Welcome to Food for Thought. My name is Colleen Patrikadro and I am your host.

Today's episode is our Elephants Vegan. No, they are not. That's the name of the whole episode.

But that's not the end of the episode. We're going to get into why. They are not. As always, you can find me at joyfulvegan.com where you can find my signed books, which you can get from me directly now.

You can join me in my online cooking classes over there. You can join the 30-day vegan challenge and you can go to joyfulvegantrips.com where you can join me in my all-inclusive trips all around the world.

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We've got some great cooking classes coming up online cooking classes. I teach from the comfort of my home and you can enjoy from the comfort of your home. We've got pressure cooking 101 mushroom recipes for mushroom haters and the people who love them.

People who love mushroom haters, not the mushrooms. But at the end of the class you're going to love mushrooms. We're doing pizza, Neapolitan pizza, of course, thin-style delicious pizza. We're making also a cashew mozzarella along with our pizza sauce and our pizza dough.

And we have a chocolate yule log class coming up. We're going to be making traditional boost in a well for the holiday. So go to joyfulvegan.com for those classes. And for the trips, as I said, joyfulvegantrips.com. We've got Rwanda coming up in 2022. So there's still time to join us. And you can join me in Tuscany in 2023 and in northern Italy in 2023. And these trips are filling up.

So go to joyfulvegantrips.com and do not miss out on these trips. They're just such a wonderful way to connect together with incredible people, enjoy delicious food, go to animal sanctuaries and enjoy the countries and the people and the culture and the food that we go to.

So let's get started with today's topic.

Being a cat momma, one of the most common questions I get is about what I feed my cats, Charlie and Michgo, and how I reconcile being vegan with the fact that cats are obligate carnivores and need animal flesh to survive and thrive.

My short answer is I'm vegan, my cats are not. Now you would have seen this if you follow me on Instagram, I made an Instagram reel a one minute video on this topic.

And you know, basically said, I'm a human being, I thrive on plants, Charlie and Michgo are carnivores, they thrive on other animals.

So this episode is not about being vegan and having cats and it's also not about the fact that humans do thrive on plants over animal flesh and fluids.

It's an episode about how we talk about who and what we eat, how we talk about ourselves and other animals when it comes to our diets.

For instance, calling elephants vegan or gorillas vegetarian or deer herbivores and lions carnivores, that sort of thing.

So a diet classification, if you will.

And the reason I started off with my answer to what I feed my cats as a vegan is because while language isn't perfect, I do my best to use it to articulate ideas and to frame things to frame my ideas as simply and succinctly as I can.

And when I say I'm vegan, my cats are not being carnivores, Charlie and Michgo eat other animals being vegan, I thrive on plants.

That's about as simple as I can make it because vegan means something. You know what I mean when I say that, you know what I mean when I say cats are carnivores.

Where it starts to get a little messy for me is when I hear people call animals who eat only plants like elephants or gorillas, vegan or when they call friends or family members who eat meat carnivores.

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