cruelty free

we went to a cruelty free expo on the weekend-- filled with products not involving animals in the making or testing and organizations fighting for animal rights. some of the stuff there is pretty amazing. theres a couple chinese ressturants and shops that do all kinds of immitation meat. i tried a sample of satay "chicken" from a restraunt we've been meaning to go to-- it was AMAZING. i havn't had actual chicken in a few years but this would have to be as good as, or better than i can remember chicken being. i wanted to buy some frozen "prawns" to do garlic prawns with but we weren't going straight home after so they'd prbably defrost and do somethign weird in zac's bag before we could get home. one day one of us will have to make the effort to get out to the vegetarian asian grocery store to buy some (its in a suburb west of here and trams run north/south from our suburb north of the city and its actually a tough suburb to get to by tram or train cuz there's only a couple lines that run through it from the city and buses are really unreliable and don't even know where to catch one going that way). there was lots of other great stuff too like real looking fake leather bags and shoes (zac's got a pair of vegan dress/nice casual shoes). i also had the most amazing vegan cheesecake. creamy just like real cheesecake but no dairy or eggs in it (i've been thinking about trying to attempt making vegan cheesecake but we don't have vegan sour cream here yet and i think if i made tofu sour cream it might give the cheesecake a bit of a tofu-y taste). it'd be nice if a lot of the products we saw there were more available. a few things are available at major supermarkets but a lot of the really nice stuff is either online ordering or you have to go out to a shop they have in some random suburb-- not great when you rely on your bike or public transport). a lot of it is kind of expensive too cuz its not produced on a large scale yet-- hopefully one day it'll be the norm.
here's a good point to ponder though: humans are the only animal that drink another mammals' milk and we are the only animal that continues drinking that animals milk throughout adulthood.
i read that somewhere a while ago. then i started seeing stuff about the horrible ways cows are treated when they're raised for milk. its pretty sad. there's a lot of other easy sorces for the vitimins and minerals we get from milk, we don't need it for survival (a lot of people do better without dairy).
we have a bumper sticker on our fridge that says "meat and dairy based diets keep the rest of the world starving" the amount of grain we have to grow to feed 1 cow can feed a HUGE number of people (i can't remember the exact number but its rediculous cuz that cow doesn't produce enough meat to feed anywhere near that number of people).
i still haven't made the jump to veganism but vegetarian with just a small amout of vegetarian (non animal rennet) cheese and maybe a few free range eggs or eggs from zacs aunt and uncles chooks makes some difference and i feel better physically without meat in my body.