11.20.08

Colin Cowie to Host ‘Get Married’

Posted in Weddings tagged , , , , , at 10:27 pm by Wendy Stewart

Here’s the news I received on celebrity designer Colin Cowie:

Dear Valued Wedding Professionals,

It is with great excitement that I announce that we have named world-renowned event designer and lifestyle expert Colin Cowie as our new host for Get Married’s television show airing on the Lifetime Channel.  Colin comes to us with a passion for weddings, and a multitude of imaginative and inspiring ideas that will help our brides enjoy the planning process and discover all the details that culminate in what will become an extraordinary special day.  In addition to Colin’s design and wedding expertise, he also brings with him a tremendous fan-base that enjoy his views on fashion, food, decor and travel – all of which Colin will share on Get Married’s television show and through his live online chats and blog postings on getmarried.com.

However, the brides are not the only ones who will benefit from this new partnership with the arbiter of style.  As an international lifestyle consultant and television personality, celebrity party designer and author of five books on weddings, Colin will build additional brand awareness for Get Married and getmarried.com, and its valued partners.

Through national and local exposure, both online and on television, Get Married’s partnership with Colin will help further your advertising budget, by connecting your brand, products and services with even more brides and wedding industry professionals every day.

Please share this amazing news with your brides, friends, counterparts, and clients and we hope you will tune in to season 2, beginning January 5th and airing every weekday morning at 7:30 AM ET/PT on Lifetime Television. Also, you can join Colin’s blogs and live online chats on getmarried.com.

You’ll be seeing a lot more about this partnership later this year and as the New Year unfolds. Please send any questions, comments or feedback about our new partnership to feedback@getmarried.com.  Best wishes for a happy and healthy Thanksgiving and thank you again for your continued support of Get Married!

Sincerely,
Stacie Francombe
Founder/CEO of Get Married

Green Dating: Vegans and Vegetarians

Posted in green living tagged , , , , at 10:06 pm by Wendy Stewart

Here is an interesting article from Newsweek on the issues vegans and vegetarians have in the dating world.

Newsweek

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Love Me, Love My Tofu

Neither group eats meat. But that doesn’t make life easier for vegans who try to date ‘murderous’ vegetarians.

Sarah Kliff
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Sep 26, 2007 | Updated: 2:44  p.m. ET Sep 27, 2007

Religion and social status have always been deal breakers in relationships. But for those navigating today’s dating pool, the currents may just have gotten rougher. No longer is it enough to share an interest in piña colada or getting caught in the rain—today’s singles want to know whether potential partners are fit and how often they work out, among other personal details. And then there’s the friction between vegans and vegetarians.

It might sound counterintuitive; after all, neither group eats meat. But for many vegans—who also eschew animal products like the dairy and eggs eaten by vegetarians—love may not be enough to conquer ideology. “I’m in a relationship with a murderer,” bemoans Carl, one of many vegans who wrote in to the “Vegan Freak” podcast for romantic advice. Carl, who didn’t give his last name, says his girlfriend is a regular vegetarian, and their differences are becoming a major source of tension. In the vegan world that’s not an uncommon dilemma. Bob Torres, one of the show’s hosts, says that dating and relationships are two of the most popular topics on the podcast, which deals with all things vegan.

Vegans are hardly the only partner-seekers with health concerns. Online dating site Match.com has noted a steady rise in interest in the topic among its 15 million members. In 2004 about 15 percent of its members said they exercised regularly. Among today’s members, about 43 percent say they exercise three to four times each week. That’s more people declaring their devotion to exercise than declaring their religion on the Web site. Food has also become a concern; just under half the site’s members want their partner to have a healthy diet, compared to 12 percent three years ago. And these are issues that relationship counselor Ian Kerner, who works with the site, thinks can cause more serious conflict in relationships than political or philosophical differences. “I think people can get past a lot of intellectual debates, because that’s what makes opposites attract,” he says. But getting past a fitness fanatic/couch potato clash? “I can’t tell you how many times I hear people breaking up over things like this,” says Kerner. “It’s a lot about sharing values, about how they spend their time. It’s both scheduling conflicts and different value systems.”

Vegans and vegetarians can get caught in worse dating dilemmas. For many vegetarians and almost all vegans, their distaste for meat runs much deeper than their taste buds; it’s an outward expression of their ethical and moral beliefs about animal cruelty and responsible living. Take John Cunningham, who lives in Baltimore. “If I don’t have to contribute to cruelty in society and this world, I would like to abstain from that,” he says. He’s been a vegan since 2001, and he married his long-term girlfriend (a vegetarian) this past summer. He understands the critical role veganism can play in dating and relationships. “If someone is going to make such a large change in the way they eat, the motivation behind that has to be serious,” he says. “That can’t be taken causally when entering into a relationship.”

Not surprisingly, a number of niche dating sites have popped up to respond to veggie dating demands. Vegan Passions, Veggie Fishing and Planet Earth Singles are all sites that cater to environmentally conscious daters. Planet Earth Singles launched in April (fittingly, on Earth Day) and already boosts 23,000 eco-friendly members, many of whom are among the nation’s 1.4 million vegans or 4.7 million vegetarians. “If somebody is for the environmental movement, they want to support it on all levels, even in their relationships,” says Jill Crosby, the founder of Planet Earth Singles.

But it still ain’t easy dating green. While these niche sites do boost memberships in the thousands, they’re nowhere near the size of dating goliaths like Match.com or eHarmony, and no site has come along to unify vegans the way JDate has done for Jewish singles. “I know it sounds corny,” says Paul Williams, a 35-year-old vegetarian in Atlantic City, N.J. “But basically I want to date someone with a good heart that can understand why I’ve chosen to be a vegetarian.” Finding a woman to share tofu for two is even tougher when you’re not near large urban centers that have an established vegetarian community and the restaurants and bookstores that often go with it. “It’s very difficult,” says Williams of finding a vegetarian mate. “I go to all the generic Web sites, like MySpace and Plenty of Fish, and I was a paid member of eHarmony for a bit. They rarely matched me up with any vegetarians.”

Still, fairy-tale vegan romance can be found. Vegan Freak host Bob Torres shares his podcast duties with his wife and co-host, Jenna Torres. The couple met at Penn State and both now teach at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. They’ve been married for nine years and vegan for three. They’re not the only ones; Bob and Jenna say they have seen successful relationships start among vegans who frequent the forums at their Vegan Freak Web site. “It’s something we really bond over and do together,” says Bob. Of course, even vegan couples may not be able to avoid the standard relationship squabbles over who’s cooking and who’s scrubbing dishes, but for the lucky ones, dinner is love at first bite.


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URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/41297
© 2007

Vegetarians, Vegans and Thanksgiving

Posted in Healthy Eating tagged , , , , at 10:00 pm by Wendy Stewart

If you are a vegetarian or vegan or will be hosting one next week for Thanksgiving, you all must be wondering what to do about the pink elephant in the room: the turkey.

Here is a recent Newsweek article to give you some food for thought.

A Recipe For A Family Fight

At Thanksgiving, vegetarians and vegans object to the menu (and the heckling), while other relatives feel family traditions are being scorned.

By Sarah Kliff | NEWSWEEK
Published Nov 19, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Nov 19, 2008

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To bring the tofu, or not bring the tofu?

It’s a question that Genevieve Hartman has been rolling over in her mind for some time now. The 28-year-old vegetarian will be spending Thanksgiving at her boyfriend’s professor’s house in New York City. Thanksgiving used to be one of Hartman’s favorite holidays, when she celebrated it with her vegetarian family in San Francisco. But ever since she moved to New York five years ago and began spending the holiday with relatives or friends, it’s been a source of anxiety. Take the tofu dilemma: on the one hand, she doesn’t want to get stranded at a turkey-heavy table without anything to eat, which might make her hosts feel bad. But she also doesn’t want to bring attention to herself as needing “special foods,” increasing the likelihood that she’ll have to field questions about why she’s skipping the turkey. “It’s going to be awkward no matter whether I bring it or I don’t,” says Hartman. “Thanksgiving has a really set menu, and people are very sensitive to any changes.”

The number of vegetarians in the United States has doubled over the past 10 years, according to polls by the Vegetarian Resource Group, and now stands somewhere around 4.7 million. Freezer aisles at grocery stores stock a growing selection of faux meat products, from tofu buffalo wings to soy-based kielbasa. Veggie burgers have become a common fixture at barbecues. But many vegetarians, particularly those who are the only one in a large family, say Thanksgiving has become that one day of the year where they’re reminded that they are indeed in the minority, a mere 2 percent of a meat-eating society. It’s the one holiday, Turkey Day, that’s so strongly associated with meat that not participating seems almost unpatriotic.

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The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of food. Between the mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, candied yams and bounty of desserts, you can usually find a way to stuff yourself silly. Instead, the vegetarian frustration is with the flurry of questions that follow saying “no thank you” to the turkey. “There was definitely some heckling,” says Carly McLean, 24, of her first vegetarian Thanksgiving at her parents’ house in central Illinois. She remembers her family looking at her as if she had grown a horn or a third eye during that meal. “There was a lot of, ‘you’re still in college, you’re going through a phase, you’re just rebellious.’ My aunt asked, ‘how can you be a vegetarian from the Midwest, isn’t that an oxymoron?’” The assumption clearly was, this is Thanksgiving, therefore you eat turkey. “I think we might have spent less time talking about what we were thankful for, than ‘What is Lorraine going to eat?’” says 25-year-old Lorraine Woodcheke from San Francisco. She’s skipping out on Thanksgiving altogether this year, leaving this weekend for Australia. On Thanksgiving Day, she’ll be climbing the Sydney Harbor Bridge. “I never considered skipping any holiday with my family before,” she says. “In a way, I’m sad to miss it, but at the same time, its just nice that I’m going to do my own thing and nobody has to change what they’re doing.”

Vegetarians aren’t the only ones anxious over next Thursday’s festivities. Many of their hosts find accommodating vegetarian stressful because they’re used to working with such a set Thanksgiving menu. “My step-mother didn’t know a vegetarian and definitely didn’t like it,” says Mollie Marti, 42, who married into an Iowa farm family. “It was more of the unknown that was uncomfortable for her than it was her judging. There was a nervousness on both sides.” The key to a successful Thanksgiving, Marti says, has been communication about what she eats and what she doesn’t. McLean has had a similar experience. While that first Thanksgiving was “pretty rough,” her dad has been incredibly accommodating. Last year, the two went grocery shopping for the dinner together and he pointed out all the vegetarian products he was buying. He made the stuffing without giblets and left the bacon off of their seven-layer salad. “The thing that was really cool was some of those recipes are family tradition, going back three or four generations,” says McLean. “So for him to switch that up, and make changes, was really big.”

Longstanding dining traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey may be particularly difficult to depart from because their associated with such distinct smells. “Memories based on sight and sound are relatively absent of strong emotional evocation,” says Thomas F. Shipley, a psychology professor at Temple University. “But because of the way the brain is wired, smells directly evoke emotions. So the thought is that with something like Thanksgiving, where you may have been eating the same foods and smelling the same smells since you were a child, it will evoke very strong emotional memories from earlier in life.” That strong association between Thanksgiving and turkey might be what’s given rise to so many substitutes that attempt to replicate the meat’s taste and smell. Tofurky, the best-known substitute, draws mixed reviews. “Honestly, Tofurky is gross,” says Ari Hershberg, who was a vegetarian for eight years. “You try and like it and you say you like it, but you really just want to be eating turkey like everyone else.” (This may just be Hershberg: he went back to eating meat six years ago.) Others, like McLean, say that while vegetarian stuffing is well and good, Tofurky would be far too untraditional: “That’s way too weird for my family.”

And sometimes, Thanksgiving tensions can turn into their own family tradition. Shelley Frost became a vegetarian over 20 years ago, on Thanksgiving Day 1986. The 47-year-old videographer received the typical jeering and questioning from her family, largely from her cousin Bryan. She even skipped the family dinner a few years ago, trading in the turkey and the taunting for a Japanese restaurant with plenty of vegetarian options. But something didn’t feel right. “Honestly, at this point, it would be weird if Thanksgiving didn’t include Bryan making every lame joke he can think of, nudging me in the ribs,” says Frost. “Who else but your family can make fun of you like that?” That’s a holiday custom that no Tofurky could ever replace.

© 2008