Category: Philosophy
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Vegandale Toronto 2025
Vegandale is a vegan festival with lots of vegan food options, some information about cruelty in animal agriculture, and a very small (disappointingly small) amount of non-food vegan merch. The Toronto event in Woodbine Park is also adjacent to a coffee rave, which means the entire time a DJ is spinning loud dance music with…
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Is it rude to eat animal products in the presence of vegans?
Awhile back I foreshadowed some future topics for the blog, all of which took up the intersection of ethics and etiquette in a way I find interesting. I find it interesting because mostly I think it’s a matter of ethics and environmentalism; but since so many people don’t consider the ethical or environmental impact of…
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Do vegans have obligations to non-vegans?
A couple of weeks ago I raised three topics for future discussion. Last week I discussed omni restaurants that include vegan options. Today I’m skipping past the second question and instead going on to the third (I’ll go back to the second next time). In the original post I put it as “how tolerant should…
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Vegan options at non-vegan restaurants
Last week I posed three questions for future discussion. Today I’m going to focus on the first of these questions: If you’re a restaurant offering vegan options, is it right to frame them as burdensome favours for difficult guests? It’s not the best-worded question because it seems as if the obvious answer has got to…
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Thoughts to foreshadow future topics
Getting back to the blog after an hiatus, you’d think I’d have no end of topics lined up. Instead, I just have a swirl of thoughts that I need to wrestle into some sort of order before I can give them their due. So today let me get started on taming the swirl by identifying…
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Reconnecting with the blog’s purpose
I’ve been flailing around quite a bit with respect to the blog this year. A number of things have contributed to the wildly inconsistent post schedule (if you can even call it a schedule these days). Sometimes when I’m faltering with something I care about I find it helpful to remind myself why I care…
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Maybe it’s time to rethink eggs if you’ve not yet done so
Avian flu has created an egg shortage in the United States and other parts of the world that has driven up prices and reduced supply. And that means it’s getting the attention of consumers of animal products. I’ve seen friends in the US post photos of empty supermarket refrigerators or of egg fridges showing astronomical…
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What’s wrong with wool?
Why do vegans avoid wool? This question comes up the way questions about eggs, dairy, or honey come up. Whether they’re genuinely curious or just trying to justify animal exploitation, people love to press about various animal products that, to them, seem harmless. The first response is that wool is an animal product and therefore…
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Is being vegan “too demanding”?
One of the great things about writing a blog, which anyone who has ever done it knows that for most of us it’s a labour of love, is that you never know who is reading. And then it is such a delight when someone reaches out in response to a post, whether with a smart…
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Objections and replies
Next week I’ll be a guest in a philosophy graduate seminar my friend and colleague, Samantha, is teaching on philosophy and food. The students will be reading the most recent draft of my paper, “Meat-eating as ideology and ‘meat-eaters’ fragility’,” which I’ve blogged about before. They’re also reading David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” a…
Vegan Practically 