Category: Veganism

Vegetarian Times magazine will be experimenting with changing its name to “Greens” by using that name with the next two issues sold at newsstands.

Their marketing people say it is an attempt to reach a larger, younger, hipper crowd. The current dominant demographic of Vegetarian Times readers are well to do non-vegetarian white women over 50. The environment is hot these days…..literally….ha ha. Brushing a product with green paint ( “green washing” ) is currently a great marketing tool.

Vegetarianism has always been about ethics in regards to animals. Environmental and health justification are new developments. Older friends of mine have told me that when the Vegetarian Times first came out it was about the original “Vegetarianism”.

By the time I started reading the Vegetarian Times in the 1980s it was just starting to move away from animal rights, animal welfare and politically orientated content. It was about where Veg-News magazine is now on the spectrum between content and fluff.

After reading the Vegetarian Times for a few years I got turned off after their lead editor Paul Obis quit. That is, he quit the magazine and vegetarianism writing in his last editorial :

“Twenty years of tofu is enough”

Every few years after that I would peruse the latest issues of the Vegetarian Times while shopping. I saw that it had changed into a gourmet recipe magazine. I started hearing accounts ( true? ) that they started including animal products in their recipes. The staff came out publicly saying that most of their readers were not vegetarians.

I got the feeling years ago that the people who run the Vegetarian Times stopped being interested in helping animals and stopped being interested in vegetarianism. Changing the name to drop “Vegetarianism” only acknowledges the staff’s change of interest and how they want a different magazine.

I like the idea of a vegetarian friendly recipe magazine called “Greens” much better than I like a magazine called “Vegetarian Times” which mentions nothing about helping animals and publishes recipes with meat in it.

Seriously, while I have bad feelings about the people at the Vegetarian Times giving up on their values I think the name change is a good thing as it finally ends an ugly and embarrassing contradiction.

The name change is a good thing.

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Checking this blog post in January of 2018 it looks like this change was reversed as the Vegetarian Times is still around.

My favourite part of the article. It made me laugh

“Leafleting” is not a typical way that friends get together, unless your friend happens to be Bruce, who is always working, and whose work consists of informing most everyone in the world, often via leaflet, that they are bloodthirsty monsters. Bruce is a national spokesman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the in-your-face animal rights organization that believes it is immoral to consign fully sentient beings to nightmarish lives of immobility, fear and pain just because we like to eat them instead of eggplant.

I know you probably have a problem with the previous sentence. Many people do. If you are like me, your problem is that you think it is

(1) personally insulting and obnoxious; and

(2) true.

In the early days of the internet before the WWW made it big people used to have “discussion forums” primarily through Usenet groups and email lists.

VEGAN-L originally created by Michael Traub was *THE* list to subscribe to talk about anything vegan. If you were vegan and knew about the internet, you were on this incredibly high traffic list.

As other email lists, the WWW, message boards and blogs came into being VEGAN-L stopped being the “go to” place for vegans on the internet. It moved from server and server fading into obscurity.

VEGAN-L eventually ended up being hosted by YahooGroups. VEGAN-L has since shut down. It accepts no new messages. You can read the archives of past messages at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vegan-l/

You can read the once famous VEGAN-L FAQ by Michael Traub at:
VEGAN-L FAQ

It may seem kind of lame now, but back in the early days of the internet that FAQ was one of the few “go-to” places for information about veganism on the internet.

Okay, enough e-nostalgia 🙂

On a related note a similar old school list, that ran about the same time as VEGAN-L, is still up, still running, is still on its own server outside of yahoo or google and still has daily traffic

VML ( Vegan Mailing List )