My name is Jakob,
I'm 25 years old and study English and Politics in Berlin. I turned vegetarian the second time in my life (first time was 2005-2007) in April 2011 (strongly influenced by J.M. Coetzee's - imho one of the greatest authors alive – writings) and went vegan in January 2012.
In my studies, I have recently worked on the cultural symbolism of meat consumption, a topic I naturally became interested in due to my nutrition… I think it is paramount to understand why people keep saying they couldn't do w/o meat and/or other animal substances to further the (our?) aim of not only more acceptance of v*ganism in wider society but also having more and more people join our group for the sake of our world.
Having said that, I maybe should add that I don't believe in any kind of mission or think it possible to persuade people to become v*gan: My girlfriend is vegetarian, my two flatmates don't care too much about what they eat. However, they eventually joined me in cooking or going to our fantastic vegan fast food diner 10 minutes walk from our flat (Berlin is a vegan's dream city!). Thus, I think anybody trying to become v*gan should really want it out of their own conviction and not because they kind of lost a debate and just think it's their moral obligation to avoid animal exploitation.
So much about me and my personal and political standpoint.
I found this forum while searching for a recipe of a kind of vegan power bar/snack for a triathlon (olympic distance) I did yesterday. I found Runes energikaka (the name is a bit silly from a German perspective) but weren't able to make them since it was impossible to find maltodextrin anywhere here on Saturday afternoon. But I'll try them out soon and hope to be able to contribute with my (vegan) sports expirience here, which leads me to the last few points abou the sports I'm doing:
It' mainly bicycling: I usually go to universtiy by bike which is a 16km ride from one end of Berlin to the other, seldomly w/o shouting @ car drivers to please not drive me dead.
Then, I go running about once or twice a week, do swimming once and as of this summer started to join an ultimate (frisbee) team in their training. Howeder, I stopped that in favour of my triathlon preparation, but hope to start it this week again. Other sports I like but currently don't do are badminton and squash. I also have to get better with my unicycle, but this is an altogether different project. Other intrests are computers, linux, command prompt, and critical theory (i.e. marxist), if time allows it travelling
Wow, this got a bit long. If you read until here, I congratulate you and hope, it wasn't too boring‽
So hello again to everybody and cheers to a good time here in the forum!
-Jakob
