Vegetarian Star

Emily Barclay would like you to know a few things about the animals that you eat the next time you sit down at the dinner table.

“I’m not against people who eat meat but I’d like them to know what happens in a factory farm where highly intelligent animals like pigs live horrific lives,” Barclay told Confidential.

Rolling Stone featured an article several years ago describing the conditions pigs lived at a Smithfield Foods farm, a leading producing of pork.

“Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth.”

“Taken together, the immobility, poisonous air and terror of confinement badly damage the pigs’ immune systems. They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush spritelike through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds — oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin — diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they’re slaughtered.”

Is this a place where you would send your 3-year old to day care?

According to GoVeg,  pigs have the intelligence level beyond a child of the same age and are the smartest animals outside of primates.

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Michelle Obama‘s White House garden is expanding!

The garden will be enlarged from 1,100 to 1,500 square feet to accommodate four additional vegetables of bok choy, white cauliflower, artichokes and mustard greens.

Once again, Mrs. Obama invited local school children to help plant this year’s seeds.

According to Treehugger, last year the garden yielded 1,000 pounds of food that was eaten by White House Staff and at State dinners or donated to local homeless shelters.

Another accomplishment for the garden last year was employing the use of “hoop houses,” protective structures placed over the plants to protect them from the winter’s freeze, allowing 50 pounds of food to be harvested during the winter.

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Food Network Magazine

Sweet and Sara and its vegan marshmallows are featured in the April 2010 issue of Food Network Magazine.

It’s about time vegan bakers help offset some of Paul Deen‘s usual recipe of the month of butter dipped battered ham and beef stack wrapped in bacon and drizzled with melted lard patties.

The company headquartered in Long Island City in New York is the home of vegan treats such as marshmallows without gelatin, vegan S’mores and other vegan desserts.

Sweet and Sara has been featured on the Food Network series “Unwrapped” and has also had one of its products named “Snack of the Day” on Rachael Ray‘s website.

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Deirdre Imus has collaborated with Operation Goody Bag Founder, Jane Cosco, to send healthy, non-toxic goody bags to children affected by the devastating earthquakes in Haiti earlier this year.

Kids-Love-Kids program has already sent 700 bags to Haiti and another shipment of 5,000 will be sent in April.

Cosco has been sending bags to troops for quite some time, but the vegetarian and environmentally conscious Imus wanted to step it up a notch and ensure the children were getting the best treats.

“We put organic lollipops, organic, gluten-free Yummy Bears, organic gum, organic granola bars, teddy bears, coloring books in French and English and non-toxic crayons inside the bags, which cost only $4 to produce,” Imus said.

“What’s so great about the program is that its easy and it doesn’t cost a lot of money to do. For $4 you can send a goody bag to a child in Haiti. The idea for Kids-Love-Kids is that this is a little thing we can do to let the children there know, ‘We care about you and we’re not forgetting you.’ It’s like getting a hug from one child to another.”

You can help by making a donation to the Kids-For-Kids program.

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Alicia Silverstone recently interviewed with Natural Solutions magazine for its April 2010 issue.

As expected, the conversation was filled with the topics Alicia is known best for–health, environment and veganism.

A few highlights:

It Is Easy To Be Vegan:
Everyone has to make time to find food, and it doesn’t add any extra time to find vegan food. It’s about prioritizing your life and figuring out what is important to you. I don’t care about new clothes, new cars, or fancy jewelry. I don’t go out and spend money on alcohol. Most people spend a lot of money on stuff: coffee, cigarettes, medication, or liquor. But when you stop spending money on stuff and start spending money on living well, it’s amazing what can happen to you.

On Her New York City Food Orgy:
In New York, I’ve been on a food orgy, walking around trying all the great restaurants, stores, and vendors. I can get a warm bagel with vegan cream cheese on almost every corner. The vegan cheese plate and vegan mint ice cream sundae at Pure Food and Wine [a raw-foods, vegan restaurant in Gramercy Park]? Oh my God, it’s so good. And there are falafels everywhere—I love falafels.

Read the entire interview with Alicia at naturalsolutionsmag.

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Mariel Hemingway was recently out promoting her latest book, Mariel’s Kitchen — Simple Ingredients for a Delicious and Satisfying Life, which contains several vegetarian friendly recipes.

A few years ago in 2003, Mariel created Blisscuits, a healthier cookie filled with omega-3 fatty acids and free of refined sugar, hydrogenated oil and gluten.

In addition, Blisscuits use egg whites sourced from suppliers that use cage free hens.

Blisscuits were created for her ex-husband after he was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma.

“(So, I told him) Give me a couple months, let’s work on this together, your food,” Mariel told the Bothell Reporter.

“And he had to change the way he lived his life, so he had to start eating differently and looking at his life differently — so it was food, it was exercise, it was learning how to meditate, it was having a different perspective.”

Mariel’s ex-husband has been cancer free for 11 years.

The granddaughter of the famous writer Ernest is into seasonal foods and her current favorite food of the season is the artichoke.

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500 Vegan Recipes

Alanis Morissette has put a photo of her latest favorite cookbook on Twitter.

500 Vegan Recipes: An Amazing Variety of Delicious Recipes, from Chilis and Casseroles to Crumbles, Crisps, and Cookies is just of the vegan books that have changed Alanis’ life.

It was a copy of Dr. Joel Fuhrman‘s Eat to Live that prompted her to go vegan.

Not wanting another fad diet, she was motivated by preventing disease and loss weight was an added consequence.

She now fills her plate with foods like fruit, nuts, collards, kale, and spinach.

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Jennifer Hudson has signed on to be a spokesperson for the weight loss program, Weight Watchers, after losing weight herself after the birth of her child.

Hudson was quoted by Popeater as saying, “{It’s} a lifestyle change, not a diet.”

When it comes to losing weight, what works?

Counting calories? Spends hours every week at the gym?

According to Food Consumer, Dr. Colin T Campbell, a Cornell University nutritionist and author of The China Study, suggests that what you eat is more important than how much and that eating a well balanced vegetarian or vegan diet may prevent weight gain.

Will Jennifer soon discover what another American Idol alumnus, Ruben Studdard, did about meatless eating and weight loss?

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