Monday 3/28: The Connection Between Eating Animals and Worldwide Violence

Tolstoy famously said, “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will always be battlefields.” The link between carnivory (eating animals) and violence has long been recognized, and is one reason many of history’s top thinkers, including Hippocrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shaw, Einstein, Gandhi, and of course, Tolstoy himself, were vegetarian or vegan.

But just how real is this link, and how does eating animals affect us?

Come join us for a presentation and discussion on this fascinating and important topic.

Our presenter is Nathan Poirier, a graduate student of Anthrozoology at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY. Nathan’s work focuses on Critical Animal Studies and the framing, perception, and implications of “techno-fixes” for issues including conservation, diet, and human population. In 2015 he organized a Rewilding conference at Aquinas College. Nathan also has an M.A. in mathematics, and has taught math at Western Michigan University and Aquinas College. He lives in Kalamazoo with his partner, Erin, a statistician.

Date: Monday, March 28

Time: 7:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Venue: Kalamazoo Library Central Branch

Cost: Free. An optional $2/person donation is requested to help defray expenses.

Note: There is no evening Living Vegan potluck this month! Come to this discussion instead!

RSVP at our Meetup (preferred) or Facebook page.

Everyone, including vegans, vegetarians, and the veg-curious, is always welcome at Vegan Kalamazoo Events.

Advance Reading (read some or all of the below!):

• World Peace Diet by Will Tuttle

• Animal Oppression and Human Violence by David Nibert (scholarly)

• We Animals (Jo-Anne McArthur, photojournalism)

• The Ghosts In Our Machine (video documentary on hidden animal violence)

Vegan Book Club Starting at the Kzoo Public Library!

eatinganimalsWe’re thrilled to announce that we’ve won approval to to hold a book club at the Kalamazoo Public Library! The Vegan Book club will be an official event at the Library and promoted on all its literature.

We’ll meet quarterly, and the first meeting will probably be some time in April, 2015. The first book (so you can get started early) is Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling Eating Animals. The library already stocks several copies of it, and most bookstores should carry it, too.  Below is a description; we’ll post post date and time as soon as they’re available.

Book Description:

Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. As he became a husband, and then a father, the moral dimensions of eating became increasingly important to him. Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them.

Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill. Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer “at the table with our greatest philosophers.”