“Thousands of people who say they ‘love’ animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the awful suffering and the terror of the abattoirs.” — Jane Goodall
 
“You have just dined, and however [...]

This past Mother’s Day saw the Core Team hosting a family brunch. Three phases of motherhood were represented in Sara, the beautiful mother of my beautiful children, my own mother, and my sister-in-law, Ursula who is a mother-to-be. To honor our guests, maternal and otherwise, I tried a fancy new recipe for Bananas Foster French [...]

Cooking is an act of love. Though this simple truth resonates with all of us on a certain gut level, I only realized it when Sara and I had kids. We prepare meals every day, multiple times a day in fact, in an effort to provide not just life-sustaining nourishment but the kind of quality [...]

This weekend, I will be hosting the Carnival of the Recipes. Surprised? Actually, food is a passion of mine, one that I don’t often blog about but still follow all the time. In fact, I’m in the middle of The Ominivore’s Dilemma and it’s blowing my mind!
The theme of my upcoming edition will be Meatless [...]

This has absolutely nothing to with birds whatsoever, but I read the report below (which I’ve edited down slightly) yesterday. It concerns the demise of a fish called the orange roughy, a deep-sea species with bad skin and jaws that could crack walnuts, and it really struck a chord.

In the mid-1990s, when I [...]

A colleague on a web forum I subscribe to posted the following little exchange from the "GINjA & SHOgA" Restaurant which is based in Cape Town, South Africa. In response to a mail asking the owners to re-think serving foie gras, the arrogant turnips wrote back saying:

"Dear ————
Lordy, lordy, once again we have another Foie [...]

John of A DC Birding Blog, originator of the 10 Most Beautiful Birds meme, has made good on his promise to instigate a   10 Favorite Bird Songs list. Students of the blogosphere may note that a list is less infectious and has less sociological sway than a meme. I’m sure that many who succumbed to [...]

It’s been a long time coming, but finally the EU, the FAO, Governments everywhere in fact are admitting that the flu caused by the H5N1 virus is an endemic disease of the poultry industry - just as (ahem) a growing number of us have been saying for many months. Despite some truly lousy reporting in [...]

Overindulgence in the cornucopia of Thanksgiving delights has rendered me unable, for the time being, to continue my seemingly endless treatise on how to host a blog carnival.  I’m going to talk instead about the topic foremost on my mind right now - food. Now let’s talk turkey! Actually, as someone who tries (but sometimes [...]

Today is Thanksgiving Eve here in the U.S. which means that most of us are already salivating over the prospect of tomorrow’s feast. Traditional Thanksgiving fare includes stuffing, potatoes, yams, and, of course, turkey. But whither the green vegetable in this avalanche of carbohydrates and animal protein? How many of us find room on our [...]