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The site is also nicely put together.

Is anyone else here besides me?

Anyone home :)

Steve

Every summer for the past 30 years, the North American Vegetarian Society (NAVS

I attended Summerfest for the first time this past July.

Summerfest 2004 took place from July 21 to July 25 at the University of Pittsburgh on the Johnstown, Pennsylvania campus, and next year's event is scheduled from June 29 to July 3.  Participants can attend the full conference from Wednesday to Sunday, or just Friday to Sunday.  The campus is easily reached by car within four hours from the Washington, DC metropolitan area.  Be prepared for a lot of beautiful rural scenery.

The Johnstown campus is beautiful, with no shortage of greenery or pleasantly fresh air.  There are nice trails suitable for running, walking, or hiking.  A pool and exercise facilities are made available to Summerfest attendees, in addition to the exercise classes hosted by NAVS.

Registration was accompanied by an array of tasty vegan snacks and friendly volunteers from NAVS to greet weary travelers.

The rooms in the air-conditioned dorm were nice, well kept, and located close to all of the activities.  I didn't try the dorms without air conditioning  (This year the evenings were cool, but that isn't always the case).

The meals were excellent.  The food was prepared under the supervision of professional chef Ken Bergeron, author of "Professional Vegetarian Cooking."  All the food was vegan and was served cafeteria style to hundreds of vegetarians in a friendly and social atmosphere.

An area for vendors was set up in the student union, which included a special vegetarian bookstore set up by NAVS.  There were several scheduled book signings, and proceeds from the sales of the books supported NAVS.

Summerfest consisted of a mix of fascinating talks on vegetarianism and practical food preparation demonstrations, several of which were given by professional vegetarian cooks.  During each class period everyone had a choice of at least 4 to 6 lectures to attend.  The topics covered were nutrition, exercise, ethical aspects of vegetarianism, environmental concerns, and some interesting miscellaneous classes.  I did not have a single bad class.  In fact, my only disappointment with Summerfest was that I couldn't possibly go to all of the lectures.

There also were daily plenary talks designed for all attendees and scheduled so that they would not compete with other activities.  The plenary talks consisted of a mixture of topics on all aspects of vegetarianism, giving attendees who might have otherwise focused on just one aspect exposure to different facets of vegetarianism.  I was one of those people, and I came away feeling enriched.

One of the messages that NAVS and the speakers strove hardest to expose everyone to through the plenary talks was that of an incipient health crisis in the vegetarian and vegan community.  In a nutshell, vegetarians ( and vegans ) need to regularly use a reliable source of vitamin B-12, increase their calcium intake, increase their intake of fresh green vegetables, increase their intake of fresh yellow/orange vegetables, secure a source of iodine, secure a source of essential fatty acids, reduce their consumption of sweets, minimize their use of refined flour products (pasta, breads, bagels, etc.), and get more exercise.  This is not a new message, but the experts at Summerfest emphasized -- with a palpable sense of caring and urgency -- that many vegetarians and vegans are simply not following this advice, to their great detriment.

I do not have the space to cover all the fascinating information given about these issues.  I highly recommend that vegetarians and vegans (both diets are well covered) read the new edition of "Becoming Vegetarian" by Summerfest speaker Brenda Davis, RD.

My overall impression of Summerfest started on the first day, while I was waiting for the orientation class to begin.  I struck up a conversation with a retired gentleman, John, who was spending his retirement years driving his truck between vegetarian festivals and sporting events around the country.

John asked if this was my first time at Summerfest.  When I answered "yes" he seemed genuinely pleased.  Several other people asked me this question over the course of Summerfest and seemed equally pleased by my answer.

I quickly discovered that many people at Summerfest had attended many times before.  Many people had formed long-lasting friendships and remembered people they had met in previous years.  I was impressed by how many people remembered the details of each other's lives and asked questions with genuine interest, even though they had not seen these people since their last visit to Summerfest.

Everyone at Summerfest seemed happy to be there, happy to be friendly to people they had never met, ready to have fun, and enjoying themselves.

If I had to sum up my experience I would say that Summerfest was about warm, caring people getting together from all parts of the country to relax, have fun, and learn in a positive atmosphere.

I just discovered this site.

I have been reading slashdot.org for years and I really liked the idea of a reader moderated forum.

I read an article in The Nation about the scopes software ( what this site uses ) and I went to the site where I found vegdot listed.

I am thrilled that there is a veg forum using this new and cool concept in content management.

I posted some notes about this site in some usenet groups.

Hopefully more people will come and participate.

I think it is a new idea for many people.

Steve

1. I'm a damn good teacher. If I must have a job other than writing, teaching is it.
2. I don't hate all the people in the world, just the ones in western countries.
3. I like China very much and I don't want to go back to live in the US.
4. I am going to be crying my eyes out and really depressed next year, because my husband wants to go back to the US and stay for a few years while he gets a degree in physics.
5. I hate Texas - oh, wait, I already knew that.
6. The current swine occupying the White House has made it utterly embarassing (at best) to tell people from other countries that you come from America. I would just lie and say I come from another country, but I can't keep up my British accent forever, and don't have the sufficient obsession with hockey to pass as Canadian.
7. I am incapable of telling my students that they were wonderful and I will always remember them without bursting into baby tears.

I love it.  I love China.  I say this in all seriousness - I never want to leave. The reasons for this are many, but basically, I feel at home here.  I like the people.  I like the culture.  I like the way education and intelligence is respected.  I like China.  A lot.

Last Saturday, we went to Zhengzhou and another foreign teacher, Bill (from Mississippi - despite this, is one of the more pleasant teachers) took us to a fantastically nice restaurant. One of his student's uncles owns it, and it's like a four-star. You don't sit on chairs, you sit on cushy couches, and the food is awesome. The uncle comped us all dinner and then drove us back to Shengda in his van, which I thought was extremely cool.

This is even more cool because there is a cadre of foreign teachers here with whom I have moved from irritation to frustration to fantasizing about their bloody deaths, and I hate taking the Shengda bus with them around. Yes, much to my surprise, the obnoxious ones are not Americans, but Canadian and British, and they have not one positive thing to say about China, the Chinese, the college, or the students. There are many thing to hate about them, but the biggest thing I cannot tolerate is that they don't respect China. They cop a completely superior attitude - they come from a superior culture, the way they do things is the only correct way, their countries are always right, the way they think is the only way to think - and they do nothing but say snotty and rude (and untrue) things about the Chinese all the way to Zhengzhou. I'm livid when I get there, and it takes me an hour to get over it. All the gazillion of things the Chinese people and the college have done for us go through my head, and I just want to kill. And then we have to come back with these idiots.

Last August, I moved from Texas (shudder) to China.  In China, dairy products are rare, and never used in dishes themselves. Some people, mostly the younger crowd, drink milk and yogurt (yes, I said they drink yogurt - it's thinner and comes in a little bag with some happy cows on it) and eat ice cream. And if you want milk, you don't even have to drink cow milk because soy milk is abundant.

But that's it. There is no - and I mean NO - cheese in anything. Chinese cooks use veggie oil and not butter to cook in. The only thing non-vegan that is commonly used in food with no meat in it is eggs.

In America, it's so difficult to be vegan. But here, if you just cut out the meat (and eggs), you are pretty much vegan without even trying.  My average lunch of tofu, rice, cucumbers, and green tea has no meat or dairy products whatsoever.

So, let's examine this.  Since I've come to China, my health has improved dramatically:

1. Lost weight;
2. Have much more stamina;
3. Asthma never bothers me (all the more amazing considering how - um, er, oh dammit, just say it - polluted China's air is.  And the fact that they burn coal and our apartment is right near a coal tower.)
4. Skin has cleared up.
5. Gallstones have entirely ceased to bother me.  One attack, two weeks after we got here, and not a peep since.

So what's going on?  

Part of this is, of course, getting more exercise.  We live on the fourth floor, so everytime we leave, it means going up & down four flights of stairs as there is no elevator.  In fact, elevators in China are rare.  Legally, you don't have to have them at all unless a building has more than five floors.  I also have four different classes on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator. We walk everywhere, so going shopping downtown means a whole day on your feet, not just a half hour in a shop and then a hour hour in the car.  Unless the distance between stores justifies the price of a taxi, we ankle it wherever we want to go.

Chinese food is cooked in oil, but it's corn, not animal, and never butter.

So I honestly think a lot of this is not chowing down on the dairy.  Except for the extremely rare occasions we splurge and go to the Italian restaurant in Zhengzhou or go to Wei San Road and buy cheese (which we've only down twice in the entire time we're here), we get no dairy.
I really think I'm on to something here.

And, besides the health issues, I'm really into animal rights.  I have been for a long time, member of PETA, joined the Veg club at my college, but recently I've just gotten lazy about what I eat - especially in America, where animal products are practically shoved down your throat.

A new dawn of veganism for Amber!