Mark your calendars! On Saturday, May 2, vegan food justice group (and Vegansaurus favorite!) Food Empowerment Project will be celebrating their 8th birthday, and you are invited.

For the past 8 years, F.E.P. has been organizing as an almost entirely volunteer group focused on promoting ethical veganism, justice for workers, expanded access to healthy foods in low income communities, and much else. They are one of the key groups linking these different struggles, and they mount campaigns, maintain vigils, provide direct support, release reports, and make resources available, all on a shoestring budget.*

All of this, you will be unsurprised to learn, takes some amount of money. So, on May 2, there’s an opportunity to chip in and help the organization continue to grow, while also eating delicious food and hanging out with rad folks!

From 2-5 pm in Ross, CA, we’ll be hosting a vegan BBQ – there will be plenty of food, a silent auction with prizes you actually want, and live music. Numerous vegan luminaries will be milling around, as well as F.E.P. founder lauren Ornelas and other board members. It will be fun (and kid-friendly!).

Please check out the link here for more details and tell your friends and family. Tickets are $25 and on a sliding scale (kids get in free). If money’s an issue, just let us know. We really want to celebrate our supporters at the same time we celebrate what F.E.P. has achieved so far.

If you are unfamiliar with F.E.P.’s work, please check out the fact-filled home page, Vegan Mexican Food, and lauren’s blog at Appetite for Justice.

If you are familiar with F.E.P., what are you waiting for? Hope to see you there.

*(Full disclosure: I also serve on F.E.P.’s board, so of course I’m enthusiastic. But all of these things would be true even if that weren’t the case.)

This guest post was brought to you by Rick Kelley! Thanks, Rick!

Ready for some irony? Two battery egg producers were sentenced this week to sit in a jail cell for three months, though probably with enough room to spread their arms. (And the nation’s largest egg producer settled a major lawsuit with the EPA this week over water pollution.)

Speaking of lawsuits, HSUS and partners  filed a case this week challenging the EPA’s exemption of factory farms from certain reporting requirements.

You can listen to my first of two appearances on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s  StarTalk Radio this week (final 18 minutes), and if for some reason you’d enjoy hearing me talk about  how much feces is on chicken, check out the final half of this Thom Hartmann show.

Finally, Village News has a  great feature this week on HSUS’s work to help hospitals reduce meat use.

Videos of the week: In yet another sign of how mainstream the plant-based message is now, MSNBC just put out a new online short video about vegan eating. Think it’s limited to left-leaning outlets like MSNBC? Check out my HSUS coworker Eddie Garza on a FOX morning show this week discussing the issue!

YOU GUYS! BIG NEWS! THE BIGGEST OF BIG NEWS! The world’s best conference just happens to be for vegan bloggers and it just happens to be happening in Austin, Texas THIS YEAR and that means all the amazing weather, delicious food, and rad vegans a blogger could ask to interact with will all be in one place and you have to go.

Of course, I’m talking about Vida Vegan Con! The best event on Earth and something we’re all lucky exists and THE MOST FUN EVENT IN THE WORLD. As someone who has had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the last two VVCs (I can call it that), I can tell you that is basically vegan summer camp with all the most wonderful people you could hope to ever be surrounded by. And it’s not too late to get tickets and go, so you really really should. It’s the best vacation for your MIND, BODY, AND SOUL and you will love every second of it. I cannot say enough about how great this event is–it feels so good to be surrounded by community that we often only get online. If you want to nerd out with other vegans HARD, this is the event. Plus, the food. THINK OF THE FOOD! It’s always so damn good.

And if I haven’t sold it enough, I just need to tell you that you should most definitely go–registration details are here. Just click! You will not regret this! I am in no way affiliated with the organizers but I just can’t say enough good things.

There’s a bunch of info about this year’s conference below or you can find out more on their handy, dandy website. DO IT!!

DETAILS:

•Vida Vegan Con III = May 29-31, 2015 @ The Marchesa Hall & Theatre and AT & T Executive Education Center & Conference Center

•Yes, there will be vegan breakfast taco (and artisan toast!! for real) buffets on Sat + Sun. Seriously, their food is always so damn good and there is so much of it.

Friday info:

The debut of the Vegan Bazaar at The Marchesa Hall & Theatre from 1pm-7pm, which is open to the public and where 98{ae720e0b436026f867bfa0c31185c2252a138f27e85f5f152ec5acc1c10a8cc9} of our weekend vendors will be, all in one place! All attendees are already on the door list, duh, and get an exclusive first hour access to all vendors, media lounge, Earth Balance photobooth and the Miyoko’s Kitchen Mixer from noon-1pm! Public tickets are now $15 each WHICH IS VERY CHEAP. Live demos on DIY Kombucha + Homebrewing, Decadent Chocolate, Vegan Family Panel mod. (the wonderful, hilarious, and lovely!) Joanna Vaught, How We Made Austin Awesome mod. Lazy Smurfy (WHO IS THE ABSOLUTE GREATEST AND HER WEBSITE IS A VEGAN GUIDE TO AUSTIN AND SO MUCH MORE)!

As far as Saturday and Sunday:

•2 intensive days of classes, panels, workshops, breakouts that are SO DAMN FUN AND INTERESTING. All of them! You won’t be able to choose! Plus, you get a schwag bag filled with SO MUCH GOOD STUFF.
•2015 speaker lineup: these people present unique content and apply over a year in advance!

They are also looking for sponsors so if you have a vegan or vegan-friendly business and you want to reach all the vegan people in the world, HOLLER AT THEM RIGHT NOW!

And now! A word from Fat Gay Vegan about his awesome new event that everyone should support and then go to because it’s very incredibly awesome and the best:

Over here in London, we like to do vegan stuff on a grand scale. The third year outing for London Vegan Beer Fest is seeing the venue more than double in size, Vegfest is returning at the end of the year for 10 000+ guests and we are celebrating over 3 years of London Vegan Drinks being a monthly party.

Yep. The UK capital has a lot of plant-based partying going on.

I love being a part of the vegan explosion in London but all of this planning and hosting doesn’t leave me much time to explore other parts of the UK. To solve this problem, I have created a super fun music, activism and food collaboration called Vegan Roadshow.

This July, I am hitting the road with a rad vegan band called Love Like Hate and the kindhearted activists of Animal Equality in order to visit 9 cities across 10 dates.

Each stop of the tour is hosted in a vegan or vegan-friendly venue and will feature a live performance by Love Like Hate, while Animal Equality will be fronting a merch and info stand with the aim of signing people up to help with campaigning. Fat Gay Vegan (that’s me!) will be the host with the most (beer consumption) and vegan food will be available to buy at every gig.

Vegan Roadshow is taking the food, music and activism of plant-based living to almost every corner of the UK. We want to help independent vegan businesses, spread compassionate messages and strengthen our vegan communities. It’s a love thing. We will be visiting London, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Glossop, Oxford and Brighton.

Of course touring the country with a bunch of vegans is not cheap. First and foremost we need kale money. We will also require funds for vehicle hire, gas, accommodation and on-the-road incidentals. It is pricey, but we think you might like to help us.

An Indiegogo campaign page has been created to afford kind friends the opportunity to help get Vegan Roadshow on the road. If we could get just 2000 people to donate one British pound each (about US$1.50, 1.40 Euros or 22 pesos), our caravan of compassion will be hitting the motorways of the UK this summer.

The most popular perks for supporters are of course tickets to each stop of the Vegan Roadshow, but even if you can’t join us on tour we still have rewards for you. How about an FGV postcard signed just to you or EP downloads from the Vegan Roadshow resident band, Love Like Hate?

We are more than ready to take this vegan show on the road. We just need a little help from our friends.

Support vegan musicians. Support vegan businesses. Support animal activists. Improve outcomes for animals.

This guest post is courtesy of Fat Gay Vegan. We love him.

We at Vegansaurus love our vegan meats. And no, we don’t think Soy Curls taste just like chicken, but they are both packed with protein and have a great chewy mouth feel so they serve a similar purpose. Oh, and one of them isn’t filled with dead animal so we’re very into that. Not being filled with dead animal is very key.

So yeah, we love us some vegan meats. And the company FakeMeats.com is doing it up in the vegan meat substitutes department! They have it all! Including a meal plan that I tried and was very much into. At the beginning of the month, they send you a box filled with all sorts of tasty vegan meats and recipes and you make one on each Monday. You have to include some fresh ingredients (which is a good thing; you don’t want your insides to be made entirely of wheat gluten) (seventy-five-percent is the ideal) to whip up the meals but all the ones I had were delicious–chicken pot pie, bbq sandwiches, chicken noodle soup! I gobbled it down like the little vegan pig that I am. The subscription is a good intro for people just getting into veganism (WELCOME FRIEND!) or just a way for people who cook a lot to get out of their comfort zone in the kitchen and try new stuff!

SO! If you want to test it out, they have some coupon codes for Vegansaurs’ only! Rowr! DO IT UP:

VeganSaurusMeal = $5 off first meal pack

VeganSaurusSnack = $2 off first snack or jerky pack

These coupons can be applied to any subscription that starts in May or June.

May signup deadline = April 24th, 2015

June signup deadline = May 22nd, 2015

Here’s a link to their subscriptions page and here’s a link to an introduction to their Meal Pack subscription!

BON APPETITO, MI AMOURS! (sp?!)