The Tofu Goddess: Education as Activism. Part One of a Vegan Politics Podcast.

I believe a man with everything to my
team like Kevin Garnett that way I'm in the real estate tonight I'm stressing to you you take this outfit home are you burning you take this right here I don't care if it's Versace name-brand it cuz I I know sorry I don't care you take this and you burn I've understand hey what's up how's it going best of times worst of times so you know my first question has to be what do I call you because I'm not opposed to referring to you as goddess during this conversation but it seems a bit awkward seems a bit strange know huh that new gen you know honestly I wish I had professors and whatnot that I could talk to about veganism in relation to the university system but first of all firstly most perfect professors don't even fully understand veganism like I took a philosophy of food course and I was really excited to take this class because I assumed my professors would be knowledgeable about veganism in a class about the philosophy of food I felt like he just didn't understand the issue and I was like yeah like we were vegans we don't want to support things that you know it directly or indirectly promote animal cruelty or exploitation and it was just like beyond him he didn't understand it and I found that they were just saying things were factually incorrect about animal agriculture and it was just I ended up dropping the course it was such a disappointment professor nothing about veganism and um so that was it that was just my disappointment that I didn't actually find a professor to talk to you about veganism in relation to the university setting but um like have you had similar experiences do you find that people who I guess we called professors up to a higher esteem right like we just I suppose we expect them to know even know what veganism is like depending on their area of study yeah you will do fine III don't let me know I really I really talk to my professor and relate to them just as some guy just as an ordinary guy and that's I think that's a turning point in everyone's life when you realize people in positions of authority are no different from any other author you know our word in English for authority first you become an author then people start to regard you as an authority you know why is this guy my professor probably because he wrote some book and you know that book got him this job you know indirectly and you can go to the library and take that book out and you may decide it's complete [ __ ] they may not be progressive at all so you know for with for me with professors of Buddhism very often that was the case was you know um I've read their book and I know I'm not impressed so you know yes they have a PhD yes they got this job which is you know very large terms of PhD ppl people pitch these are either unemployed or underemployed permanently it's a very sad path to take in life I'm sure many people would encourage you to instead get a you know diploma and education for that reason because it could actually lead to economic independence unlike unlike getting a PhD and trying to become a university professor but no I don't meet them with those expectations for me the experience is the opposite they asked me about and you know it'll come up in different ways uh you know the background in humanitarian work and politics and that stuff will tend to come up in class first and the professors may respect me or may fear me or may be apprehensive about me for those reasons and then the role veganism plays in that starts to become obvious because you know any of the humanitarian where this this stuff you're alluding to its are the course you dropped out of the politics of agriculture and agricultural reform the Anthropology of food the cultural anthropology of food of what people think is food and what is not food you know it may sound stupid but when you walk through a forest what foods do you see as edible that's completely cultural and not scientific you know the Cree here in Canada there were tons of edible and highly nutritious foods in in their environment in their mental niche that they never exploited never harvested and the reason for that was that the Cree had a monomania with meat they were absolutely obsessed with joke with having a meat heavy meat intensive diet as a result they would die at age 45 or 50 you know they had short short but vibrant lives the traditional diet was incredibly unhealthy and it's still an issue to some extent culturally in as much as anyone is influential diet anymore but you know likewise in Laos you can have two different ethnic groups living in the same ecological niche walking through the same forest and what they regard as food is totally different I'm talking about plants basically but in terms of animals it can be even more extreme so I lived amongst the aqha I have a two or three articles about the akka but they're specifically about humanitarian work and sex scandals and corruption and politics in the acadecki culture but the ACA's still to this day there among the ethnic groups who eat dog meat on a daily basis dog is to them it's not us because there are other cultures more common where dog is a special food dogs and they once in a while but for them dog is a daily source of protein and when you walk up to an Akha village they have wicker lattices a wicker lattice stretching out dog skin to make it into the leather you know so you see the the height of a skin dog it's one of the first things when you walk up to a kvetch them right away you know the ethnicity of that village the ethnicity and language and right next door to them will be another ethnic group who are you know traditional tera vaada Buddhists who not only never eat dog but who regard it as you know a sin as religiously offensive he does all basically all tera vaada Buddhists would refuse to eat dog unless they're starving to death or something they're also supposed to refuse to eat elephants and a few other things it's not it's not a very demanding religion but there are there are a few meats that are that are off-limits that way so yeah the question of what is food how is food produced the ethics of food and then the you know the indescribable challenge that modernity poses to all that because in all these countries you know that the diet has changed in Italy 200 years ago nobody ate food out of an aluminum can and nobody had an electrical refrigerator you know if we pretend Italian culture is something continuous and Italian food is a continuous concept but the reality is everything has been transformed whether it's Italy or Ireland or Canada or Thailand or Cambodia all these places it's been transformed and then veganism obviously fits into that posing I get a yet more dynamic challenge so you know obviously you've heard some my videos videos talking about that stuff I mean you know I do think so for me I just to say on one hand I do think anthropology assign disabled that agronomy as well as agriculture mean agronomy is this kind of in between science but frankly public education you know your chosen field your presume feel this much probably is the single most dynamic battlefield for the future of hearts and hearts and stomachs you know what I mean is that that's the real question is what what do we teach people food was and is and it ought to be so no totally I mean that was I got the part of my reasoning for wanting to go into that just because you know like how it would just be such a huge win if you could even include like on hot dog day or something if you could just include veggie dogs like that would just be such a simple thing to do that theoretically if I were in any kind of position of authority that I could like achieved and there's just so many things that it could be done so easily right now and be implemented but aren't and I find that very frustrating well right I mean obviously I'm a few years older than you but I mean you know when I went through the education system we had all this kind of rather hollow education aids was a huge fear at that time I know aids still exists but it's no longer the the the concern it was at that time so year after year we got the lectures in school about AIDS year after year we got these kind of meaningless lectures about ecology and recycling you know it's just like okay you're eight years old I'm gonna teach you the enormous significance of a plastic bottle and I am it is just kind of phony and a lot of that it really it created a kind of culture of neurosis you know meaningless neurotic forms of ecology and ignoring really important ones now you you already know I'm vegan but um you know even without that I had a girlfriend Canadian you know white Canadian girlfriend this was just a not not a cambodian girl friends maybe that would be a different story but I had I had a Canadian girlfriend and you know she I think just as in effect of you know what we have on TV like the CBC and what's in the schools she had this kind of neurotic belief that you know plastic shopping bags from the grocery store that this was a huge ecological problem and you know I got the hard numbers for because I already knew it wasn't and I you know I sympathize up to a point but only up to a point I had to sit down there and say look you know as a percentage of the waste stream this is less of a problem than carpeting this is less of a problem than drapes like I know you really believe that plastic shopping bags are a big deal I even know why you think that because the education system kind of shapes you that way you think this is the difference you can make um but you're wrong and and again I you know as you know obviously veganism I don't have to repeat it here maybe those those other questions of meat-eating and leading a meaningful life anyway you know and how do we organize our cities how do we live does I mean you know does your life revolve around eating meat and drinking alcohol I realized alcohol is vegan um does your life revolve around car ownership and driving a car and then the way that you know when you scale that up a whole city full of people who eat meat and drive cars and you know anyway these are these are the real questions they say ultimately i think it is education and sort of politics of education that's that's got to be the battlefield for that at least in a semi democratic society like Canada you know yeah I definitely think so I mean like culture I think is going like I think yeah culture must be the biggest obstacle there to get him out the entire world to go vegan i I just I hear people on YouTube right like it drives me crazy and rising absolutely crazy when they promote things like YouTube is it's going to liberate the animals because if we just get everyone to watch these videos so why not and like whiteley someone in some foreign country they don't even speak English Larry they're going to watch this youtube video and they're just going to forget about their entire their people's entire history me and their upbringing and whatnot and now they're going to go vegan because of social media because people in the West are it's just totally ignoring like the culture in these institutions and just how deep rooted animal agriculture is you know you've got to get on the educational level you got to get to the family you know that it's mind-boggling so many your doors the end of your first university degree i take it something like this yeah i'm going into my final year majoring in english literature minoring in french hopefully i will wind up being a schoolteacher with that but i've already mentioned um yeah i'll be content doing that for a few years i think but i don't we'll see we'll see how content i am with that i feel like i'm gonna get ambitious i'm gonna want to move up and have something with a more authoritative power I suppose like there's only so much you can do within the system as an actual school teacher so well then going back to school or not you were dressed in the bowl you're just the politics of education and education policies that sort of thing is that is that what you're referring to or yeah yeah I like I would love to be um work on the school board be a director of education whether as a president or as far as I can get really just because uh you know I'm really passionate about youth and education in general so it's just the perfect fit at the at the early stages of that in terms of the exotic places I've lived like Laos and Thailand and Cambodia and so on you know I'm I did meet a lot of Canadians out there who finished who were fully qualified school teachers and who then lived in Asia for a couple of years because the school board didn't want them or didn't want them yet you know they had no work experience yet and there was so much competition there were so many qualified teachers you know looking for the same positions so whether whether you like it or not that that will be one option for you and now you might like it you might want to kill again don't don't waste your life with it but you can kill a year or two if you wanted to you know teaching in parts of Asia just to just to have that as intermediary but there are good reasons also not to waste a year of your life that way but if you want the experience that that'll be open for you if you're getting a full you know what a teacher's certificate and so on yeah I mean I've certainly considered going abroad I know I do have friends who've already graduated Teachers College and whatnot and they can't find jobs so they've gone to England to go teach and um you know it's just funny how you say like I don't know if you want to do that because you know when you hear oh when a friend tells you I'm gonna go live in England for a year and you go work abroad like that sounds really awesome you're gonna be a teacher but then they get there and they say you know the kids they're horrible their breath all the food they all say this and you know I was thinking about it and I was like why would England want teachers from Canada like why don't they have their own teachers and apparently it's just not a very like a steam job it's not as respected like it is in Canada as it is in England she says there's just no respect for teachers there and what not yep so yeah that's I mean that's the thing about education it brings you into cultural and political questions everywhere you go you know if if you became a teacher in Cambodia come back to you once a but if you become a teacher in Cambodia you'll be dealing with the wealthiest the most cosmopolitan the most dear assen ated of children children who are Cambodian by citizenship but who grew up in Paris you know because their parents their the few millionaires than Cambodia and yet we had an incident with one of those kids you know no offense but spoiled rich kids pulling a gun at school and you know this is not like youth violence in Los Angeles or something the his method of pulling a gun was going out to his father's limo driver grabbing the limo drivers gun and then pointing it I forget he pointed a kid or at the school teacher what have you yeah you know that that's that's the millionaire millionaire gang violence it's not you know it's yeah he was mad at he was mad at someone at school I forgettable the kid was you know I forgave was 11 or 80 he was a kid he wasn't uh wasn't a teenager and then the controversy the reason I read about it was that his his father was wealthy and powerful and his father was trying to prevent the school from from expulsion from expelling the kid they always so you say everywhere you go as a teacher where you fit into the social hierarchy and your role political is very different but when I was in England it was a fact nobody wants to deal with that school teachers were paid less than plumbers you know skilled tradesmen like that doing plumbing or carpentry you learned a lot more money and the the traditional view of school teachers from a hundred years ago or even 200 years ago in England had really withered away and it had become an underpaid miserable job such as his infamous in many parts the United States you know it's stereotypical schoolteacher in Detroit I'm sure some schools in Detroit are wonderful but that actually in many ways England had simply caught up with the pattern already seen in the US yeah yeah i think i read somewhere actually that canadian teachers are the second highest paid only behind sweden i believe yeah it's that's right it's different from problems to problems but yes ontario school teachers are very very highly paid and that's one reason why it's so hard to get a job in ontario the one period of my life when I looked at applying to formal you know education programs i forget they were Bachelors of eddore what you know but education certification was in connection to first nations languages to create and you know we have a whole separate school system for first nations in canada because that's not under the provincial government then you have that that struggle for to provide education on you know residential i was going to say residential schools but that's it that's a batter but providing education at all to First Nations so yeah and my mind ersten that was obviously the native language wasn't teaching English but inevitably they all learn English now so you know there's a tension there video so you wanted to like what would have been your teachable though in fact if you know what I'm talking about and what would you know you apply for legging teachable is can we English or French what would you well look if you're serious about first nations languages you'll do anything so you know you could be the gym teacher matter much window in terms of in terms of what it was learning you know you're looking for a way in to communities that are closed for a good reason you know if your long term goal is to really be involved with creative ways as a language I was looking at you know again see that's something people think I'm an egomaniac but there's a lot of really pragmatic humility you need to do this kind of thing so I was looking at a ten year process of okay I'm gonna live in these communities I'm going to learn this language because not a language you learn in one or two years you know and make the kind of connections that let you later do exactly the kind of work you're mentioning really political work on education policy and also charity work you know work relating to libraries and books can be crucial for those communities to to get them the books I was also interested in prison activism and prison education which again for the Korean age of ways a big deal because in Saskatchewan there are ten percent of the population but they're way more than ten percent of the prison population so getting education for First Nations people in jails so that kind of thing but leading up to that you know I never had this delusion that you start as an executive it's like well I've got ten years between now and then so know it whether I was a gym teacher or a math teacher or anything else you know i'd be there and my passion minders to be the the language and the related you know language language politics but you know that too same thing in Laos you know I didn't show up laos expecting to have the role of a you know an expert who dictate dictates to the people how they should change their culture or change their their politics would have you a lot of people do especially if you have the money as a donor I remember you know I was I was actually given the official legal title of government expert which there is a scary title like when you have that title people worry that you have the power to get them killed because you probably do in that country um but remember they they literally gave me that ID card that that says I'm a I'm a government expert as a title on the same day that I was informed that i was being exiled from the country and could never return and my life would be in danger I might be put in a gulag or beaten up or killed if I came back this this tells you something about communist bureaucracy the delay in issuing that card to me recognizing mystified expert perfectly coincided with him having the the meeting that denounced me and issued kind of formal death threats against me wait formalized what had been before then you know formal death threats so yeah but yeah I was just gonna say you understand why people think you're our CIA agent right with him well no different people different people see in different ways when I was in Laos before I got exiled from the country there were people who thought I was a CIA agent who then finally stopped thinking I was a CIA agent when the government threatened to kill me and that kind of stuff so that was refreshing but I mean other people like I knew a guy was an American University professor he's probably still here in conveying I haven't looked him up but he so he had a PhD and he was here doing low-level semi academic stuff so he's an educated guy and just once in conversation I used a turn of phrase I use some technical term like deployed in one of those technical terms like rendition that not everyone knows but for me it's my normal way of talking and from that moment he became convinced I was a CIA agent and would never hear otherwise at that time at that time I was literally living as a refugee because I just been kicked out a louse exactly what I mentioned you so I only had my backpack and my bicycle and I was you know sometimes sleeping on the floor of a friend's apartment sometime staying in a in a hostel and out like a youth hostel or hotel I was really scraping by not know my next dollars coming from it's just like if this is how you think the CIA operates you must think the CIA really have a deep commitment to Buddhist scholarship and charity work you know this is this is your tax dollars at work this is what the CIA really supports it Southeast Asia you know anyway I wish an undercover CIA agent would say so I don't go in the clearing everything too much seemed like Kevin Garnett it's not any part I can keep no nothing so when you get done with this you should be butt ass naked this should be this should be burned okay it's good to see like always in the shoes to just burn them okay they just burn it don't ask no questions burn the whole the Red Sox was the people can't see you at home take all this handkerchief lime thumb all that burn it okay that might a business really stick