veg

Drew Wilson will open a vegan diner in Worcester, MA if we raise $19,900.

Today, several Worcester vegetarians used their lunch break to hand out 135 Vegan Outreach booklets at Assumption College.

The group will be leafleting other area colleges soon.

To get involved, contact Drew at drew@VegWorcester.com.

Several of us have been posting vegetarian/vegan-type stuff to Worcester Activist, so all of this will now appear at a group blog here: Link.

Photo: zenera (Flickr)

At Step It Up I was pleased to meet Christina Triplett of the Worcester Vegan Society. She told me one of the WVS’s projects is making Worcester a foie gras-free city.

Chicago went so far as to ban foie gras sales, with mixed results.

According to the WVS’s materials, only 2 restaurants in Worcester serve the stuff: Block 5 (which uses it to garnish steak) and Bocado (which serves it on a sandwich). What’s more, they have the same chef! So making Worcester foie gras-free would be no more complicated than one man tweaking his menus.

Wolfgang Puck recently removed foie gras from his offerings, and in a statement said:

Our guests are interested in the same environmental issues that have long concerned us—sustainable farming and fishing, humane treatment of farm animals and reducing the amount of hormones, antibiotics, preservatives and pesticides in the food we eat.

YouTube video of Wolfgang Puck

So Drew Wilson was on WCCA TV13 talking about the WPI "no battery eggs" campaign, and since it was posted to the web it was picked up by noted vegan activist Erik Marcus, who praised it to the heavens on his podcast Erik's Diner:

This thing's really worth watching, because this is a young college activist who, I would imagine, has very little experience being on TV, but he was magnificent! You gotta watch this guy!

Download the podcast (mp3)

One week in February, Jenna Calabrese of Vegan Outreach was in town. I got to spend some time helping her distribute "Even If You Like Meat" pamphlets at WPI on Feb 22. She reports 550 were handed out--pretty cool.

Me, a student, and a pamphlet. Photo by Jenna Calabrese.

There's currently a campaign to encourage Morningstar Farms to stop using eggs in their products. Their stuff is already vegetarian, and a lot of it is vegan, so this isn't much of a stretch. Today I wrote them a postcard.

Sometimes I think the local veg community is a bit fragmented, at least the parts I'm in contact with.

Today four of us handed out 53 Why Vegan pamphlets in 13 minutes at WPI.

I'm too shy to really like handing out literature, at least at first. After the first couple, I get into an extroverted groove.

I got a few dirty looks, but no really negative reaction. The last woman to take a pamphlet was actually excited to get one!

One of the Vegan Outreach staffers will be in Worcester later this month to do some serious leafleting. If you're interested, you can contact pieandcoffee@gmail.com. (Or pretty much any animal protection activist in town.)