Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Pickler? Really?

Wow - Kellie Pickler has been named by PETA as the sexiest vegetarian in America.



I guess that's great - I watched the season of American Idol that she was on (Chris Daltry was in her season, wasn't he?), and I'm thinking that with Pickler's grassroots appeal, and with her rural background, she could make vegetarianism popular with a swath of North Americans who otherwise would barely know what vegetarianism was all about.

Still - remembering what Pickler was like on American Idol makes me wonder how the heck SHE decided to go veggie.

Another story on the web mentions that she got some guidance with going veggie from another American Idol graduate, Carrie Underwood. I don't know anything about Underwood, but my general impression is that she's a fairly intelligent, world-aware person, so bravo - good for her for spreading the word.

The story above also mentions that Pickler learned about vegetarianism by googling around and watching PETA videos. That makes me a little nervous - PETA stuff is so unbelievably biased that they make it hard for someone with a research background to take them seriously, but oh well. To be fair, I guess we all kind of start with those videos.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

From the news today

I make fairly good use of google news alerts, and here are some items that came my way via a (vegan OR vegetarian) news alert today:

I'm not sure if this is really the website for the prestigious (and right-wing) Foreign Policy journal (a few things about the site make me suspicious), but the site has a piece called Meat: The Slavery of our time. How the coming vegetarian revolution will arrive by force.

Then, from the Huffington Post, there is a piece called Why I'm almost a vegetarian, but not yet. He makes some interesting points, although if you've read Michael Pollan you've seen these arguments before.

However, Harris's piece gets a thumbs-up because it refers to a documentary I've never heard of before, and which looks great: Food, Inc.