From the fine folks at the Onion News Network comes this piece on Taco Bell’s new Green menu. It may be vegan, but not in a good way. I think. Take a look and leave your opinion in the comments.

Taco Bell’s New Green Menu Takes No Ingredients From Nature

And I don’t even want to know what the pink stuff is. Vegan or not.

I don’t have any regrets about going vegan but there are times I’m really happy.

For example, if I were ever tempted to join this group of diners. “Hmm, what do I feel like tonight?”, I asked, perusing the menu. “The fish testicles look awfully tempting, but they’re not vegan. Oh well.”

Seriously, fish testicles? I never want to hear about how disgusting tofu is again.

Tomorrow is Blog Action Day 2008. That’s a day when folks across the blogosphere take a respite from their normal topics and talk about a common cause. This year, that cause is poverty.

I was all set to write a screed about how evil it is to feed X pounds of feed to a cow to get a pound of beef, to a pig to get a pound of pork and so on. I started looking around the Web to get some numbers to fill in there and I found animal rights folks saying one thing and meat producers saying another. Now I’d be lying if I said I gave both of those equal weight but you know what? I think we’re just talking past each other.

We’re all mammals here (or so I assume, apologies to any visitors from Alpha Centari) and we eat food. Different kinds of food probably but food none the less. If you eat a pound of food do you gain a pound of weight? I doubt it. Some calories get burned off just through normal life processes, like keeping your heart beating, your brain going and your last meal digesting. And you probably got some exercise. Maybe not a lot but you walked around a little, maybe climbed some steps, picked something up. All that takes energy. And that energy comes from your food.

It’s not that much different for a cow, a pig or a chicken for that matter. As a side note, any bird keepers out there know, the phrase “eat like a bird” was not coined by anyone who had to feed a bird. No matter how horrible the conditions they suffer under, animals burn calories. Those are calories that are not being used by a person, potentially a poor person who needs those calories to live.

If we can cut out the middleman, we can provide more food to people around the world. And until all people have enough to eat, how can we justify giving the food to animals just so the “modern” world can get a hamburger?

That’s the headline on a BBC story. But before you start eying your gin and tonic suspiciously, take a look at the list of ingredients her ‘cocktail’ contained. Baileys, chilli, tequila, absinthe, ouzo, vodka, cider and gin. I’m sorry but I count enough stuff in there for at least three different drinks. Letting the guy behind the bar dump the last little bit of what ever he has back there in your glass just isn’t a good idea. A chemical reaction the doctors are calling it. I’d say we’re lucky it wasn’t a nuclear reaction! I’ll be sticking with my Floradora’s, thank you very much.

And no, that doesn’t mean what you think it does. Unless of course you’re thinking it’s time for a Vegan Month of Food. And if you are, well then you’re absolutely correct. Of course the graphic kind of gives it away.

And what is VeganMoFo you might ask? And you might as well because I’m going to tell you anyway. It’s an effort, begun by Isa, to get more folks writing about vegan food on the Internet. Basically it’s a commitment to write something at least vaguely related to vegan food every weekday during the month of October.

And I thought that would be an awesome way to launch my new project, LowCarbVegan.com. That’s one of several reasons I’ve been a bit scarce around these parts lately. So come on over to the blog and see what’s going on.