Vegans of Color

My three kids loved my strawberry hemp seed ice cream. I use a Vitamix Standard Blender for blending ingredients smoothly, and then I use a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker. The lecithin blends and binds the ingredients very nicely. It creates a creamy and smooth texture.

Hemp seeds are a powerful super food. They are incredibly high in magnesium as well as brain building Omega 3-6-9. 3 tbsps give you 10 grams of protein. It’s a mineral rich seed and best of all, it’s an incredibly sustainable crop to grow. Some people do not like the strong taste of hemp. I got my kids started off on hemp seed based ice cream and cookies at a very early age. I prefer it to the soy milk vegan alternative when making ice cream. Hemp seeds also make powerful milkshakes as well! You can turn the recipe above into a milkshake by adding…

Yesterday I felt terrific. I was glowing and feeling healthy. I asked my husband to take a photo of me. 2 days before, I looked quite different (‘sickly’, which, for me, means looking dehydrated and ashy, with dark circles under my eyes)

Dr. A. Breeze Harper. September 2015. Muir Beach, CA.

I had beaten an oncoming cold that my 22 month old had given me (who got it from her siblings from school). I used ginger, garlic, nettles, catnip, and cat’s claw herbs to fight it off. I swear by these herbs for me. Other things I like to do and recommend:

Take the sugar and coffee out of your diet. Replace with mostly high quality plant-based proteins and lots of greens like kale.

Sugar weakens the immune system so take it out. I removed the sweets and replaced most of my meals and snacks with mostly dark leafy greens…

everybody just needs to get along plain and simple. Why make it more complicated than that? Race this, race that, blah blah blah, religion and borders and politicians divide us, when you see the big picture you will understand. Go out and hug someone no matter what they look like or their background, people are people, learn to love animals first though because they are the unvoiced ones that need our love. As for bashing people with confidence… come on now, really? Grow up people, it’s time to grow the fuck up and start bonding for the animals, not for us humans. 

-Says the person who is annoyed with me for opening my heart about racial micro-aggressions while pregnant and trying to do both anti-racism and anti-specieism.

This was one of 121 comments to this video that I posted more than 4 years ago.

Have you ever poured your heart…

Yesterday, Queen Afua posted this on her Facebook page. Why does she keep on repeating this cis-sexist and heteronormative ‘advices’ on how to be ‘healthier’ Black woman? This is just inexcusable. And quite dangerous and irresponsible. Completely pathologizes the entire spectrum of gender identities, gender expressions, sexualities, etc that don’t adhere to cis-sexist heteronormative notions of being human. Too many people on her page support it too. This plants seeds of hate and gives permission to enact violence (whether discursive or physical) upon those who don’t fit into her rubric of a ‘healthy Black conscious’ nation. So dangerous. Blows my mind. This is her concept of veganism but it is not the Sistah Vegan Project’s. This is not ‘non-violence’ or ahimsa (the tradition of veganism that the Sistah Vegan Project draws from). I’am quite disappointed but not surprised by this continued ‘advice’. Defining who is a real man or…

(Copyright Dr. Amie ‘Breeze’ Harper)

What I learned last night: Never question certain white man ‘gurus’ of the food sustainability movement. Never critique how a significant number of them uphold racist, sexist, white supremacist and colonialist framings of ‘food sustainability’ (some unconsciously, some consciously).  After receiving a post about Joel Salatin having been chosen as a judge for a soil contest,  I did just that on the COMFOOD listserv: I broke the golden rule. I have read a lot of critiques of Salatin that show his framing of food sustainability as white supremacist libertarian, sexist, and neoliberal capitalist. I ask the woman who posted about he being selected as a judge this:

Was wondering how the contest works given the documented history of Salatin’s publicly outspoken views that are racist, xenophobic, and sexist. How can contestants be assured that he will be ‘objective’ when judging if the contestant is not a white man?

James McWilliams wrote a new blog piece called Modest Proposal. He critiques the vegan movement as not self-reflexive and also makes the observation that the movement is rooted in anti-intellectualism. He basically asks if one can make an ethical argument for veganism that is based on intellectualism: the theory that knowledge is wholly derived from reason and rationalization; the theory that emotions cannot produce intellectually rigorous based knowledge systems.

How interesting….

If you have spent any time with academics involved in critical animal studies who practice veganism, you will find a rich canon of intellectually rigorous research that is pro-vegan– some rooted in Eurocentric traditional notions of intellectualism and some not. All of these scholars are very much part of the vegan movement, which is not a monolith, but like any movement, has a plethora of varying perspectives.

I wrote an award winning Masters thesis at Harvard University in 2007. I…

I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘voting with your dollars’ mantra that I see just about everywhere in the racially and economically privileged areas of the SF Bay area where I live. I wanted to express my perspective with the below infographic and am hoping to open up the conversation about such topics; in my experience, such topics are nearly silenced within the ‘post-racial’ good food movement in the SF Bay area (and most of the USA). Reminder, this is not the “end all be all”. However, after reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and attending the Vegan Praxis of Black Lives Matter conference, I started thinking even more critically about the racial privilege analysis needed within this mainstream good food movement, here in SF Bay area– especially in California with the rise of the prison industrial complex.

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I am sitting at Coffee Conscious cafe in Berkeley CA right now. A truck just pulled up and parked on the side of the road. It is a Clover Farms truck filled with cow dairy milk products. I took a picture and added my own text to what I would like the truck add to reveal.

Nothing is as infuriating as constantly being bombarded with imagery that continues to create myths around the lives of non-human and human beings who are exploited, abused, and suffer immensely to fulfill the desires of certain human beings within a capitalist system– because capitalism cannot be ‘successful’ without these constant fairy tales and myths that distract one from what is really going on.

Just wanted to remind many of you that most white people found comfort in the myth that Black cisgender women’s bodies and reproductive purpose were there to make white Americans happy and thrive…

Here is the the kick-off blog piece for SisTot Vegans.

Kira-Satya, My 21 month old daughter, enjoying a cupcake.

I made these yesterday morning for my 4 year old’s birthday party. They were a fantastic hit, enjoyed by everyone. I surprised quite a few non-vegan folk who didn’t know that it was possible to make a superior tasting cupcake without eggs, animal based butter, and animal based milk.  I enjoyed photographing my masterpiece.

I got the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Save the World via Chow website.  I did my own modifications for the recipe. Because the birthday party was for 2-6 years olds, I thought it would be a good idea to reduce the sugar that the recipe calls for by 50% and replace it with coconut sugar which has a low glycemic index and can prevent the crash and burn hyper kid syndrome that many…

The above image is satire. I created it because…

I am on a community food listserv (Comfood). I am also on my community Critical Race and Food Studies list serv. The other day, I sent an email to the wrong listerv (the Comfood one).

On July 24th 2015 I wrote:

Good morning,

I was wondering if people who post events on this list would be willing to let everyone know if the event happening is occurring in a ’sundown’ town. I know ’Sundown’ laws are technically illegal this day in age, but just because it’s illegal to post such signage doesn’t mean it isn’t happening through the USA.

Best,

Breeze

 I immediately sent an apology

I sent that last request about sundown towns to this comfoods listserv by mistake. I thought I had sent it to the community critical race food studies listserv.

Best, 

Breeze

First of all, it didn’t…