For a blog that is supposed to chronicle my exploits, this one looks very empty! Sadly I have found that when my life is most interesting, I don't get to write things down. This week has been quite remarkable, and I just couldn't put off writing about it for another second!
The PETA Lettuce Ladies demonstration is now well-known. It has been done around the world, by regular people and celebrities alike. We decided that it was about time the PETA Lettuce Ladies came to Johannesburg. And they did.
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| Cloris Leachman and Pamela Anderson have both been Lettuce Ladies for PETA. |
Yesterday three amazing vegetarian women agreed to wear leafy green vegetables in the middle of the Johannesburg winter to draw attention to the benefits of vegetarianism - for the animals, for the environment, and for your health. The consumption of meat, eggs and dairy are major contributors to climate change, resource depletion, pollution and world hunger. Each day, animal agriculture consumes a shocking 2.5 trillion litres of water – enough for everyone in the world to take eight showers.
Meat production wastes food that could be used to feed people! It takes up to 16 kilograms of grain to produce just 1 kilogram of meat, and animals raised for food consume nearly 1 billion metric tons of human-edible food every year. That's enough to feed almost half the world's population. We could solve the problem of world hunger, just by going vegetarian!
Animals raised for food are confined to filthy, crowded enclosures and denied everything that is natural and important to them. On factory farms and in slaughterhouses, chickens have their throats cut while they're still conscious, piglets are castrated and have their tails cut off without being given any painkillers and cows are hung upside down and skinned while they're still alive and able to feel pain. This happens all over the world.
Even if this doesn't concern you, you cannot ignore the fact that meat-eating is linked to heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes and impotence. Vegetarianism is as important for your own health as it is for the animals and the environment.
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| PETA Lettuce Ladies ask South Africans to go vegetarian. |
The ladies wore spinach, and distributed literature explaining the links between the modern meat industry and global warming. They were very brave, considering the cold weather!
The media loved the Lettuce Ladies (or Spinach Sisters, as someone quipped)! Mail & Guardian put footage of the event and interviews on their website. The Beeld Newspaper printed a large picture of the ladies, and three newspapers in India printed the pictures too! Several online publications also featured pictures of the PETA Lettuce Ladies! The Ladies themselves blogged about the event here and here. We received very positive comments from onlookers. I think my favourite was someone who drove past and posted a picture on facebook with the comment, "PETA in Greenside FTW".
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| The Lettuce Ladies in Greenside. |
A big thank you to the three Lettuce Ladies, and to Ashley Fruno at PETA for all the help in putting together this demo! If you would like to be on our mailing list for future events, please email me!
