Melanie Joy Day

Well what an exciting day it’s been! Melanie Joy is touring Australia, speaking about carnism, so H and I took the day off to go and see her.

She was speaking at the National Herbarium at around lunchtime, and I knew there was slim chance of any vegan food at the Botanic Gardens cafe, so I made the Chocolate-Chocolate Chip-Walnut Cookies from Veganomicon to keep us going. (Not a healthy lunch…but they do contain flaxseeds, walnuts…and dark chocolate!) I highly recommend them—can’t go wrong with that much chocolate in one cookie. Anyway, we made up for the bad stuff with a healthy fix later on.

I love pigs!

Pigs are smart

I think it was Arnold Ziffel who first made me love pigs. If you’re too young to remember him (or if your parents only let you watch the ABC) Arnold was a pig on the TV show Green Acres. He was handsome and he was smart—hell, he could do crosswords!

My next favourite pig was probably Wilbur from Charlotte’s Web (read to us by Mr Forrester in grade 3) who only confirmed the idea that we shouldn’t be eating animals, because they want to live too.

I was really quite obsessed with pigs, even before Babe came along and stole our hearts. I collected pigs (not real ones, pictures and ornaments and piggy banks and that kind of thing). When I first saw pictures of Edgar Allen Pig, from Edgar’s Mission, many years ago I could absolutely understand how Pam Ahern could fall in love with him, but I still hadn’t REALLY met a pig (apart from a quick pat at the Royal Melbourne Show each year).

The un-birthday dinner

Staring into the crisper for inspiration (this morning’s re-enactment of the scene of the staring)

Don’t you hate it when dinner plans are cancelled at the last minute?

My husband (let’s call him B for now) had his birthday last week and we’d planned a family night out at Pizza Meine Liebe. I was really looking forward to it because it’s been our favourite pizza place for a long time, but we hadn’t been there since we went vegan in January.

They make really good pizza, so I was a bit disappointed when I found out that they use milk in their pizza bases—but my daughter and I would be able to eat their dairy-free, gluten-free bases, so all would be fine…or would have been fine if B hadn’t found out that his compulsory after-work function went until 10 pm and not 6 pm, as he’d thought!