June
1994
The Satya Interview:
Pamela Teisler of the VivaVegie Society
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She has been featured in PETA news and Vegetarian
Times. You’ve perhaps seen her on the street, or at a fair,
parade, or march - a mound of fruit on her head to rival Carmen Miranda
and carrying a sandwich board proudly reading ‘Ask Me Why I’m
a Vegetarian.’
Her name is Pamela Teisler. She is the founder and
head of the VivaVegie Society, editor of its newsletter the VivaVine,
and since Earth Day 1991 she has been spreading the vegetarian word
and the word Vegetarian around the streets of New York, making people
realize you can have a sense of humor and still be a vegetarian and
animal advocate. In the last eighteen months she has been joined in
her venture by Jesse Silverman. Last month on Mother’s Day and
- so it turned out - Ban Veal Day, Pamela, Jesse, and others set up
a veal crate in SoHo and asked passers-by to sit in it, just so they
could see what the children of non-human mothers experience in their
short lives. (See photo)
Pamela reaches a large audience countrywide via her hugely popular flyer,
101 Reasons Why I’m a Vegetarian which has now over
30,000 copies in print and is in its second edition. 101 Reasons uses
the information
found in John Robbins’ Diet for a New America, Jeremy Rifkin’s
Beyond Beef, and books by Peter Singer and Richard Schwartz among others,
to present 101 powerful and shocking facts to countermand any question
from a sceptical meat-eater.
Like Pamela herself, 101 Reasons is friendly, informative,
and full of passionate conviction.
Q. How did you become a vegetarian?
A. It was about five ago when I was visiting my girlfriend, Kim Rosenthal.
She was a member of every animal rights movement around and her apartment
was filled with stacks of flyers and information. And there I was before
this stack, which just happened to be out there, and I began looking
through it and was astonished. None of this information of course is
anywhere in the mainstream.
But that didn’t completely do it for me, although Kim at the
time had been a vegetarian for twelve years. When I was with Kim, I
would
always eat vegetarian food, which was just fine with me. But, as everybody
says, it was so difficult to be a vegetarian because you went into
a
store and there were so few options. I had always known Kim was a vegetarian
and she had never made anything of it. She did try to get me to stop
eating tuna, because I had no consciousness about that either.
I really started to become a vegetarian in January 1990; and I had meat
dishes about three times during the next six months before I went to
the North American Vegetarian Society Summerfest. There in just three
days I learned all the things in my 101 Reasons.
Q. What happened?
It was like I had been hit. I learnt about over-population and encroachment
on natural habitats and how our earth is being gobbled up by human activity.
I had actually gone to the Summerfest for a quite frivolous reason.
My girlfriend wanted me to go with her; she was single at the time and
wanted to find a guy and begged me to go with her because she thought
she might meet someone. At the Summerfest I saw Dr. Clapper and Richard
Schwartz [author of Judaism and Vegetarianism] and others.
There was one especially memorable speaker who talked to us about milk.
On the way to the Summerfest, my friend and I had had a lunch on the
road and she said to me, "You know, they’re going to tell
us that dairy is no good." And I remember being astonished; because
I had been eating cheese like mad to compensate for not eating much
meat.
So this guy was talking about milk and that little seminar, which wasn’t
particularly well-delivered, hit me. When I got home I read Diet for
a New America because during the Summerfest Dr. Clapper had lifted up
the book and asked for a show of hands of those who’d read it.
And everybody raised their hand, and I had never even heard it. On my
way home and a week later I kept writing down all the things he talks
about in the book, item by item. The list got longer and longer, until
one day I said to myself, "I bet I can think of 101 reasons why
I’m a vegetarian. And that became my 101 Reasons.
It’s interesting, because with all this information, you go into
a funk. You go really into a depression, sometimes for years. I am
still
suffering in this kind of period, and I am not sure it will ever go
away for me. You know I really do not have much hope for the world,
the signs of extinction are everywhere. But I still go and try to do
whatever I can to make the world a little better. I do not wonder about
the consequence of my actions I continue to push that Sisyphean rock
up the hill. And if from my actions I marginally reduce some cruelty
in the world; if perhaps from my work, a numher of chickens or steers
are saved from slaughter, I am soothed just a little.
Q. What keeps you going?
A. The need to do something with this information. You have to pick
yourself up. My mission is vegetarian street advocacy, to reach Mr.
and Ms. Pedestrian. Much of the vegetarian world, the societies, the
animal rights groups, the environmentalists many times preach to the
converted. My sandwich board, with its curious question, is aimed at
drawing people to me one by one so they can learn about the abysmal
reality behind the closed doors of our factory farms, and the health
risks and environmental destruction associated with a meat-centered
diet.
We’re up against so much: the shrewd and calculating forces of
the meat, biotech, dairy, pharmaceutical, pesticide, and fast food industries.
The money behind these industries has bought the minds of the entire
society. I want to tell people all the reasons why they should be vegetarian;
I’ve received literally hundreds of letters from compassionate
people, deeply troubled by the information in 101 Reasons. I have a
huge business accordian file in my attic, filled with them. There is
real power in this compassion and concern.
Q. How did your costume come about?
A. Well, it was made for me by my artist sister. All I told her was
I needed a sandwich board with ‘Ask Me Why I’m a Vegetarian’
on it and some plastic fruit I had picked up from the Salvation Army.
That became my headstocking with the fruit on the top and my sandwich
board. I debuted on the streets - my first day of ‘veg-evengelism’ on
Earth Day 1991.
Q. Some people feel their vegetarianism very early, in their
family for instance. Was your experience like that?
A. Well, we had pets, goldfish. I remember I always had goldfish, and
I took pretty good care of them and they lived for years. I kept them
real clean and I had nice filters for them. I used to try and keep
them
semi-happy, because they would die when their partner died, of loneliness.
However, one day I was cleaning the fishbowl, and the fishbowl dropped,
and I couldn’t find one of the fish. There was broken glass everywhere,
and I looked under my bed, trying to find this fish and I was in tears
about my goldfish. I was devastated.
But that afternoon I probably had a tuna fish sandwich or that week
I must have had fish. So I saw absolutely no connection whatsoever.
No consciousness or conflict.
My father, however, has an extremely strong sense of ethics, for what
is right and what is wrong. He hates hypocrisy. None of us particularly
cared for money, but ethics - that was the highest, and the only thing
we ever talked about round the dinner table was about what was right
and what was wrong.
Q. Did that prepare you for becoming a vegetarian?
A. Absolutely. But, there was no organized religious basis behind it.
It was just a belief in ethics. Even now, when we talk, we get right
on the subject.
Q. You converted to Judaism. How is that linked to your vegetarianism?
A. I was raised a Unitarian and converted about four years ago - the
same time roughly I became a vegetarian. It may have begun really when
I came to New York from Illinois seven years ago. I was reading Khalil
Gibran and became very interested in religion. I went up to the Cloisters
and was generally feeling spiritual. I was drawn to Judaism and I like
the ritual. There’s a lot in Judaism Richard Schwartz brings out;
all those passages in the Scriptures that point to God wanting humans
to be vegetarian and putting every obstacle he could in the way of eating
meat. Even the times when he says "Go ahead" he then plagues
you.
It’s significant to me that, in Judaism, there are no blessings
for meat. Vegetables and wine can be blessed, and there is a general
blessing for food and good food generally, but none for meat. My rabbi
pointed out about food: "Here’s something that’s out
here and then goes inside your body, and becomes you." And I said,
"I never thought of that!" I don’t think people generally
do think about food that way. It’s my goal to change that!
Four and a half years ago, I would never have predicted that I would
be hawking a vegetarian lifestyle to passers-by on the street. Anything
can happen when the facts of meat get out. That gives me some hope.
I never know if I’m talking to the next Mahatma Gandhi, or the
next Martin Luther King, or the next Ingrid Newkirk. I can only hope
that one day one of my flyers gets into the hands of the ‘right’
person. I know my flyer has already had quite an impact upon many individuals;
and that makes me want to continue to promote vegetarianism. As they
say, I just do it - and I don’t look back.
To order a copy of 101 Reasons why I’m a Vegetarian and
to find out about Viva Vine and the VivaVegie Society write
to: The VivaVegie Society, Prince St. Sta. P.O. Box 294, New York, NY
10012.
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