. In May, in the span of two weeks, I was robbed at gunpoint, broke up with Greg, and then had one of my best friends unexpectedly die of a stroke at age 23. So it’s been kind of a crazy month for me, and I haven’t really been prioritizing the blog.

But now I’m back. :)

So, apparently breakfast is important or something?

I dunno. That’s what they tell me.

I’ve been trying to make an effort to eat better, and part of that is making an attempt to eat something, even something small, every morning before work. My mornings are a bit rushed, what with taking care of all the animals and trying to get myself showered and out the door by 7:00 AM, so I need something quick and easy.

Before I was a vegan, I would get a big box of Eggo waffles from the store and just pop one of those in the toaster right before I left. But alas, Eggos are decidedly UN-vegan, so that doesn’t work anymore.

Imagine my excitement when I happened across a box of Van’s All-Natural Waffles in the freezer area of the “hippie section” at my favorite local store!

First off, I adore any company that puts the word “VEGAN” in big letters somewhere on the packaging. Reading labels is such a pain in the butt, and it takes up more of my time than I’d like to admit when I go grocery shopping. So it was nice to be able to skip that routine with these waffles.

There are only six waffles to a box, but one box lasts me about a week, since I usually only eat one in the morning. The box cost me just under $4 with tax, so they’re about $0.60 per waffle, which is pretty damn cheap! And they taste FANTASTIC. I’ve had the blueberry and the Belgian-style multigrain varieties, and they were both great. I usually just eat mine plain, but the Belgian-style is also really yummy with some chunky peanut butter slathered on.

Add a glass of vanilla soymilk or a travel mug of coffee, and it’s the perfect hurried breakfast for the vegan-on-the-go.

Or just the lazy vegan, which is another category I also sometimes fall into. I won’t lie and say I haven’t fixed these for dinner, as well. :)

Overall Rating:

If you’ve got an iPhone and you’re anything like me, the thing may as well be surgically grafted to your hand. I use mine allll the time: at work, in the car, on the bus, at home, and even in the bathroom. (TMI?)

When I got mine, there wasn’t a whole lot available in the way of vegan-related applications, so I was constantly going, “Man, I wish they had an app that could do [insert handy task to benefit the vegan-on-the-go here]!” And then I would make a mental note to talk to one of my programming friends to start helping me build it so we could help make vegans’ lives easier and become filthy rich at the same time.

Of course, my mental notes typically get lost in the cobwebby abyss I call my brain, so none of that ever panned out and I’m still a cheapskate vegan trying to scrounge together enough change from in between the couch cushions for a block of tofu.

Fortunately for us, though, someone DID develop cool apps to help vegans find restaurants, foods, and products that are cruelty-free and locally available.

So, without further ado, here are my five favorite vegan iPhone apps.

[=>] slide to unlock

I’m sure by now we’ve all heard about the swine flu pandemic that’s already killed more than 100 people in Mexico had has spread to the US.

Honestly, I’m not surprised by the outbreak, considering the fact that factory farms are filthy cesspools of disease, and taking into consideration our brainwashed germaphobic societal urges to eradicate everything with antibiotics, creating mutated supergerms that will probably eventually wipe us all out like the aliens in War of the Worlds.

We’re supposed to be the smartest, most capable species on earth. How much would it suck if a teeny-weeny germ took us all out?

Anyway, I was also not surprised to read PETA’s idiotic blog post headline this morning: “The Pigs’ Small Revenge?” Yes, PETA, you have once again used your keen deduction skills and uncovered a secret plot by Mexican pigs to seek vengeance by getting sick, and then spreading it to us! Mwahahahaha!

I’m not trying to downplay either the seriousness of the outbreak or the plight of the animals in factory farms across our continent. Large-scale pig farms are usually filthy, windowless, enclosed buildings crowded with thousands of animals living ankle-deep in their own excrements and awaiting brutal slaughter at an abattoir, and there’s nothing funny about it. We wouldn’t have outbreaks like E. coli, salmonella, mad cow, hoof and mouth disease, and avian and porcine influenza if we didn’t raise animals for consumption.

But I have to laugh at the stupidity of the notion that the pigs sat down and plotted all of this, and the mental image of an Orwellian pig meeting to draw up strategical charts is pretty ridiculous.

Those crazy PETA kids! What will they think of next?

Also, does this quote from their comments make anyone else’s head go ’splode?

“I don’t find anything wrong with eating meat as long as we treat them with respect such as not harming them in anyway and help them have a good life.” (Emphasis mine.)

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but wouldn’t you consider killing something a form of harm? And how does living your (very short) life on a crowded farm wading in your own feces and then being shipped to a slaughterhouse where you may very possibly be skinned and dismembered while still conscious constitute a “good life”??? What goes on in people’s tiny brains?

I think the worst part of this whole swine flu panic is the fact that so many pigs are inevitably going to be slaughtered to prevent the spread of the disease, just like all the sheep killed in the UK during the hoof-and-mouth scare and the cows butchered during the big mad cow freakout.

Sad, sad, sad.