Up until a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten meat in almost four years.

I wasn’t entirely meat-free. There are the occasional seafood po-boy and Gulf-caught fish. And I eat cheese and eggs and drink milk — on the conditions they come from safe, humane and local sources, if possible. I don’t support factory farming. Period. And for obvious reasons.

Last month, I cut all of those foods from my diet and committed to a vegan diet for a month. I wrote about that experience in this week’s Gambit. And judging by the comments and emails I’ve received about it, I did it wrong. Never mind that I consulted with a vegan dietitian, as well as Peter Singer, a vegan scholar if there ever was one, and my vegan friends, who have navigated the halls of New Orleans restaurant culture and could steer me in the right direction — and that was what I wanted to find out: can a vegan experience the restaurant culture in New Orleans the same way a non-vegan does, which is something people in New Orleans live to do and some would feel they can’t live without. I let a few others answer that in the article.

And I ate well. I won’t bore you with my month-long meal plan, but it was balanced, healthy, nutritious, and I surprised myself in the kitchen. Katelynn Phillips said it perfectly: “If you think about all the plant varieties in the world, there are thousands. And there’s really not that many meat options, so there is a ton of stuff you can eat … People are just used to the American diet.”

But I had cravings — omelets and grilled cheese sandwiches, mostly. (I settled for a cheese pizza — manchego on flatbread — at the end of the month.)

As the month went by, I opened up the conversation to both vegans and people who eat meat, like Scott Gold. I don’t personally agree with much of what Gold said (like the “sad, deprived existence” comment), but he echoed points made among many in the meat-eating community. I hoped his voice could lend some balance to the issue. It’s one thing to introduce why one should consider veganism, but it’s another to leave out the voice on the other side of the fence, which there clearly is, as Gold illustrates. After all, not only was I writing a personal experience, I had to produce a balanced story. I wasn’t eating meat, anyway, so whose team was I rooting for?

But when I went out to eat the weekend after I finished the month, I ordered a sandwich with bacon. I didn’t expect to order it, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. It wasn’t a decision I thought I was going to make, ever, but I did, and I’m in no rush to eat meat any time soon.

Perhaps that’s where I went wrong, according to some readers: I didn’t end the month deciding to become vegan full-time. Bottom line was, It wasn’t for me, at least right now. This was just one man’s attempt, not a vegan manifesto. At the very least I hope I started a conversation about veganism and hopefully readers will make better eating decisions because of it.

In a letter to Gambit, Derek Zimmer offers some (delicious) advice:

Buy a bag of kidney beans, a container of seasoning, and maybe a tub of Earth Balance spread, and treat yourself to some classic red beans and rice. Heck, grab a pound of soy-based sausage if you must! Top that off with a loaf of Leidenheimer’s French bread if you’re feelin’ real saucy, and that’s simply days of leftovers! Alternatively, touch a couple boxes of the ol’ Zatarain’s Jambalaya mix, add some chopped bell peppers, mushrooms, whatever (maybe more of that aformentioned mock sausage), and — tadaa! — you got yourself a delicious plant-based meal in 30 minutes! There’s also this thing our ancestors invented back in the day called a “roux” — basically you heat up oil, add flour, then water, which you then use to to make a cabbage, potato, bean, etc., stew! Oh, and ever heard of okra gumbo? Whew! What what a “sad, deprived existence” veganism in the Big Easy is! (Though certainly no where near as “sad” and “deprived” an existence as those of the animals inside factory farms!)

For more information, here are some New Orleans-related vegan and vegetarian groups and blogs:

www.pakupaku.info

www.nolaveggiefest.com

www.meetup.com/vegetarian-515

www.veganorleans.com

The phrase “Sounds like an Onion headline” is pretty common these days. I saw this, and asked the reverse: “Shrimp Boat Captain Worn Out From Long Day Of Putting Human Face On Crisis“

The Onion’s coverage of the oil disaster has been perfect — biting commentary wrapped in easily viral, satirical news nuggets. But the headline above, and its following story, seem almost true. Fishermen, shrimpers and Gulf coastal residents really are feeling pretty overwhelmed. Yeah, it’s a funny bit, but there’s some truth in there. Kindra Arnesen says she has been interviewed at least 300 times, and it’s not enough. She knows residents on the Gulf need the media to tell their stories, so she’ll keep telling hers. Other reporters have talked with dozens of sources on the Gulf, more than once or twice. It’s exhausting work, so a lot of phrases and information are repeated.

And now we’re in Day Two of shrimping season. Is testing enough? Will people eat the catch? Are suppliers and warehouses and factories even buying? Few are on the water. Others are sticking with the BP checks, knowing there’s plenty of work to do and hoping BP is willing to stick with them through the bitter end in the months and years to come.

Below, Kindra Arnesen (at 10:40) and fishermen’s families at a Sunday rally in Panama City Beach:

(Clarification: Recycling at City Hall and the Main Library is in-house only. Recyclables will not be accepted at those locations.)

As members of City Council try to squeeze the return of citywide recycling pickup into Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s budget, Landrieu announced a compromise: At the tail end of his first 100 days as the latest Hizzoner, Landrieu opened a city-provided recycling drop-off site at 2829 Elysian Fields Ave. Beginning Saturday, Aug. 14, Orleans Parish residents and small businesses can drop off recyclable materials between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. every Saturday.

Landrieu also announced the return of recycling at City Hall and at the city’s Main Library branch (219 Loyola Ave.)

“We heard citizens loud and clear asking for recycling again, and this is a first step in the right direction as we continue to research ways to grow the program,” Landrieu said in an Aug. 10 release.

This is a first for post-Katrina New Orleans, where, under the direction of former mayor Ray Nagin’s sanitation director Veronica White, recycling has been ruled out of the question due to budget constraints — but Landrieu announced the recycling return while managing a $67 million hole in the city’s budget.

Accepted materials include paper, cardboard, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, aluminum cans, plastic bottles and containers, tin, steel and metal cans, and up to four tires. The program does not accept glass. Materials don’t have to be sorted, and residents must bring a driver’s license to prove residency in the parish.

In this week’s issue, Gambit spoke with Kindra Arnesen, wife of a Plaquemines Parish fisherman and one of the loudest voices on the Gulf. She battles BP, the Coast Guard, the Environmental Protection Agency and other authorities daily, and it’s a brutal fight. She’s exhausted, but she’s not going to stop. ”I’m tired of arguing with these people and I’m tired of fighting it,” she says, “but I know we’re in for a probably 20 year battle.”

Read the rest of this entry »

As Unified Incident Command makes its move from “response to recovery,” as National Incident Commander Adm. Thad Allen called it last week, cleanup crews and the Vessels of Opportunity (VOO) will suffer a few casualties — cleanup crews have slimmed by about 10,000 and VOO has slimmed by about 1,000 since Allen’s announcement on July 29. Mother Jones says: “On July 13, the Deepwater Horizon Joint Command was reporting 46,000 responders. On July 23, it was down to 30,000, and the numbers have hovered around the low 30s since.”

Pre-Bonnie figures for VOO participants were around 5,000 to 6,500. Today, the number is 4,950.

“Obviously as we transition to where there’s not as a threat of a spill … the employment of VOO is necessarily going to have to change,” Allen said last week.

Consider the changes VOO has already seen since its inception:

VOO participants sign up or call to register in a database, attend orientations and safety trainings, and within seven to 14 business days, they’re out on the water. There wasn’t a “time limit” — no contracts. Then there’s “deactivation“:

BP decides when it needs to “deactivate” a vessel. There are so many applicants that BP has to “rotate, so everybody will be able to (participate),” says Valerie from BP’s command center in Houston. (Valerie could not provide her full name, she says, as “it’s against policy. That’s everything out of our manual.”)

“The ones that have been deactivated have been out there since the beginning, which is about eight weeks now,” she says. “You have to give everybody else the opportunity to get in. A lot of them aren’t seeing it that way, but it’s just the fair thing to do.”

Then, on July 16, Louisiana Vessels of Opportunity director Judith Paul announced the “new” deployment plans to get more participants into rotation — which also pulls off those on the water, putting them in a sort of VOO limbo until their names come up again in the cycle.

But on July 29, Allen essentially said, “Too bad” — VOO was getting slashed. If you were waiting to get back to work, chances got much slimmer with “less oil in the Gulf” to clean up.

Cue August: A slimmer fleet means less VOO participants and less paychecks, reports continue that there’s little oil left in the Gulf as BP sneaks out of the disaster, and hey, why not, let’s drug test those who are still left:

Friday, the day before Bonnie, they sent a bunch of people home until further notice, and a lot of people didn’t get the further notice,” one supervisor told me. “Then last week, they shut the whole [cleanup operation] down. It was ‘Piss in a cup or throw your ID in the bucket.’ This was a BP drug test, not a [subcontracting] company drug test. It’s the first time BP tested us.”

A BP spokesman told me that all its subcontractors are required to drug test their cleanup employees and allow BP to do random checks itself; it just happened to do one of those checks last week. But the cleanup workers believe the company’s motivation was to fire a bunch of people fast. Maybe it’s because they’re conspiracy theorists. Or maybe it’s because the subcontractors had long had openly lax substance-abuse standards. “Most of those people had never been drug tested before,” the supervisor told me. “I worked for two different subcontractors that didn’t test me.” He also pointed out that the local bar’s parking lot is nightly full of company cars and drunk guys who drive them; one cleanup worker I talked to had a picture in his phone of beer cans in the cupholders of cleanup vehicles in broad daylight. “They wanted to get rid of people, and drug testing was a good way to do it. I used to supervise 30 guys; now I’ve got 10.”