"Quorn chicken has milk in it? What a CRUEL HOAX."
Here’s something important you should know about me: I’m a vegan.
Some of you know that. If I mention it in passing, I’m guaranteed at least five tweets and two sternly-worded e-mails about how a brief mention of my personal dietary choices equates to full-on BLOOD PROTEST, and how I need to stop trying to cram it down the readers’ throats. If you weren’t aware, that’s probably normal, because I don’t mention it much.
I have, however, sorta ended up as “the vegan” in the Notable Comedy Sports Blogs circle of friends. Almost everyone else who writes about sports is full-on Ron Swanson 24/7, so if, say, vegan chicken wings are mentioned by a sports guy, Cosby Sweaters will talk about how their “world is imploding” and CFB Section gets comments like “go throw red paint on someone wearing a fur coat … tree huggers.” It instantly turns normal people into Jim Belushi. I’m left here to kinda meekly say “those wings aren’t bad, because they aren’t really supposed to be chicken wings” and hope nobody throws a brick at my head.
The reason I bring this all up now is because Peta has launched a Manti Te’o ad campaign, and oh my God I want to hit them in the head with a brick.
Manti Te’o may have been buffaloed by a fake girlfriend, but sometimes “fake” is actually better. That’s why PETA created this billboard urging football fans to avoid unnecessary roughness to chickens on Super Bowl Sunday by intentionally grounding real chicken wings and opting for play-action fake fowl instead.
[…]
Those animals in PETA’s “Glass Walls” video? Unlike Manti’s make-believe girlfriend, their deaths are real. Birds slaughtered for their wings and other body parts are often dropped into tanks of scalding-hot water while they are still conscious and aren’t covered by even the meager protections of the Humane Slaughter Act.
Peta is the worst. I probably hate them for different reasons than you, but you’re totally right to think they are self-centered, opportunistic and more or less the Westboro Baptist Church of animal rights. The idea should be education and compassionate discussion, not trying to “convert” people with Faces Of Death-style Driver’s Ed videos of chickens getting fed into an industrial fan, or whatever.
Who at Peta read the Manti Te’o story and thought, “you know what? People are gonna want to BE like this guy. Let’s compare his weird lying to the food we eat, because we are already respected and taken seriously.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain that the food I eat isn’t “fake,” it’s still food. It just has different ingredients. When you eat a french fry or whatever you don’t start scoffing and yelling with your mouth full about how you’re being SCAMMED because these potatoes aren’t WINGS. It’s food. Now every time I eat a breakfast taco with beans, potatoes, onions and salsa, I’m going to be just like that brain-dead asshole who couldn’t figure out it was Terry Jones in a wig doing a lady voice on the other end of the phone.
Here’s a suggestion for your next campaign, Peta: “Alex Rodriguez cheated by using steroids. You can cheat by eating a BOCA BURGER!”
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Lie, you mention it all the time. You’re worse than crossfitters. I know because I AM a crossfitter.(SEEEEEE?)
You probably loathe PETA for the same reason I loathe cheap, Woody Allen-esque Jews: you don’t want people thinking you’re like that. But I was on the “seriously, f*ck PETA” bandwagon after they compared animal slaughter to the Holocaust.
I’ve never gotten how someone not eating animal products affects me. You enjoy vegan food? Cool, bro. I like some of it too, I just happen to eat meat as well. You not eating meat does not harm me or throw me into a Hulk-like rage because I’m a sane adult.
Right. People are weird.
Agreed. I don’t care if people want animals treated properly or if they refuse to eat animals. That’s your life, and it has no effect on mine. I care if people financially support arsonists, protest animal testing for medical research (how’s that insulin, diabetic VP of PETA?), and harass animal shelter employees for euthanizing animals (something PETA THEMSELVES DO! PETA EUTHANIZES ANIMALS!!!). Being a vegan and animal lover is perfectly fine. PETA being a shitty organization isn’t.
I started going to an environmentalist club at school recently, and I’m still bothered that “the cause” seems to take precedent over the reason for the cause. Like people need to protest outside the White House for the protection of trees, but can’t teach why people should like trees in the first place.
“The cause” = donations.
You get crap for occasionally mentioning you’re a vegan because A: you do it all the time and B: you feel the need to do it ever. I don’t see any other Uproxx writers/bloggers making it clear what they eat in the opening line of any other posts today. I can’t really think of any personal information about anyone else here (besides what teams they root for), except I definitely know you were a vegan. You can eat whatever you want; if you think it’s healthier or makes you happier, good for you. But don’t bang the drum and then get upset when people notice you banging a drum.
As for your premise, I agree. It’s like going to a ball game in an opposing stadium and having some asshole you don’t even know who roots for your team get everyone pissed at you because he’s drunk and swearing at little kids.
“Mentioning it ever” is “mentioning it all the time” to people who don’t agree.
Besides, it’s contextually appropriate for stories about Peta, or thoughts on a vegan pro wrestler, or whatever.
The answer to this is to have every Uproxx writer/blogger add a disclaimer/instagram about what they’re currently munching on.
Brandon also has a girlfriend named Destiny, grew up in rural Virginia, was overweight as a child, and went with Destiny as Team Hell No this Halloween (Brandon was Daniel Bryan). He’s mentioned all those things in his columns.
People get way too butthurt about vegans. If Brandon were preaching or being passive aggressive about people who ate meat I’d see giving him crap. But seriously, who cares what someone eats if they don’t make a big deal out of it? And mentioning is not making a big deal out of it.
But I think Patrick’s suggestion is the right one. Plus they have to hold up a newspaper and their driver’s license to prove it’s really them.
if it helps at all, my diet is 90% coffee and sriracha
Brandon, that is very true about “Mentioning it ever.” And it was contextually appropriate here. But it isn’t fair for you to mention (with some frequency) some detail about yourself that a huge majority of the people find quite strange and then be shocked at them every time for thinking it strange. Sorry if I came off as “butthurt” despite saying good for you for doing what makes you healthy and happy. And sorry for the assholes who jump down your throat about it and make me, who is being pretty reasonable, look bad (post relevance!).
Also, you want to consider a restraining order against SHough610.
You also have to consider that the intro I wrote was mostly to set up the joke about how I’m a complainy vegan but hate the shit out of Peta.
Can any rational person like Peta? I mean, you can like what they stand for, but can you like who they are? And I’m not talking about vegetarianism, I’m talking about militant vegetarianism.
Although, they are probably just bringing balance to the universe after all the Carl’s Jr./Hardees commercials. “Hot chicks doing vaguely lesbian things while having meat juice dribble down their arms as they eat burgers? Fine, here are hot chicks doing vaguely masturbatory things with vegetables.”
Moral: everyone wins.
Ah you’re no fun anymore
Good on ya Brandon. Whatever makes you feel better.
– ON WITH THE SNARK!!!!
Well-said, friend.
So this probably isn’t the place for it, but when did you take up veganism? (Become vegan? Convert? Upgrade?) I don’t recall much of your mentioning of it during the heyday of P-boi, and I think it only adds depth to your articles when you do talk about it.
This is the extremely abridged version of the story:
I had a really bad eating disorder for a long time. Most of it was psychological, but some of it had to do with how my body reacted to certain foods (milk, for example) and guilt from understanding how the food was made, but it being “normal” to eat it anyway. I ended up being a vegetarian for 9 years, but that just made me fat (because all I ate was cheese and french fries), which triggered all the eating disorder stuff again, and it was a big cycle of denial and self-destruction.
I never wanted to be a vegan because I thought all vegans were jerks (which is still pretty true … most of us are total a-holes, which is why I don’t hang out with vegan groups in Austin more often). Eventually I found out about how several people I loved were vegan (UltraMantis Black, Nellie McKay, my eventual girlfriend) so one day I was just like “I’m not gonna have cheese on this sandwich.” Almost 4 years later, I’m just vegan by nature. I lost 70 pounds, my stomach stopped hurting, I stopped being sick all the time, I developed a healthy (not perfect, but healthy) relationship with food, and I don’t have to beat myself up about it all the time.
So, health, with a huge chaser of relief.
(thanks for asking, btw)
As someone who has bounced between morbidly obese and nearly healthy and is currently at, “hey buddy, you should think about losing weight” I can say that what you eat has a BIG effect on how you feel.
I’ve recently decided to focus on losing weight again because after months of eating like a garbage can I don’t feel very good. I can’t even describe it, but I know that if I were eating lean ground turkey and skinless, boneless chicken breasts five days a week like I used to I’d feel a lot better.
Vegan By Nature would be the preachiest hip-hop group since Public Enemy.
No Brandon, not that Public Enemy.
@Brandon, thank you for sharing! I do hope you’re enjoying Austin aside from the amount of jerks in their vegan community. If you’re ever in Portland, I will gladly find a few good vegan restaurants for you.
I’m lactose-intolerant (but to overcompensate, I’m excessively tolerant of everything else) so I use a lot of soy products. My cholesterol is shockingly low considering what else I like to eat. Are the vegan wings soy, or something evil like those veggie burgers?
The wings Peta mentions are soy protein, but you can make some pretty good ersatz wings from seitan. Beyond Meat is apparently really good, but I don’t live anywhere where they sell it.
Okay, one other question: every time I try to eat a vegan-style meal, I’m hungry as hell after. What do you use to fill up? Non-buttered bread?
I don’t know, I get pretty full. Part of it is training yourself to not have to be “full” at meals but satiated, which is the healthy way to do it. Smaller portions, more meals, that kind of thing. It’s good for your body.
I am certainly Swanson like in my diet, but my girlfriend is vegan. I don’t have to share any of my food. I love it.
I dated this chick for a while who was a total vegan. She convinced me (she was pretty persuasive in her methods) to try it for a week. It actually wasnt bad, had some pretty tasty dishes
you’d be shocked by how many people can’t believe people who choose an alternative diet can still enjoy food
Oh Peta, as I get older, you still remain really crazy. . . Perhaps not as crazy as Raw diet vegans. I met a Raw vegan for the first time the other day. At first it was a pleasant experience as they were actually not being all high and mighty and were willing to give me advice on how to incorporate vegan food options into my diet. But then when their advice consisted of eat 30 bananas, 6 mangoes, 30 dates or 4kg of oranges a day, I did the Ashley Simpson jig out of the way.
But yeah, PETA sucks for so many reasons.
You are vegan. That means more pork for me so I am cool with it.
It also means another 100,000 comments like this for me every day. One of the best reasons to go vegan is to get away from omnivore food hyperbole, which is the worst.
You will never escape it. You need to eat this bacon otherwise you aren’t a real man or something like that
Man, I wish people paid more attention to stuff people put in other people’s bodies against their will than what other people put in their own bodies. Between people backlashing against Brandon for his Veganism and the PED outrage, the levels of MYOBism is at an all-time low.
I tend to believe people in general bring up whats important to them in their own lives and there’s nothing wrong with that. Personally, you could start absolutely every blog post you right with ‘I’m a vegan and the Rock is a misogynistic pig…now here is what happened during the Capitals game last night’ and it would bother exactly zero %. I don’t blog but I’m on Twitter / Facebook a lot and when I look back at my posts I realize, man I talk about my ex-wife or being single again a lot. Its not that I’m struggling with it its just that is biggest thing that has happened to me in 6 months. Your vegan-ism also does tie into the story as it gives us a ground work as to where you are coming from. So yeah, long story short: Haters gun h8.
I’ll also admit this, I follow your stuff more because I DO know a bit about you and where you came from to get here and I enjoy the articles more than I would Wilbon or Mariotti or Barnwell etc etc ad nauseum…
also, fuck Jay Mariotti. Just Sayin’
If you’re ever in Houston, Pondicheri has meatless mondays, and good vegan stuff all week and Ruggles Green has a meatless (can get it vegan) dish every night. I’ll choose this stuff over meat dishes sometimes, it’s that good. Also, any of the southern indian places on Harwin are great, but you need someone to tell you what’s in the dishes (if you’re not indian)
For your next pre-Rockets game meal!
I’m a vegan too. I suppliment my vegan lifestyle with meat 4-6 times per week just like Tony Gonzales.