"Cash for Cluckers" Might Get You a Buck

Why bother with collecting cash for your clunker? Sure, a rebate for up to $4,500 might be nice, but wouldn’t you rather be guaranteed of a dollar right now? You can get that dollar if you go to your grocery store and purchase a vegan faux chicken product and send PETA the receipt. In return you’ll get a $1.00 rebate and a vegetarian starter kit.

One of the motivations for the Cash for Clunkers programs is to reduce emissions, but chickens have a fairly deep carbon footprint as well. From PETA’s blog:

According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the equivalent of taking more than a half-million cars off U.S. roads.

Here are the details of the rebate:

· No tardiness! Receipt for your (repeat) vegan chicken product must be dated between August 6 and September 30, 2009 and received by PETA by October 5, 2009.
· No foreigners! You must be a U.S. resident.
· No liars! You must include a written statement affirming you have never tried faux chicken before.
· No seconds! Sorry, only one per household.
· No swarming! Offer is limited to the first 5,000 entries.

If you fit the above requirements, send your receipt and declaration of fake meat virginity to:

Cash for Cluckers
PETA
501 Front Street
Norfolk, VA 23510

All joking aside, this is admittedly another one of PETA’s creative ways to utilize current events and a catchy tagline to provide more awareness of animal rights. (Maybe next year we’ll see Cents for Salmonella. No?)

Visit PETA’s blog for more info.

Food, Inc.

A great 90 minute film is in theatres now called “Food, Inc.” If you haven’t seen “The Future of Food”, you may be interested in the eye-opening but sickening details in this movie by award-winning filmmaker Robert Kenner.

If you are one of those rare individuals who’d rather read than watch a movie, there is also a book available, containing 13 essays from experts in the food field such as Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield Farm and Robert Kenner himself.

Here are a couple of points from the movie that you might not know about:

Did you know that in January, 2008 the FDA approved the sale of meat and milk from cloned livestock, despite two votes from Congress to delay the decision until more information was gathered, and letters from 150,000 citizens expressing their disapproval of the consumption of cloned meat? It is even more disconcerting that if cloned meat is introduced into the marketplace, the FDA will not require these foodstuffs to be labeled as cloned goods.

Did you know that 45 percent of U.S. corn and 85 percent of soybeans are genetically engineered? Many of the processed foods on supermarket shelves contain high fructose corn syrup and soybean soils, so it is estimated that over 70 percent of these foods contain genetically modified ingredients.

Did you know that 1 of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants do not have adequate food? Not a million, a billion. This issue could be improved with major changes to the way food corporations and the FDA are allowed to operate. Food, Inc. believes these changes can begin with consumers, likening each purchase we make to a vote - a vote for corporate greediness and unhealthy food, or clean and healthy sustenance.

Here is the Food, Inc. trailer: