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Mar 17, 2008

This week's theme
Words from guest wordsmith Matt Ball, founder of Vegan Outreach

This week's words
vegan
speciesism
factory farming
cartesian
karuna

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Growing up, I was a big fan of Carl Sagan, and I dreamed of exploring the universe, expanding the frontier of human knowledge and vision. I started my college to become a rocket scientist, with the plan of working for NASA.

But fate intervened on the first day of college when I met my roommate, a big, strong guy, who was not shy about explaining his vegetarianism or what hidden realities my eating meat supported. After a false start, I went vegetarian -- I simply found the cruelties of meat production too severe to continue to rationalize away.

Shortly thereafter, I met Jack Norris and started learning more about animal exploitation in this world. I decided I needed to do more than be a vegetarian. With ten other activists, Jack and I held a three-day Fast for Farm Animals in front of a Cincinnati slaughterhouse (three days being the amount of time farmed animals often go without food before slaughter). After the fast, Jack and I formed a group which eventually became Vegan Outreach, dedicated to preventing the most suffering possible.

Learn more at Vegan Outreach.

(This week's guest wordsmith Matt Ball is co-founder and executive director of the non-profit organization Vegan Outreach.)

vegan

noun: One who does not consume animal products.

adjective: Made with no animal ingredients.

[Coined in 1944 by Donald Watson (1910-2005) to describe a "non-dairy vegetarian"; formed from the first three and last two letters of the word vegetarian.]

"Kitsch, lively and glamorous, Canadian food writer Sarah Kramer bucks all the vegan stereotypes."
Leonie Cooper; The Garden of Vegan; The Guardian (London, UK); Feb 6, 2008.

See more usage examples of vegan in Vocabulary.com's dictionary.

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