Etc.

Chabad's Vegan Shabbat Dinner
A Chabad House in a particularly vegetarian-friendly area of England hosted a vegan Shabbat dinner earlier this month. A must-read Chabad.org article quoted one attendee as saying, "My veganism doesn’t clash with my Judaism. In fact, the Garden of Eden was a vegetarian paradise; no one was permitted to eat meat until after the flood." The attendee continued, "The vegan night was great. The food was brilliant. I felt the night brought us one step closer to bringing in the Messianic era."

Alleged Flood at AgriProcessors
Failed Messiah posted last week that it appears that AgriProcessors' equipment for beef production has been rendered ruined and irreparable because of a flood. Failed Messiah speculated about what this could potentially mean:

I think it means Agriprocessors will be primarily a poultry facility for the foreseeable future. It will also process cold cuts, some of them beef. This will be done by buying beef from other producers. Or it will be done because the [prospective] buyer [of AgriProcessors] is working as a front or in partnership with another kosher beef producer ....

Recent Goodies on The Jew & The Carrot

• Rebecca Tanen talked about the International Vegetarian Food Fair at a Seventh-Day Adventist church and noted, "Judaism certainly believes in treating the body in a healthful way, and it was interesting to witness a faith that puts such a serious and spiritual emphasis on taking care of one’s body. ... I thought this was a great way to bring a community together while promoting a healthy lifestyle."
• Eda Goldstein reflected on Ynet's recent ranking of the best hummus restaurants in Israel.
• Cecily Marbach Oberstein is a vegetarian who handles and cooks meat for her husband and children, and she discussed her struggle with this. (Click here to read yesterday's heebnvegan post about handling and serving meat at a soup kitchen and in other special cases. Click here to read my March 2008 post about Jewish married couples that consist of one vegetarian and one meat-eater.) Here's an excerpt:

I am doing a lot of things that I thought I never would. I purchase, cook, serve, and clean up animals. I am personally responsible for creating a demand for these products. OK so I still avoid cooking cows and boycott steak restaurants but there are poor chickens whose lives rested in my hands and they lost, I lost. However I do have some rules in my house: 1. I never take compliments on the animals that I cook. 2. If it had to die to be at our table there better be no leftovers. Just as bad as buying and cooking the animals in my opinion, is throwing some away in the trash.