Victory Gardens and Veganism from Dani in Davis

I recently found myself reading a blog called Dani-Feed by a young woman in Davis, California. She's interested in local food, biking, and environmentalism, among other things.

Two particularly interesting items from Dani:

A site called The Victory Garden of Tomorrow, where an artist named Joe Wirtheim shows his silk-screened posters inspired by WWII propaganda posters. Unlike so many of the updated versions of these posters you see, however, Joe's are not specifically based on the historical posters, but are instead original artworks.

On his site, Joe writes:

It began suddenly as doodles, sketches, and writing in my notebooks. I was reading lots, and rode my bicycle everywhere -- which led to strong feelings about urban design and culture. I wondered about my city and how it became this way, and where we were going with it. For example, the way the streets were arranged to inhibit anything but cars and trucks, how so much land was vacant, trashed, wasted it seemed. How people seemed depressed, unhealthy, without energy.

...I think this is when I decided I wanted the art to influence or propagate these ideas of a simple living. I started reading some history and looking up period poster art, and fell in love with the idea of the "victory garden." The history of it is so simple and charming - I especially liked the active voice in the poster art, like: "Help Harvest" or "Can all you Can" about canning vegetables for winter.... There were others like collecting salvaged steel, aluminum, and rubber which I felt was perfect -- it's like not only going back to classic folk values, but then cleaning up the industrial mess that we appear to buried in.

I enjoyed the charm of the active-voice propaganda, like a mother telling you to eat your vegetables -- who can argue with that? Planting a garden, riding a bike, and just getting up and doing something. I found out that kind of art is called "agit-prop" or agitational propaganda, because it persuades the audience to get up and do something, not just change their minds.

Dani's second post included this environmental argument for veganism, found on one of her favorite blogs, La Vida Locavore, by Jill Richardson. Jill's post summarized the findings of a study called Diet, Energy and Global Warming by Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin from the University of Chicago:

If you put in 100 calories of fossil fuel, you can produce:

18.1 calories of chicken
20.6 calories of milk
11.2 calories of egg
6.4 calories of grain-fed beef
3.7 calories of pork
1.2 calories of lamb
110 calories of herring
5.8 calories of tuna
5.7 calories of farmed salmon
0.9 calories of shrimp
250 calories of corn
415 calories of soy
110 calories of apples
123 calories of potatoes

Whoa. That's an amazing set of numbers.

Dani ended her post about this list by saying it's important to realize that not everyone is going to convert to veganism overnight, no matter how clear the reasons for it might be -- but that if everyone decreased the amount of animal-based food they eat, it would still make a very big difference.

Just start somewhere. The perfect is not the enemy of the good.