response 1 of 36:

Oct 4 20:39 UTC 2003

Hmmm... gravy is basically grease-fried flour.  What you could do is use
ground beef, brown it first, and then you'd have a lot loose grease in the
skillet to either turn into gravy or else dump.  You could also bake a
bread-type topping onto your stew, like cornbread.  Grease would then be
absorbed into the bread.

response 3 of 36:

Oct 23 03:38 UTC 2003

Chicken fat makes especially good soap for washing dishes.

response 5 of 36:

Oct 23 14:50 UTC 2003

Well, she said "for washing dishes", and I'll take Sindi's word for it.
And that's if you want to go to all the bother of making soap.

response 7 of 36:

Oct 23 17:38 UTC 2003

Haha. That totally reminds me of this guy I used to work with. He 
always had weird issues. ONe time he mentioned that he was frustrated 
because his roommate was using Ivory soap which was leaving soap scum 
in the bathtup. He asked me if I thought it was ethical for him to tell 
his vegan roommate that ivory bar soap is made from animal fat (which 
it is) in order to get him to switch to the liquid ivory soap which 
isnt made with animal fat. I always want to send that one in to Randy 
Cohen of the NYT.

response 9 of 36:

Oct 24 14:54 UTC 2003

Soap is made from fat and lye.  I have used cow fat (tallow) and pig fat
(lard).  You need to follow directions carefully as lye is dangerous.  It is
first mixed with water.  Then you pour one ingredient (forget which) into the
other and mix it together and pour the result into an insulated container to
set overnight and react chemically.  Soap is made by the reaction of the fatty
acids from the fat (which are broken loose from the 3-carbon glycerol) and
the -OH group on the alkaline lye, producing a long-chain molecule one end
of which is fatty and grabs onto fats, and the other end reacts with water
to hold the two of them together so the fat will 'dissolve' in the water.

I made brown soap once by adding a bit of cocoa powder.

response 11 of 36:

Oct 24 23:47 UTC 2003

*shrug* I guess that's why there's the vegan category.

They might as well be nudists, too, because quite a few clothes they 
wear were manufactured with the use of fossil fuels... sometimes their 
shoes are petroleum products, too.

But I'm being snarky.  No one remembers that "Mike the Vegan" section 
in Dilbert?

response 13 of 36:

Oct 25 09:18 UTC 2003

Depends on your vegan, I suppose.

response 15 of 36:

Oct 26 01:29 UTC 2003

*shrug*  Anyway, back to Sindi's idea, it's more in idea of low-impact 
living, and reducing waste, which I *think* she promotes more heavily 
than strict vegetarianism, i.e. better to put chicken fat to use than 
waste it because it was an animal by-product.

response 17 of 36:

Oct 26 20:49 UTC 2003

Right.  Just to bring things a little closer to topic, of course.

response 19 of 36:

Oct 28 03:05 UTC 2003

What ever floats your boat-- or cuts your grease, as it were (being 
the original subject).  I just didn't think drift was fairly typical 
for this conference very often.

response 21 of 36:

Oct 29 04:39 UTC 2003

A-ha, so you're the problem!  *grins*

response 23 of 36:

Oct 29 18:05 UTC 2003

We went to a talk that preceded a vegan potluck, where someone explained that
a large part of the profits from raising cows comes from the sale of leather,
and that this keeps the cost of cow meat down so that more cows are killed,
and therefore it is bad to wear leather.  He spent a lot of money on new belts
and shoes that looked like leather but were not leather.  We wear used
footwear that does not kill any cows, or use petroleum products to
manufacture.  We also wear used cotton t-shirts so don't worry a whole lot
about how the cotton was grown as our wearing them does not increase the
amount of pesticide used.  The vegan group also had a talk about organic
cotton by someone who sells it locally.  Since we don't get our food used,
we tend to buy it organic (or get what the farmers could not sell by 3 pm and
would have thrown out or fed to pigs).  Another pre-potluck speaker explained
how it was bad to buy even organic eggs (remember that vegans don't buy eggs)
because the supply would run out and then people who would have bought organic
eggs would buy non-organic eggs.  All of the people who come to these potlucks
except us burn fossil fuel to get there and we bike.  Some of them drive from
Detroit to help make the world a cleaner place to live in.  Or maybe they are
religious vegans.