New York City: Day 2

On Friday, I got up early and ate a delicious breakfast that Emma made for Gwen and me of steel-cut oatmeal with grilled bananas and apples, cinnamon, vanilla and pecans. It was delightful! I headed to the conference, which was on NYU’s campus. A cute little food market on the way:

The conference, called Animal Studies: Changing the Subject?, was a day-long event and I outlined the line-up of speakers in an earlier post. When I arrived, breakfast was laid out for all the conference participants. All of the food was vegan and you wouldn’t have believed the smorgasbord of vegan sweets available. I felt too conspicuous snapping photos of the food, so unfortunately I have no pictures from the conference. But, if you can just imagine a long table filled with several different kinds of brownies, cookies, and all kinds of other amazing looking vegan desserts… I didn’t eat any breakfast (bagels and fruit, I think) since I had eaten at Emma’s, but at the midmorning coffee break, I did have a cup of tea and a brownie. Delicious! Lunch was also good–several different quinoa and other grain salads, several different kinds of sandwiches (I had one of the pesto panini, some quinoa salad, and another brownie). The food was great and it was such a treat to have such a wide selection of all-vegan goodies!

Contrary to what you might be thinking, I didn’t go to the conference for the food. I went to hear the amazing scholars who were speaking! Each of the speakers was very interesting and I came away with much to think about. There were certainly a few special highlights:

Gary Steiner, professor of philosophy at Bucknell and author of several books on animal ethics, was a real treat to hear speak. He began by tracing the history of how animals have been theorized by philosophers throughout history and then responded to why he believes their theorizations were insufficient. Steiner takes a fairly radical, hardlined approach to thinking about animals and ethics. Similar to Gary Francione , Steiner advocates the abolition of our use of animals in every facet of our lives, arguing that animal use is so pervasive and wide-spread because it is convenient, pleasurable, and customary. These reasons are anthropocentric and if we want to avoid engaging in speciesist practices, we should turn to the idea of the ‘vegan imperative,’ which requires us to stop using animals for our purposes and understand veganism as a goal where we are constantly striving to be better. He challenged the audience to imagine life without the use of animals and then work toward that goal. I was inspired by Steiner’s talk, partly because his use of philosophy was interesting, and partly because he is willing to talk about veganism in an academic context.

Marc Bekoff is a former evolutionary biology and ecology professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published extensively on animal behavior and emotion and has collaborated with the likes of Jane Goodall. Bekoff was already one of my ‘animal studies heroes’ before the conference and so I was very excited to see him speak in person. He’s very casual in his demeanor and speech and was a pleasure to hear. The talk he gave was filled with statements that lended themselves well to bullet-points:

• where is the animal in animal studies?
• do no intentional harm- do the best we can in a complicated world
• expand our compassion footprint for coexistence
• the question is about who lives and who dies. We’re making these decisions all the time.
• caring about animals is not radical or extreme
• we don’t have to apologize for caring and feeling
• animals live in different sensory worlds than humans and this is important.
• we know enough about animals’ emotional and intellectual capabilities right now to stop harming them

Bekoff is also dedicated to working with children and has written several children’s books. In one activity with a group of kids, the children were asked to draw a picture of their dreams for the future. One child drew a picture of happy-looking animals and people and the caption was “I dream that all animals will be safe from people.” I was really touched by this. I think children are so important in making a better world for animals. So many children start out sensitive to the animals they encounter and as they grow up are often taught by adults to care less for animals. Kids are told that some animals are made for us to eat (cows, chickens, pigs) and some are made for us to love (dogs and cats) and so they are (at an early age) indoctrinated into the culture of violence and domination that humans have created in relation to animals.

Steiner’s and Bekoff’s were the two talks that stood out the most to me, but the other talks were also very good–from Lori Gruen’s talk about chimpanzees mourning, and Jeffrey Bussolini’s research on cats developing a taste for eating chili peppers, to Susan Crane’s beautiful analysis of the poem, “A Scholar and His Cat”.

The conference was great and I’m so excited that NYU has begun the Animal Studies Initiative.

After the conference was over, I met up with Emma for dinner. We were quite close to Angelica Kitchen, so we walked over there.

As I said, in yesterday’s post, I was still thinking about the delicious cornbread and chili I had the night before at Bliss in Brooklyn. You can imagine my delight when I opened the menu and saw this:

That’s right! Three bean chili with cornbread! Emma and I both ordered it. Emma said that she likes when she’s out to dinner with someone and they order the same thing because it’s like they’re having family dinner together and can have more of a shared experience of eating. I thought that was a nice way to think about it:

The chili was served with a little side of butternut squash salsa, which was superb and which I am going to try to recreate at home.

It was so wonderful to have a nice hearty dinner with Emma. Good food and good conversation.

For dessert, we shared a piece of pumpkin pie, which I honestly thought was a little lacking, though it looked pretty:

It just didn’t have much flavor and it was quite sweet. Emma thought it tasted okay to her, but did admit that her cold might be preventing her from tasting it. We stopped for a bottle of wine on our way back to Brooklyn and stayed up late talking and catching up. A nice end to another full day in New York.