The Metropolitan Organizing Strategy Enabling Strength, or MOSES, Supermarket Taskforce is a coalition of community groups, churches, unions and residents planning to open the store to strengthen the community…Cindy Warner, owner of Zaccaro’s, said she would advise the coalition to set up the store as a nonprofit and use it to train people in nutrition, food preparation and grocery operations. “That could help keep their labor costs down,” she said. Another idea is to join a co-op to gain purchasing power, she said. Warner said she wishes them luck. “The only failure is in not trying,” she said. [via]

Locally made vegan ice cream that is, if we can be real, the best i have ever had. I mean, Tofutti, Chicago Soydairy, I love y’all (Although I might love you more if you distributed Temptation Ice Cream in Cleveland), but this is awesome. One of the (many) perks of veganism in an area with a prominent kosher community.

Inspired by my recently devoured cone of vanilla.

The crux of the matter is, veganism is a consumer activity. It is ultimately an attempt to change capitalism and human civilization through the exercise of one’s privileges as a consumer. This is an impossible approach.

Are there really all these vegans who presume their choice is going to change the food economy? For me, its a choice (one which obviously takes a significant amount of privilege to make) to not participate in a particular facet of capitalism (the meat and feminized animal product industries) because I find it particularly despicable. I am not under any illusions about the wider effect of that choice. Its not an environmentalist choice, and its not an activist choice. It has nothing to do with the morality of animal product consumption in any other context.

I find the anarchist critiques of vegetarianism and veganism fairly dull/repetitive. Which is not to say that they aren’t useful anyway.

Lists of foods generally unavailable in Europe during the middle ages, that are often strangely prominent at renaissance ‘faires’. My interest in this historical anachronism overshadows my interest in lying about having been to a renaissance festival.