Blog Round-Up

I've stumbled across some exceptional blogs lately. I encourage you to check out each of them ASAP:

* My good friend and our first guest blogger, Sky Chari, is now blogging regularly at her new venture, Eats Well with Others. It's chock full of restaurant reviews and tales of being vegan amongst the aforementioned others.

* I came across Elaine Vigneault's blog after reading her balanced and reasoned comments in response to a particularly heated post on I Blame the Patriarchy. Elaine's post today, "Because They Can," led me to...

* Vegans of Color, which, after comments like the one that follows, I am so eating up.

I’m glad some people are looking at the socioeconomic implications of the meat industry. So much attention has been put on animal welfare, animal rights, health, and the environment in relation to vegetarianism and veganism. Few people — vegans included — are aware of, or choose to think much about, who is relegated to the killing floors, namely minorities.

*

Finally, today is the one year anniversary of my grandfather's death. I'm not so much sad as I am just shocked that I've lived without him for a year. It wasn't long after he died that I decided to stop eating land animals. I didn't think the two had much to do with one another until I remembered how my grandfather often was treated like another cog in the hospital industry's wheel. How he was prodded and poked and turned over at the ease of the hospital staff and was completely dependent on others for his life. This isn't to say there weren't quite a few great nurses and aides and doctors. After all my grandfather needed to be turned and jostled because he was so sick. It still made me feel sad and powerless, nonetheless. I can't help but wonder if the sadness I felt for my grandfather being just another sick person out of many opened me up to feel sadness for so many other things, including for the billions of anonymous animals we eat.

Well, a lot has changed for me during this year without my grandfather, except for the fact that I still miss him terribly.