Erik profile picture

Erik

I am here for Friends and Networking

About Me

I work seven days a week on efforts related to animal protection and promoting vegetarianism. I publish Vegan.com, which features my daily blog, and my weekly podcast. Please check out the site:
I'm also the author of two books: Meat Market-Animals, Ethics, and Money (2005), and Vegan-The New Ethics of Eating (1998, 2001).I do a regular podcast on Vegan.com that provides news, recipes, and commentary. My main activist focus relates to "dismantlement" -- a branch of the animal protection movement specifically devoted to stripping animal agriculture of its key assets. Dismantlement is the theme of Part II of Meat Market.An important part of my work relates to helping vegetarian activists hone their rhetoric in order to become more persuasive. Towards that end, I advocate the "commodity-cruelty argument." This argument is described at length in Meat Market but can be boiled down to just a few sentences. Specifically, animal products tend to be almost pure commodities. As such, only the lowest cost producers can stay in business. It turns out that the main way to bring down the costs related to raising poultry and livestock is to resort to overcrowding the animals and subjecting them to inadequate care. So what we have in the United States is an industry that systematically brutalizes nearly every single one of the ten billion farmed animals it raises each year. And on top of that, the industry consistently lies about the cruelties it inflicts upon all these animals.I'm devoted to helping people learn to advocate effectively for farmed animals, and inspiring them to take up a variety of activist efforts. If you'd like to find out more about my work, please check out my podcast on Vegan.com.

My Interests

Apart from animal protection work, my main interests are reading, vegan cooking, listening to music, snowboarding, and watching movies. If you're as into vegan cooking as I am, you'll probably enjoy these great recipes:

I'd like to meet:

That's really easy. I want to meet people who are disgusted by cruelty and who want to work to make the world a more compassionate place. Above all, I would like to meet people with the ambition to make a big difference: how would you like to keep a million animals out of the slaughterhouse?

Music:

Boston, Graham Parker, Thin Lizzy, Jackson Browne and Cat Stevens are some of my faves.

Movies:

Anything either incredibly smart or breathtakingly stupid: The Godfather, Goodfellas, Life is Beautiful, As Good as it Gets, Beavis and Butthead Do America, Borat.

Television:

Giants football every Sunday. Olbermann excerpts on MSNBC. Also a big fan of the HBO Series: Oz, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire.

Books:

Meat Market, Anthony Trollope, David Foster Wallace, Jane Austen.

Heroes:

Winston Churchill, Henry Spira

My Blog

Clary Shirky and Dr. Fuhrman

Over the past month or so, I've become a huge fan of Clay Shirky. After finishing his new book Here Comes Everybody, I have to say that it's quite possibly the most important activist-oriented book I...
Posted by Erik on Sat, 03 May 2008 01:08:00 PST

Vegan.com Top 10 Recipes, 2008

I'm proud to announce the launch of a great new recipe feature on Vegan.com -- our ultimate top 10 recipe list for 2008. Check it out here:http://www.vegan.com/recipes/vegancom-top-10-recipes-of -2008...
Posted by Erik on Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:17:00 PST

Bonus VegTalk Podcast: Paul Shapiro on California and Colorado

Paul Shapiro, Senior Director of HSUS’ Factory Farming Campaign, joins me this morning for a chat about the California ballot initiative as well as Colorado’s big out-of-nowhere victory ag...
Posted by Erik on Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:30:00 PST

Vegan.com Relaunched

If you haven’t check it lately, I relaunched Vegan.com last week with a daily blog, a new interview-based podcast, and all sorts of other forthcoming goodies. Please give it a look and subscrib...
Posted by Erik on Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:46:00 PST

Paul Shapiro on Chino Slaughterhouse and Humane California

I decided to call Paul Shapiro for an unplanned podcast, even though development for Vegan.com's relaunch is still underway. We discuss the cruelty investigation that occurred at the Hallmark dairy ...
Posted by Erik on Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:54:00 PST

Phone Chat: Looking Ahead to 2008 with Paul Shapiro

It's my final podcast of 2007, and I finish off this year with an informal phone chat with Paul Shapiro. We talk about the major wins for farmed animals in 2007, including the decision of Colorado's ...
Posted by Erik on Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:03:00 PST

A Meaningful Life

Here's the first of two podcasts to close out 2007. I end today's show with my lengthy reading of Matt Ball's wonderful vegan activist essay, "A Meaningful Life." But before that, a quick roundup o...
Posted by Erik on Tue, 01 Jan 2008 09:02:00 PST

The Hungry Vegan

I'm back today with a Christmas Eve podcast. The folks at The Hungry Vegan sent me a week's worth of delicious food, and I can't believe I gave half of it to Skimpola. She drops by and we talk about...
Posted by Erik on Mon, 24 Dec 2007 12:56:00 PST

Waiting for Skimpola

Plenty of news on today's show starting with a visit from Josh Balk of HSUS. Josh and I discuss the huge announcement that Compass Group will no longer purchase battery eggs -- until now the company ...
Posted by Erik on Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:17:00 PST

Morningstar Farms Egg Victory

I've got two interviews on today's podcast plus ten days' worth of news. I start by telephoning JP Goodwin of HSUS, who tells us about how Michael Vick's 23 month prison sentence changes the animal f...
Posted by Erik on Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:31:00 PST