The Vegan Option including Vegetarianism: The Story So Far

In the first millennium CE, Indian vegetarianism advances from an ascetic fringe to a mainstream high-status lifestyle.

How did vegetarianism permeate Indian society? Ian tracks the changes in India’s religious life during the first millennium, following the vegetarian strands of the tapestry that we now call Hinduism.

Ian travels to a temple to Vishnu in eastern India to understand the importance of vegetarianism to his worshippers. He talks to theologians and historians in Oxford and Delhi about the factors that caused the change. He uncovers heated arguments about vegetarianism and animal advocacy in the leaves of India’s sacred texts. And he explores the medieval Buddhist monastic university of Nalanda, in the company of a lecturer from its modern namesake.

Play or download (42MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

You might be wondering what the deal with the half-golden Mongoose in the Mahabharata was. He was looking for a perfect sacrifice to remove his curse (of being a half-golden Mongoose), and had hoped that the immense horse sacrifice at the end of this truly epic war might be it. But he learns that whatever makes an offering perfect, victory in war and animal sacrifice isn’t it.

One reading I didn’t get a time to include was from the Laws of Manu, about how meat-eaters will be consumed in return:

“He whose meat in this world do I eat will in the other world me eat.“ Wise men say this is why meat is called meat.

This is just because of the heroic act of punning that renders the Sanskrit folk etymology (“mamsa” = meat, “mam” = me, “sa” = he) into English in a way that still makes sense. (Alas, I’ve lost the name of the first translator to do this. )

I’d like to thank Sanjeeb Kumar (YouTube) of the artistic Kanti Centre for practical help in Bhubaneswar. Katherine Ulrich and John Smith helped enormously with historical advice and translations.

Music by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, and Selva Rasalingam.

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 6: Hinduism. On Indian Vegetarianism, Vaishnavism, Satvik, and Mahayana Buddhism first appeared on The Vegan Option.

As the British public make their biggest decision in a generation, Ian asks Kerry McCarthy MP about the potential impact of Brexit on animals.

In this special short extra edition of the Vegan Option, Ian catches up with longstanding vegan MP, and main official opposition spokeswoman on farming and the environment, Kerry McCarthy. How does she think animals would vote? (And, for that matter, how will Ian?)

Play or download (17MB MP3) (via iTunes)

I compiled the thoughts of ten EU immigrant vegans for a post on my friend Sean’s blog, Fat Gay Vegan.

I also mentioned the UK Government’s recent proposal (now withdrawn) to make the poultry industry self-regulating.

Podcaster and YouTuber VeganTrix (SoundCloud) filmed Kerry McCarthy’s full talk to VegFestUK [since deleted from YouTube]. It’s an hour long and very interesting, with a bit of gossip about life as a vegan MP. Plus, I’m in it. An audio-only version will be up soon.

Music by Robb Masters. Interview recorded at VegFestUK Bristol.

The post Kerry McCarthy MP on Brexit first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the eastern Roman Empire, several faiths and philosophies agree on one thing; that you need to eschew flesh to live a life of the spirit.

Not all Romans celebrated pagan sacrifices or the bloodthirsty arena. Some Romans followed the semi-mythical vegetarian Pythagoras, or neoplatonist philosophers who preached a vegetarian contemplative life.

In the melting pot of Jewish mythology, Greek philosophy, and the worship of Jesus many forms of Christianity emerge. Some of them advocate vegetarianism. The lost world religion of Manichaeanism took ideas from India and was led by a plant based priesthood that would last a thousand years.

Alexandria in Egypt is the epicentre of many of these contemplative movements. Ian visits a valley in Yorkshire that still echoes with the traditions of the ancient Egyptian desert – the Coptic Christian monastery of St. Athanasius. He discovers why the monks pursue that life, what it means to them, and how they maintain some of the original vegetarian traditions of the Egyptian desert fathers.

Play or download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Now the story has reached characters whose writing survives to the present in volumes, I’m spending less time talking about historical sources and more time quoting people. And it’s hard to leave things out. There are so many things that Plutarch said in the first century that people like Vegan Sidekick have had to repeat in the twenty-first.

This was also the hardest episode for which to arrange a location visit; the story unfolded a long way from where I live, there’s not enough reason to travel, and precious few ethical vegetarians. It took me a while to find the monastery of St. Athanasius.

The tattoo of a Coptic cross on Fr. Yostas’ wrist is what modern Copts (Egypt’s Christian minority) show on entry into a church.

Music by Robb Masters, and Michael Levy. The actors were Jeremy Hancock and Yasser Sha’aban.

The music was:

The show also included part of a service at the monastery of St. Athanasius, and (at the end) an Ethiopian Orthodox Service at St. Mary of Tserha Sion in Hackney, East London.

The icon of St. Nofer the hermit is taken with permission from this Russian-language tourist website.

Special thanks to the Coptic Monastery of St. Athanasius, and Marian and Kevin McDonald (my parents) for driving me there.

Geek recommendation: some of the Christian theologians in this episode also appear in the excellent (and uncharacteristically monster-free) Doctor Who audio drama Council of Nicea.

The post VegHist Ep 5: Flesh and Spirit. On Egyptian monasticism, Early Christianity, Plutarch, Neoplatonism, and Manicheansim first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the largest ancient Indian empire, at the height of its power, its Buddhist king advocates for animals in his edicts, and tries to change India for good.

In the fourth century BCE, the śramaṇa movement (anti-violence anti-ritual ascetics) has produced three religions: the vegetarian Jains, the freegan(ish) Buddhists, and the mysterious (and now vanished) Ājīvikas. The Mauryan Empire is absorbing almost all of the subcontinent, from present-day Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal.

At its height in the middle of the third century BCE, the king – Ashoka – has edicts carved in stones and columns across the realm. Alongside the rulings and propaganda you might expect, his edicts oppose the slaughter and abuse of animals.

Ian travels to the Indian Museum in Calcutta to speak with historian Dr Suchandra Ghosh. And he visits a hillside that looks down on the battlefield that – King Ashoka says – turned him way from violence forever, and where Ashoka erected an edict that still stands today.

Play or download (44MB MP3) (via iTunes)

These are the artefacts of the Ashoka and his dynasty we talk about during the show.

The translations of the edicts of Ashoka Maurya are based on those of Hultsch 1925, Ven. S Dhammika 1993, and Romila Thapar 1999. I had a look at the original work of Prinsep and Wilson (PDF) who decoded the Brahmi characters in the nineteenth century.

The Indian diplomat is Megasthene. He was based in Pataliputra, at King Chandragupta’s court, and his work Indika (PDF) (various fragments and translations) remained the major Greek source on India for centuries.

When Ashoka defines dharma, he starts with a list of who should be treated properly, beginning with “bonded servant”. This is how I translated “dāsa” – a word scholars variously translated as “servant”, “slave”, or simply left untranslated. (It has other meanings, too, like “religious devotee”, but not here.)

So what is a dāsa? We know from a contemporary orally transmitted book of governance that they couldn’t change master unless they bought their freedom, but they also had legal protections against abuse, demeaning tasks, property theft, or being sold on to someone else. Ancient Greek commentators say there’s no slavery in India, implying they don’t recognise dāsas as slaves.

My original script used the translation “slave”, explained that in more detail, and added:

Ashoka usurps the spiritual monopoly of Brahmins, spreads a casteless religion, and his attempt to change a continent’s values is astounding; but it’s still a stratified society. He does not seem to change that.

I changed it because that would have been a distraction from the story.

But accepting that dāsas are quite different to Greco-Roman slaves, they’re still forced labourers in any modern sense. And the Mauryan empire has a Greek corner in which Greek-style slavery presumably did exist. (In one text, the Buddha says that the Greeks have only two castes – slaves and free.)

We look back at Ashoka from the perspective of a society that finds all forms of human slavery abhorrent but generally takes it for granted that other animals exist for humans. We’re used to assuming that the first injustice is challenged before the second, but that’s not always the case.

Of course, the word “slavery” today principally conjures up the racist “peculiar institution” of the southern United States and Caribbean, and the transatlantic slave trade. When the movement to abolish those horrors gets going, campaigners against the abuse of animals will be part of the alliance. But that’s seven episodes (and almost 2000 years) away.

The interviews were recorded in early 2014, before the the lion capital was seriously damaged in a museum accident.

Recording these interviews was a little hectic. In order to make a different interview in Calcutta on the Saturday after interviewing Dr Ghosh, I took an overnight train to Bhubaneswar on for Friday morning, gave myself a day to set up the Dhauli interview, head back overnight to Calcutta for another interview; and then back to Bhubaneswar in the hope of gathering material on Sunday. (Which you’ll hear in episode six.)

The following Monday was Holi, the Indian spring festival of colours. Folk in the west have embraced it as a chance to throw brightly coloured powder at each other.

I alighted in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. I’d given myself a day to setup and a day to interview. My solution in India when I hadn’t managed to set anything up with phones and emails beforehand was to turn up on people’s doorsteps – and the local Archaeological Survey of India office can be relied upon to know everyone. They very kindly sent me to Dr Pal at the museum.

This is probably where I should mention that Holi is a much bigger deal in Orissa. There’s a major procession with religious idols, and two linked festival days. So I’d turned up on the Friday before a bank/public holiday weekend. And at the end of the working day, just before starting her holiday, Dr Pal very graciously got into a motor-rickshaw for the Dhauli hillside.

That schedule meant I completely missed Holi on the following Monday, apart from sharing the carriage with young folk whose clothing was still tinged with coloured powder.

The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Sandeep Garcha and Vinay Varma as King Ashoka Maurya (Wikipedia)

The series has included some brilliant actors in a range of roles, but this is the first episode where a single actor carries the show in a single role. Vinay is an accomplished Hyderabad-based actor who has appeared in a range of Hindi and Telugu films, TV series, and theatre.

The music is by Robb Masters, and Michael Levy.

The clip played under discussion of Greek India is the “Epitaph of Seikilos”, taken from a Greek gravestone, performed by Michael Levy on his album “The Ancient Greek Lyre”.

The composite image (of the Dhauli elephant with text of the edict) is available for re-use under a CC-BY-SA license; attribution should link back to this page (or list veghist.org in physical media) and name either the “The Vegan Option” or “Vegetarianism: The Story So Far”. The original photograph is by Michael Gunther.

Special thanks to the Archaeological Survey of India, and to Nimi Hirani of The Philosophy Club Ahmedabad (FB) for advice and interpretation throughout my time in India.

This episode was sponsored by Kickstarter backers Menka and Ajay Sanghvi, to whom I’m very grateful.

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “Ashoka” for “Aśoka”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 4: Ashoka first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In Ancient Greece, vegetarianism belongs to a secretive subculture – amongst the mystery religions of Orpheus and the musical mathematical cult of Pythagoras.

The Greek philosophers knew about vegetarians. But they were part of cults associated with the mythical figure of Orpheus, and the guru of harmony and number – Pythagoras. The people who introduced the concept of reincarnation into Greece.

In the British Museum, Ian talks to Hugh Bowden, the head of the classics department of King’s College London and mystery religion specialist. There, Prof Bowden examines what its artefacts of Greek life and death tell us about attitudes to animals. Including – some suspect – an Orphic pocket guide to Hades.

Play, download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript

The translations used in the show aren’t necessarily the ones linked to here; for example, I used “animate” as a consistent translation of “ἔμψυχος” (empsychos), to help communicate that they all used the same phrase to mean abstaining from flesh.

It was extremely tempting to go on a long tangent about efforts to record ancient Greek music. There are two extant compositions – the Delphic Hymn (which far from being Pythagorean relates to an animal sacrifice), and the haunting Epitaph of Seikilos.

Historians go to great length to try to recreate lost instruments.

Academics like Armand d’Angour endeavour to infer melodies based on the rhythm and accents. His current project to recreate ancient Greek music will bear fruit in the shape of a CD and radio broadcast later this year.

Meanwhile, dedicated amateurs like Michael Levy simulate a range of ancient music.

Music by Robb Masters, Michael Levy, and Stefan Hagel. The actors were Jeremy Hancock, Sandeep Garcha, Orna Klement and Vinay Varma as Ashoka Maurya. Additional sound engineering by Mathieu Gillon.

The track played under discussion of musical harmony is the “First Delphic Hymn to Apollo”, performed by Michael Levy on his album “The Ancient Greek Lyre”. The track played under the Orphic totenpass is “The Epitaph of Seikilos”, performed by Stefan Hagel.

Special thanks to the British Museum, and to Elizabeth Alexandra Fisher for assistance and photography.

Nerdy language coincidence of the month: the Pythagoreans’ adversary at Croton was called Cylon (although pronounced with a hard “c”). Someone should make a TV series about their years on the run from a Cylon attack. It could have lots of references to Greek deities and mysticism.

The post VegHist Ep 3: Pythagoreans first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Ian travels to the tree where the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, and explores the paradox of his early followers’ attitudes to vegetarianism.

Of the many monks of the ancient Indian kingdom of Magadha, only one has become a global household name. Buddhism will spread ahimsa to the ends of the earth, and inspires many millions of vegetarians today.

And yet the oldest Buddhist texts seem to portray the Buddha eating meat. Hear commentary from theologians from both vegetarian and meat-eating interpretations of Buddhism, the insights of world-leading historians, and a dramatisation of the moment in early texts where vegetarian Jain activists clash with Buddhist meat-eating.

Play or download (43MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

Rev Dr Varasambodhi by the enclosure housing the trunk of the Mahabodhi tree and the Buddha’s throne.

I was fascinated to find out there was a whole other religion, at the time as important as the Buddhists and the Jains, that’s now almost forgotten, called the Ājīvika. But the evidence we have is fragmented and contradictory – so it was an area where one spends much time but grows only in uncertainty.

Even the small picture I give in the episode only hints at the patchwork of information we have about them.

The very word “Ājīvika” for example, is often used in Buddhist texts in a similar sense to “heretic” – capturing every śramaṇa other than Buddhists and Jains. (US Vyas used the word in the heretical sense in the full interview; but I only used his references to the movement of Makkhali Gosal, which is consistent with the later use. It would have been too confusing to introduce different meanings.)

The “educated guess” I mention is that of Arthur Llewellyn Basham, the twentieth century Welsh Indologist. His book “The Wonder that was India” was the leading popular history of the subcontinent. He did his PhD thesis on the Ājīvikas in the 1940s, and 65 years after publication (Basham, 1951) it is still the standard reference work.

Another view I didn’t have time to include was Johannes Bronkhorst, who quite radically reinterpreted the mentions of Ājīvikas at the turn of the century (Bronkhorst, 2000). He argues that the early Buddhist texts named rival groups not according to doctrine but according to appearance. Most academics assume “Niganthā” in Buddhist texts means the Jains. (The word “Jain” didn’t emerge for many centuries.) So in his view, the words “Ājīvika” and “Niganthā” in Buddhist texts describe (respectively) naked rival orders and clothed rival orders; with the former term including not just the “true” Ājīvikas, but the Jain followers of Mahavir (who would have been naked) and the latter including the Jain followers of the teachings of Parshwa, the preceding tirthankara (Jain inspired teacher, literally “ford-maker”) who had lived centuries before.

(We don’t know if the Jains cohered as a single tradition during Mahavir’s lifetime.)

So, as interesting as this all is, all this tells us is how little we know about this period.

(We can be confident that the Niganthās in the argument at Vaiśālī that our actors portray are Jains because Mahavir is mentioned earlier in the story. Just in case you were wondering.)

Though I did manage to learn that the Ājīvika leader is, once you translate both names into their meaning, basically called Gandalf. (Those years poring over Tolkein’s fictional etymology finally pay off.)

Music by Robb Masters. The actors were Sandeep Garcha, Chetan Pathak, and Selva Rasalingam.

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Ep 2: The Middle Path first appeared on The Vegan Option.

In the Ganges plain in Northen India in the middle of the first millennium BCE, the idea of “ahimsa” – non violence – emerges.

Ian visits the intellectual hub of iron age India – the Kingdom of Magadha. He discovers a subculture of vagabond philosophers that developed two world religions; and the vegetarian order of monks and nuns who became the torchbearers of ahimsa.

Play or download (41MB MP3) (via iTunes) or read transcript.

I’d only been told about Rajgir the day before arriving. I was staying at the refounded University of Nalanda for a couple of nights, where I interviewed two people who lived in the block in which I was staying. Institutions like that are fantastic for my research. But one interviewee – Deepak Anand – told me the real place I needed to go to was Rajgir. My desk research had led me to places like Vaisali – which will turn up via Buddhist texts in episode two – but at Rajgir, modern Jains celebrated and could talk about what happened there two and a half thousand years ago.

Finding guests with good English is obviously helpful. So it was gratifying to learn that the Veerayatan Institution at Rajgir was led by Jain sadhvis (nuns) who were very used to communicating with foreign and English-speaking audiences, because of their outreach overseas.

When I got there, I discovered all the English-speaking sadhvis were overseas doing outreach. So I had very little time to find both a learned sadhvi, and a way of interviewing her. An English-speaking physician, a glaucoma consultant from the hospital on the other side of the site, helped me out and acted as interpreter; and I’m very grateful to her indeed. Dubbing a non-English speaking guest is a lot more work (Yasājhe’s words were retranslated carefully and then read by actress Sandeep Garcha) but I’m glad now that the first words you hear from a guest in the series are in Hindi.

This left me not much time to get to the station for the train back to Patna – later Magadha capital and current Bihar state capital.

The background noise at the start of the show was from two different journeys: a crowded auto-rickshaw in Mahabodhi, and that train I took back to Patna. Both were travelling the kinds of routes Śramaṇas would have taken within ancient Magadha.

Particular thanks to Dr. Smita Bagrecha for interpreting Yasājhe at short notice. The featured pic is public domain painting of Mahavira, Rajasthan, circa 1900.

Where there are no established Anglicisations (eg “ahimsa” for “ahiṃsā”), I have rendered Indic languages in Latin letters with marks called diacritics, loosely following the IAST standard explained at Jainpedia. For example “ś” is a soft “sh”, and a bar over a vowel lengthens it.

The post VegHist Episode 1: Ahimsa first appeared on The Vegan Option.

As the internet transforms the media landscape, how can vegan organisations and businesses survive and thrive? In the midst of the crowdfunding campaign for Vegetarianism: The Story So Far, Ian McDonald interviews Stephanie Redcross of Vegan Mainstream.

Play or download (23MB MP3) (via iTunes)

This show is an update to Digital Vegans, in which we spoke with Eric Brent of Happy Cow, Kerry McCarthy and others at venerable group London Vegans, and reviewed vegan smartphone apps. The interview will form part of the Resonance 104.4FM broadcast radio edit of Digital Vegans.

Stephanie Redcross is the managing director of Vegan Mainstream – a San Diego-based marketing company that specialises in vegan and vegetarian businesses.

Digital media artist Robb Masters wrote our theme. Also, thank you to everyone who has backed the Kickstarter for a radio history of vegetarianism.

The post Digital Vegans: Picking up the Tab, with Stephanie Redcross of Vegan Mainstream first appeared on The Vegan Option.

Palm oil is everywhere – from cooking oil to soap to vegan margarine. Equatorial rainforest and peatland are cleared and replaced with serried ranks of oil palm trees (Elaeis guineensis).  The biodiversity of Borneo and Sumatra, including  the iconic Orang Utan, is threatened by habitat loss.

Some vegan activists say no product that causes so much destruction can be considered vegan. But is palm oil really worse than the alternatives? And can poor countries like Malaysia and Indonesia develop without it?

Environmentalist Catherine Laurence helps me disentangle the thicket of issues.

Hear academic experts Eric Lambin and Robert Greenland; vegan baker Ms Cupcake; primatologist Georgina Ash; vegan MP Kerry McCarthy; the boss of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil; and vegan Indonesian palm oil activist and Miskin Porno lead singer Daniek Hendarto.

 Play or download (38.3MB MP3) (via iTunes)

There is more about Catherine in her blog post, “Being part of the solution“.

Georgina Ash is a primatologist who has worked and volunteered with Orangutans. She is now the picture editor for the World Society for the Protection of Animals in London, UK, where I spoke with her.

Daniek (pronounced “Danny”) works for Indonesian NGO the Centre for Orangutan Protection: he helps advise Zoos on care, resettling Orangutans from threatened areas, and campaigning against the impact of palm oil. Daniek is vegan, and also the lead singer of punk rock band “Miskin Porno”, which (content warning) sings sweary rants against palm oil:

Dr Lambin is a Professor of Geography at Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium and at Stanford University, California. He specialises in land use change. Because of his work, he has received the Prix Franqui, and been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. He is a meat reducer, for environmental reasons.

Dr Goodland is a tropical ecologist. He went from an academic career to being an environmental advisor at the World Bank, and from there to being an environmental campaigner, consultant, and writer. He is vegan. Dr Goodland blogged at WorldBank.org about the research he did with Dr Anhang that concluded that livestock are responsible for 51% of Greenhouse Gas Emissions. He also wrote a column for The Guardian criticising the World Bank’s environmental impact in 2007. He received the Coolidge Memorial Medial from the International Union for Nature Conservation in 2008.

Darrel Webber left a career in business to join the World Wildlife Fund, where he liaised with palm oil companies to build wildlife corridors into their plans. He is omnivorous – his interest in conservation is led partially by his fishing. He joined the RSPO from WWF. As Director General of the RSPO, he has taken part in:

Ms Cupcake is a vegan baker and media personality, the author of “The Naughtiest Vegan Cakes in Town” cookbook, and winner of the British Baker 2011 “Rising Star” award. Her bakery is in the gentrifying south London suburb of Brixton.

You hear the Member of the UK Parliament for Bristol East and her two parliamentary colleagues in the shows about vegan politicians.  There is more about her on the page for the first politics show.

You can read reports from US-based Center for Science in the Public Interest (2005, PDF), the United Nations Environment Programme (2011, pdf), and campaigns from the Rainforest Action Network and  the UK magazine Ethical Consumer. But you should definitely read Catherine’s blog post about what she thinks the solutions are, now the episode is done. As a commodity, we used statistics from the US Department of Agriculture.

The Oil Palm yields fruit; the fruit has both flesh and kernel; and both of those produce meal as well as oil. In the show, we talked mainly about the fruit oil (which is four-fifths of the economic value). Here is my working for how the economic yield breaks down (showing that it’s mostly the fruit oil). According to the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, each hectare produces:

The oils are used mainly for food, but are also used in biofuel and other non-food products. The kernel meal is mainly used as animal feed, but is sometimes also used locally as biofuel.

The saturated fat molecules in palm oil have a kink that makes it easy for the molecules to stack into a solid. For this reason, palm oil is a source of fats that are solid at room temperature, making “ambient products” possible. This is an issue for anyone avoiding fat, as well as for bakers.

The Orangutans (Indonesian: forest man) are the only species of great ape restricted to Asia. The Sumatran Orangutan is critically endangered; the Bornean Orangutan is endangered. (The other great apes are Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Eastern/Western Gorillas, and – lest we forget – Human). See also:

The Orangutans are a symbol, but not the only threatened species; the Sumatran Rhino is thought to number fewer than four hundred;  and the Sumatran tiger is also critically endangered:

with just 1 percent of the Earth’s land area, Indonesia’s rainforests contain 10% of the world’s known plants, 12% of mammals and 17% of all known bird species – Rainforest Action Network

The RSPO includes a wide range of producers, traders, and consumers of palm oil as well as NGOs. It marks palm oil that is traceable to source and produced in line with its principles and rules as CSPO (Certified Sustainable Palm Oil)

The RSPO revised the specifics of some of its rules in 2013: I mentioned that WWF was so disappointed with this revision that they want to set up a new, stricter, certificate within the RSPO (PDF).

Catherine includes more information about Green Palm and CSPO on her blog post about what consumers can do.

Kerry Foods make “Pure”, the UK’s leading brand of vegan margarine. They are RSPO members (membership page). Their Annual Communication of Progress for 2010-11 said only 2% of their palm oil was CSPO. My comparison with 10% of Palm Oil production being CSPO was based on these RSPO figures for CSPO production. Kerry failed to file an ACOP in 2011-12, as shown by their absence from this list. The RSPO process does at least make it obvious when someone does not even fill in the paperwork.

Earth Balance are produced by Boulder Brands. They are not RSPO members, and have a web page about their palm oil sourcing.

… go to Robb Masters and Miskin Porno for the music. The title of the Miskin Porno song used in the show, translated and bowdlerised, is “F___ palm oil”. The illustration pic of Indonesian deforestation is by Vincent Poulissen, used with permission; the sound clip pic is of Orangutan is Kani from Melbourne Zoo by Macinate (and yes, I did try to find a pic of a freeliving Orangutan) used under CC-BY.

The post Palm Oil: with Catherine Laurence, Eric Lambin, Orangutan rescuer Daniek Hendarto, RSPO SG Darrel Webber first appeared on The Vegan Option.