Road Apples by Tim Sanders
July 8, 2013
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Surviving the Vegan Death Grip If you are anything like me, God help you. Wait, what I meant to say was, if you are anything like me, the word “vegan” was not a part of your vocabulary 40 years ago. If you were a teen in the 1960s, you probably thought that a vegan was either an individual from Las Vegas, or a guy with pointy ears, like Mr. Spock, whose main job on the Starship Enterprise was to train the crew in the use of the Vegan Death Grip. But now, in 2013, human knowledge has advanced to where we all know the truth. A “vegan” is not a Vegasite, or a pointy-eared interplanetary traveler; a “vegan” is a pointless, earthbound wing nut. Mr. Spock was a Vulcan. Vegans are like vegetarians, only more so. Your average vegetarian eats vegetables and cardboard and something called tofu, which he always swears tastes just like chicken. He avoids meat, poultry and fish. Some vegetarians are just normal, logical people who vegetate for health reasons, and some of them do it because it is fashionable. Vegans, on the other hand, feel that all animals and non-vegetative life forms (except for stockbrokers, cattle ranchers, chicken farmers, and Dick Cheney) are just like humans, and should be treated as such. Vegans not only avoid meat, poultry, and fish, they also avoid products containing eggs, leather, feathers, fur, sea shells, whalebone, catgut, horseradish, and any kind of seal at all, including even the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Vegans believe that naugahyde and neatsfoot oil are evil products which exploit innocent naugas and harmless little neats. Vegans are, deep down, very moral and ethical ideologues with a mission. This makes them, deep down, very moral and ethical royal pains in the buttocks. According to Kristen Butler's July 1 UPI blog, a new website called “The Vegan Sellout List” was recently added to the Internet. The website posts names, photos, and locations of ex-vegans who've returned to their evil ways and started wolfing down quarter pounders and three piece KFC meals like there was no tomorrow. Apparently this wholesale backsliding into carnivorous behavior by what vegans call degenerate “carnists” has caused a panic in the already unstable vegan community. I've looked at lists of famous vegans, and a large portion of them are musicians, actors, and celebrities not known for what we unsophisticated folks call common sense. Their purpose is to “out” the vegan sellouts and shame them into either repenting, or moving to New Guinea, where people seldom eat animals, only each other (and only at special holiday barbecues). Here's a quote from the Vegan Sellout website: “The spirits of the billions murdered have risen to deliver: The Vegan Sellout list–an online directory of those who have regressed from moral consistency to moral depravity. The Vegan Sellout List is our answer to the epidemic of vegan sellouts–those who ... choose to look away while the animals suffer.” Meat eaters are referred to in the Sellout website as “swarms of naughty, nose thumbing carnists,” and “paleo-terrorists.” One of the sellouts on the list is New Yorker Berlin Reed, 31, who, according to an interview with the New York Post, said that at one point he was so seriously devoted to veganism that he refused to kiss meat eaters. But Reed later took a job as a cheese monger, and it was a downward spiral from there. He is now a butcher, of all things, and says he's learned that most small farmers don't treat animals inhumanely. So now he eats 'em. Animals, that is, not small farmers. And how, you may ask yourself, did the vegans believe that farmers were torturing their livestock? Well, one story, probably apocryphal, told of New Hampshire chicken farmer Ringold “Beelzebub” Feeny and his hen, Fertile Myrtle. Most of Feeny's hens laid between one and three eggs per day. On the other hand, Fertile Myrtle could produce as many as sixteen, but only after listening to two hours of Slim Whitman's Very Best album piped into her coop. Feeny assumed that Myrtle's prodigious egg-laying ability was due to her admiration of Slim Whitman, so he decided to try piping that same album into her coop for three hours instead of two, hoping to increase her production to eighteen or twenty. Unfortunately, Myrtle had been laying those sixteen eggs daily, but only out of relief after the Whitman yodel-fest was over. So when Feeny went to check on her after leaving that racket going, full blast, for three hours nonstop, he found that poor little Fertile Myrtle['s head had exploded. Many New York vegans were known to weep while telling that story. Another told of a Nebraska farmer who forced his dairy cows to watch DVD reruns of The Golden Girls on a widescreen TV if they didn't produce at least 12 gallons of milk per cow per day. The cows, or so the vegan story goes, tolerated most of the show's cast, but became boisterous and began kicking at their stalls whenever Bea Authur appeared on the set. This inhumane treatment resulted in gallons and gallons of curdled milk, not to mention some very irritable dairy cows. The vegans were fond of this story, despite the fact that most of them had never seen an actual dairy cow, let alone milked one. So, to sum it all up, in the final analysis, taking everything into consideration, and when all is said and done ... where was I? Oh yeah, if you are an ex-vegan and don't want some nosey do-gooder neighbor or friend to report you to the Meat Police at the Vegan Sellout website, you have three options. • Hire a low-level mobster to go to the store to purchase your meat and poultry for you. Make him sign an oath of silence. In chicken blood. • If you eat out, disguise your steak, eggs, chicken, or whatever under several layers of parsley. • Or better yet, leave the food uncovered and disguise yourself. Somewhere in the basement I have a box full of those very realistic Groucho glasses, complete with the huge Groucho honker, the bushy eyebrows, and the mustache. When I locate them, I'll put an ad in the paper. But the Groucho noses are all plastic, so be careful not to get yours in your soup–it will melt. |