Patti Breitman is an advocate for health and animals, a writer and an expert public speaker. She teaches vegetarian cooking classes in Marin County, CA, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area. Patti is the director of The Marin Vegetarian Education Group and a former food columnist for VegNews Magazine. Her writing is often published on VegSource.com. Patti is the co-author (with Connie Hatch) of How to Say No Without Feeling Guilty and (with Carol J.Adams) of How To Eat Like a Vegetarian, Even If You Never Want to Be One.
Virginia Messina, MPH, RD is a dietitian and public health nutritionist specializing in vegan nutrition. She has a degree in nutrition from Douglass College of Rutgers University and a master’s degree in public health nutrition from the University of Michigan.
Ginny publishes widely on topics related to vegan diets for both health professionals and the public. She has worked as a dietitian for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), taught nutrition to dietetics students at the university level, and was the director of nutrition services for a group of medical clinics serving 50,000 patients in Washington, D.C.
She serves on scientific advisory boards to both vegetarian and professional nutrition organizations. Ginny has twice co-authored the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetic’s Position on Vegetarian Diets, and is co-author of a textbook on vegetarianism written for health professionals and nutrition students.
A long-time vegan herself, she seeks to share the best and most up-to-date information on vegan nutrition and to make ethical eating an easy and realistic option for everyone. She writes about a variety of issues related to health and animal rights on her blog www.TheVeganRD.com and at www.VeganForHer.com. She is also a regular contributor to www.OurHenHouse.org and www.OneGreenPlanet.org.
In addition to her work as a vegan dietitian, Ginny volunteers at the local animal shelter, serves as a board member of a local spay/neuter outreach organization and of the national advocacy group Alley Cat Rescue, and spends her leisure time feeding feral cats, reading, gardening, and learning piano.
Carol Adams: I’m the author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. It’s been called “ground-breaking” and “pioneering” (interesting how our description of books draws from our invasive relationship to the land). Many say it is an underground classic, which I guess means that lots of people know and love it, but it goes unnoticed by the dominant media. Of course, when it first came out, that was slightly different. Then, right-wing reviewers held it up as the latest example of academic excess and political correctness, which was funny to me, because I am not an academic. I used to teach a course I developed at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University on “Sexual and Domestic Violence: Theological and Pastoral Issues” — but very infrequently. Basically, for as long as I have been an adult, I have been an advocate, an activist, someone trying to figure out how do we transform this d*#! world that is built on inequality.
I have published more than 100 articles in journals, books, and magazines on the issues of vegetarianism and veganism, animal advocacy, domestic violence and sexual abuse. I am particularly interested in the interconnections among forms of violence against human and nonhuman animals, writing, for instance, about why woman-batterers harm animals and the implications of this (it’s in my book Animals and Women). Besides advancing scholarship and developing theory in the area of interlocking oppressions, I have created a series of books that address the vegetarian/vegan experience: Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian Survival Guide, Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat! and The Inner Art of Vegetarianism.
I’ve worked to bring back into print Howard Williams’s nineteenth-century classic text on vegetarianism, The Ethics of Diet. I have contributed prefaces to important vegetarian, vegan, and animal defense books and discovered an eighteenth-century vegetarian work that had never entered the vegetarian tradition.
Because I am so deeply moved by my relationship with animals, I have authored books of prayers for animals for both adults and children.
I am excited that the 20th anniversary edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat will be published next February.
I also write about literary topics, including two “Bedside” books: one on Frankenstein and one on Jane Austen. I am finishing a memoir on caregiving and reading.
