What’s not for dinner in LA?/Craig Medred

California boasts U.S. vegan capital

In what is likely to come as no surprise to Alaska residents, WalletHub has declared Anchorage the least “vegetarian- & vegan-friendly” city in the country.

After crunching the numbers on the cost of groceries for vegetarians, the percentage of restaurants offering vegans and vegetarians options and the per capita numbers on juice and smoothie bars, salad shops and vegetable nurseries, Anchorage beat out Chulista, CA, for last or fell to worse, depending on whether you looking at this from the standpoint of vegan/vegetarian or a meat eater.

Meat eaters could be considered the traditional northerners. Before the white man arrived and for decades after, there weren’t any vegetables available during the long Alaska winters.

“Shaped by glacial temperatures, stark landscapes, and protracted winters, the traditional Eskimo diet had little in the way of plant food, no agricultural or dairy products, and was unusually low in carbohydrates,” a writer at Discover Magazine summarize years ago. “Mostly people subsisted on what they hunted and fished. Inland dwellers took advantage of caribou feeding on tundra mosses, lichens, and plants too tough for humans to stomach (though predigested vegetation in the animals’ paunches became dinner as well). Coastal people exploited the sea. The main nutritional challenge was avoiding starvation in late winter if primary meat sources became too scarce or lean.”

Thankfully, the nutritional challenge of avoiding starvation in late winter is now primarily gone, but many Alaskans – Native, native and non-Native – still cling to diets heavy in meat and fish.

Not so those in Los Angeles, which WalletHub rated the vegan-vegetarian capital of these unUnited States.

This, WalletHub says, “shouldn’t be a surprise when you consider that L.A. residents eat this type of food 187 percent more often than the U.S. average. In addition, the city has the second-highest number of affordable restaurants with vegan and vegetarian options that have at least 4.5 stars on Yelp.”

Well, if Yelp says it’s so, it must be so.

And Southern California is inherently far more salad country than salmon country, the salmon having taken a beating from the farmers and urbanites.

“California engages in massive water diversions – supplying the state’s cities in Southern California and industrial agriculture operations, such as hundreds of thousands of acres of almond orchards planted in arid regions, and with the water salmon need to survive. This is far and away the biggest single problem” facing California salmon, according to the Golden Gate Salmon Association.

Alaska is fortunate in that it still has large and healthy wild salmon runs, and the fish taste really good. But despite this, a vegan wouldn’t touch one.

“Eating fish is bad because of the suffering it causes billions of fish every year,” according to Sentinent Media. “Fishes are sentient and intelligent beings, integral to the earth’s ecosystem. Our current fish consumption patterns are not sustainable, and research has predicted that there will be no fish left to catch by 2048. The interaction of flora and fauna keeps our oceans thriving. With much of the fish going extinct, the ecological balance will change, resulting in depletion of available oxygen and other potential climate impacts.”

Yes, you read that right. Fishermen are going to kill us by rending all of the fish extinct by 2048 causing a massive loss of oxygen in the atmosphere and causing many humans to die of asphyxiation. Talk about your dietary habits catching up with you….

But that’s in the long term, in the short term, fishermen and people who eat fish are just sort of, well, evil.

“Larger questions of justice are also brought up when discussing the ethics of eating fish. The problem is that, as it stands, humans lump millions of species into one ‘not human’ category,” according to Sentinent Media. “Their nonhuman classification then justifies anything that happens to them because they are animals, not humans.

“This process of ‘othering’ appears in many different contexts. For example, during colonialism in India, the British viewed themselves as civilized humans and Indians as primitive savages, thus justifying whatever happens to them…However, there is no basis for humans’ moral superiority, and so it is being revisited.”

Sentinent Media is based in San Fransisco, which would have been number one in the WalletHub rankings if not for the astronomical cost of living in that city. That San Fran has become the city for rich folk pushed its “affordability rank” to the very bottom of the list, which pulled down its number one rankings for “vegetarian lifestyle,” and “diversity, accessibility & quality.”

Ah, California.

The state with the grizzly bear on its flag but no grizzly bears left running around in its forests, let alone sububurban parks.. Maybe Alaska should ship them a few to provide a lesson on the natural diets of omnivores.