Vegan options at summer hill hotel

Friday 19 June 2015 

I had a pretty funny experience at the Summer Hill Hotel last night, but it didn’t have anything to do with their ‘comedy’ trivia. My girlfriend and I went along with her brother and two of his colleagues, and finished up at a respectable third place. Afterward, when it had emptied out a bit, we got talking to one of the bar staff who was coming around to clean the tables. While he was hanging around, Tilly noticed a sign saying they do veggie burgers on Mondays, and asked him why only on Mondays. We’ve been to the pub a couple of times and they only have two vegetarian options, neither of which can be veganised, so the only vegan option is a bowl of chips (almost certainly fried in the same oil as the chicken schnitzel). Keep in mind that this is in Sydney’s inner west, possibly the most vegan-friendly place in Australia outside of Melbourne, where just down the road I could ask for no fish sauce or oyster sauce in my stirfry at the Thai place or no cheese on my pizza at the Italian and get the response, ‘Oh, you mean vegan?’ 

‘Good question,’ he answered. ‘I don’t know. I assume all the ingredients are there right now, but we only sell it on a Monday.’ 

There was a bit of a back and forth where he bitched about his evangelistic vegan ex-girlfriend and her hypocrisy in drinking non-vegan wine and wearing leather shoes, and then Til volunteered that I was vegan and he started interrogating me about wine and shoes and honey, absurdly insisting that bees have no use for it (!?!?). Then he said, ‘It’s funny, ’cause we actually got this loooong email a while back from some vegan who wanted more options on the menu. And for the first few paragraphs I was on board; I was like, yeah, mate, I agree, but then he got to the part where he started trying to preach and stuff and I was just like ‘Nup.’’ 

Then he talked a bit about how he ‘gets’ people who do it for the health reasons, and that he’d do it for the health reasons but he loves chicken, but he doesn’t get people who say it’s for ethical reasons. 

When he walked away, I turned to the rest of the group and said, ‘Yeah, so the guy who sent that email was me,’ and everybody lost their shit. No one could believe that had happened. I hadn’t said anything because I wanted to hear what he had to say honestly. It was like being able to eavesdrop but he was talking straight to my face – quite a rare opportunity, really. 

Not that it particularly helped. After the encounter I dug up the email and read it back to myself to try and see where he was coming from. Obviously his reaction is not the desired one for my cause. I know that people often respond negatively to any discussion of veganism, so that was nothing new, but in this case I thought I’d tried to be particularly non-threatening and polite because I was trying to effect a concrete change. But see for yourself! I’ll copy and paste the contents below, with a little commentary. 

Firstly, I guess the email was pretty long – four paragraphs in total, but I’m just a longwinded, thorough person and that probably won’t ever change. I didn’t want to just send a three-line email asking for vegan options, I wanted to make a case and give some suggestions, too. 

My first paragraph was basically just sucking up to them and setting up the situation: 

     To the management of the Summer Hill Hotel/AHL Group 

     My girlfriend and I have just moved into the area, and we'd heard great things about 

     your establishment, so we decided to try out the hotel for our first lunch after a big 

     morning moving in. We loved the atmosphere and service at the hotel, but were a bit 

     disappointed that there were no vegan meal options available at your bistro, and the 

     two vegetarian options were unable to be 'veganised' because they were pre-prepared 

     and contained fish sauce and dairy products respectively. 

Nothing to see here, right? Pretty tame? 

Next I got to the point of the email: 

     We're eager to make your establishment our new 'local' for drinks, trivia, and lunches

     and dinners with friends, but obviously we'll have a hard time if there's nothing we 

     can eat there! So I'm just emailing to ask if there's anything you can do to 

     accommodate vegans in your meal options – whether it's enabling one of the 

     vegetarian options to be altered for vegans, or even adding a new menu item. 

Again, pretty reasonable, I think. 

My third paragraph was about establishing common ground in case they were thinking ‘Jesus, no meat, dairy or eggs – what the hell does he want, then?’ (a common reaction). I explained what veganism actually is, which, in retrospect could’ve sounded a bit patronising, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t actually know, so I had to explain it to be sure. Here I also gave some suggestions for actual meals, because it’s generally good practice not to just point out a problem, but  also to arrive with a solution, and I think a lot of classically trained chefs and cooks have just never contemplated cooking something without meat, dairy or eggs, so I wanted to show that there were viable options:

     I come from a family of chefs, so I know veganism can sound prohibitively 

     restrictive at first. We essentially don't eat (or use) any products that involve 

     harming animals, so no meat, dairy, eggs, honey, etc. But there are actually so many 

     inclusive, delicious vegan meals that anyone can enjoy, even staunch meat 

     enthusiasts (if they give it a try)! At other pubs in the past I've had wonderful veggie 

     burgers; simple mushroom, tomato and herb pastas; open pies of roast veggies in 

     (dairy/egg-free) filo or shortcrust pastry; falafel and hummus pitas with salad; nachos 

     with beans; and vegan pizzas. Often other pubs go to the extra length of making their 

     vegan meal gluten-free as well, so they always have at least one option that anyone 

     can enjoy, whether they're vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, lactose-intolerant, 

     gluten-free or whatever else! 

Okay, there, bud. Calm down with the exclamation marks. 

'Anyway, I was just reading your final edit, and um, there seems to be an inordinate number of exclamation points ... 'It was a damp and chilly afternoon, so I decided to put on my sweatshirt!' ... 'I pulled the lever on the machine but the Clark Bar didn't come out!''

But still, maybe just annoyingly nice, right? Not exactly raging preachy vegan yet? 

But these were all still the paragraphs that he’d been ‘on board’ with. It was the last one he said he had an issue with. And I can definitely see why. The last paragraph was where I raised the issue of ethics. It wasn’t in my original draft of the email, but then I found this pamphlet on their website that was basically fifteen pages of them bragging in poorly written copy about their commitment to ethical food sourcing and sustainable environmental practices and I thought, ‘Well, then I’ll bring up how maybe offering a SINGLE vegan option on your menu might fit in with your dedicated passion for ethical food and environmental sustainability’: 

     I was interested to read the ALH 'Our Sustainable Kitchen' brochure available on 

     your website and glad that all your meat seems to be procured as ethically as 

     possible. 

Okay, not really, but a bit of flattery couldn’t hurt … 

     As a company 'committed to ethical food sourcing and supporting environmental 

     resource management now and in the future', I hope you guys will look into 

     accommodating what I and many other people are increasingly finding to be the 

     most healthful, ethical and environmentally sustainable lifestyle choice available. As 

     you may know, growing crops to feed livestock around the world is the biggest cause 

     of habitat loss and deforestation, and raising animals for consumption contributes 

     more to greenhouse gas emissions than all our transport needs combined. 

     Thanks for your time and hope to hear back from you soon. 

     Cheers 

     Mr L Phillip Lucas, BA, BCA 

     Freelance writer and editor 

     lphilliplucas@gmail.com

     lukewarmmanifesto.blogspot.com.au

     

So, what? Is it that ONE sentence he took issue with, then? Merely making a claim about habitat loss, deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions? Claims the UN itself has validated by urging the world to move towards a vegan diet? To me it seems that people are just so sensitive on this subject that you literally can't say anything without being written off as ramming your ideology down people's throats. I think this ties back to a realisation I had the other day that I posted on my L Phillip Lucas Facebook page: 

     Shouldn't the real indicator of self-righteousness be the belief that all of our actions 

     are beyond reproach, that no one has the right to criticise our behaviour? As a 

     society, our fixation on 'judgement' is reaching phobic levels. In a world where most 

     of us never really think critically about our lives, it becomes easier to dismiss any 

     form of criticism as rude, judgemental, self-righteous, sanctimonious, holier-than

     -thou or preachy than to make sure our ideas and actions can stand up to criticism. 

They never did write back to my email. Apparently they just passed it around to all the staff, had a laugh at my expense, and now they bitch about it (to other vegan patrons???). I'm not really sure what I should've done differently, except not mention the ethical side of things. Obviously, in a way, I did get ‘preachy’ at the end there, but only to hold them to their own professed commitments. I wouldn’t have brought it up if they hadn’t done so first, bragging about their obviously bullshit passion for sustainability. 

Maybe you can write a more successful one than me. If you’d like to send them an email asking about adding a vegan option to the menu, that’d be amazing. If they hear it from enough different people, they might actually consider it. Their email is: SummerHill.Hotel@alhgroup.com.au 

Thanks for reading 

LPL

Murdoch, the market and the myth of consumer choice

EDIT: I received an email threatening me with a $1,350 (+GST) out of licence fee for using several NewsCorp front pages in the original version of this post, so I've now removed them. I thought they might be covered under the 'criticism and review' fair dealing exceptions, but wasn't in a position to look into it any further at that point. Wishing the guys at News Corp well in their continuing endeavour to pander to the masses, disregard all journalistic principle, capitalise on people's fears and erode democracy.

Saturday 10 August 2013

In a move that unexpectedly became the talk of Twitter this week, Wallabadah General Store owners Glen and Kim Sheluchin announced on Monday they would no longer stock News Corp papers, citing the company's 'blatant' and 'long-standing' political bias (Nickell 2013). Owned by Australian-born media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the corporation's front pages have been devoid of any pretension to objectivity since Sunday's election date announcement, giving credence to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's claim that editors have been instructed: '[G]o hard on Rudd, start from Sunday and don't back off' (Grattan 2013).

(Refer, for example to the Daily Telegraph frontpage from the 2013 election reading 'Finally, you now have the chance to ... KICK THIS MOB OUT' and the other featuring Photoshopped images of Craig Thomson, Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as characters from Hogan's Heroes, accompanied by the caption 'THOMMO'S HEROES' and the headline 'Albo's explanation for German beers with Thomson: I KNOW NUTHINK!')

As I've mentioned in the past, I believe along with many others that the two arms of a functioning democracy are a robust media and rigorous universal education, so watching the descent of Murdoch's tabloids, especially The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail, from populist mouthpieces to full-blown propaganda over the past few years has been extremely disturbing. It was only in 2010 on my first trip to Britain when I encountered the shameless (and shamefully popular) likes of The Sun (News Corp) and The Daily Mail (DMGT) that I thanked heaven the media discourse in Australia was not so woeful,* that you'd never see such openly biased headlines here. It seems I was wrong to put it down to anything more than antipodean backwardness: we've finally caught up.

*Of course, at this time, I'd never yet seen an edition of the NT News (News Corp), which is known for its outrageous headlines (see the edition featuring an image of a shirtless man drinking a beer with a snake coiled around it accompanied by the headline 'WHY I STUCK A CRACKER UP MY CLACKER').

I first became alarmed in early 2012 while on a business trip in Brisbane. There the political temperature allowed The Courier-Mail to trumpet anti-Gillard sentiment in a way I suspect no other state (excepting perhaps Western Australia) would have tolerated at the time, stirring up even more of the public vitriol demonstrated when local colleagues would whip around in their chairs at the mere mention of the PM, ready to criticise the way she spoke or dressed at any opportunity.

The Sheluchins may have already overturned their ban after a smarmy diplomatic mission by the Tele (discussed in all its quease-making detail here), but hearteningly, not before they received a deluge of 'calls and messages of support' (Nickell 2013) and inspired other vendors to follow suit. The management of Brisbane's Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge, for example, which never sold the paper but had it available for customers to read, revealed on Twitter yesterday that they're now displaying this sign in-store:

But there have of course been negative responses to these small business boycotts, most of them bizarrely labelling them acts of 'censorship' (a term the Tele was more than happy to throw around in the gloating victory speech linked to above). For example:

This, of course, is nonsense. As I pointed out on Twitter, the argument is essentially that a newspaper's existence demands its supply or else it's censorship. The Sheluchins said themselves they don't stock Fairfax's The Financial Review. Presumably they don't sell Green-Left Weekly or Uganda's Daily Monitor, either. Censorship? Of course not. The difference, some might argue, is that there's an established demand for the Tele, but I'm afraid there's still that much-vaunted principle at the heart of capitalism to contend with: choice. There might also be a demand for child pornography or cocaine, or even cigarettes. That doesn't make it 'censorship' to refuse to sell them because of your 'own personal political views' that child pornography/cocaine/cigarettes are unethical.

Because unfortunately, that's what capitalism does to truth: commodifies it. The newspaper is a product like any other, and if the vendor of that product decides it is of substandard quality, they are free to cease selling it, and their customers are free to shop elsewhere if they don't like it.

It's curious the disproportionate amount of concern the objectors seem to have about this one supposed form of obfuscation of the truth through 'censorship' in comparison to the potential obfuscation of the truth Murdoch's papers might have through, say, shoddy journalism, lies, dubious ethics, bias, editorial influence, vested interests and market monopoly (as the management of the Slightly Twisted Refreshment Lounge noted, 'there are no local publications not controlled by Mr Murdoch' in their area; what does that say about the influence of one man over an entire community?)

Here is one of the multifarious failings of capitalism: it's as though in its animalistic mimicry of the system of evolution (competition, survival of the fittest, etc.), it has also taken on Freud's eros drive, that biological urge 'to combine organic substances into ever greater unities' (1920, page 50), realised in the inescapable corporate gravitation towards monopoly, the ineluctable upward accumulation of wealth and power. 'He's earned his influence', free marketeers, Libertarians and minarchists will protest. 'He's powerful and wealthy because his papers are popular!' Truth by popularity. 

Which is what's so strange about these objections: they controvert the basis of the Right's usual disagreement with 'regulations' and 'red tape' and 'big government', that one golden principle I referred to earlier which it mistakenly apotheosises as the way to determine all truth and quality and morality: consumer choice. As far as I can see, these News Corp boycotts are one of the few examples of consumer choice actually working as it is supposed to. Every time the quality or ethics of a product is questioned and the suggestion of more regulation is proposed, the Right turns to the touchstone of consumer choice: 'We don't need big government interference – the consumers are our regulators. If consumers don't believe what Rupert Murdoch's papers say, they won't read them ... If consumers don't like the way cage eggs are produced, they won't buy them ... If consumers think reality television is vacuous fluff, they won't watch it.' 

Under capitalism, your dollar is your vote, and (in the fantasies of Randists) the market is supposed to adjust itself to align with consumer opinion as businesses consumers like succeed while businesses they don't fail. As though we are all moral philosophers, thoroughly conscious of the ethical ramifications of our every purchase. As though we have the time in our busy lives to research whether every product we buy is tested on animals or contributes to the deforestation of the Amazon or is made by third-world child sweatshop labourers working eighteen hour days for infinitesimal pay. As though in the moments before we put each item into our trolleys, bombarded by psychologically manipulative advertising and marketing and packaging designed to conceal anything untoward, dogged by a hundred other disparate velleities and cravings and distractions and concerns, we are our best rational and ethical decision-making selves. As though the majority of us are even concerned with right and wrong when we are shopping. As though we haven't been taught that the only value worth considering is monetary value. As though most of us even have the ethical fortitude to resist purchasing products we know involve unethical practices. This system is demonstrably flawed.

So here, in the form of a few small business owners rejecting the low-quality products of a powerful multinational corporation which will probably get its own chapter when historians write about the downfall of the United States (notoriously evil American television network Fox News, panderer to climate change deniers, Creationists, second-amendment nutjobs, Tea Partiers, Republicans and other fundamentalists, is also Murdoch's handiwork), we have one rare instance of an actual deployment of consumer choice for a reason other than price, one time where the consumer has looked at a substandard product and said, 'No, this isn't good enough; I refuse to sell this', and the internet commenters of the Right denounce it.

Jeff Sparrow, editor of left-wing literary journal Overland, is optimistic about the recent slew of rubbish front pages from The Daily Telegraph, and claims the reaction to them online is a signal that 'Murdoch's spell is breaking' (2013). But it's easy to convince yourself you're in the majority when you're surrounded by sympathisers, when you're caught up in the outrage of the Twitter intelligentsia. Growing up in the safe Labor seat of Throsby I'd never met anyone who voted Liberal and couldn't even imagine anyone voting for Howard, and yet he'd won every election in my lifetime until '07. I'm sure Sparrow has the deductive powers to see past those in his immediate political surrounds; I just can't share his optimism in this.

Besides, it's not the engaged people I'm worried about. Not the ones who spend time reflecting on these issues, reading political articles, tweeting their outrage, and slowly constructing a worldview from a number of sources like world news from other countries, independent media, books, discussion, Q&A and Lateline. It's the ones who can't be bothered with politics most of the time, the reluctant voters, the uninformed but stubbornly opinionated who concern me. The ones who glean their political views incidentally from here and there: the mainstream news, the Sunday paper, what other people seem to be saying, a bit of Alan Jones here, a bit of The Bolt Report there. Because when you don't seize control of the discourse, when you just cruise through your intellectual life on autopilot receiving whatever comes your way, the vested interests take control for you, and you've got nothing against which to contextualise your information. The chances are that the vast majority of news these 'uninformed opinionated' come into contact with is produced by the Murdoch media and they don't even know.

So I think Sparrow might be giving people a little too much credit. People don't want facts and truth and expert opinions from people smarter or more specialised than them. They don't want hard questions about right and wrong that might require them to change their behaviour. They want entertainment. They want fluff. And 'consumer choice' on its own without any other barometers of quality or truth usually ensures they get it. Consumer choice alone results in pandering, like a divorced glory parent who only takes their child on weekends and spoils them with gifts and sweets and amusement parks instead of necessities and vegetables and homework, making the other parent seem boring. Given the choice, who might the child prefer to live with? What lifestyle would they choose to adopt? Do they want to watch Big Brother or Lateline? Do they want to read celebrity gossip or serious policy discussion?

This is why it would've been useful to have a real media inquiry in this country. But the howls of 'freedom of the press' that issued from the papers, accompanied dutifully by the Coalition, saw the death of that. You might disagree it was needed, but let's just imagine that it was. One wonders how we would ever get such an inquiry given the corrupt media would use its opinion-forming power to turn public sentiment in its favour with whichever party was in opposition to give it credibility.

No, my feeling is that we're stuck with tabloids that will become ever more like Britain's now, at least as long as the newspaper format survives. All we can do is try to avoid ending up with the Australian equivalent of Fox News that we already know prominent conservatives and conservative organisations like 'Lord' Monckton and the IPA are gunning for. And, of course, to save the ABC from privatisation or, in other words, dumbing it down as much as the commercial networks. I only pray it doesn't come to that.

Thanks for reading

LPL
L Phillip Lucas (Facebook page)
@LPhillipLucas (Twitter profile)

References

The Daily Telegraph's Monday 5 and Thusday 8 August 2013 front pages.

Harry Dellavega's (@NastyHarry) 9:11am 9 August 2013 Twitter tweet.

'Didie's' comment on Ms Alena Nickell's 4am Friday 9 August 2013 The Northern Daily article ''Be fair or you'll be binned''.

Sigmund Freud's 1920 book Beyond the Pleasure Principle in Volume 18 of James Strachey's 1953 –1974 series The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, published by Hogarth Press, London.

Michelle Grattan, AO's 1:48pm Friday 9 August 2013 The Conversation article 'News Corp chief quits as PM claims editors told "go hard on Rudd"'.

NT News's Tuesday 31 July 2012 front page.

Alena Nickell's 4am Friday 9 August 2013 The Northern Daily article ''Be fair or you'll be binned''.

Jeff Sparrow's Thursday 8 August 2013 Overland article 'The good news behind that Telegraph headline'.

Slightly Twisted Refresment Lounge's (@Sl1ghtlyTw1sted) 8:23am Friday 9 August Twitter tweet.

Lukewarm manifesto

Monday 18 July 2011

Welcome to the inaugural post of my new blog, 'lukewarm manifesto'. Nice pun, there, right? You know it is.

I hated blogs before I went on exchange. I subscribed to the usual non-blogger attitude that they're solipsistic and lame, and I refused to read any. Except Patrick Lenton's 'The Book I'm Drinking' and later, 'The Spontaneity Review', because they're clearly hilarious. But other than that, nothing.
 

Writing a travel blog would be different though, I told myself. Not like one of those regular blogs. It's that same old thing of hating something until you're on the inside of it, until you've experienced it. Like, for me, Star Wars, or Survivor, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like a teenage boy who knows he's not allowed to like Twilight by the rules of the universe, but who thinks he'll 'just read the first chapter', y'know, to see how bad it is. Like a rapidly ageing single woman who's always chuckled disdainfully at her friends' suggestions of dating websites, until one late night when she's bleaching her lip hairs and watching Roseanne reruns with a box of Special K Raspberry Chocolatey Bars (those oft-vaunted multitasking skills of yours do come in handy, I'm sure, ladies), she sees an eharmony ad and thinks, 'It can't hurt to just make a profile ... see who's out there' (no doubt thanks to eharmony's extremely subtle and canny claim to 'match you on the deepest dimensions of compatibility, like character, intellect ... and values'):

Ooh, look! Vague, floating buzzwords! Buy, buy, buy!
(Image from http://www.davidweedmark.com/)

That was me with 'ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted'. In writing it, I accidentally initiated myself into the blogosphere. Once I'd signed up I thought I may as well follow the blogs of the few people I knew who had them, if only out of politeness and mild interest. Then strangers started following my blog, so I followed theirs, and they mentioned other blogs on their blogs, so I started following those, and before I knew it I had amassed literally TENS of followed blogs. Whenever I signed in there were fascinating, thought-provoking, hilarious things there waiting to be read and watched and looked at. It was great. I was converted, and this blog is the result of my conversion.

Here you'll find me writing about my passions and my opinions. Things that make me laugh, things that make me mad, and things that depress me. You'll find articles and reviews, details of my writerly pursuits, and links to things that I come across. I make no pretensions to regularity, so you'll never see one of those irritating 'Sorry I've been away so long, my two followers, if anyone even reads this anymore. Here's what's happened in the last six months (posted 6:38pm Monday 8 October 2004)' posts here. You also won't see any 'crazy ramblings and random musings from an insane and crazy mind' or 'stories of an average American family taking each day as it comes in this crazy rollercoaster ride called life as they try to live closer to Christ' (Thank GOD).

Thanks for reading,
 

LPL