Aaniin!
“People care about animals. I believe that. They just don’t want to know or to pay. A fourth of all chickens have stress fractures. It’s wrong. They’re packed body to body, and can’t escape their waste, and never see the sun. Their nails grow around the bars of their cages. It’s wrong. They feel their slaughters. It’s wrong, and people know it’s wrong. They don’t have to be convinced. They just have to act differently. I’m not better than anyone, and I’m not trying to convince people to live by my standards of what’s right. I’m trying to convince them to live by their own.” (Jonathan Safran Foer)
I am Ikwe (ih-kway) and I created this website to educate others who would like to discontinue exploiting animals as products.
Growing up in Minnesota, my parents raised chickens, turkeys and pigs for a time. I remember removing red-meat products from my meals and refusing to eat the animals (or their eggs) that we raised. Something about it was very unnatural and disturbing to me. I didn't like the texture of the meat and the idea of caging animals for the distinct purpose of killing them was very upsetting. In my early 20's, I began a lacto-ovo "vegetarian" diet, cutting out animal flesh and fats. Eventually, as I educated myself, I decided that Veganism would become my next major lifestyle choice.
Why Vegan?
The turning point for me came when I was eating pizza with a friend and wondered aloud how cheese was made. My research lead me to the discovery that the agent used to bind cheese, called rennet, was actually the lining of the fourth stomach of a baby calf (a byproduct of the dairy/veal industry). I then furthered my research, learning all about the sad facts of dairy farms. Being a feminist, I became outraged at the way that my fellow female mammals were being exploited. They are artificially inseminated and kept continuously impregnated, being fed hormones to produce 4 1/2 times more milk than they would have naturally. They are forced to live their entire lives standing up in pens too small to even turn around! This causes their legs to buckle under their tremendous weight, their teats to bleed and puss up with infection (which is in the milk) as well as many of them developing a very painful condition called Mastitis (approximately 30-50% of dairy cows suffer from this). To think that this beautiful female mammal, who experiences live birth just like a human does, has her offspring ripped away from her (psychologically, we have no idea what this does to her), and the milk that is meant to nurture her baby calf to grow into a 1,000+ lb mammal, is being fed to human beings.
Humans are the only mammal that drink breast milk beyond infancy and furthermore, the only mammal that drink another mammal's breast milk! How UNNATURAL! And unnecessarily cruel to this beautiful animal that is treated as a product.
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| A still from Pink's video "Raise Your Glass" |
The main objective of this website is to make the transition to Veganism as simple as possible. Here, you will find alternative food choices for the many processed foods that you may already consume. Obviously, the ideal diet would be eating as "close to the ground" as possible-- minimal processing from the ground to table. Vegan Ikwe contains processed food alternatives and recipes that incorporate vegan ingredients into family favorite meals... and of course, original recipes by this lady. ;)
One more thing I wanted to note is that there are many, many other vegan products and alternative food items other than what I have listed, however, I choose to feature only what I actually 100% recommend and eat. By all means, do some research and try what suits your taste! Please feel free to email me at veganikwe @ gmail.com with any ideas, comments, suggestions or requests for information.
Happy cooking! ;)
Peace,
ikwe